‘We have destroyed something by our presence,’ said Bernard, ‘a world perhaps’.
The word ‘world’ recurs ninety-six times in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, a work more commonly understood as a Modernist experiment with temporality and voice, but which might also be thought of as one of the novel’s most self-reflexive engagements with world-making. The increasingly extended speech acts of six voices are encapsulated within typographically distinct interludes, whose description of the gradual revelation of sky and firmament and the movement of light and water over the course of a single day recalls the foundational world-creation of Genesis. In the effortful process of extracting character, context, narrative time and sequence from the continuous present of the voices’ attributed speech, the reader is invited to confront her co-implication in the taken-for-granted work of constructing novel worlds. Each articulation of ‘world’ contributes to distinguishing each voice as character. ‘The light falls upon real objects now. Here are knives and forks. The world is displayed, and we too, so that we can talk’, says Neville.Footnote1 ‘I require the concrete in everything. It is so only that I lay hands upon the world’, says Bernard (Woolf, The Waves 58).
I begin to draw a figure and the world is looped in it, and I myself am outside the loop; which I now join—so—and seal up, and make entire. The world is entire, and I am outside of it,
The voices’ self-referential grasping at the prosaic in their efforts at world building is Hegelian, both in its recognition of the pull of the authenticating contingencies of the ‘world of prose and everyday’, and in Woolf’s simultaneous attempt to distance herself from the ‘prose of the world’Footnote3 as represented by Edwardian realism. If realism came to own referentiality over the course of the nineteenth century though, it has not been the only genre to lay claim to the world. The earliest picaresque novels sent heroes into a world of at once familiar and allegorical encounters; the Gothic purported to expose the world’s dark underside; fantasy and science fiction have long played in possible worlds. Moreover, since the early 1990s, as Palumbo-Liu, Robbins and Tanoukhi observe, countless disciplinary manifestos ‘have offered promising blueprints for a globalising or transnationalisation of knowledge’.Footnote4 World literature studies, pioneered in the work of Pascale Casanova and David Damrosch, have achieved huge academic purchase and made a significant impact in the world of novel publishing, aiming to expand the canon of the literary properly to reflect global diversity. Recently their critical hegemony has been challenged by Emily Apter, who points out the resistance of national concepts to a depoliticised, border-dissolving translational imperative.Footnote5 Where world literature situates the novel within a vast transnational library, world systems theory (building on the work of Immanuel Wallerstein and Franco Moretti) has found fascinating ways to adjust our reading of the novel to world scale, inciting authors and critics to ‘tell large stories and tell them better’ (Palumbo-Liu, Robbins, Tanoukhi, 9). World systems theory seeks to map the production of novels not just within historical time but global space, showing, in Moretti’s terms, how plots travel while styles morph. As Eric Hayot notes, the concept of ‘world’ has emerged as ‘one of rhetorically unmatched prestige’Footnote6 in these two recent critical discourses.
Implicit in all of these disparate, world-invoking modes of writing, classifying and critiquing novels is an understanding that the novel and the world are mutually constitutive: that a relationship between the two must be assumed, constructed or interrogated, naturalised or highlighted. Hayot returns us to this deceptively simple proposition in his book On Literary Worlds, writing ‘aesthetic worlds, no matter how they form themselves, are among other things always a relation to and theory of the lived world’ (44). Hayot seeks to recuperate the literary world as a formal proposition, and to identify particular modes or variables that underpin the production of aesthetic ‘worlds’, both in individual works and across genres. As with Woolf’s, one effect of his intervention is to destabilise realism as the genre via which the world is understood to show up in the novel. Hayot demonstrates instead that
an attention to the world-creating and world-relating dimensions of [a] work shows us what kinds of realism there are, opening up inside the field of realism (not to mention naturalism, modernism, romanticism and so on) as a world-oriented aesthetic an analytic category that allows us to describe new kinds of difference and similarity (46).
It is the aim of this special issue to test Hayot’s axiomatic formulation by mapping the relationship of the novel to the world, and interrogating the function of the everyday within this contingency. Moretti has observed, ‘We may […] speak of everyday life whenever the individual subordinates any activity whatsoever to the construction of “his own world”’Footnote7: equally, these essays suggest that the construction of a distinctive ‘novel world’ involves some level of negotiation with, if not subordination to, the quotidian. The issue’s scrutiny of the category of worldedness enables the reconsideration of novels across a very broad spectrum of genres, histories and geo-political contexts, from the Anglo-Irish social milieu of Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee, to the village life of modern neoliberal China; extending beyond national borders to the oceans, airwaves and telepathic prediction and encompassing formal structures from the prefatory frame to the serial. The essays are linked by attentiveness to unforeseen or elusive, rather than imagined, communities, that subsist in the unresolved tension between diegetic and extra-diegetic worlds. At the same time, they return to the problem posed by The Waves’ voices: How does the novel’s capacity to ground us in worlds from the realist to the fantastical depend on its longstanding association with qualities of the prosaic and graspable?
The issue opens with John Frow’s ‘Prefaces to Defoe’, which considers the paratextual material that bolsters Robinson Crusoe, a privileged contender for the title of ‘first’ novel in English. As Frow observes, in its early history the novel frequently deploys such material to orient generic expectations, and in particular to navigate the often complex relation between the real and the fictional. Defoe’s prefaces to the three instalments of the story of Robinson Crusoe map out an increasingly tortured attempt to puzzle out the world-forming quality of the novel and thus to construct a kind of proto-theory of novelistic form. Seeking both to claim the historical truth of the narrative and to deal with the consequences of the fact that that claim is untrue, these paratextual materials seek to reconcile novelistic invention with the revealed religious truth that stands above it.
Michael Falk’s essay, ‘Making Connections: Network Analysis, the Bildungsroman and the World of The Absentee’ engages with the world systems theory that has, as noted, dominated recent discussion of the novel’s world-organising and world-creating propensities. Falk rehearses critical approaches to the eighteenth-century novel that have implicitly relegated public and private spheres to separate generic worlds, concentrating in particular on Armstrong and Tennenhouse’s distinction between the ‘domestic novel’ and the ‘networked novel’. Using Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee (1812) as a case study and Moretti’s digital technique of ‘character network analysis’ as a methodology, he proposes that the ‘network’ and ‘domestic’ novel can actually be seen as two distinct but interrelated aspects of the Bildungsroman. Falk’s networked analysis of Lord Colambre’s journey from London to the family estates in rural Ireland exposes networks that connect the domestic to wider colonial contexts.
Daniel Cook’s essay ‘Articles of War: Subjects and Objects aboard the Nineteenth Century Naval Novel’ considers how the ‘wooden world’ of shipboard came to shape a unique representational order. Via a reading of Captain Frederick Marryat’s The King’s Own (1830), Cook argues that naval novels depict the man-of-war as a place where the things and men of the parlour and marketplace find themselves reconstituted as components of the ‘Service’. This alternate order becomes apparent in the recurrence of high-seas thrillers to dense, largely un-translated nautical terminology. The man-of-war is implicitly figured in such terminology as a purely functional assemblage of parts, inviting the subject to die and become reborn as an object of state. At one level, this is a distinctly nationalist project. At the same time, the British fixation on naval gadgetry resonates with American and French naval novels of the period, cooperating in what arguably became a transnational militarism.
Yi Zheng’s essay, ‘The Prosaic History of a Provincial Revolution’ takes as its focus Li Jieren’s historical trilogy The Great Waves (1937), comprised of Ripple on Stagnant Water (sishui weilan 1935), Before the Tempest (baofeng yuqian 1936) and Great Waves (da bo 1937). The novel sequence recounts the last days of the Qing Empire (1644–1911) in Chengdu, the capital of its frontier Sichuan province. Its layered narrative recreates on the one hand the affective and social transformations of a provincial city following the ‘New Policies’ of a dying empire, and on the other the great agitations leading to the riots of the Sichuan Railway Protection Movement (1911) which launched the revolution that ended China’s imperial history. Zheng examines Li’s structural juxtaposition of epic events with the prosaic details of a fin-de-siècle life world. She suggests that in the search for the narrative possibilities of the ‘historical real’ of a seminal event, Li’s novel cycle inscribes the process of a communal world change, and in this way opens up a new direction for the development of the modern Chinese novel. His spatial-descriptive form demonstrates an original conceptual and formal possibility that is all the more significant because of its disappearance in the second half of the twentieth century.
The constant tension between the physical limits of the novel form and the expansive scope of its representative possibilities was a recurring undercurrent in much of Doris Lessing’s fiction, and one made explicit in The Four-Gated City, the concluding volume of her five-part series Children of Violence. The novel’s significance as the first step in Lessing’s wide-ranging experimentation with science fiction has been extensively discussed in scholarly literature on her work; less studied is the way in which it functions as a commentary not only on the imaginative limits of realism but also on the material limits of the novel as a physical object. In ‘Novel Worlds: Tracing the Ripples in Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City’, Sophia Barnes argues that Lessing tests the imaginative parameters of her novel in a succession of different ways: introducing the trope of telepathy into the last volume of a heretofore realist series; allowing the text to break down in its final section into a series of fragmentary appendices; extending the narrative some three decades into the future; and finally moving beyond the frame of her central protagonist’s consciousness. Notable for its metamorphic shift in scope, The Four-Gated City is a novel about the imaginative and material limitations of the form itself.
Adam Hulbert’s essay, ‘The Persistent Elsewhere: Radio in the Novels of Philip K. Dick’ considers three of Dick’s novels [Time Out of Joint (1953), Dr. Bloodmoney: Or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1965) and Radio Free Albemuth (1985)]. In these novels the radio receiver operates as a mediator between the listener and the electromagnetic field. Dick’s famous definition of reality as ‘that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away’ seems to find especially useful purchase in his ideas of radiation. Hulbert’s essay examines the idea that, in Dick’s fiction, the mundane activity of listening to radio always also affords the possibility to overhear an ‘elsewhere, elsewhen and otherwise’ that persists outside human intention. By reframing the radio as a weird object, Dick highlights that the limits of broadcast are not institutional: radio can revitalise society by bringing the listener into contact with alternate worlds that are in the process of being spoken into being.
Finally, Xuenan Cao’s essay, ‘Village Worlds: Yan Lianke’s Villages and Matters of Life’ discusses Yan Lianke’s ‘mythorealism’ (shenshi zhuyi), the stylistic mode through which this contemporary author exposes the fantastic, grotesque and traumatic sides of urbanisation against the historical backdrop of rural-to-urban migration in China. The essay considers the isolated villages in Yan’s novels Ri Guang Liu Nian (Time That Flows, 1998) and Zha Liezhi (Explosion Town Chronicles, 2013), as singular sites in the space between the rural and the urban and in the time between the underdeveloped and developed, where life and death are at times synonymous. Yan’s focus on the village world complicates discussions of neoliberal governmentality in post-1949 China, which have been addressed critically within the frameworks of Michel Foucault’s ‘biopower’ and Giorgio Agamben’s ‘bare life’. In Yan’s novels the sharp distinction between life and death that informs these critiques is destabilised in an ostensible absence of law and an eternal state of exception. Yan’s novels defamiliarise the world of neoliberal China through the distortions of mythorealist world-making.
As each of these essays demonstrates, a novel world is also a manifesto, advertising its author’s understanding of the limits and possibilities of the form. This can be as explicit (and duplicitous) as Defoe’s prefaces or Lessing’s appendices, as nebulous as Dick’s radio waves, as political as Yan’s portrayals of the world of neoliberal China or Marryat’s depiction of shipboard hierarchy. In other cases its world-making methodology is best described with hindsight: Edgeworth’s novels as networks, Li Jieren as a writer of ethnohistory. Moving beyond the description of diegetic alternatives and their relationship to extra-diegetic histories or national contexts, this special issue therefore takes the novel world as a starting point for a reconsideration of the state of novel theory today.
Notes
1. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (London: Penguin, 1951), 108.
2. The generic alternatives posed by the voices perhaps offers a fictional realisation of the typologies set out in Woolf's essay ‘Phases of Fiction’, published in 1929 as she was beginning The Waves: the truth tellers, the romantics, the character mongers and comedians, the psychologists, the satirists and fantasists, the poets.
3. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 149. Virginia Woolf, ‘Phases of Fiction’, in Granite and Rainbow (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, c. 1958), 93–145.
4. David Palumbo-Liu, Bruce Robbins and Nirvana Tanoukhi (eds.), Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World: System, Scale, Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 4.
5. Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Translatability (London: Verso, 2013).
6. Eric Hayot, On Literary Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 30
7. Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, [1987] 2000), 34.