Abstract
Ivan Stacy’s aim is ambitious: he wishes ‘to develop a generally applicable theory of the relationship between complicity and fiction’. To this end, he chooses six writers who employ different formal means to explore complicity in a range of historical and political contexts post 1945. In the first three chapters, Stacy analyses novels by Albert Camus, Milan Kundera and Kazuo Ishiguro, writers whose characters allow him to explore the dilemmas faced by individuals in relation to the Holocaust and the legacy of World War II, events that continue to dominate discussions of complicity and narrative’s role in bearing witness. The last three chapters consider authors whose work points to complicity as systemic and pervasive: W. G. Sebald, Thomas Pynchon and Margaret Atwood. Stacy structures his analysis in each case by considering complicity at three levels of the texts: the protagonists’ complicity, the formal qualities of the text, and whether or how the texts elicit empathy in the reader, thereby gaining their complicity with a particular position.
One of the strengths of Stacy’s study is his refusal to accept that complicity is a subject position. He offers a thoughtful discussion of definitions of complicity, aligning himself with critics who argue against complicity being used as a generalizing category that undermines its critical value. Stacy insists that complicity is contingent on an individual’s actions and their effects, actions that stem from a complex interaction of agency and structural forces. He also rejects the reduction of complicity to a direct linear relationship between actions and effects, pointing to the importance of, for example, complicit forms of language that can inhere in narrative. Indeed, Stacy contends that narrative’s own complicity is to be found in a failure to witness wrongdoing, specifically in the form of condoning, connivance or culpable ignorance. The unique strength of fictional narrative is that it can scrutinize such failure to witness precisely through its self-reflexive nature. Again, Stacy points to the importance of analysing each text’s representational strategies. He resists thinkers who when thinking about complicity in relation to cultural representation suggest that narrative complicity is, in effect, an ‘ontological state’ because of the authors’ embeddedness in the discourses they are critiquing. His close textual analysis is informed by the recognition that writing and reading are both forms of positioning that may invite or resist complicity. I would add that one of the strengths and challenges of fiction is that a text may do both.
Stacy’s analyses of individual authors are carefully and lucidly argued. The chapters work well on their own, but also serve as thought-provoking studies on different strategies for engaging with complicity. In the chapter on Camus, the emphasis is on the role of silence and how representational omissions may be culpable (The Plague) or themselves witness to the failure of witnessing (The Fall). The chapter on Kundera is concerned with the ‘trap of totalitarianism’ and how aesthetic forms can contribute to forming dispositions that facilitate alignment with totalizing modes of thought. Stacy’s study of Ishiguro foregrounds self-exculpatory narratives and the ethical dilemma faced by the reader in empathizing with the protagonist. The Sebald chapter focuses on the embeddedness of the individual in systems and structures, and how the ‘belated’ witness depends on mediating material traces of the past, traces that are themselves implicated in the system. The dominant theme of the Pynchon chapter is on institutional complicity, in the form of military, industrial and corporate conspiracies by those in power. The further extension of neoliberal development through the internet, which compels people to become participants in the system, leads well into the final chapter on Atwood’s dystopias. Here, Stacy considers how far fiction has the potential to imagine and therefore to help create compromise within systems that make a position of non-complicity difficult if not impossible.
The Complicit Text is an engaging and stimulating book. I would have welcomed a less Anglocentric approach: French, Czech and German scholarship is pretty much absent. But the book both offers thoughtful analyses of six writers and raises suggestive questions about complicity and fiction that extend beyond those authors. One issue that I would be interested to hear more about from Stacy is the role of enjoyment and play in fiction. Why should it matter if the reader is empathetically complicit with a fictional text or aspects of it, and, moreover, enjoys that complicity?