“A bold question motivates Timothy Bewes’ Free Indirect: Is a non-subjective thought possible?”
“His contention is that the novel is a mode of thought which operates not only beyond the ideas represented within it – those of a narrator, protagonist, character or author – but also beyond novelistic form itself”
“In the instantiation relation, then, the novel makes sense of the world by tempering its indeterminacy in forms”
“For Bewes, however, only in the gaps between what is instantiated in the novel is it able to think what Lukács called ‘the fundamental dissonance of existence’”
“it is only worth paying attention to free indirect style, Bewes claims, because contemporary thought has witnessed the ‘universalisation’ of its inner logic, the separation of thought from thinker”
“the thought of such novels – irreducible to form, the interpretive possibilities of criticism, or the thought expressed within the novel itself – is like that of cinema in the work of Deleuze: it is a thought unthinkable by us, a thought in which the universe thinks itself”
“this has always been the promise of the novel – whether in the dialogic quality that Bakhtin praised in the works of Dostoyevsky or in the possibility of an ‘ultimate futility of man’ that the novel made visible to Lukács – though only recently has such a promise been actualised”