Totality and incoherence: for a shared project of novel theory and black studies

ABSTRACT

This article considers two questions asked by two very different thinkers through a concept that only one of them uses, and only in a nontechnical sense: ‘totality’: What is the basis of the novel’s internal organization? and What do all Americans have in common? The two works are Georg Lukács’s Theory of the Novel, written in Budapest in 1914–15, and James Baldwin’s ‘Notes For a Hypothetical Novel’, delivered in San Francisco in 1960. Both thinkers describe the totality they are attempting to understand using negative formulations. For Lukács, the question of the novel’s ‘internal organization’ concerns the ‘form-giving process’ of the novel, a process that cannot hope to be adequate to the world’s meaning. For Baldwin, the question concerns the US in the 1950s and 1960s – a world divided by the ‘fact of color’. Both thinkers decline to theorize the world in question, while insisting upon a totalizing analysis. Despite the discrepancies in their social and political worlds, what they have in common is a sense of the failure or unavailability of theoretical formulations. This sense of failure is shared by recent figures in black studies, who are exploring antisubjectivist and antiformalist understandings of totality that implicitly reject positive notions of blackness. Thus, behind this interrogation of the work of Lukács and Baldwin is another question that relates to our present: what relations exist between novel theory and black studies? Or more baldly: what does Lukács’s Theory of the Novel have to say about race in twenty-first-century North America?

KEYWORDS:

• Black studies
• blackness
• novel theory
• Georg Lukács
• James Baldwin
• totality
• Marxist theory
• Alexander Weheliye

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1998) is a counternarrative of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre; John Keene’s ‘Rivers’ (2015) is a counternarrative of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

2 For Harper, the representational ethic needs to be supplemented by a practice of ‘allegorical reading’, according to which the ‘condition of continuity that defines African Americans as a historically coherent people’ may be reconciled with the principle of temporal and historical ‘differentiation’, a principle that involves ‘conceptualization’. Harper is drawing on Fredric Jameson’s references to allegory in ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’ (Jameson 2000). By such allegorical means, Harper contends, ‘the otherwise incoherent category of African American literature is made to appear logically whole’ (468n).

3 The fifteenth amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1870 during Reconstruction, prohibits the federal government and each state from denying or abridging a citizen’s right to vote ‘on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude’.

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Notes on contributors

Timothy Bewes

Timothy Bewes is Owen F. Walker Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English at Brown University. His books include Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age (2022); The Event of Postcolonial Shame (2011); and Reification, or The Anxiety of Late Capitalism (2002). He is an editor of the journal Novel: A Forum on Fiction and he convenes the Film-Thinking series for the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University.