| Description |
This dissertation demonstrates the Victorian novel's preoccupation with what it understands as liberal society's disavowed reliance on arbitrary and often violent decisions as a means of overcoming political and moral incommensurability, or, in other words, what Carl Schmitt has rather infamously called the "exception." Precisely opposed to Schmitt's concept of the sovereign decision is the position of procedural liberalism, in which abstract and objective concepts of right arrived at through deliberative procedures are understood to motivate legal processes that induce justice. Because the absolutist commitment to the sovereign decision is precisely antithetical to liberal ideals, the decision must either be deferred-only to begin a chain of deferrals-or, once implemented, its use must be disavowed. Novels from Thackeray to Conrad all recognize, I argue, the existence of what I call the "crypto-decisionism" obscured by the rhetoric and operations of procedural liberalism. Victorian demands of propriety and public morality, I argue, require the collective disavowal of whatever is antithetical to publicity. My focus then is on the way that the Victorian novel self-consciously reproduces the relationship between violence and disavowal that it portrays as essential to social harmony within the liberal context. The novels I consider in this dissertation present worlds in which the essential role of violence to preserving community stability is known but not acknowledged precisely because any open acknowledgement of the role of violence in maintaining social equanimity at the same time threatens to destroy the equanimity it secures. Ultimately the contradiction between deliberative procedures meant to produce consensual action on the one hand, and the violent decision on the other hand, creates a tension, I argue, that shapes the narrative structures of the novel in its image. In the novels I examine narrative conflict takes the form of incongruities or disturbances against which the novel must marshal exceptional means-a sort of internal, aesthetic decisionism-in order to secure aesthetic coherence or closure. In this way the novel form, I contend, mimetically reproduces Victorian anxieties regarding liberal forms of individual and community self-understanding. |
