A slim volume of one hundred pages, A.N Kaul’s The Domain of the Novel: Reflections on Some Historical Definitions packs a huge punch: “nothing less than a synthesis of a lifetime’s work on the novel” by a legendary teacher and theorist of the form. Its ambition, couched in appropriately self-conscious disclaimers regarding its limits, nevertheless delivers, representing the immense range of cultural and critical work that the novel—particularly the 19th century English, Russian, and American novel—accomplishes through analyses that anticipate and/or are in tune with crucial theoretical preoccupations of contemporary novel criticism.
In four lucid chapters, Kaul presciently raises concerns about ideology critique and “nationality and the novel” central to emerging debates in the late 20th and early 21st centuries regarding the politics of, and in, literary or cultural texts.
The first three chapters—“A New Province of Writing,” “Nationality and the Novel,” and “Ideology of the Novel”—are transcribed from a series of three lectures Kaul gave in 1998 at the urging of his students at Venkateswara College, Delhi University; the fourth, “Hawthorne and the Idea of Historical Continuity,” is a transcription of an earlier lecture from the 1970s included in this volume by virtue of its focus.
A work of homage and meticulous recovery by Mythili Kaul that seeks to retain the “speaking voice” of Professor Kaul, the chapters are framed by Sambudha Sen’s indispensable introduction that both articulates the originality and acuity of Kaul’s thinking and situates it in the larger debates and criticism that throw these qualities into sharp relief.
At the beginning of each chapter, Kaul stakes out his ground, providing a strong thesis that he works through, elucidating and critically examining its elements through a handful of examples.
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A.N. Kaul
The Domain of the Novel: Reflections on Some Historical Definitions
(Routledge, 2021)
Chapter One specifies a set of methodological and analytical moves that turn up in other chapters: an insistence on novelists’ self-definition and understanding of the novel form; and careful attention to the persistence of residual, older elements in the newness the novel represents. The second and third chapters, which address the novel’s salience for elaborating nationality and transmitting ideology, focus on examples from American, Russian and Indian novels; these chapters resonate powerfully with some of the most productive strands of critique and dissent in earlier and current discussions of the post-colonial novel and world literature.
In the former, Kaul’s disaggregation of two distinct concepts—“natio” and “nation”— often conflated in national imaginaries and his insights into how they are deployed differently in novels of national self-imaging is particularly useful in distinguishing national traditions. So too is his suggestion to view the “invented” or “imagined” dimension of nationalism as coterminous with the constructed nature of all social formations and historical realities.
Most resonant, however, for postcolonial and world literature criticism especially, is his argument regarding the “belated nationalisms” of Russia, America, and India, whose novelistic discourse is “richer, more radical . . . contentious, and problematic than the internally self-defining, homogenizing discourse of Western European nationalism.” Defined by their belatedness, these nations had to contend with an already given Western model and native conceptions at once embracing and resisting the Western nationalist imagination.
The chapter on ideology and the novel ask us to rethink ideological criticism: while concurring with Althusser and others who posit the pervasiveness and deep penetration of ideological operations within human consciousness, Kaul finds their “ironclad ideological determinism” deeply problematic in that the human subject and human agency are simply erased. In counterpoint, Kaul references Marx’s “altered circumstances” and E.P. Thompson’s “crises” of “experience” as crucial elements in destabilising the ideologically overdetermined subject.
These disruptive elements are central to the American Romance, a mode of writing that subjects sociohistorical realities and their mode of representation to critique from “alien and alienating points of view and vantage,” producing, in turn, alternative, and potentially more liberating social and ideological formations. This focus on a productive intervention in the overdeterminations of Althusserian accounts of ideology also enables Kaul to retain the political as an important dimension of literary/cultural analysis.
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Alternative social and political formations, especially the utopian, are the subject of Chapter Four concerning Hawthorne’s idea of historical continuity. Kaul finds in Hawthorne’s novels a “transtemporality” that erases fixed demarcations between past, present and future and troubles any notion of a finished historical event. He argues that Hawthorne envisioned the past as neither settled nor determinative, but open to alternative futures, demonstrating an expansive historical imagination given full rein in his major romances.
Recognising the chapters’ origins as lectures is crucial to do justice to the arguments being forwarded and the contexts being activated by Domain. They are best read as provocations to (as in urging, stimulating, prompting, encouraging) further exploration and thought. Lectures by and conversations with Professor Kaul were always dialogic encounters, providing the opportunity in real-time for counter arguments and examples that could problematise, but also render more complex and extensive, the claims being made on behalf of any given subject.
An infinitely patient listener and agile thinker, Professor Kaul, would respond in ways that enriched the questioning or intervention itself in valuable ways. At this distance in time and place from my last encounter with Professor Kaul, so many questions arise about what he would have thought of contemporary postcolonial novels that I teach—novels preoccupied with “nationality” in some of the ways Kaul elaborates, but written by transnational or avowedly global subjects. His thoughts, I’m sure, would have been as insightful as the arguments set forth in The Domain of the Novel.
Anuradha Dingwaney Needham is Longman Professor English and Cinema Studies at Oberlin College, US, where she teaches postcolonial literature and theory and Indian cinema; she is author, most recently, of New Indian Cinema in Postcolonial India: The Cultural Work of Shyam Benegal’s Films (Routledge, UK) and co-editor of The Crisis of Secularism in India (Duke)