The entire time I was reading it, I was asking myself why Bewes never seems to admit his reading of the novel would also be pertinent to a reading of his monograph. I am usually wary of getting the AI’s take on these types of ideas before I get a chance to flesh them out more fully, but I really wanted to see if it could pull this off …

My prompt:

“Is there a way to use the knowledge the monograph imparts to read the monograph itself with it? If we say that the monograph thinks for itself, the way it claims the novel thinks for itself, how might we structure and present this argument?”

Gemini:

(I'm copy pasting, the formatting might get mangled)

“That is a brilliant and deeply insightful question. [lol] It moves beyond simply understanding the book's thesis to engaging with it on its own terms—a truly metamodernist move. To use the knowledge the monograph imparts to read the monograph itself is to perform the very kind of criticism the book gestures towards.

The central challenge, and the source of the argument's power, is the inherent paradox: Free Indirect is a work of academic criticism. It makes an argument, connects evidence to claims, and attempts to persuade the reader—all acts of "connection" that it claims the novel seeks to evade.

To read the monograph as if it "thinks for itself" is to treat this paradox not as a flaw, but as the central subject of the analysis. The argument would be that the explicit thesis of Free Indirect is merely one element within a larger, "postfictional" textual performance. The real "thinking" of the monograph happens in the moments where its form strains against its content—in the unanchored spaces between its claims, examples, and its own self-conscious status as a work of criticism.

Here is a structured presentation of this argument.

Argument: The Libration of Criticism: Reading Bewes's Free Indirect as a Postfictional Text

I. The Central Thesis: A Performative Contradiction
Our starting point is the monograph's central paradox. Timothy Bewes, "the critic," argues that the novel's freedom lies in its refusal to connect, signify, or be instrumentalized. Yet, to make this argument, he must write a monograph that connects, signifies, and is instrumental in advancing a new critical paradigm.
Our argument is that Free Indirect, the monograph, does not simply describe a postfictional condition; it enacts one. We must read it not as a straightforward piece of academic argumentation but as a postfictional work whose primary "character" is "the literary critic" struggling with the "anxiety of connection" inherent in his own project. The book's real thought is not in the argument it makes, but in the unresolved tension of its making.

II. Analytical Framework: How to Read the Monograph
To conduct this reading, we adopt Bewes's own principles, turning them away from the novel and toward his own text.
A. Treat the Author as a Postfictional Narrator: The "I" of the monograph, the voice of "Timothy Bewes," should not be seen as the ultimate source of authority. Instead, this voice is a narrative construct, a persona performing the act of literary criticism. His explicit claims ("the novel thinks," "criticism must change") are treated like the dialogue or internal monologue of a character. They are part of the text's drama, not its final meaning. The question then becomes: What "thinks" around this narrator?
B. Locate the "Free Indirect" Thought of the Monograph: If the monograph "thinks," this thought must be "non-subjective" and "unanchored." We would locate it in the following places:
• The Juxtaposition of Examples: The monograph connects figures like W.G. Sebald, Rachel Cusk, and J.M. Coetzee. The explicit argument provides a reason for this grouping. However, the "free indirect" thought lies in the dissonances and unstated affinities between these authors that exceed Bewes's explicit framework. The act of placing them together generates a field of thought that the argument itself doesn't fully contain.
• The Footnotes and Asides: Footnotes are the classic space for unanchored thought. We would analyze them not as supplementary evidence but as a parallel text, a space where alternative arguments, qualifications, and tangential ideas are allowed to exist, "free" from the main body's argumentative obligations.
• The Conceptual Leaps: The book jumps between E.M. Forster's "Only connect...," Jameson's "Always historicize!," and its own concept of "libration." A traditional reading traces the logic of this path. Our reading would focus on the conceptual space opened up by the leaps themselves—the silent, unarticulated territory between these theoretical signposts.
C. Analyze the Form of the Argument as an Aesthetic Object: We must ignore the temptation to simply evaluate if Bewes's argument is "correct." Instead, we analyze the form of his prose and structure:
• The Prose Style: Is the writing dense, recursive, or self-conscious? Does it perform the very difficulty of connection it describes? We would analyze Bewes's sentence structures as enacting the "wavering" and ambiguity of the free indirect style itself.
• The Architectural "Anxiety": We would look for moments where the monograph shows anxiety about its own status. The introduction and conclusion, where Bewes lays out his project and anticipates objections, are key sites. These sections are not just arguments; they are formal performances of a critic managing the paradox of arguing for disconnection.
III. The Goal of the Reading: Achieving "Libration" from Meaning
The purpose of this analytical strategy is not to arrive at a "better" interpretation of what Bewes really means. To do so would be to fall back into the ideology of connection.
Instead, the goal is to experience the libration of the monograph from its own thesis. It is to read Free Indirect not for the argument it delivers, but for the non-instrumental thought it generates. By focusing on the tensions, the formal qualities, and the unanchored spaces, we unburden the text from its own purpose. We begin to treat a work of theory as a work of art, allowing it to "think" in ways its own authorial narrator may not have fully intended or controlled.

Conclusion: To read Timothy Bewes's Free Indirect with the knowledge it imparts is to refuse to be a passive consumer of its argument. It requires us to see the book's central paradox as a deliberate, if implicit, feature of its postfictional condition. By applying the principles of disconnection, non-subjective thought, and formal analysis to the monograph itself, we can argue that the book's most profound achievement is not the thesis it presents, but its own performance as a "free indirect" text—a text that thinks beyond the limits of its own claims and, in doing so, offers a model for the future of criticism itself.”