Buzard - Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels

Disorienting Fiction

Disorienting Fiction

THE AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC WORK OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH NOVELS

JAMES BUZARD

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2005 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock,

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Buzard, James.

Disorienting fiction : the autoethnographic work of nineteenth-century British novels / James Buzard.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-00232-0 (cl. : alk. paper) ISBN 0-691-09555-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. English fiction19th centuryHistory and criticism. 2. National characteristics, British, in literature. 3. Alienation (Social psychology) in literature. 4. Difference (Psychology) in literature. 5. Social isolation in literature. 6. Outsiders in literature. 7. Culture in literature. 8. Self in literature. I. Title.

PR868.N356B89 2005

823.809358dc22

2004040127

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Times Roman.

Printed on acid-free paper.

pup.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

MANY THANKS to James Eli Adams and Ian Duncan for their support, valuable criticisms, exemplary professionalism, and friendship. To Christopher Herbert, il miglior fabbro, I owe a special debt for his work and example. I would also like to thank Amanda Anderson, Joseph Childers, Jay Clayton, Penny Fielding, Eileen Gillooly, Tanya Holway, Michael Levenson, and Andrew Miller for many encouragements and enabling interventions. My department chair, Peter S. Donaldson, could write the book on how to nurture a colleagues developing career. The dean of my school, Philip S. Khoury, has afforded me every opportunity I could have asked for, and then some, in the form of leave time and research support. An NEH fellowship at the National Humanities Center was an invaluable stimulus in the early stages of my work on this project: at that time, Elizabeth Helsinger kindly read and commented on some early drafts. Lectures developing portions of my argument here have been delivered under the auspices of numerous organizations, including the MLA, NAVSA, the Dickens Project, the British Council, INCS, NVSA, the Victorians Institute, the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature, the Society for Utopian Studies, the Humanities Center at Harvard University, the CUNY Graduate Center, the History and Literature Workshop at MIT, the University of Exeter, the Literature Faculty of MIT, and the English Departments of the following universities or colleges: Edinburgh, Indiana, Duke, Salem State, Oregon, Tennessee, Harvard, and Fordham. I would like to thank all of these organizations for the opportunities they extended to me.

Mazviita, Tuku.

In a category of their own are Ina, the irrepressible Nathaniel, and the peerless Camilla. Camilla was born just after my previous book appeared and has had to wait far too long to be acknowledged in this one.

The following published essays represent early versions of parts of this book:

Anywheres Nowhere: Bleak House as Autoethnography, Yale Journal of Criticism 12/1 (1999), 739.

Anywheres Nowhere: Dickens on the Move, in Anny Sadrin, ed., Dickens, Europe, and the New Worlds (London: Macmillan, 1999), 11327.

Ethnography as Interruption: News from Nowhere, Narrative, and the Modern Romance of Authority, Victorian Studies 40/3 (Spring 1997), 44574.

Translation and Tourism: Scotts Waverley and the Rendering of Culture, Yale Journal of Criticism, 8/2 (1995), 3159.

If everything is related to everything else, where does the description stop?

Raymond Firth

The concept of Kultur delimits.

Norbert Elias

Where would you wish to go? she asked.

Anywhere, my dear, I replied.

Anywheres nowhere, said Miss Jellyby, stopping perversely.

Let us go somewhere at any rate, said I.

Charles Dickens, Bleak House

I have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

PART ONE

Cultures and Autoethnography

CHAPTER ONE

Uneven Developments: Culture, circa 2000 and 1900

[A]lthough it is still spoken of as the science of culture, modern cultural anthropology might be more accurately characterized as the science of cultures.

George W. Stocking Jr.

AT THE END of the twentieth century, the anthropological concept of culture, once heralded as a colossal advance in social thought, occupied an uncertain terrain. On the one hand, its usefulness and even indispensability were championed in a series of ambitious studies of international economic and political relations, including such works as Samuel P. Huntingtons The Clash of Civilizations and David S. Landess The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, which sometimes treated cultural differences as if they were capable of accounting for virtually every feature of contemporary geopolitics, and especially for every troubling feature. As the title of a recent Landes essay puts it, Culture Makes Almost All the Difference. Such books reflected the terms phenomenal success outside of academic discourse, where, on talk radio and in book groups, on editorial pages and elementary schools, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that sustained conversation about human affairs could hardly be carried on without almost constant recourse to the idea that the world population is divisible into a number of discrete cultures, and that these cultures determine or at least explain much of what goes on in the world.