Bo Lundén
(Re)educating the Reader: Fictional Critiques of Poststructuralism in Banville’s “Dr Copernicus,” Coetzee’s “Foe,” and Byatt’s “Possession”
Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1999. Pp. [viii] + 144
Reviewed by Arnd Bohm

This well-written study began as a doctoral dissertation presented to Göteburg University in 1998, and it reveals both the strengths and the shortcomings of its origin. It is tightly focused and clearly organized, and it demonstrates familiarity with the secondary literature relevant to the texts being analyzed. Even when the issues become abstruse, Lundén strives to avoid becoming prey to the jargons of postmodernism and poststructuralism. The thesis is restated again and again, most forcefully in the abstract and in the conclusion, namely that the three novels selected from the contemporary canon present “that which appears to elude what we call intellectual thinking.” In other words, “the novels (re)educate their readers by demonstrating the “other” of knowledge, the knowledge which might appear-at least in the Enlightenment system-to be ignorance” (127).

After an introductory chapter sketching the contexts of modern theoretical discourses in which the works are to be situated, Lundén devotes one chapter each to John Banville’s Dr Copernicus (1976), J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), and A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1980). Certainly the last two need little introduction, and the first deserves to be much better known. The brief concluding chapter goes beyond the reiteration of the main thesis to a consideration of why novels of “this type”-that is, ones in which contemporary theories of language, of representation, of undecidability, and of the vagaries of interpretation are foregrounded-have been proliferating. The remarks are rather speculative and do not consider factors such as the pressures from other domains (film, politics, performance art) being exerted upon the literary system.

No doubt each of the individual chapters will be useful to readers of Banville, Coetzee, and Byatt respectively, for Lundén does a good job of summarizing the plot and highlighting those passages consistent with his argument. On the whole, however, the limitations imposed by the dissertation have restricted Lundén’s critical insight. It does not become clear how the sample of works was established, just why these three novels were selected from the contemporary corpus to serve as examples of “fictional critiques of poststructuralism.” One might have expected some discussion of undisguised satires aimed at literary theory (David Lodge; Herbert Lindenberger’s Saul’s Fall [1979]), or the reasons for excluding them, or a work such as Samuel R. Delany’s Nevèrÿon cycle, which makes brilliant use of deconstruction and poststructuralism, as well as of gender studies. Connected with this is the fact that there is a rich tradition of authors playing elaborate games of literature (rewriting, alluding cryptically, destabilizing mimesis, and so on). Dante, Cervantes, and Joyce come to mind. Similarly, making readers wary of the arbitrary authority of this philosophical system or that ideology has often been an important goal (Rabelais, Voltaire, Swift). Lundén fails to consider whether these three novels are all that unusual, or whether they actually revert to important yet familiar strategies in subverting the reader’s confidence in the power of reason.

The other major shortcoming is that Lundén’s model of “the reader” and his understanding of the intermingling of rationality and emotion in the hermeneutic process are insufficient to meet the challenges presented by these novels. Because Lundén is unsympathetic to the contributions of poststructuralism in elaborating and enriching our understanding of the complexities of reading, he emphasizes the critique in these texts without realizing how loyal the authors have been to theory. Nor is it self-evident that the readers of this sort of literature need to be re-educated in this way. Although Lundén seems to feel that “the reader” should be discomfited by the ironic subversions of the putative differences between reading, writing, and interpreting, readers who are drawn to writers such as Coetzee or Byatt positively enjoy being dissolved through the text. They also revel in the intellectual exercises of detecting allusion (to theory, to other texts), of playing the literature game.

But how could a dissertation, bound to remaining serious, confess that the most exquisite pleasures come from reading and writing about reading and writing, pleasures so refined that novels are invented to imitate the experience? That would veer perilously close to a case where a professor starts writing fiction about literature, instead of producing more criticism.