Allusive Networks in The Little Stranger

In her post “Tea Cake and Literary Play,” Jenny explored an idea that is not explicitly addressed in Derrida’s “Structure, Sign and Play,” but that naturally arises from it. For Jenny and her analysis of Their Eyes Were Watching God, the idea of literary play leads to how a text “sets up readerly expectations … and leaves us unsure whether [it] has confirmed or contradicted them.” In the case of Jenny’s novel, the result of literary play is to leave characters (and the reader) wondering – “What kind of story am I in?” Novels such as this and The Little Stranger ultimately resist a definitive answer to that question.

Critics such as Katharina Boehm have labeled Waters’s works as exemplifying “postmodern historiographic metafiction” a genre that “draws attention to the narrativity of the past by exposing “both history and fiction [as] discourses, human constructs, signifying systems” (237). Consequently, the novel bristles with allusions to British literature, specifically of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – various works of George Eliot and Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies, Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, and Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, to name a few. For Derrida (and Jenny), the quick introduction and equally speedy dismissal of these allusions lead to play; they suggest ways of understanding the story by offering potential points of comparison with previous stories. As Jenny writes, such a Derridean reading offers “an acknowledgment of tropes, stereotypes, and a literary tradition (and its foils), but an effort to pursue complexity rather than reveal a ‘true’ and fully explained nature.”

A “true” center and stable meaning are also impossible for Latour. An actor is always simultaneously a network, both an individual and the countless connections it has. Therefore, these allusions can be seen as connections the text has to other, previous works of literature. However, to stick with Latour, these are only connections that the novel has, they don’t define what it is. For instance, the text’s implicit comparison of Caroline Ayres with Tess of the D’Urbervilles could suggest, among other things, that Faraday takes advantage of her in their romantic relationship. Yet to see The Little Stranger as a rewriting of Tess is a mistake. First of all, the class relationship is inverted – Caroline is the figure of the upper class and Faraday is of the lower – and second, it is Caroline who breaks off the engagement. The narrative offers the comparison but doesn’t sustain it.

Katharina Boehm doesn’t acknowledge another complexity of these literary allusions. She sees them simply as a textual alternative to the material history of the house. However, these are not merely connections to other works that the novel “has” – they are made by the characters themselves. The fact that Faraday narrates the novel brings into question the provenance and nature of many of these allusions, while others are made by other characters. Does someone like Faraday see a kinship between his life and those of these figures of Victorian fiction? Or is he aware of the gaps and breakdowns where the allusions fail?

I think that Latour’s networks and Derrida’s “play” work so well in this novel because of the way the text resists closure: a multiplicity of networks and connections, but no “center”; a variety of possible interpretations, but no “answer.” The review that I cited at the beginning of the quarter discusses how emotionally unsatisfying the ending is. The Ayres family is nice enough that you don’t want to witness their downfall and destruction, while Faraday certainly isn’t likeable enough for you to appreciate his questionable triumph. Perhaps Latour helps to reveal the novel’s attempts to illustrate the truly complex networks of history.

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