Once you start looking for the politics of the commons, you will find it everywhere. It drives protests for popular justice of all kinds. It appears in actions against evictions nationwide, both before and during the coronavirus pandemic. It inheres in efforts to expand public transportation, to rebuild municipal infrastructure, and to abolish prisons. It animates fights for indigenous sovereignty across the globe, from Palestine to Turtle Island. The attempt to topple the relentless regime of capitalist expansion — to undo the accretive process of land privatization called enclosure — is ongoing. Centuries of escalating inequality and colonial violence has wrought legions of organized resistance and utopian dreaming. The continuing nature of this struggle firmly attests against the claim that it is easier to imagine the end of everything than to imagine the end of enclosure. This enduring and ubiquitous desire for the commons connects political struggles in the immediate present to their origins in the not-so-distant past. It allows us to link, for example, the political contradictions driving both Occupy Wall Street and the Swing Riots. The history of enclosure and the commons is, in other words, a history of capitalism and its discontents. It stands to reason that the realist novel, as one of the most enduring objects concomitant with that history, has particular insight into the nature and scope of the longue durée of endless dispossession and its energetic opposition.

Carolyn Lesjak’s The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons begins with the bold claim that literary studies has almost entirely ignored this historical trauma and its present-day persistence. Critical scholarship, Lesjak argues, has not only ignored enclosure’s appearance in the novel, it has reduced realist representation to the bad and bourgeois work of reproducing the status quo. Lesjak aligns her book with alternative accounts of realism — including recent monographs by literary critics Lauren Goodlad, Isobel Armstrong, and Anna Kornbluh — which “emphasize its generative possibilities and transformative or even radical politics.”1 These authors reinvigorate realism by attending to its uniquely dialectical mode of representation, its ability to think opposites together, to apprehend space as both individual experience and transindividual structure. Following this strain of interpretation with an “overtly political aim,”2 Lesjak proposes to revive the connections between the common as a figurative concept and the commons as a literal space. Doing so will illuminate the unifying thread linking various expressions of the commons as indirect figurations of “a collective in the making”3 rather than direct representations of privatized land or political programs. Setting the commons free from a mimetic imperative within the nineteenth century novel is the first step to reclaiming it in the present.

Figuration is often a confusing rather than clarifying term in literary criticism. Lesjak uses it frequently and with confidence, constellating the multiple meanings — construction, formation, projection — that convoke its psychic and material significance. In the wake of the physical destruction of the shared world and the social consequences of such decollectivization, she writes, nineteenth-century novelists produce “figurations of the commons,” in the form of “language of common characters and types; in visions of common culture and the common good, and in the language of common relations.”4 Time and time again, Lesjak finds in novels by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy a commitment to the collective nature of literary character, each amounting to different kinds of refusal of individual self-possession which Lesjak takes to be proof of faith in the commons as a political ideal. Literary character is so often subjected to undialectical treatment in nineteenth century scholarship, so Lesjak’s intervention is particularly welcome for its refreshing insight. One could perhaps imagine readings of these authors that might focus on narration as the primary site of this “decentering and literal objectification of self.”5 Take, for example, Audrey Jaffe’s argument on Hardy’s “exclusionary realism” examining perspectival constraint and the production of space in The Return of the Native, or my own reading of shame in The Mayor of Casterbridge as an affective form linking spatial exposure and economic degradation. Such readings differ slightly from those in The Afterlife of Enclosurein their explicit linking of the psychic and material dimensions of third-person narration rather than the material collectivity of character. But by reframing a literary device such as character away from its tired definition as a representation of dematerialized interiority and towards its inspired reformulation as a collective conceptualization, Lesjak’s readings do offer a window into a world in which the individual is not of the utmost importance — a world made all but impossible by the enclosure of the commons and the dispossession of the people.

These immaterial reflections on material ruin grasp at the possible appearance of the commons at a historical moment when it cannot be realized. The Afterlife of Enclosure thus echoes the foundational claim of Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious: that social reality and emergent consciousness develop in dialectical relation and depend on a process of figuration. Without conditions of figurability, particular modes of production, shifts in capitalist development, and even relations of class struggle are unavailable to thought. If we cannot think these social relations, we cannot confront them. This, put simply, is the indispensability of the dialectical method, its uncompromisable necessity for any political project striving towards total liberation from global capitalism.

But “it is not enough,” as Marx says, “that thought should seek to realize itself; reality must also strive towards thought.” In the last line of the book, Lesjak asserts that we are still faced today with the “imaginative task” of transforming collective life away from further privatization — a task nowhere more urgent than in the landscape of higher education. After four chapters mapping the commons within the nineteenth century imaginary as a set of symbolic meditations on community, it remains to be seen how literary analysis can bridge the yawning chasm between idealizations of collective being and materializations of political collectivity, especially when the discipline does not seem to agree on the politicization of reading. It is unclear, in other words, how literary study can help to realize a future free from exploitation when the study of literature has not only almost succumbed to aggressive material attack by boards of trustees and budget cuts, but when literary scholars further insist on the individual nature of reading. Critics have the responsibility not to simply avow literature’s singular pleasures, but to champion, as Lesjak does, the necessity of literary insight for social transformation. There is no task more urgent for academics today than the reorganization of the university according to the politics of the commons and the redefinition of higher education as a public good. We should get it together.

1. Carolyn Lesjak, The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021) 2.
2. Lesjak, Afterlife 2.
3. Afterlife 6.
4. Afterlife 11.
5. Afterlife 106.