The history of the commons is the history of the tension between collective life and individualized experience. Eighteenth-century British discourse around land enclosure registered a newly paradoxical conceptualization of the “public” wherein individual benefit (achieved at the expense of collective loss) was framed as a method by which collective benefit might be achieved. Picking up from John Locke, many advocates of enclosure rejected the ethical, moral, and political utility of the “commons.” As Locke wrote, “God gave the world to men in common; but since he gave it them for their benefit, and the greatest conveniencies of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated.”1 Eighteenth-century advocates of enclosure like Arthur Young cast the commons as wastes full of “beggars and weeds”2 that could be trusted to “fill a country with barbarians ready for any mischief.”3 At the same time, many justified what they saw as the relatively slight losses of enclosure (enacted primarily upon peasants and small landholders) with the collective good of increased agricultural productivity. According to these reformers, the loss of common right was a sacrifice in the service of a more broadly conceived community: most often the nation. The justification for enclosure was deeply entangled with an ideological configuration of the idea of community itself. This ideological project, as Benedict Anderson has memorably argued, was reinforced by the emergence of the novel. In her new book, The Afterlife of Enclosure,Carolyn Lesjak pushes back against this figuration of the realist novel as an ideological apparatus of the nineteenth-century industrial nation — noticing instead the way that the more utopianvariety of collectivity gets embedded in the form.

To support this argument, Lesjak makes a convincing case for the influence of eighteenth-century land enclosure on nineteenth-century realism. She takes up figurations of “the common” that exceed the purely representational mode frequently associated with realism, focusing instead on a set of ethical concerns clustered around commonality. In pursuit of this ethic, she turns most frequently to character. At first, this articulation of character and the common seems to be synonymous with the broad universalism of liberal humanism which, like its representational aesthetic, has been widely understood as the nineteenth-century realist political project. In the same way that Lesjak gestures away from verisimilitude, however, she also refuses familiar definitions of realist character. For Lesjak, “type” structures nineteenth-century character. She traces type from popular eccentric biographies early in the century: these books featured detailed descriptions with accompanying portraits that catalogued such characters as “misers, persons with missing limbs and special talents … to famous historical personages, such as Napoleon and Frederick the Great.”4 While these collections might seem to reify and dehumanize the characters that they display, Lesjak argues that they “turn human subjects into a collection less to ‘possess’ them than to preserve their individuality.”5 Against Lukacs (and, I would also suggest, Foucault), Lesjak argues that “their reification revivifies them rather than turning them into ossified commodities.”6 In Lesjak’s view, this thing-like materiality of character — taken up most obviously in Dickens, — “recognizes the embeddedness of characters in a profoundly social world.”7 The proliferation of difference, rather than its diminution, is representative of a social ethic of the commons.

This challenging line of argument refuses to cede to an Auerbachian definition of realism as serious representation of the actually existing world — a definition that, as Anna Kornbluh puts it, “bolsters today’s hegemonic consensus that literature is information.”8 Alongside recent work from Kornbluh, Lauren Goodlad, and Isobel Armstrong, Lesjak emphasizes that the political project of realism is found in its formal and aesthetic qualities, rather than in its function as a faithful document of past historical life.9 The nonrepresentational qualities of realism are particularly important for Lesjak because she is attempting to adumbrate the influence of land enclosure. Because land enclosure took place over at least six centuries (and is arguably ongoing), Lesjak turns to Rob Nixon’s theory of “slow violence” to interrogate the tools available for registering and representing expropriation and loss that is not easily perceptible in a human lifetime.10 This, in turn, informs Lesjak’s focus on nineteenth-century novels despite land enclosure reaching its peak during the eighteenth century. Enclosure and the commons are everywhere in the nineteenth-century novel, but representations of enclosure and the commons are rare. Partially out of analytical necessity, then, Lesjak links the commoning economies of pre-enclosed England to representations of the “common” as in “shared” and “coarse,” which are two major motifs of nineteenth-century realism.

I was resistant to this approximation of the common fields of pre-enclosure England with characterological abstractions. It seemed to me, at first, to be more of an etymological relationship than an historical one (even if etymologies are important histories of their own). The materiality of common fields — the way they were farmed, the kinds of produce they offered, the way they shaped the English landscape — seem to be the crucial details of the earlier mode of rural life. The physicality of this landscape also makes its way into the realist novel, in descriptions of gardens, bucolic scenes, or desolate wastes. Lesjak’s emphasis on character, and the abstraction of commonality, at first seems to have little to do with this spatial history. But, as Lesjak argues, “the commons can be realized only with a fundamental restructuring of everyday reality itself.”11 Common fields instantiated a certain kind of reality, an everyday experience of gleaning and gathering that provided the occasion for a particular social experience. In fact, the common fields themselves were simply physical reflections of a complex set of social agreements — from the level of the Magna Carta down to neighborly consensus —that became a rule of custom that could only be eradicated after centuries of strategic privatization. Lesjak shows that this social and ethical practice lingered and was renegotiated in the realist novel: while much of the commonness of Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy might now be received through the political framework of liberal individualism, Lesjak contends that there is a more radical history, and more utopian future, at stake in this realist commons.

I am reminded here of Nancy Armstrong’s claim, in Desire and Domestic Fiction, that the rise of the novelistic regime of representation ultimately enclosed and policed residual eighteenth-century forms of collectivity. Armstrong argues that “the novel provided a means of displacing and containing longstanding symbolic practices — especially those games, festivities, and other material practices of the body that maintained a sense of collective identity.”12 By enclosing the figure of the woman within a domestic space of apolitical desire, the symbolic methods for the formation of collective social identity were restricted to a masculinist political space. Lesjak, responding to Silvia Federici’s argument that the loss of the commons led to the gendered division between productive and reproductive labor, argues that “the consequences of enclosure, and the specifically gendered differentiation of wage laborers, need not lead to nostalgia for the past but instead can point toward a different future, in which new visions of the commons would be possible.”13 This dialectical recovery of the novel as an apparatusof hegemony deepens the affinity between Lesjak’s project and Anna Kornbluh’s latest book, The Order of Forms.Both insist on the utopian potential of realism: as Lesjak writes, realism can “evoke a desirablecommon future and engender a desire forthat future.”14

It is undeniable to me that realism was a mechanism of capitalist ideology: its elaboration of a bourgeois regime of ethical concerns, its validation of the individual experience of collective life, and its reification of the political present all work together to suppress radical visualizations of the future. At the same time, it is undeniable that the realist novel takes up the “imaginative task” of sustaining and reinventing collective life.15 This contradictory dialectic reminds me of Fredric Jameson’s description of Wal-Mart as utopia: “what is currently negative can also be imagined as positive in that immense changing of valences which is that Utopian future.”16 As Lesjak writes, realism “allows us to see that any possible common future must be grounded in the nitty-gritty details of material life.”17 Her book stands as a call to take seriously our contemporary realisms — and their own invocations of the common — in order to counter the ongoing hemispheric violence of dispossession. This Lukáscian faith in the power of realist literature to narrate new collectivities into being refuses the critical stagnancy of description. The question, I think, is whether realism’s power to imagine can overtake its capacity to control.

1. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, and; A Letter Concerning Toleration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) 114.
2. Arthur Young, The Farmer’s Tour through the East of England. Vol. 2 (London: W. Strahan and W. Nicoll, 1771) 161.
3. Young, Farmer’s Tour 438.
4. Carolyn Lesjak, The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021) 51.
5. Lesjak, Afterlife 54.
6. Afterlife 60.
7. Afterlife 66.
8. Anna Kornbluh, The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019) 16.
9. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Isobel Armstrong, Novel Politics: Democratic Imaginations in Nineteenth-Century Fiction(New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
10. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
11. Afterlife 173.
12. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)18.
13. Afterlife 29. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation(Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004).
14. Afterlife 172.
15. Afterlife 174.
16. Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (New York: Verso, 2009) 423.
17. Afterlife 13.