Toward the Novel as Critique

Abstract

Commissioned originally as part of a special issue for the 50th anniversary of the journal Novel: A Forum on Fiction, this essay undertakes a pointed retrospective of 50 years of Marxist theory of the novel. Breaking with the contemporary movement of “postcritique,” which posits the end of a great epoch of critique and with it the end of Marxist cultural aspirations, the essay emphasizes the unfinished business of critique. Critique cannot come to a close because it has not yet properly begun, despite more than 50 years of its enunciation. Critique in the fundamentally dialectical register requires both what Karl Marx called the “ruthless criticism of everything existing” and what he practiced as its correlative, utopian striving for what does not exist. Literary method has not fully exercised this dialectic, falling short on its utopian axis. To explore how literary interpretation could succeed in this vein, the essay builds upon the work of Pierre Macherey and Fredric Jameson to outline a theory of the critique immanent to the literary form of the novel itself. Critique is not an operation extrinsic to literature, but one intrinsic to the literary project of creative construction. A brief reading of this critical capacity, as illustrated in Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel, The Underground Railroad, concludes the argument.