The boy’s quest is, in a sense, quixotic, doomed to fail in advance, yet in his determined refusal to settle for a bad father we can see the core dialectic of The Last Samurai. One must, the book suggests, face reality honestly but never submit to that reality. We must judge what exists, what is given, what we unthinkingly take as natural or necessary or conventional by the most stringent standards of analysis—not by the standard of what exists but by the standard of what might become possible in a better, more rational world. When we marry our wildest desires to the highest standards, we thereby test our reality.

A good reality will parry the blow.

She quit and planned to live off her savings. She would write full time.

But after quitting, it proved difficult to make progress. Her hard drive was already a graveyard of unfinished and abandoned projects. Weeks passed, and she found she wasn’t getting much writing done. Instead, she sat on the floor for long stretches of time, alone in her flat. One day, during this period of paralysis and growing despair, she talked to her father in the United States. Over the long-distance line, he began hectoring her for not being sufficiently hopeful about her life—which, DeWitt told me, did little to kindle hope in her.

Her father had a unique talent, she recalled, of reminding you that— however depressed you might think you were— deeper basements of hopelessness were available to you. Nearing a new bottom, DeWitt reflected on the fact that you can’t pick your parents. Certainly, if she had ever been given the chance, she would have chosen someone different. Sitting on the floor of the flat, back against the wall, brooding on her miserable relationship with her father and the creative impasse she had reached, something was dislodged within her.

What would it mean, she wondered, for a child to select his father? It was “a completely preposterous idea,” but one that captured her, blooming in her mind, filling her with enthusiasm. What sort of adult would be a plausible candidate for surrogate fatherhood? What education might allow the child to make an informed decision? And at what age would this lucky child, on the one hand, be capable of making a serious choice while, on the other, be young enough to have that choice be meaningful? After all, the point of choosing one’s father should be, at the very least, to be raised by that father, to discover who you were, who you might become, through the medium of good parenting.

Rigorously well balanced, stately paragraphs shred into spindly fragments. The mother is trying to explain something but is constantly being interrupted. The boy recombines Greek numerical prefixes to create new adjectives. The son’s incessant questions—Who was X? Who was Y? Why don’t you Z?— create a tempo of agitation and interruption not only for the mother but also for the reader. Greek-derived numerical prefixes bludgeon the listener. The mind of this new version of Ludo’s mother can barely sustain a thought, let alone explain everything. In the contrast between these two versions of the same passage, we see the difference between writing “as if for an intelligent six-year-old” and writing while doing the unpaid reproductive labor of taking care of an intelligent sixyear-old, the difference between writing without interruption and writing while having to do other work.

[...] The Last Samurai has largely been written about as if it were part of the postmodern tradition. It’s often taken as an example of one of the most prestigious postmodern genres, encyclopedic narrative, “an almost super-canonical form, yet one that is virtually unread.” Sam Anderson has called The Last Samurai a “meganovel.” The Last Samurai was the subject of a group read at Veronica Esposito’s literary blog Conversational Reading (in the manner of Infinite Summer, dedicated to David Foster Wallace, or #OccupyGaddis). Contemporary encyclopedic narrative is typically defined by its length, its eager incorporation of technological and scientific rhetoric, its formal difficulty, and its ambition to make an all-encompassing artistic statement about the character of contemporary life. And it is overwhelmingly assumed to be a masculine genre.

Critics who celebrate the encyclopedic novel have argued that DeWitt not only belongs to this tradition but has broadened its gender profile. Steven Moore begins his Washington Post review, for example, by explaining that “the learned novel is mostly a guy thing.” DeWitt has, he suggests, “crashed this boys club,” and “The Last Samurai will crown DeWitt this year’s It Girl of postmodernism.” Sven Birkerts highlights DeWitt as a writer who is “writing determinedly outside the domestic pigeonhole (old stereotypes live on)” and can “match their male colleagues in inventiveness and a willingness to take on the zeitgeist.” Stephen Burn has suggested that The Last Samurai is an emblem of the “broadening” of the encyclopedic tradition to include authors other than straight white men. The all-male panel of judges who shortlisted the book for the Orange Prize describe the book in similar terms. The book is, according to one summary of the deliberations for the prize, a “bravura grandstand of intellectualism, which eschews plot and character to revel in the sheer delight of languages and obscure learning.” The Last Samurai is “a witty, smart, cerebral book” that “appeals to the brains and a sense of the absurd rather than to the heart and reader/character empathy.” “Pack[ing] an emotional punch,” we learn, is “not DeWitt’s game.” DeWitt is also passive-aggressively praised for being, perhaps, too much like male novelists who are guilty of “show[ing] off in their writing, putting their logo on the text, never allowing the reader to forget them.”

These are not incorrect assessments—DeWitt does have encyclopedic ambitions—but there are problems with this line of interpretation. First, these critics generally ignore or minimize important encyclopedic works by women such as Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans (1925), Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962), Margaret Young’s Miss Macintosh, My Darling (1965), Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991), Gayl Jones’s Mosquito (1999), and Karen Tei Yamashita’s I Hotel (2010). [...]

[...] And as reviewers have frequently pointed out, DeWitt is as interested in writing fiction as she is in discussing information theory and linguistics and classical scholarship. One critic suggests that The Last Samurai is “a rare work of knowledge porn that actually conveys knowledge.” Unlike other recent novels such as The Secret History or Special Topics in Calamity Physics, the intellectual content of The Last Samurai “actually” matters to its author— and, by extension, is supposed to matter to us readers. What if, DeWitt seems to ask, our intellectual lives weren’t so alienated? What if novels could produce and disseminate knowledge?

[...] DeWitt’s novel hopes for a world that might make it possible to write a better sort of literature and be ready to receive that literature. The Last Samurai is not an example of that hypothetical literature. DeWitt knows perfectly well—though she may not always admit it in interviews and essays—that such a vision of literature is, under current institutional arrangements, improbable. But the improbability of its own aspiration is part of what makes The Last Samurai compelling. As long as we live in a world of wasted potential, the book will continue to speak to those who might hope to build a better world, a more rational institutional life, and who hope art might play some role in the making of such a world.

David had this entirely different sensibility. He loves grand, mythic works of art. His favorite composer is Wagner. Among tragedians, he likes Aeschylus, whereas I’m a Euripides person. He introduced me to Sergio Leone and Kurosawa and Mel Brooks. The coexistence of these radically different aesthetic possibilities made me see ways that I could be a writer, things that I could do. He introduced me to bridge, to poker, to statistics, things that to other people might seem completely unrelated. . . . Previously I just thought, What’s the point in writing a novel? Everything’s been done. But now I saw, No, there are so many things that have never been done! All these possibilities! This is so great!

This definition of the purpose of art sounds familiar, resembling in some ways the Russian formalist description of art as an engine of defamiliarization. “Defamiliarization,” or ostranenie—alternately translated as “estrangement”—is a concept most associated with the founding father of formalism, the critic and novelist Viktor Shklovsky. “The purpose of art,” Shklovsky writes in a classic 1917 essay, “is to lead us to knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition.” Art takes familiar objects, which through long exposure become subject to “automized perception,” and makes us see those objects again. It systematically defeats the habituated oblivion most of us inhabit most of the time.

In highlighting habituation, the concept of ostranenie doesn’t only give an account of art’s relation to human perception. It also posits a theory of art’s relationship to itself, an explanation of the driving force of artistic change. When devices become canonized, too familiar, cliché, they lose their ability to revivify the world. Artists hoping to create living art must therefore develop new devices. And so, art moves on, is forced to change, and (in a narrowly defined sense) progresses. This account of art, consilient with modernist and avant-garde ideas of artistic innovation, encodes a set of assumptions about how an idealized— and homogeneous—modern readership comes to internalize specific expectations about art and then (repeatedly) should have those expectations shattered.

We can now see the gap between DeWitt and formalism. DeWitt is not much concerned with art’s effect on the habituated consciousness of a hypothetical general reader, nor does she develop new artistic devices through which to render lost objects again visible. She is, in one sense, indifferent to the consciousness of her audience, though not in the way some critics celebrate as a hallmark of modernism. Likewise, she’s not obsessed with the internal relations of literary form and the autonomy of art (quite the opposite in fact, since she often speaks of art in instrumental terms). Instead, DeWitt focuses on the normative social standards and aesthetic horizons within which artists work and within which readers read. DeWitt is interested in what artists take for granted, what they assume they are and aren’t allowed to do or say, and the institutions that hem in what they can say. She asks the American novel of the late twentieth century to be more ambitious, to discard its Anglocentrism, and to widen its geographic and linguistic horizons. She asks something similar of the reader. After all, the ambitious writer of the future—who loves the “monosyllables and lack of grammatical inflection in Chinese,” “lovely long Finnish words all double letters & long vowels in 14 cases,” and “lovely Hungarian all prefixes suffixes”—will require a corresponding ambitious reader, one who might judge such a virtuosic textual performance. DeWitt’s vision of art is political to the degree that making the polyglot literary world she dreams of anything more than a quixotic fantasy would require a wholesale transformation of many existing norms and institutions.

Ludo’s failure would seem to support the conclusion that the critics Caroline Marie and Christelle Reggiani reach about The Last Samurai. In a typology of how mathematics has been incorporated into contemporary literature, they suggest that DeWitt’s novel ultimately disavows Sibylla’s mathematicized way of seeing the world. “Becoming a samurai,” they argue, “implies giving up the illusory quest of a perfectly mathematized reality in favour of the pragmatics of action, by nature unforeseeable and irreducible to axioms.” DeWitt would be suggesting that Ludo must learn what Sibylla fails to see: that strict adherence to standards of rationality and mathematized reconstructions of life can create its own forms of dysfunction.