Deidre Lynch reviews The Grounds of the Novel

Daniel Wright. The Grounds of the Novel. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2024. 229 pp.

5 September 2024

When I say that Daniel Wright’s The Grounds of the Novel is a foundational, field-(re)defining study, I mean to do more than applaud Wright for intervening so effectively into novel studies and studies of literature and philosophy—though this book does provide tools we might use to rebuild both those enterprises from the ground up. I am also referencing the ambitious redescription of the novel genre this book offers as it highlights the ontological preoccupations of realist writing. Traditionally realism has provoked questions about what is in the novel, or even how much (questions about the sociological limits of fictional worlds, for instance). Renovating the concept of realism, Wright redirects attention, instead, to what is in the novel, to questions about how what is fictional exists and about the grounds, the foundations, on which that existence takes place.

In a series of philosophically attuned close readings of novels, he traces the language novelists use to lay bare the metaphysical substructure that is prior to and undergirds their acts of representation and reference. Wright annotates the measures that writers from Thomas Hardy to Colson Whitehead take—the metaphors of terraforming to which they resort—to make the reader apprehend the groundwork that extends beneath the fictional worlds into which they invite her. Think of Hardy’s presentation, as he opens The Return of the Native (1878), of the “Titanic form” of Egdon Heath, as “A Face on which Time makes but Little Impression,” and think of how it takes another chapter before, as the novelist puts it, “Humanity Appears upon the Scene.”[1] Think of how, prefacing The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Henry James first describes Isabel Archer as appearing in his consciousness as a “germ” of an idea, out of somewhere (some where), and then puzzles over how “If the apparition was still all to be placed, how came it to be vivid?”[2] James’s protagonists emerge, in Wright’s summing up of the metaphors of the prefaces, “in relation to a support: a garden to grow in, a pavement on which to stand, a canvas on which to be embroidered” (p. 121). Figuration along these lines is how novels do philosophy—“metametaphysical[ly]” (p. 38).

All who, with Wright, feel certain that they have “known fictional beings” and “been to fictional worlds” will be touched by his insistence that there is, somehow, a there there (p. 1). I am not sure I concur with him that an internalist rather than a contextualist approach to fiction represents the only method we can adopt to honor such knowledges. But I appreciated, especially, the rebuke The Grounds of the Novel directs at the gatekeeping of philosophers like W. V. O. Quine and at their conviction that to do philosophy means policing admission into the precincts of the real.

If unreal beings didn’t exist, then what became of me? or, at least, what became of the queer parts of me that felt both electrically real and also always existing under threat of derealization? (p. 2)

In this courageous passage, in which he remembers taking personally Quine’s 1948 essay “On What There Is,” Wright indicates how for him questions of ontology—for all their abstraction, nay, because of their abstraction—open out onto questions of ethics and politics. Another reason, then, to read this excellent book is for its argument that the novel’s real/unreal worlds can be resources for people who are harmed by this “in-or-out kind of metaphysics,” and who commit therefore to an “ontological pragmatism” as they reimagine what it is to be (p. 7). Wright mentions trans people, for instance, who “want to be able to say that the sexed body . . . is something real without saying that we must simply be satisfied with the one we get” and racialized people who want, similarly, to say that “the racialized body is something real without saying that that race is deeply determinative of identity, status, or standpoint at the level of ontology” (p. 176). There are alliances to be assembled between Black studies and novel theory and Trans studies and novel theory, this book demonstrates, to thrilling effect—and, Wright would insist, they are ones we can assemble even while cleaving to the novel’s own grounds.

[1] Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, ed. Tim Dolin (Cambridge, 2021), pp. 12, 11, 17.

[2] Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, ed. Roger Luckhurst (Oxford, 2009), pp. 4, 8.