Many of us, and I am certainly guilty of it, fall into the habit of saying that such and such a novel “thinks” about marriage, death, war, fear, art, and so on. However, this way of putting things is often misleading since what we are really talking about is not actual thinking but the representation of thoughts in the work. For Timothy Bewes, this everyday, barely-thought-about rhetorical phrasing reveals an assumption about the most fundamental relation between the novel and the world: that assumption being that there is a relation.
The assumption that novels make connections—internally or externally, intentionally or not, represented or instantiated—structures our everyday understanding of fiction and the novel form. Moreover, it is the “structure that has organized almost all professional literary criticism since the novel’s inception” (38). Against this insistent belief in connection, that the novel’s ideas are or can be communicated through the interpretative work...
