Carolyn Lesjak’s The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons associates enclosure with a kind of “slow violence”— a term Rob Nixon uses to describe the accumulating effects of ecological devastation and climate change on the global poor.1 For Lesjak, enclosure, like climate change, does not have a punctual, “evental” status; not only are its effects delayed and diffused, but new waves of enclosure are always extending enclosure’s “afterlife” and problematizing any one-and-done explanations of its origin.2 Moreover, if the commons are always being enclosed without any punctual or evental finality, they are always also persisting in pockets and being mobilized against further plunder and enclosure. The idea for her book, she explains, “took shape” in one such moment of resistance in 2011, when “Occupy reclaimed public space, and squares, parks, and plazas became for a time a commons.”3 This insistence on “the persistence of the commons” gives her argument a dialectical twist. Lesjak is not just interested in how authors like Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy register and represent the afterlife of enclosure — even though “the literal enclosure of land does not make its way into classic nineteenth-century realist novels … as a discrete event to be narrated” — she also wants to examine how they figure “the persistence of the commons” as continued resistance to on-going enclosure.4

Lesjak’s approach is “contrapuntal,” to borrow a phrase from music theory that Edward Said liked to use. A counterpoint is a piece of music composed of two different melodies played in conjunction with one another. The afterlife of enclosure is played against the persistence of the commons — dispossession against its resistances. Crucially, though, the “social unity” projected by Lesjak’s authors is “neither a given nor recoverable from the past, but instead something to be achieved … in a future that has yet to come.”5 For this reason, I propose to call her method of “reading dialectically” (as she calls it elsewhere) figural reading after Erich Auerbach’s famous essay “Figura,” and — in a connection that will become clearer later —Walter Benjamin’s conceptualization of a Marxist hermeneutic that brushes history “against the grain.”6

As Lesjak’s references to Occupy and renewed interest in the commons indicate, it is something about the present that makes her authors now readable as case studies in the persistence of the commons. In this sense, her analyses involve a form of what Auerbach calls figura, a Latin term which came to refer to “something real and historical which announces something else that is also real and historical.”7 In the hands of the Church Fathers, “the aim of this sort of interpretation was to show that the persons and events of the Old Testament were prefigurations of the New Testament and its history of salvation.”8 Figura, although similar to allegory, “differs from most of the allegorical forms known to us by the historicity both of the sign and what it signifies,” implying, as it does, “the interpretation of one worldly event through another; the first signifies the second, the second fulfills the first. Both remain historical events; yet both, looked at in this way, have something provisional and incomplete about them; they point to one another and both point to something in the future, something still to come, which will be the actual, real, and definitive event.”9 One consequence, however, of the figural reading of the Old Testament was its annulment as “a book of laws and a history of the people of Israel.”10 Here, we encounter a recurring risk of strong figural readings — their tendency to annul past meanings and contexts. This is a risk with which Lesjak gambles in each of her chapters.

Since the enclosure movement came to a head in the period from 1750 to 1850, when roughly 6 million acres of unenclosed land were transformed into private fields by Acts of Parliament, Lesjak tends to find figurations of the persistence of the commons not in the literal landscapes of her authors’ novels, but “in the language of common characters and types; in visions of common culture and the common good; and in the language of common relations.”11 Turning to Dickens, she argues that, while his characters, as an ensemble, represent the new urban masses driven together by the displacing force of enclosure and the industrial revolution, each is unique and differentiated from the other, providing his novels with an image of utopian multiplicity. Here, Lesjak traces the influence on Dickens of “an earlier tradition of … eighteenth-century ‘characteristic writing,’ ‘eccentric biographies,’ and ‘character books.’”12 She finds this practice of eccentric character-making at odds, however, with the consensus that sees in Dickens’s characters — who often have a pained aspect of the maladjusted — a representation of the dehumanizing and homogenizing effects of capitalist reification on the individual.13 Her solution is to argue that Dickens’s characters are marked by both aspects. They are Lukácsian “types,” realistically representing the destructive and delimiting dynamics of the new class society on human independence and development, and, at the same time, a hodgepodge of “eccentrics,” who embody the diversity of the collective and the resiliency of the human spirit against dehumanization — in short, the “utopian many.”14 These two arguments, which could cancel each other out, are allowed to coexist: characterization in Dickens is both representative and exceptional — typical of the norm and also figurative of the exception.

In Eliot’s version of this “social chorus,” Lesjak again traces the figure of the “utopian many.” Lesjak sees Eliot’s narrator as teaching readers egalitarian humility, when characters that are too eager to separate themselves from the collective find themselves returned to the field of the many. But is egalitarian humility really the lesson Eliot is offering? In Middlemarch, the characters who fall back into the fold of the common are usually also forced to abandon their altruistic ambitions to intervene in history for the many. It is worth remembering that in her celebrated essay, “The Natural History of German Life,” a review of two works by Wilhelm von Riehl, she endorses the German author’s “social-political- conservativism,” which admonished “communistic theories” that “attempt to disengage” from the slow progress of “incarnate history” as being “destructive of social vitality”: “What has grown up historically,” she concludes, “can only die out historically, by the gradual operation of necessary laws.”15 The lesson on offer is not egalitarian humility, but adaptation to the slow and painful progress of the new economic order that is emerging.16

Lesjak makes a lot of Adam Bede’s impressive range of “common” characters, but here again the figuraltreatment of character presents issues. The novel’s eponymous hero, a lowly carpenter, is devoted to self-improvement and economic rationality. He dreams of overseeing the local squire’s land, feeling that he can manage it more productively than the old man. The local tenant farmers the Poysers (i.e., capitalist farmers) feel the same. When the old squire tries to convince them to take on more dairy, so he can increase his rent roll by leasing some of their arable land to another farmer, Mrs. Poyser “has her say out,” telling the old man that they won’t take on the risk of making more dairy than they can sell. In Lesjak’s reading, Mrs. Poyser becomes a figure of the utopian many protesting the greedy landlord’s further encroachment on the commons.17 This forms no part of the actual discussion in Adam Bede, though.18 Mrs. Poyser is self-interestedly telling the old squire that, as capitalist tenant farmers, they can only make their money through products they can turn over on the market; unlike him, they don’t have a rent roll to pad their pockets. The squire dies and his heir goes into exile after ruining the life of a local dairymaid. The Poysers remain where they are and Adam Bede takes over management of the land — slow and painful progress is achieved through economic rationality in land use, not against it.19 Mrs. Poyser may be “common” but she is not a commoner. The issue turns once again on the one-and-both logic of Lesjak’s figural reading, which is also built into the interpretation of enclosure as always beginning and never completed.

Lesjak’s “longue durée of enclosure” is perhaps better conceived as a kind of “punctuated equilibrium,” in which patterns of capital accumulation are punctuated by new waves of enclosure as capital reorganizes itself around the globe. Each of those waves would then have its own evental status in the evolution and mutation of capitalism. What I mean by the above can be elaborated by a consideration of Lesjak’s chapter on Hardy, where the argument turns less on character as a figure for the persistence/resistance of the commons as it does the actual land —the ominous heath of The Return of the Nativeand The Woodlanders— which figures the shared environment that sustains and unites the characters as a laboring collective. Significantly, this collectivity is threatened not only by figural but also literal dispossession, when characters are evicted from their homes and forced into a life of itinerancy.

But here it may be important to highlight changes to rural life not directly related to enclosure that also contribute to the novels’ structure of feeling. In her much-neglected study, Thomas Hardy and Rural England, Merryn Williams (Raymond Williams’s daughter) observes that rural life in the south-west had stagnated significantly in the second half of the century when Hardy began writing his Wessex novels. The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 had exposed domestic production to foreign competition, but the real blow came in 1875 when “a series of disastrous harvests coincided with an influx of cheap grain from America and caused heavy losses among the corn farmers.” For many farmers, the only “solution … was to convert arable land to pasture, especially as a dairy farm required only about half as many workers.”20 This crisis spawned two great depressions (1875-84 and 1891-99) and massive waves of migration, particularly from Hardy’s native Dorset which “was one of only nine counties in England which recorded an absolute population decline.”21 There is certainly a sinister “afterlife” of enclosure here, which, as Lesjak says, makes “social space” feel both more empty and “constricted and constricting,” since the loss of the commons makes the hardships of the unemployed and displaced all the more unbearable.22 But for its suffocating effects to be registered in this way, enclosure must, pace Lesjak, already have achieved a kind of punctual and evental status as indeed it had by 1875.

My disagreements, then, are not with the spirit of the interpretations Lesjak puts forward, but with the letter— that is, with the figures that they take and with the heavy emphasis on character, which, in my opinion, is made to bear too much significance. This dynamic tension, however, between letter and spirit is part of figural reading itself. As Auerbach writes of the new Christians’ emphasis on God’s grace over God’s law, “in its Jewish and Judaistic legal sense the Old Testament is the letter that kills, while the new Christians are servants of the new covenant, of the spirit that gives life.”23 Lesjak’s method of figural reading, however, lacks the stability of a phenomenal prophecy supported by a new dispensation. Her novels’ figurationsof the persisting “commons” have a fleetingness and fragility to them that renders them vulnerable to a still radically undetermined historical present and future. A better model can be found instead in Benjamin’s elective blending of Jewish messianism and Marxism in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”

In thesis IX, Benjamin famously argues that History can be thought of as “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.” Each historical episode adds more tragedy and suffering to the pile, pushing the “angel of history” backwards into an obscure future. The angel “would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed,” but “a storm is blowing from Paradise” which “has got caught in his wings.”24 The task of the “historical materialist” is to “brush history against the grain,” not only to produce a history that tells the story of the vanquished rather than the victor, but also to illuminate, through “a tiger’s leap into … the open air of history,” the latent but unrealized drive for justice in every revolutionary opening that ended in defeat or betrayal.25 There is, however, a “weak Messianic power” operating in History — a “messianic” figure could arrive at any moment to redeem and fulfil these repressed calls for justice.26 This power is “weak” because this figure will not fit the typical image of a messiah, but will instead be of a more common and embattled character: Benjamin, in this Marxist phase, was probably thinking of the revolutionary proletariat, which he saw as simultaneously betrayed by social democracy and Stalinism, and thus not having completed its historical mission.

Does this not describe Lesjak’s own hermeneutic? She too brushes literary history against the grain to reveal a story of dispossession that continues apace as the afterlife of enclosure. But, alongside this first story, she also illuminates the uneven persistence of the commons — buried utopian horizons — “hiding, as it were, in plain sight,”27 but only graspable in the light of the present, in a political conjuncture like our own which takes the recuperation of the commons not as a backwards-looking interest, but as an immediate and pressing task for justice and survival in the present.

1. Carolyn Lesjak, The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021) 7.
2. Lesjak, Afterlife 22.
3. Afterlife xi.
4. Afterlife 10.
5. Afterlife 6.
6. See Carolyn Lesjak, “Reading Dialectically,” Criticism 55.2 (2013): 233-77.
7. Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans. Ralph Manheim (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984): 29.
8. Auerbach, “Figura” 30.
9. “Figura” 54 and 58.
10. “Figura” 52.
11. Afterlife 11.
12. Afterlife 47-48.
13. Afterlife 64.
14. Afterlife 74-76.
15. George Eliot, “The Natural History of German Life,” Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, ed. A. S. Byatt (London: Penguin, 1990) 127 and 139.
16. For a reading of Middlemarch in this vein, see Thomas A. Laughlin, “George Eliot’s Epic Syntax: History and Totality in Middlemarch,” Mediations 33.1-2 (2020): 1-30.
17. Afterlife 101.
18. George Eliot, Adam Bede, ed. Margaret Reynolds (London: Penguin, 2008) 371-80.
19. As the reader may have guessed, this paragraph previews the argument of a larger essay I am writing.
20. Merryn Williams, Thomas Hardy and Rural England (London: Macmillan, 1972) 5.
21. Williams, Thomas Hardy 111.
22. Afterlife 157.
23. “Figura” 51.
24. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968) 257-58.
25. Benjamin, “Philosophy of History” 257 and 261.
26. “Philosophy of History” 254.
27. Afterlife 2.