Does that make Buffy the new Trotsky?

When you start reading a book with a cover and title as “tasteful” as this, you don’t expect it to conclude with an argument that we should all start acting more like vampires.

But that’s where Nancy Armstrong goes, in “How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719-1900.” Like a good Foucauldian genealogist of ideas, Armstrong treats “the novel” as a formerly powerful medium for the production of concepts, which is to say also for the installation of those concepts within reading subjects. For Armstrong, the history of the British novel in the 18th and 19th centuries is primarily a history of how British subjects conceived of themselves in relation to society. (When in this entry I write “us” I mean it strictly: Armstrong has argued elsewhere for the continuity rather than the distinctness of the British and American literatures.)

She begins with a discussion of the Lockean model of the mind, the famous tabula rasa on which ideas, derived from sensations that originate from objects in the world, are finally synthesized into judgments and emotions, both of which well up from within the mind of, crucially, an individual. The human body is conceived as a container of a unique human subjectivity with a rather strict division between interior and exterior that’s permeable only by sensations and actions (as mental commands to the body). This, Armstrong says, is the model of subjectivity presupposed by realist fiction, governed by what she calls the “logic of sympathy.” That is to say, sympathetic identification with the interior experience of another, his or her frustration and elation, suffering and satisfaction.

Such an individual has a place, of course, within a society: but it might not be the right place. Social mobility may be achieved by those individuals who enjoy (or suffer from) an excess of desire, will, wit, and ability relative to that which is appropriate to their birth position. The protagonist of the picaresque enjoys an excess of this kind in addition to the lack defined by his excess of desire—often, the lack simply of a more fitting adequation between his desire-will-wit-ability and his position. In the early decades of the period Armstrong’s book covers, the protagonist is thus a “misfit” for whom self-expression is a key to success. Here the democratic nation is formed by voluntary self-restraint, which also takes the form of tolerance; the picaresque often ends with the protagonist’s accession to the “society” that formerly excluded him. The community has reformed itself to make room for the misfit individual.

In the 19th century (with Austen as the crucial turning point whose work lies between the two eras), the story shifts. Now the individual with an excess appears as a compulsive violator of bourgeois sexuality, although of course his or her violations seldom if ever appear as directly described sexual deviancies. She or he has two possible fates: gaining entry to society by sublimating the excess desires and thus accommodating his or her sexuality to society’s norm; or else being destroyed as monstrous. Whereas18th-century society accommodated itself to the misfit, 19th-century society is represented as unyielding. The twist lies in the fact that once the C19 moral protagonist either renounces his excess of individualism for social stability (thus paradoxically becoming a complete individual) or is killed as a monster, the reader feels that the fictional world is diminished. For Armstrong, the principle purpose of the novel as a cultural form in these eras is to instruct the reader not to prefer the diminished world, but to settle for it.

But what is the alternative? Armstrong thinks she finds it in Deleuze. Some frustrated students complain that Deleuze’s philosophy is impossibly difficult, perhaps even unthinkable in some profound way. That’s precisely the value for Armstrong of Deleuze’s concepts: only something radically weird can ever hope to think outside of a mode of thought and being as pervasive as individualism. What Deleuze calls the rhizome Armstrong reframes as “vampire thinking” by way of reference to Bram Stoker. This is experienced as a loss of individual boundaries, an infusion of sensations that seem not to be your own, a “compulsion to dance, so to speak, to someone else’s tune.” It is an experience of abandon, a belonging to the “mass man.” Dracula himself, his victims, as well as the transformed group of vampire hunters at the novel’s end provide the model for Armstrong’s elaboration: each member of the group can carry all that group’s knowledge (collective thinking); the group shares a common object of desire (polyandrous desire); the group’s child belongs to no single member of the group (collective parenting); and the group is detached from geography (nomadism). Kant’s ideal representative republic of “universal hospitality,” where anyone has the right of access to anyone else’s society (the “right of visit”), Armstrong implies, may be achieved only by such a collective subject.

So what she’s really getting at, through a conversation about the recent history of feminist scholarship, through a discussion of the distinction between reproduction and repetition as ideals of patterning, and through a deliberate misreading of Freud’s “The Uncanny,” is a sort of belated (in Harold Bloom’s sense) attempt to theorize socialism. Not as a functional political system, but rather as a mode of relations in society. Demonstrating how it became so difficult for us to think that mode of relations—through our long engagement with novelistic narratives—serves primarily to help bring into focus what the alternatives might be, or have been.

Fortunately, Armstrong claims, there has been an alternative current running all along, though it has been far from dominant. Against the “logic of sympathy” that governs the individual’s relation to the collective and structures the classic novel, there has been a “logic of sensibility” that opposes the Lockean model of mind and challenges individualism. For this logic, emotions do not “well up from within the subject in response to sensations and acquire the form of ideas that enrich that subject’s personal storehouse of knowledge” (16). Rather, emotions and judgments originate outside the subject. They are literally in objects in the world, and they spread to us by means of a sort of contagion. Though Armstrong uses the phrase “literature of sensibility,” that refers only to the late early modern* philosophical texts that attempted to theorize “contagion” as the mechanism for the transmission of thoughts and feelings. That is to say, the logic of sensibility seems to be for Armstrong absolutely antithetical to the novel itself. Thus Austen is read as staging a battle between sympathy and sensibility in which sympathy wins every time: “whenever the emotional charge entering the individual from external objects through the senses overwhelm [sic] those genuine feelings that well up from within the individual, Austen’s novels draw a line, as if to say, ‘sensibility, thou shalt go no farther.’” (18) For Armstrong, there is no way for the novel to uphold the logic of sensibility, no matter what formal strategies it employs. “[N]ew varieties of the novel cannot help taking up the project of universalizing the individual subject [i.e., the subject governed by the logic of sympathy]. That, simply put, is what novels do.”

This proclamation raises any number of questions about where and on what grounds Armstrong would choose to draw the line between the novel and competing literary forms—not historically, but formally, and in the present cultural climate. She may be excused for omitting to pass this judgment in a book whose very title limits its concern to a period in which “the novel” was perhaps (perhaps) delimited by less porous boundaries than it is today. But when she ventures to judge absolutely, however briefly and however abstractly, twentieth and presumably even twenty-first century attempts to stretch the novel into performing new feats of imagination, she places herself under a certain obligation to define her central term. On the other hand, Armstrong has authored at least one major previous book I haven’t read that’s principally about “the novel,” so perhaps a satisfactory formal definition may be found there—the kind of definition that is required to underwrite a claim like “that, simply put, is what novels” (rather than most novels or these novels) “do.”

(Oh, and by the way, I read “Jane Eyre” last week for the first time, in preparation for reading this book . . . but that doesn’t mean I have anything to say about it.)

*How does one write this? I mean: the later decades of the early modern period, just before the industrial revolution. “Late early modern” does have the look of a typo. What is preferable?