In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust (Modernist Latitudes)

281 Pages·2011·2.79 MB·English

by  Barry McCrea

“McCrea has considered every alternative in cutting his own path from Dickens and Conan Doyle M
to Joyce and Proust. He mounts a sustained attack on the prevailing tendency to read these novel- c Columbia University Press
ists as if the only form possible were the reestablishment of family genealogy. His simple—but C contact: Lisa Hamm
absolutely brilliant—purpose is to give form to what, from the blinkered perspective of the family, r 212 459-0600 x7105
e
seems to be formless.”
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—Nancy Armstrong, Duke University, author of How Novels Think: The Limits of McCrea, In the Company of Strangers
Individualism from 1719–1900
4-c process only, gloss lam
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n the Company of Strangers shows how a reconception of family and kinship underlies the revo-
All art is live and in position.
lutionary experiments of the modernist novel. While stories of marriage and long-lost relatives
were a mainstay of classic Victorian fiction, Barry McCrea suggests that rival countercurrents within i
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these family plots set the stage for the formal innovations of Joyce and Proust. Tracing the challenges

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to the family plot mounted by figures such as Fagin, Sherlock Holmes, Leopold Bloom, and Charles
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Swann, McCrea tells the story of how bonds generated by chance encounters between strangers come
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to take over the role of organizing narrative time and give shape to fictional worlds—a task and power

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that was once the preserve of the genealogical family. By investigating how the question of family is a
hidden key to modernist structure and style, In the Company of Strangers explores the formal narrative o
potential of queerness and in doing so rewrites the history of the modern novel. m
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“In this stylish and intelligent work, McCrea offers a vision of something like the end of the Victo-
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rian family not as a social reality, since it is still with us, but as the imaginative heart of the good
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society. The modern novel as a genre, it turns out, reveals riches of queer metaphorical kinship
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that kinship doesn’t know.”

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—Michael Wood, author of Literature and the Taste of Knowledge
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“To read In the Company of Strangers is to experience literary criticism at its very best. McCrea’s S
discussions give one a sense of having reread an author with new sensitivity and depth; they im- t
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merse the reader in McCrea’s rich, energetic prose. This is an exceptionally mature, original work.”
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—Ravit Reichman, author of The Affective Life of Law: Legal Modernism and
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the Literary Imagination
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“In this transformative account, McCrea shows how the stranger becomes a foundational figure, e
the random encounter the foundational event for the modern novel, prompting and justifying its r
formal innovations. The modernist embrace of nongenealogical forms of human connection is the s
great story recounted in this book, an exhilarating, utterly original, and moving work.”
in the FamilY aNd Narrative
—Maria DiBattista, author of Novel Characters: A Genealogy
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ompany
iN dicKeNs,
Barry McCrea is associate professor of comparative literature and
English at Yale University and author of a novel, The First Verse.
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ISBN-13: 978-0-231-15763-6 b
Modernist Latitudes i
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9 780231 157636 Barry McCrea
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in the
Company
of

Strangers
Modernist Latitudes
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Modernist Latitudes
Jessica Berman and Paul Saint-Amour, Editors
M odernist Latitudes aims to capture the energy and ferment
of modernist studies by continuing to open up the range of
forms, locations, temporalities, and theoretical approaches
encompassed by the fi eld. The series celebrates the growing
latitude (“scope for freedom of action or thought”) that this
broadening affords scholars of modernism, whether they
are investigating little-known works or revisiting canonical
ones. Modernist Latitudes will pay particular attention to
the texts and contexts of those latitudes (Africa, Latin Amer-
ica, Australia, Asia, Southern Europe, and even the rural
United States) that have long been misrecognized as ancil-
lary to the canonical modernisms of the global North.
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in the
Company
of

Strangers

Family and Narrative in Dickens,
Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust
Barry McCrea
Columbia University Press New York
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Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
Copyright © 2011 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved

Parts of chapter 3 originally appeared as
“Family and Form in Ulysses ,” Field Day Review 5 (2009).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McCrea, Barry, 1974–
In the company of strangers : family and narrative in Dickens,
Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust / Barry McCrea.
p. cm. — (Modernist latitudes)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-231-15762-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-231-15763-6
(pbk. : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-231-52733-0 (e-book)
1. English fi ction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Fiction—
20th century—History and criticism 3. Families in literature.
4. Queer theory. 5. Modernism (Literature) I. Title.
pr830.f29m33 2011
823'.809355—dc22
2010053806

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent
and durable acid-free paper.
This book is printed on paper with recycled content.
Printed in the United States of America
c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Designed by Lisa Hamm
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A B
To my parents

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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Modernism and the Family 1
Narrative and Family 8
The Stranger 14
PART I
1. Queer Expectations 25
Oliver Twist : Outlaws and In-Laws 25
Bleak House 46
Jarndyce and Jarndyce 50
Great Expectations 54
2. Holmes at Home 67
Reviewing the Situation: Holmes and Fagin 67
Stately Homes 71
Holmes at Home 82
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viii • CONTENTS
PART II
Introduction 97
3. Family and Form in Ulysses 101
The Foundling Plots of Ulysses 101
The Marriage Plots of Ulysses 126
4. Proust’s Farewell to the Family 157
“Combray” 157
Swann and the Bond with the Stranger 169
The Race of Aunts 179
Notes 211
Index 251
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Acknowledgments
A t Columbia University Press I would like to thank Philip Leventhal
for taking this project on and seeing it through with good humor, and
Michael Haskell for his thoughtful editing. Thanks also to the series edi-
tors, Jessica Bermann and, especially, Paul Saint-Amour, whose input on
the manuscript was most valuable, as were the reports of the anonymous
readers for the Press.
At Yale, a Morse Junior Faculty Fellowship and a travel grant from the
Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies allowed me time and resources to fi n-
ish the book, and its publication was assisted by a grant from the Freder-
ick W. Hilles Publication Fund.
This book owes its fi rst and deepest debt to Maria DiBattista. It was in
her seminar at Princeton that I fi rst read Ulysses and Proust, but, more
than this, it has been in her teaching, in her generous company, and
by her example that I have learned how to read at all. She was the fi rst
stranger to offer me a home in the new world, and she has been a guiding
intellectual and personal light ever since. For this, for her kindness and
good company, and for the adventurous spin she gives to life on and off
the page, I am happy to have this chance to thank her from the bottom of
my heart.
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