Daniel Williams, The Art of Uncertainty: Probable Realism and the Victorian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024) 346 pp. £89.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781009436113
Daniel Williams’s The Art of Uncertainty explores some of the ways in which nineteenth-century fiction drew on and critiqued emerging legal, mathematical, philosophical and scientific ideas. As such, the book joins the growing body of scholarship examining literature’s engagement with contemporaneous discourses and practices. Williams does not merely extend previous efforts in this area by attending to the interconnections between a range of disciplines, however. The opening pages of his study offer an impassioned defence of literature ‘as an indispensable form of inquiry’ which centres on literature’s unique ability to bring subjective, everyday experience together with more intellectual, ‘rational frameworks’ (6). The novel in particular, Williams posits, can distinctively formulate and model a ‘phenomenology of uncertainty’ through character delineation as well as thematic and narrative patterns (3). Williams’ interest in fictional representations of the counterfactual, the hypothetical and the provisional in turn means that his book additionally contributes to ongoing revisions of a key literary genre. It does so, too, by astutely unpacking and problematizing the traditional and ‘silent predicate in the practice and analysis of realism’ (17): the notion of probability.
In Chapter 1, Williams challenges readers to revisit George Eliot’s realist project and the ‘narrative control, moral coherence and formal consistency’ with which it is associated (41). Williams’s reading of Daniel Deronda (1876) emphasizes the ‘labyrinthine picture of self-states’ presented in the novel as Eliot, following psychophysiological ideas, explores the complex terrain of human volition, decision and action. For example, Gwendolen’s initial ‘inductive vanity’ and the ‘inept rapidity of prediction and action’ which accompanies it is later replaced by ‘hesitation’ and ‘its maze of delay’ (52). While Deronda’s story develops in parallel, Williams goes on to argue, his trajectory as a character is in the main opposite to Gwendolen’s in so far as his uncertainty is rooted in the past, not the future. Dynamic comparison thus becomes another layer that both highlights and seeks to correct uncertainty in Eliot’s novel by encouraging ‘reflective orientation’ (77).
Taking a detour in Chapter 2, Williams turns his attention to Wilkie Collins, precisely because of his foundational role in the establishment of genres adjacent to realism (sensation and detective fiction) and with uncertainty at their core. Williams is especially fascinated by Collins’s engagement with legal logic in The Law and the Lady (1871). In this text, Williams contends, Collins’s rejection of the English binary legal system in favour of the greater flexibility afforded by the intermediate verdict in Scottish law (‘not proven’) manifests itself thematically and formally. Just as the ‘not proven’ verdict acquits the defendant legally without confirming their innocence, the polyvocal frame of The Law and the Lady encourages speculation and ‘resists the hardening of probability into fact, of alternatives into single outcomes, of informational clutter into significant clue’ (91). Bringing his project back to realism, Williams concludes this chapter by claiming that ‘the “not proven” frame’ is applicable to ‘novels not centrally about the law’, including some of those he considers elsewhere in his study, but which resort ‘to social or moral adjudication’ as they try to steer through uncertainty (102).
Chapter 3, theoretically thinner than the rest, both takes us back to a trope noted in relation to Daniel Deronda (gambling) and makes this key to the examination of William Thackeray’s version of probable realism. Indeed, Williams uses the fact that gambling emerges as a narrative frame in The Paris Sketch Book (1840) productively to illustrate Thackeray’s belief that ‘reality’s visible manifest is shadowed by invisible presences and unrealized possibilities’ (112). A later work, The Roundabout Papers (1860-1863), in turn enables Williams to ground his argument about the frequent intermixing of reality and fiction, and consequently facts and counterfacts, in Thackeray’s work given that he ‘uses memory’s precarity to muse on the past’s ontological instability’ (136). Ultimately, Williams’s analysis of Vanity Fair (1847-1848) and Lovel the Widower (1860) revolves around a ‘small-scale narrative grammar’ of uncertainty characterised by hypothetical statements which embody ‘a cloud of possibilities in excess of the narrative’s capacities to substantiate them’ and ‘introduce two or more possibilities into mental space’ (110, 141).
Williams starts the book’s final, most ambitious and most accomplished chapter with readings of two of Thomas Hardy’s novels against the backdrop of complementary modes of thought that recast Eliot’s use of comparison, Collins’s favoured logical flexibility as well as Thackeray’s counterfactual imagination. To be sure, for Williams, The Return of the Native (1878) is a prime example of serial thinking, according to which knowledge derives from ‘structures of habit and repetition’ (156). Crucial for Williams’s argument is the fact that serial thinking was promoted by logician John Venn, whom Williams perceptively adduces is constructed into the narrative via his namesake character, Diggory Venn, the eventual winner in the central gambling scene. If in The Return of the Native “‘hypothetical focalization’” aligns Diggory Venn and the narrator (172), in The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) it is the elevated physical position from which Elizabeth-Jane observes the town that connects her with the narrator’s viewpoint and, Williams maintains, signals Hardy’s engagement with a mode of thought derived from Francis Galton’s use of composite (or juxtaposed) images in photography. Linking composite thinking to Thackeray’s counterfactual grammar, Williams shows how Elizabeth-Jane’s appraisal of her surroundings ‘builds on minimal cues (the “now and then”), undoing habitual anxiety and learning how to discriminate anew – how to draw two distinct perceptions out of what the senses take as one’ (179). This time, too, Williams concludes the chapter with an extended exposition of probable realism, which is developed in reference to critiques of Hardy’s work and whose main aim is to bridge the different attitudes to chance and probability they contain. Hardy’s own literary manifesto, as outlined in his critical articles and narrative prefaces, serves as the basis for William’s claims.
Williams then uses the book’s conclusion partly to acknowledge that the literary manifestations of uncertainty continued to evolve in the twentieth century in line with, most notably, developments in physics, statistics and quantum mechanics. After a brief overview of modernist uncertainty, nonetheless, Williams zooms in on Joseph Conrad’s work and more specifically on his novel Chance (1914) to show some continuities. He does so by drawing attention to how ‘the architecture of inference’ in Conrad’s text operates in similar ways to how it does in Eliot’s, Collins’s, Thackeray’s and Hardy’s work, by ‘blending logic and probability’ as well as ‘forward-facing uncertainties’ with ‘retrospective certainties’ (210, 211). As such, the Coda deftly illustrates the lack of full closure that Williams discusses throughout at the same time as it poignantly weaves together once more the key argumentative threads running through The Art of Uncertainty.
Encarnación Trinidad Barrantes, The Open University
