'A dense tangle of logically interacting illusions': Suspicion in the post45 novel

Suspicion has received a lot of attention in recent criticism, often portrayed as an illness which infects a reader who is obsessed with interpretation. This thesis shifts focus from criticism to examine suspicion as a vernacular sensibility in the postwar novel, not borrowed from theory but born out of fiction. Grappling with the long history of the affects, politics, and ethics of suspicion, it offers a reassessment of metacritical arguments which see suspicion either as pathological, dangerously apolitical, or even irrelevant. Engaging with the cultural history and critical literature of suspicion in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this thesis examines how suspicion is exuded from the formal mechanisms and devices of the novel, shedding light on suspicion’s aesthetic and political potential.
Establishing a transhistorical and transatlantic dialogue to model suspicion in a variety of novels, this thesis draws a casting of suspicious characters who perform suspicion and embody wariness in different ways. In doing so, it examines the intersection between suspicion and race, gender, capitalism, and mental illness, as well as suspicion’s intrinsic coexistence with trust. Taking as case studies Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), Muriel Spark’s The Comforters (1957), Siri Hustvedt’ The Blazing World (2014), Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (2015) and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout (2015) the thesis suggests that suspicion in the novel does not entail detachment but demands interaction—not devoid of tension and contradiction—and illuminates how suspicion makes the reader committed and wary, reluctant but intimately involved.