| There was a time some decades ago when it was merely assumed that the novel was a site of subversion, when it was regarded as a genre uniquely equipped to expose the machinations of power, to speak for the downtrodden and the forgotten, and to suggest ways of arranging our private and social lives undreamed of by bourgeois orthodoxy. If, under such a conception, all literature deemed worthy a place in the canon was declared to be a criticism of life, the novel was seen to embody the rougher and sharper edges of this critique, for, New Critical valorizations of detachment notwithstanding, there appeared little that smacked of complacency in even its most elaborate aesthetic patterns, and its detailed discriminations of character and feeling could always be credited with being so many diagnoses of what a pitiless capitalism or a straitened imagination or an outmoded Christianity was doing to us. It was as though nearly every novel likely to be studied in an undergraduate classroom carried as its unwritten but palpable subtitle "The Way We Live Now," with Trollope's angered inflections wholly intact. Recently, of course, the situation has become wholly reversed, and today the genre is much more likely to be charged with collaboration than with giving any aid and comfort to the Resistance. Whether a text be Jamesian or Jeremiacal, the outcome is the sameeventually criticism forces it to betray its guilty allegiance to the liberal subject and the discourses that sustain him, a confession which paints the novel not as the scourge of middle-class hegemony but rather as its velvet police baton, relentlessly disciplining us in our easy chairs and seminar rooms. What appears to be subversion, we are inevitably informed, is merely the prearranged charade of Power, a feigning of distress designed to lure us into believing that we are somehow dismantling the Bastille, when in actuality we are walling ourselves up in textual Panopticons. Novelists, like Shelley's poets, have thus become, in an ironic and despairing sense, the |
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