Title: Tomaiuolo, Saverio. Victorian Unfinished Novels: The Imperfect Page
Abstract: Tomaiuolo, Saverio. Victorian Unfinished Novels: The Imperfect Page. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. pp. 1 + 204. $85; 50 [pounds sterling]. Dickens's novels are infamous for their insipid, cliched, unconvincing and fantastical endings; good end happily and bad end unhappily, exemplifying what fiction means. In this fascinating, closely argued and exuberant study, Saverio Tomaiuolo describes Dickens's stories as closed unities, typifying semantic and formal coherence of Victorian novel (55). How then do we comprehend unending, imposition of illness, physical disability, and death between a novelist and his or her ability to close a narrative tidily, definitively and resolutely? The quality and silences of an incomplete text speak to us, Tomaiuolo argues, and raise important questions on nature and meaning of novel-writing per se (13). Tomaiuolo deftly deploys a range of literary-critical tools to interrogate how closure--or lack thereof--shapes cultural circulation and critical interpretation of a text. He follows D. A. Miller in arguing for impossibility of closure, even as it takes place (10), although this does not necessarily enable us to imagine it away (53). Tomaiuolo considers an impressively wide range of unfinished texts: Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870); Charlotte Bronte's Emma (unpublished); Thackeray's Denis Duval (1863); Gaskell's Wives and Daughters (1864-66); Trollope's The Landleaguers (1883), Collins's Blind Love (1889); Stevenson's Weir of Hermiston (1896) and St. Ives (1897); and Henry James's The Sense of Past (1917). Of course, not every novel is unfinished in same way: Bronte's Emma is little more than a fragment and has inspired two continuations and a radio drama; Thackeray's Denis Duval and Dickens's Drood were about half-finished, with latter--perhaps most famous unfinished novel--bequeathing many continuations; Gaskell's Wives and Daughters was almost complete; while Collins's Blind Love was finished, under direction of dying author, by Walter Besant. Intriguingly, Tomaiuolo observes that these unfinished texts bring their writers back to their biographical and narrative beginnings as they strive to accommodate historical change within existing literary structures. For all of these authors, he argues, one of ways to try to understand challenge of a mutating society was to search for a renewed literary (124). The Victorian novel, he insists, was always characterised by an intrinsic metaliterary (103), with authors intensely aware of the 'literariness' of literature (12). Drood thus reflects Dickens's growing dissatisfaction with his own rhetorical and his own sense that moral, social and cultural values of his society were in crisis (77). The novel's pervading motif of decomposition echoes and amplifies failure of literary and narrative strategies of Victorian novel to offer resolution and closure. Tomaiuolo is perhaps retrospectively assigning a unity of purpose and vision to these texts, but it is an intriguing, thoroughly pursued and compellingly argued thesis nonetheless. Successfully adopting a magpie approach to literary criticism, Tomaiuolo uses work of Derrida, Barthes, Adorno, and Lukacs, among others, to bolster and frame his observations and interpretations, lie also champions an existential humanism, arguing that incongruities and paradoxes we encounter in unfinished texts resonate deeply because life itself is interrupted unexpectedly by death before many of its plots are unravelled (19). Tomaiuolo is fascinated by form and how composition/decomposition of both literary and real matter is interlinked, a line of thought pursued cogently and vigorously in Droodchapter. He reads Droodas obsessively concerned with dissolution--from material decay of Cloisterham to mirroring psychic breakdown of John Jasper--while text itself is unstable to point of disintegration. …
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-09-01
Language: en
Type: article
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