An event in Marxist literary criticism, The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons finds in realism less a document of nineteenth century capitalism than a paratheoretical inquiry into its causes and determinations. Citing the historical process of enclosure as a slow-moving catastrophe of dispossession which functions as one of contemporary capitalism’s foremost causes, Lesjak centers imaginative remediations of what was lost. After a brief instructive engagement with John Clare’s poetry, these remediations are sourced to the dominant cultural form of the nineteenth century, the novel. Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy, a trio encompassing the realism spectrum from extravagant picaresque to tangled web to modernist-ish redaction, shimmer in Lesjak’s readings as artists of character above all, who produce and probe the tension between type and instance in order to refract what is held in common, what sociability could and should direct in economic systems. Through closely considering the weave of character, Lesjak reimagines realism against its reduction to the mere representation of capitalism, educing instead its fluency with Marxist critique, from Marx and Engels, to Adorno’s negative dialectics, Raymond Williams’s democratic socialism, Jameson’s utopian interpretation, Hardt and Negri’s multitude, and Andreas Malm’s fossil capital. This is at once presentist reading and engaged theory, speaking well beyond a discrete academic field, and thinking with the past for the sake of opening the future, precisely when its terrible closure seems more certain than ever.

Reductions of realism are lingua franca for non-Marxist even more than Marxist critics; the dictates of contextualization and of exposing power’s ruses, and their entailed correlation of literary representation to reification or alibi, are etched in Victorianist stone. Lesjak’s radical proposition to read nineteenth century realism otherwise – to genuinely receive its energetic making of social woofs as a kind of utopian practice – dares to be dialectical: realism establishes figurative realms that register and depart from the abjections of the known world. The intensifying of these abjections in the twenty first century, which Lesjak adroitly touches at numerous moments in elegant coordination of enclosure and ecocide, render this dialectical impulse all the more crucial. Marxist literary criticism is activated here as receptiveness to the dialectic in creative work as it localizes the dialectic of social transformation.  

“Reading Dialectically” is indeed Lesjak’s influential prescription for criticism, and fortunately for those so inclined there are many ways to do it. In Afterlife the way is character. It could have been plot (how better to mediate causality?), setting (environments for living, in common and not), or especially narration (what is more marvelously evocative of an inexistent commons than omniscience or free indirect discourse?!), and thanks to the book, all these prospects open widely for future Marxist Victorianists. The delimited choice of character strategically “counters or at least fractures the equation of nineteenth-century British realism solely with the ideology of liberalism and the consolidation of a capitalist world economy, captured most succinctly in Eagleton’s claim that ‘liberalism and the realist novel are spiritual twins,’”1 and it does so as a literary figure that is constitutively, if counterintuitively, material. “The materiality of character” and “the material, collective nature of character” counter the association of character with interiority and individualism; “at the most obvious level, character types and commonness work by dint of their reproducibility: it is only by capturing what is typical or common, what is shared by others, that a type makes sense.”2 Materiality as the interdependent relations of species-being that support individuation and materiality as common join in “type” as the materiality of print: “[c]haracters were conceived in terms of brands, stamps, letters of reference, and bodies of writing” and associated with “literal typefaces” and “literal impressions.”3 This latter conception of the “materiality of character” relies on matter, raw materials, the existent tools at hand for the production of books and their “engravings, caricatures.”4

Marxian materialism surely emphasizes such a realm of concrete materiality, but in its dialectical propulsion it also always emphasizes something like abstract materiality: the efficacy of the abstractions that animate the capitalist mode of production, the unrepresentable totality of social relations imposed by capital, and the ongoing struggle of making a commons that has never been given. As Alberto Toscano suggests, taking up Etienne Balibar’s formulation of a “materialism without matter” and Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s theorization of “real abstraction”: “[T]he materialism of practice of the early Marx … must be pulled away from the humanist myth of a transparency of praxis, in the direction of a materialism attentive to the potent immaterialityof capital’s social forms, in other words, a materialism of real abstraction.”5 Lesjak’s careful analysis pursues this dialectic by correlating the concrete fabrications of character to the abstract systematizations of ecological degradation and imperial depredation. Eliot’s narrator famously ruminates near the end of The Mill on the Floss: “Nature repairs her ravages – but not all. The uptorn trees are not rooted again – the parted hills are left scarred: if there is a new growth, the trees are not the same as the old, and the hills underneath their green vesture bear the marks of the past rending. To the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair.”6 Against remaining stuck looking through “the eyes that have dwelt on the past,” Lesjak reads in Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy’s project of representing common character the impetus toward reparative, survivable futures. 

In concert with current ecotheory, Lesjak borrows the notion of entanglement to suggest a kind of subjectivity that isn’t merely equated with the liberal bourgeois individual. But just as so much of that prominent theory gestures to a generic humanity as the trouble in the Anthropocene without adequately pointing to the rapacious logic of capital in its specificity, the idea of shared relationality does not guarantee anti-capitalist politics. The book’s underscoring of figuration makes this point affirmatively, albeit tacitly: imaginative mediations are integral to the work of composing solidarities around constructive representations of what should be; sharing visions and uniting in praxis ground a common neither in sameness nor in difference but in produced, dynamic synthesis. This is also why Marx’s own theorization of character conspicuously insists on figuration: the dramatis personae of Capitalare “personifications,” bearers of social relations, who don “character-masks.” Lesjak thus invigorates the Marxist literary critical project of embracing in realism’s figurative mediations those inventions of the social which stake out terrain for human flourishing and operate collectivities against class rule. Realism’s immanently critical project, Afterlife makes clear, at once maps historical processes like enclosure and speculatively produces what can come after. Through dialectical reading, then, Lesjak gives us a dissent on realism, a dissent on the closure of the nineteenth century, and as well a supple sense of the affinities between those imaginative efforts in the past and the imaginative challenges of the present. This is a model for Marxist aesthetic critique in general - whether it be period-defined or not, in the university or not - and the font from which the generative reflections in our forum spring.

1. Carolyn Lesjak, The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021), 98.
2. Lesjak, Afterlife 98-99.
3. Afterlife 98.
4. Afterlife 98.
5. Alberto Toscano, “Materialism without matter: abstraction, absence, and social form.” Textual Practice28. 7 (2014): 1223 (emphasis in original).
6. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (New York: Penguin, 2003) 543.