On his book In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust
Cover Interview of October 10, 2011
In a nutshell
In the Company of Strangers is about how different ideas of the family affect the deep narrative structure of novels.
The principles of marriage and reproduction seem to be fundamental to the idea of narrative—we traditionally expect stories to end with marriage and often with an implicit promise of reproduction. The prospect of marrying and having children is associated with narrative closure; the adventures and chaos of the story are given retrospective meaning and legitimacy by the happy marriage at the end, and its promise that the family line will continue.
My book looks at how alternative ideas of family and kinship challenged this template. In particular, I argue that a fundamental rethinking of how family ties are formed and sustained was behind the experimental narrative projects of Joyce’s Ulysses and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (In Remembrance of Things Past in an earlier translation).
We all know that plots about genealogy—wills, long-lost relatives, marriages, bequests—were the great obsession of the English nineteenth-century novel. In the Company of Strangers suggests that this fixation with the family and its mechanisms was also a way of thinking about it, of casting it into doubt.
In many Victorian novels, Oliver Twist most obviously of all, outside strangers (such as Fagin) and relatives of blood or marriage (Mr. Brownlow) compete to control the destiny of the protagonist. In Dickens, the family (almost) always wins; In the Company of Strangers explores how in Joyce and Proust, the stranger wins, and how these novels offer a narrative world in which continuity and meaning come from outside the genealogical family structure.
The construction of a narrative world which is not implicitly built on the family is a lot of what feels “modern” about Ulysses and Proust, but my book also shows how the roots of this can be found in “anti-families” throughout Victorian fiction that rival the family plot, such as Fagin’s den of thieves, or Holmes and Watson’s mini-“family” in Baker Street.
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
In a nutshell
In the Company of Strangers is about how different ideas of the family affect the deep narrative structure of novels.
The principles of marriage and reproduction seem to be fundamental to the idea of narrative—we traditionally expect stories to end with marriage and often with an implicit promise of reproduction. The prospect of marrying and having children is associated with narrative closure; the adventures and chaos of the story are given retrospective meaning and legitimacy by the happy marriage at the end, and its promise that the family line will continue.
My book looks at how alternative ideas of family and kinship challenged this template. In particular, I argue that a fundamental rethinking of how family ties are formed and sustained was behind the experimental narrative projects of Joyce’s Ulysses and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (In Remembrance of Things Past in an earlier translation).
We all know that plots about genealogy—wills, long-lost relatives, marriages, bequests—were the great obsession of the English nineteenth-century novel. In the Company of Strangers suggests that this fixation with the family and its mechanisms was also a way of thinking about it, of casting it into doubt.
In many Victorian novels, Oliver Twist most obviously of all, outside strangers (such as Fagin) and relatives of blood or marriage (Mr. Brownlow) compete to control the destiny of the protagonist. In Dickens, the family (almost) always wins; In the Company of Strangers explores how in Joyce and Proust, the stranger wins, and how these novels offer a narrative world in which continuity and meaning come from outside the genealogical family structure.
The construction of a narrative world which is not implicitly built on the family is a lot of what feels “modern” about Ulysses and Proust, but my book also shows how the roots of this can be found in “anti-families” throughout Victorian fiction that rival the family plot, such as Fagin’s den of thieves, or Holmes and Watson’s mini-“family” in Baker Street.