Objective Eventfulness

The Natural Laws of Plot is a subtle and sophisticated synthesis of work in narrative and novel theory, and formalist criticism more broadly, with an equally rigorous incorporation of eighteenth-century science studies. What may be most remarkable is what the book does not say, the way it achieves its level of reading by tactically restricting its attention and calmly delimiting its relevant materials. For although this is a book of rare expansiveness and literary-historical range, traversing a vast tract of eighteenth-century culture (with a coda on Zadie Smith's White Teeth), its focus is quite concentrated, and the generative tension between these two aspects of the project should be of interest to literary critics.Delimitation may be understood first in terms of the book's self-assigned ambit. The “natural laws” of its title are those articulated by eighteenth-century natural philosophy across areas of inquiry later codified into specialized disciplines, from matter and mechanics to chemical substances, from molecular interactions to the problem of subjectivity itself. For The Natural Laws of Plot, these are centrally the stuff of objectivity: of the definition and animation of the world of external things, most especially at those smaller scales that compose the material world. Plot is in this sense the background of a narrative, its material precondition and physical logic of operation: it is, as the subtitle puts it, how things happen. Plot is thus neither desire-driven design and intention nor the temporal elaboration of symbolic structures, respectively familiar to us from psychoanalysis, via Peter Brooks, and structuralist linguistics, via Fredric Jameson, though Yoon Sun Lee is invested in both traditions. The “realist novels” of the book's subtitle are those of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from Daniel Defoe to Walter Scott, and a quiet but meaningful case is made here for the eighteenth century as the proper site of realism as such, an implication with significance for an understanding of the concept.Restriction also might be expressed in terms of dosage. From one angle, Lee's book appears to be a contribution to the ongoing development of eighteenth-century science studies. But natural philosophy does not function here as a total atmosphere (as it has tended to in that field as a whole) but instead—and following the grammar, if not the letter, of Michel Foucault's The Order of Things, which is Lee's lodestar—as a series of discrete concepts, manifesting themselves as novelistic plots. But as soon as one makes this observation, one recognizes that Lee's readings are not simple arrangements of correspondence (intermediate causes in Defoe, chemical substances in Ann Radcliffe, and so on), but rather are radical concentrations of formalist reading in which those very natural-philosophical figures are formalist categories. To put it in deliberately stark terms: there is no natural philosophy in this book; there are only forms.What does it mean for a concept to become a form? For The Natural Laws of Plot, this entails the animation of its terms in narrative, but narrative viewed as “objective eventfulness as such” (28). The subject of the book is objectivity: “Novels became powerfully appealing in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries at least in part because they aspired to represent an objective world as a totality, something complete and ordered in itself. Their plots offered a means to grapple with questions of objectivity as a dimension of the world, as an aspect of how things happen” (19). And for this to be the case, for novels to fulfill this “appealing function,” plot must be understood “in its pure materiality; viewed as if under a microscope or in the chamber of an air-pump” (27). After a rich first chapter outlining the book's argument about plot-as-background, seven chapters take up particular aspects of eighteenth-century natural philosophy and show how its concepts are formalized within novels: matter and mechanics in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy; intermediate causes in Defoe; natural history and the notion of type in Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding; chemical substance in Tobias Smollett, Radcliffe, and Frances Burney; molecular interaction in Jane Austen; quixotism as a problem of subjectivity in William Godwin and Maria Edgeworth, with an exhilarating discussion of Austen; and concatenation, vertigo, and bodily disorientation in Scott.Plot is thus foundationally based in what the book calls “the background,” or the setting (6). In this regard, one hopes the reader of Novel will think of Mikhail Bakhtin's great concept of the chronotope, the narrative space-time of any story, which sets determinate limits on what is representable within it. But the chronotope is basically absent from The Natural Laws of Plot, presumably because of the difference between Lee's emphasis on the material constitution of the story world and Bakhtin's on the socio-narrative conditions of possibility of that world. But it is also absent because of the special accent, for Lee, on the causal chains in and through which the world emerges: its physis. Crucially, for Lee this is an asocial matter: it is, baldly, matter as such. A question therefore recurs throughout one's reading: In what kind of social formation is matter represented as merely matter?Procedurally, The Natural Laws of Plot both observes and follows a certain logic of abstraction. The decisive move occurs in an extended meditation on Erich Auerbach's Mimesis—a constant companion in the book, even when it goes unmentioned—in which Lee shifts from Auerbach's insistence on the historicity of plot for most of his text to the immanence of matter in its final chapter. “In this case,” Lee writes, referring to Auerbach's reading of the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse, “what's been evacuated are human-scale actors” (27). Counterintuitively, but to productive effect and also in tune with a happy thought of Viktor Shklovsky's, Lee thus studies the eighteenth century as the most modernist or Woolfian moment in the history of the novel (far indeed from Auerbach's own idiosyncratic view of the period, via Antoine François Prévost's Manon Lescaut and Friedrich Schiller), though of course this is Woolf doubly distilled, temporarily shorn of social reference at the end of Auerbach's long argument. Lee ultimately returns, in striking fashion, to historicity (and to Auerbach's concern with historicity) in the final chapter of The Natural Laws of Plot, where social mediation tentatively reasserts itself. Yet there, too, the question of history is oddly yet compellingly asocial: in Scott, Lee argues, the experience of history is registered as a kind of vertigo in which scales of change greater than the individual subject are given form through a phenomenology of disorientation, a literal loss of apperceptive coordinates in which the subject effectively fades in the face of movement itself: “We could say that history is simultaneously figured as movement and resolved into movement or movement-sequences. This is how motion becomes more than simply a figure or analogy for history. It seems to occur at the level of history's elemental substance” (197). There's no better signature of Lee's compressed style of literary-critical expression (in a book brimming with resonant formulations) than that encapsulation of her argument in the three-word phrase “history's elemental substance.”What, then, is history in The Natural Laws of Plot? In the first place, the concept of history is inseparable from the history of objectivity, which is itself the frame of reference for understanding the history and theory of the novel: “The concept of objectivity is neither static nor timeless. It possesses its own history. . . . I will suggest that the history of objectivity offers a frame within which we can situate the developments of natural philosophy, the novel as a genre, and novel-theory. . . . These developments appear to share the same fulcrum: the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries” (9). Following Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, along with Foucault, Lee asserts that objectivity and subjectivity were aligned for the first part of the eighteenth century, but that by century's end “the human subject who assembles knowledge and represents the world becomes the object of a new, anxious scrutiny.” The novel “participated” in this shift, along with the theory of the novel, “which accompanied this genre like a shadow” (11). The model here is The Order of Things: a slice of synchrony, bounded by epistemological breaks.The last two chapters, on quixotism and the historical novel, respectively, stage that break in two different registers. Chapter 7 describes the way the “long latency” of quixotism in English narrative articulates the transformation in subjectivity between epistemes (151). For most of the eighteenth century, argues Lee, a novel has space for only one quixote: that figure is “anomalous rather than typical of its represented universe,” and the narratology of quixotism pivots on characters’ structural relation to that figure (“friend, accomplice, abuser, disabuser, etc.”). Around 1800, quixotes proliferate in novels even as their defining trait—subjective distortion—is calibrated at multiple levels, and is especially oriented toward the characters’ misperception of themselves, in “the form of a persistent, willful, dangerous bias or partial blindness” (161). Quixotism in this sense “becomes endemic” to the novel as a form, emblematized in Emma Woodhouse's “infatuation with the very idea of objectivity” (179).But Emma is not yet herself a historical being in the way The Natural Laws of Plot understands history. For history as such begins in this book with the historical novel. Objectivity remains precisely objective during the eighteenth century as it appears here. An index of that stability is the curiously noncontradictory relationship between the novel and natural philosophy until the final chapter. The novel, to repeat Lee's verb, “participates” in the episteme; Foucault's own closed version of totality—the sheet of historical sameness, juxtaposed alongside what a different idiom would call other, discontinuous planes of consistency—rules until Scott. If plot is, in Lee's apt phrase, “the totalizing machine” (213), it is a strangely inert totality. That is not to say it is undynamic: quite the contrary, Lee's argument is based on the variety and ingeniousness of the novel's actualizations of natural-philosophical concepts. But the novel here reiterates them; novelistic plots enact and actualize material from the other discourse; there seems to be no distance between them. Natural philosophy, “far from being a rival, was closely enmeshed with the way that novels conceived and executed their plots” (4). In this sense, natural philosophy establishes the bounds of the objective, which is then installed as the background of the novel. The movement across the divisions between chapters in The Natural Laws of Plot is a shift within that overall discourse, from one aspect to another (materiality, causality, visibility, composition, and so on).With the Scott chapter, contradiction arrives, and it does so in a properly dialectical way, through Scott's ingestion and supersession of Erasmus Darwin's lessons on concatenation, according to which an idea produces a physical motion in the body which, in turn, produces another idea, and so on. Vertigo sets in when the body's orientation in the world is disrupted, when “we can't help noticing that both the ambient movement and the ambient stasis we see are largely fictional, that what we see isn't real,” because what we see—how we orient ourselves bodily—is based on a disconnection from the world (190). Stability depends upon a quixotic filter or block. History in Scott, then, is precisely the interference with this screen: in history, you “lose the ability to tell whether you're moving or the world is moving” (191).The upshot is a sudden surge of social material into The Natural Laws of Plot. Rejoining Auerbach's larger claim about realism, Lee invokes Mimesis's account of historical representation as “the dynamics of opposing social forces” (Auerbach qtd. in Lee 205) and situates Scott as the figure “filling the gap between Goethe and Marx.” But this is a Scott informed by the prior tale of a different episteme: the historical novel “explore[s] the dynamic forces that can be sensed, correctly or incorrectly, in any historical moment, but [it does] so in a way that the novel is now best equipped to do”—that is, abstractly, as an expression of the objectivity of history crystallized through subjective disorientation (205).I continue to be struck, even in relation to this astonishing passage of reading, at how, in The Natural Laws of Plot, the novel fades as a social mediation. Plots are figured as totalities, yes, yet as closed totalities that seem not to touch or to represent social reality. Thinking along these lines, I am reminded of that crucial socio-narrative element that, as Lee explains, is not eliminated from the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse: “Harder to remove,” writes Lee with a certain poignancy, “is the persistence of consciousness, of looking, wanting, and seeking meaning or wholeness” (27). Among the achievements of The Natural Laws of Plot is its bold reduction of the novel to a machine of natural-philosophical representation—a reduction that sets the stage for a renewed, more thoroughly dialectical account of the novel as a social mediation.