“The critique of ideology,” Theodor Adorno argued, rests on “the confrontation of ideology with its own truth,” which “is only possible insofar as the ideology contains a rational element with which the critique can deal.”1 Adorno, here, seizes on a key element of Marxist dialectics, which is its ability to read contradiction productively, to reveal the utopian elements within even the most seemingly ideological forms. We can trace this idea directly back to Marx himself, whose critique of capital rested on the categories given by bourgeois political economy: the labor theory of value, wages, profit, commodities and the isolated bourgeois subject. Working through these concepts, moving from their abstract appearance to their mediated concretion as the “concentration of many determinations,” Marx saw the liberatory potential latent in the forms of sociality built by a system dedicated to personal gain.2 His work rested on an exposure of this potential, not as something given or teleologically guaranteed, as is often falsely assumed, but as something requiring effort to realize. And this was possible because bourgeois political economy was able to describe the forms of appearance of capitalist society, which, in turn, allowed for the revelation of their truth content through critique. Intellectual work, then, insofar as it is able to trace the liberatory elements of ideological forms has a part to play in their realization.

I thought of these ideas as I read Carolyn Lesjak’s The Afterlife of Enclosure, for here Lesjak finds the utopian possibility of thinking in common in a genre — the Victorian realist novel — that has often seemed dedicated to the tenets of liberal capital and its particular construction of the subject. In doing so, she pushes against a central thrust of theories of the novel, while also offering a way out of the dead-end into which ideology critique, as it has often been practiced within literary studies, and the critique of this critique has landed us.

Lesjak has already weighed in on this latter argument in her 2011 essay “Reading Dialectically.” Arguing for the “ongoing necessity … of a dialectical Marxist literary criticism,” Lesjak defends Frederic Jameson’s “articulation of the positive Utopian impulses that lie along negative critique.”3 This dialectical relation is central to Jameson’s work, and places him squarely in the tradition described above. A similar idea occurs in Lesjak’s review essay on Franco Moretti, where she refers to the need for “a theorization and interpretation of unconscious Utopian investments in realities large or small, which may in themselves be far from Utopian in their actuality.”4 In each case, Lesjak writes against the uncritical “acceptance of the historically given,” whether it occurs in the “abstract scientism” of Moretti’s work in the digital humanities or in the idea of surface reading against which her earlier essay is pitched.5

So too, the new book is written in defense of the “utopian energies” within nineteenth-century realist texts.6 These energies are seen not in the places we might think to find them — in overt representations of enclosure, for instance, though there are some of those — but rather emerge in a series of figures that arise in response to the fundamental difficulty of representing enclosure. Enclosure takes place over a longe dureé, its history marked by “unevenness,” its disruptions akin to the slow violence Rob Nixon has used to describe environmental degradation.7 (I will return to this unevenness below.) But the turn to figuration is not only a response to enclosure’s long, gradual unfolding; it is not, that is to say, a representational choice dictated by the shape of the object to be represented. Rather, figuration is one way in which history makes its mark formally on a text. Less a reading of scenes of enclosure, then, Lesjak’s book instead describes the ways in which these novels preserve a sense of the common world lost through enclosure through formal means. The key figure through which they do this is the type, which becomes a kind of master term for the book.

Here we can see Lesjak’s most obvious departure from a novelistic tradition devoted to the individual. Types “rely on an indebtedness to others insofar as a common type has no meaning in isolation.”8 Novel theory, however, rests on “a narrative of teleological development” whereby “character types gradually disappear …replaced by some version of psychological interiority.”9 “Such a view of character,” Lesjak concludes, “implicitly endorses and naturalizes an individualist view of individuals as de facto more complex, psychological rich, and ‘developed,’ thereby reproducing a noxious developmental hierarchy, in which individual interest superseded communal concerns.”10 Novel theory has its own form of enclosure: one that bounds the liberal subject.

Lesjak develops this point in a key sentence that suggests the considerable distance she takes from traditional forms of ideology critique:

Against claims such as Terry Eagleton’s that ‘liberalism and the realist novel are spiritual twins’ (The English Novel 164), or Alex Woloch’s formulation of realism as an opposition between ‘the one’ (the unique individual) and ‘the many’ (homogenized society), Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy attempt to reconfigure the relationship between individuals and their social world as mutually constitutive rather than oppositional: social unity appears as an ensemble of rich individuality, and individuality finds its richness in social being.11

The final clause is, of course, a summary of a basic tenet of Marxism, expressed in many places but perhaps most succinctly in the sixth Thesis on Feuerbach, which states that “the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations.”12 Marx, here, sets himself squarely against the liberal individualism often found in the Victorian novel. What is most striking, though, about Lesjak’s sentence is that it sets three avowedly liberal writers against two if not exactly Marxist critics, at least two critics who would likely agree with her restatement of Marx’s position. Nevertheless, it is the liberals who offer a utopian vision of transformation that eludes the Marxist-adjacent.

The Woloch reference is to his influential text The One vs. the Many, whose theory of character-space asserts that novelistic characters fight for our attention in a process explicitly likened to the competitive ideology of capitalism. “This field of characterization,” Woloch writes, “rigorously links the protagonist’s interior development to the dispersion and fragmentation of the many other minor characters, producing a textual structure homologous to the social structure of capitalism.”13 Thus “minor characters are the proletariat of the novel.”14 Given this claim, we can assume that Woloch’s sympathies are with the minor characters. And yet in locating the competitive structures of capitalism in the realist novel’s form, Woloch risks reinforcing that process even when it is his ostensible object of his critique.

A more rigorous form of ideology critique is suggested by Eagleton’s sentence, and it is indicative of a whole school of thought for whom the Victorian novel is the apotheosis of a restrictive social order. (Lesjak names many of these in her work.) More prominent in the Foucault-drenched 1980s than now, this type of argument tends to read literary texts through the prism of an aesthetic ideology that works in two seemingly contradictory ways. Either literary texts are taken to task for their flight from history — think, for instance, of Marjorie Levinson’s famous readings of Wordsworth — or they fail because they are incapable of being anything other than a vehicle for their culture’s ideology — as in D.A. Miller’s Novel and the Police, itself the occasion for Eve Sedgwick’s original discussion of “paranoid reading.” But the question always lurking in the background of such work concerned its efficacy. For what exactly gave literature such power that its unmasking was so seemingly urgent? The overestimation of the cultural impact of the literary text led directly to an overestimation of the power of its demystification, which in turn produced its dialectical opposite: a radical under-estimation of the literary text, which was incapable of doing anything other than reflecting, naively, the cultural values of its era. The result was the projection of the text’s sophistication onto the critic, who articulated a reflection theory of art that would make the most vulgar Marxist blush. This is the dead-end — falsely applied to a caricatured Marxism — to which surface reading, with its investment in the pleasure of what Sharon Marcus has called “just reading,” tried to respond. But as I have already suggested, surface readings imagine that there is some straight-forward access to what is just there on the page; they thus remain content with the historically given facts and their forms of appearance. How then to attend to what is compelling about literature without negating its relationship to the ideological structures out of which it emerges?

I think Lesjak’s book addresses itself directly to this question. Taking up the type — that much pilloried relic of an older literary tradition — and transvaluing it, she shows how its very commonness offers a different kind of character, one less devoted to liberalism’s individualizing narrative. She does so by attending to what we might call the type’s unevenness, its contradictory nature. And this is key, for what the destructive form of ideology critique described above has in common with surface reading and the digital humanities is a flattening out of contradiction. Literary texts are homogenous; they reject history; they reproduce its structures; you can count the words and get the answers that are lying there in plain sight. Contradiction, in these accounts, disappears. But without contradiction there can be no change, which is to say no utopia, no possibility of imagining things otherwise. To be sure, Lesjak risks reproducing a Victorian literature in the image of what she would like the future to look like, a direct inversion of the risk courted by Woloch in reifying capitalist social relations as the only available way for novels to think of themselves. But I think she is aware of the risk.

If culture is a resource for thinking about our life in common, an idea implicit not only in The Afterlife of Enclosure but in the discipline as a whole, then we need to think carefully about how we reproduce that culture. Describing the history of the novel as the triumph of the liberal individual might just end up reinforcing that triumph. Tracing the utopian potential of another way of being — while attending to the ideological traces which are also, necessarily, present —provides one way out of a critical deadlock and, perhaps more optimistically but also more importantly, of the enclosures of capitalist subjectivity itself.

1. Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, Aspects of Sociology (London: Heinemann, 1973) 190.
2. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin Books, 1973) 101.
3. Carolyn Lesjak, “Reading Dialectically,” Criticism 55.2 (2013) 246, 238.
4. Carolyn Lesjak, “All or Nothing: Reading Franco Moretti Reading,” Historical Materialism 24.3 (2016) 186.
5. Lesjak, “All or Nothing” 203.
6. Carolyn Lesjak, The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021) 3.
7. Lesjak, Afterlife 25.
8. Afterlife135.
9. Afterlife 123.
10. Afterlife 123.
11. Afterlife 5.
12. Karl Marx, Early Writings (New York: Vintage Books, 1978) 423.
13. Alex Woloch, The One Vs. The Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003) 124.
14. Woloch, “One vs. Many” 27, italics original.