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Experiments in Semi-Detachment |
SENSIBLE DISTRIBUTIONS
The previous chapter explored the rise of self-referential literary representations of the experience of semi-detachment—of what it means to be caught up in a moment but also capable of pulling oneself away from that moment to reflect upon it. Framing the problem of fictionality’s appeal in that way enabled authors of provincial novels to explore the immanent provinciality of their readers—the way in which every reader might understand him or herself as at once at the center of their own world and also right out at the world’s edge. Working forward from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, from Dickens through Eliot to James, this chapter moves from simple formal problems turning on the representation of inner and outer lives to subtler challenges that relate to the self-awareness of writers, of readers, and finally even of characters about what it means for attention to be temporarily suspended within the world of a novel.
If semi-detachment comes to look like an answer in Victorian fiction, it is crucial to know what the question is. What problem might be resolved by thinking of the experience of life inside the mimetic word of the novel (or life in one’s own social actuality for that matter) as a semi-detached one? One way to begin getting at the tangled question of the novel-world’s believability, or the ways in which readers suspend disbelief to make sense of and enter into that world, is to link this investigation to the vexed question of whether we should think of aesthetic experiences as the product of an artist’s creation or an audience’s apprehension. It may seem tempting to approach that as a chicken and egg question (neither without the other), but Jacques Ranciere’s recent interest in the “distribution of the sensible” offers one avenue of approach. Ranciere proposes revisiting some of the core conundrums of European aesthetic theory in light of who is implicitly or deliberately included as the potential addressee of the art. He denounces all accounts of aesthetics that presume the existence of a sensis communis defined by shared exposure to thought or feeling-provoking stimuli.1
In some ways, Ranciere aims to extend Dickens’s account in Hard Times of Mr. Sleary’s circus as a site simultaneously of entertainment for those who pay and of work for those who, being paid, are deprived the aesthetic experience of the artwork they themselves produce (“People mutht be amuthed, Thquire, thomehow. . . . I’ve got my living out of the horthe-riding all my life”).2 My Friday night is, inescapably, someone else’s Monday morning.3
There is however another intriguing wrinkle to Ranciere’s account, an attack on what he parses as the ossified nineteenth-century distinction between the space of labor and that of truly free aesthetic contemplation. He proposes finding a way to conceive of the aesthetic realm that will restore workers as well as idle consumers to doubleness.
The democratic distribution of the sensible makes the worker into a double being. It removes the artisan from “his” place, the domestic space of work, and gives him “time” to occupy the space of public discussions and take on the identity of a deliberative citizen. The mimetic act of splitting in two, which is at work in theatrical space, consecrates this duality and makes it visible. . . . The aesthetic regime of the arts disrupts . . . apportionment of space. . . . It brings to light, once again, the distribution of occupations that upholds the apportionment of domains of activity. . . . Schiller’s aesthetic space, by suspending the opposition between active understanding and passive sensibility, aims at breaking down—with an idea of art—an idea of society based on the opposition between those who think and decide and those who are doomed to material tasks.4
Ranciere touches here upon audience members’ capacity to be semi-detached from their own laboring bodies. This way of thinking about what aesthetic experiences have to offer differs both from liberal complacency about the universality of aesthetic experiences as a withdrawal from the demands of work and from Lukacsian accounts of a proletarian experience shaped entirely by work.5
One way of making sense of that doubleness is to notice that within Victorian realist novels themselves this problem of double engagement with the world is already explicitly under discussion. This chapter concludes with a look at Henry James’s complex coils of self-referentiality around the question of where the reader’s attention is understood to be located while reading a novel. It is however possible to approach the question of “distribution of sensibility” even in the more putatively straightforward, representational realm of the midcentury realist novel. Half a century before James’s experimental gyrations, Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend makes visible a problem that the Victorian realist novel returned to repeatedly: how to tell the story of moments when thinking and acting occur simultaneously, but have to be represented sequentially.
There are myriad ways this dichotomy can be staged so as to generate a vision of utter separation between the crass material world and the higher realm into which mental reverie places one. Many modernist novels certainly stage an explicit tradeoff between aesthetic reverie and worldly engagement. Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim sets the pattern in place from the start: what Jim loses by sneaking belowdecks to read about nautical adventures turns out to be precisely the chance to have a nautical adventure. “In the babel of two hundred voices he would forget himself, and beforehand live in his mind the sea-life of light literature. He saw himself saving people from sinking ships.” But when the call comes from above, and Jim stumbles blinking into the light of day with the chance to perform a rescue rather than read about one, he “stood still—as if confounded.”6 Precisely because he is immersed in fantasies, he can do nothing to realize them. Here the tradeoff between fantasy and action is made entirely bald: Jim cannot rescue because he is dreaming of rescue.
The contrast could hardly be greater between Lord Jim and the moment in Our Mutual Friend in which Lizzie Hexam (the beautiful boatman’s daughter) has to spring into action to rescue a drowning man. Dickens splits a single moment into two: first, a long paragraph recording the prayer that she utters, and second, the description of the actions she has been taking to save a man while she mentally prays.
Following the current with her eyes, she saw a bloody face turned up towards the moon, and drifting away.
Now, merciful Heaven be thanked for that old time, and grant, O Blessed Lord, that through thy wonderful workings it may turn to good at last! To whomsoever the drifting face belongs, be it man’s or woman’s, help my humble hands, Lord God, to raise it from death and restore it to some one to whom it must be dear!
It was thought, fervently thought, but not for a moment did the prayer check her. She was away before it welled up in her mind, away, swift and true, yet steady above all—for without steadiness it could never be done—to the landing-place under the willow-tree, where she also had seen the boat lying moored among the stakes.7
The reader sees what she sees, then enters her thoughts, then learns what she does. On the one hand, Lizzie’s body gets instantly to work because “her old bold life and habit instantly inspired her,” but on the other hand, in a free indirect discourse that is pointedly not put into quotation marks, she is overheard delivering a paragraph-long prayer. Readers cannot handle the rush to the oars and the prayer to the Lord simultaneously. Lizzie, though, has what might be called parallel processing capacity. She can be in two states at once; a fact readers know only because the narrator takes the trouble to spell out the overlapping temporality of two paragraphs readers have experienced serially.
As in those examples from Jane Eyre and The Mill on the Floss discussed in the previous chapter, there arises here a split within the novel’s own strategy for what might have been called verisimilitude, or truth to life, or even realism; a palpable disjuncture that required readers to think in two radically dissimilar ways about the representation that was laid out before them; or even, you might want to say, to locate themselves in two places at once in relation to that world. What might seem like a formal problem with fiction, a lapse in its mimetic ability, is actually flipped around into a strength of the novel. The marked seriality with which the reader experiences Lizzie’s simultaneity suggests that Lizzie’s training and moral sense combined allow her to handle at once what the reader is required to handle consecutively.
A recent article on revision in David Copperfield analyzes the insertion of metaleptic moments of retrospection, for example, the famous addition of an early passage asking whether “it would have been better for Little Em’ly to have had the waters close above her head that morning in my sight.”8 That account emphasizes the ways in which the reader can gain access simultaneously to an experiential present and the as-yet-undisclosed future. My account of the split between an account of Lizzie’s actions and her thoughts emphasizes the attention Dickens pays to immanent disruptions in temporality—that is, the impossibility of sustaining a sense of thought and bodily action simultaneously.
Ranciere has in mind aesthetic experiences that serve to fracture the location of the worker, turning work into both a site of activity and of potential contemplation that undoes or indeed redefines the act of working itself. However, his idea of aesthetics as “disrupt[ing] the apportionment of space” illuminates the ways in which Lizzie is at once inside and outside of her mundane work environment. The work of novels like Dickens’s, then, can be understood both as distracting the reader and (as in the passages previously cited) as making sense of that very same distraction.
Bender and Marrinan have recently argued for the emerging early nineteenth-century importance of
those novelistic instances of free indirect discourse where subjective and private internal states are represented impersonally as if present to external perception. Impersonal, third-person grammar produces an effect of mental presence without narrative, analogous to the raw data of physical phenomena produced by recording instruments.9
This impersonal subjectivity produces a “now in the past” moment within fictional discourse that Bender and Marrinan see as comparable to the sort of conjectural interpolation of a readerly presence that is evident in the scientific diagrams of Diderot’s Encyclopedie (1751–72). Brewer and Marrinan want to locate nineteenth-century novels as part of a project—as much epistemological as aesthetic—to make sense of a world where “limits of human perception” can come to be modeled by way of a series of experiments that measure what can be captured and conveyed on white pages intermittently blackened by print. The novel is placed, in their reading, alongside a range of scientific publications, as a particular kind of “working object” in a larger culture of observation and experimentation.
There is much to be learned by asking what new vantage points are gained when free indirect discourse becomes part of the standard novelistic armamentarium. The relationship between implicit mental states of characters and the implicit stance of the reader can vary enormously, with the result of a highly differentiated range of possible standpoints from which a reader can appraise the scenes as they actually occur and as they are experienced by various participants. Consider, for example, how Jane Austen conveys Harriet Smith’s excitement at meeting Emma Woodhouse:
Miss Woodhouse was so great a personage in Highbury, that the prospect of the introduction had given as much panic as pleasure; but the humble, grateful little girl went off with highly gratified feelings, delighted with the affability with which Miss Woodhouse had treated her all the evening, and actually shaken hands with her at last!10
Attending to what free indirect discourse adds to the novel’s range here means stressing the reiterative structure of “grateful” and “gratified feelings,” which hints at the gap between the impersonal narrator summing up Emma’s reputation at the beginning of the sentence and the flood of feelings (culminating in the jubilant exclamation point) that occupies the sentence’s end. Yet such a reading would also have to find a way to accommodate the persistent line the text draws between reportage and “raw data” even at the moments when subjectivity seems most on display. The exclamation point at once marks Harriet’s joy and encourages the reader to assume a sardonic distance.11
This kind of back-and-forth offers a way of registering the relationship between individual consciousness and the overall social habitus that critics have not always given its due. For the realist novel, Lukacs argues, “man is a social animal” whose “individual existence . . . cannot be separated from the social and historical environment.” Within the realist novel,
solitariness . . . is always merely a fragment, a phase, a climax or anticlimax, in the life of the community as a whole. . . . Solitariness is a specific social fate, not a universal condition humaine.12
By contrast, man, for modernist writers, “is by nature solitary, asocial, unable to enter into relationship with other human beings. Man may establish relationships . . . only in a superficial, accidental manner.”13 Once this modernist (post-realist) writing loses its capacity to align social context with the experiential shape of individual experience, any reliable connective logic vanishes.
Here, I make the case that Eliot’s fictional experiments, building on the rise of free indirect discourse but exploring the recursive implications a step further than her predecessors, suggest the need to revisit Lukacs’s account of the gulf he perceives between socially anchored realism and its subjectivist successors. The role of free indirect discourse in Eliot’s novels (Middlemarch especially) and the principles of characterization that shape her final book, the generically odd Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), show Eliot experimenting with, refining, and altering the sorts of fiction-induced semi-detachment that earlier chapters of this book have traced. The result is a novelistic form that fits neither Lukacs’s notion of a realism, which depicts individuals located in their “knowable communities” (to borrow a phrase from Raymond Williams),14 nor his notion of a modernism that dissevers a character’s temporal, spatial, and concrete links in favor of what he labels “abstract potentiality.”
VIEWPOINTS
Raymond Williams argues that Eliot’s “critical realism” is ultimately characterized by “withdrawal from any full response to an existing society.”15 Eliot, though, is grappling with a new set of concerns that shape the mid-Victorian novel as they had shaped predecessors like Scott and Austen. Henry James’s notion of Eliot as an expert in creating characters who are “solid and vivid in their varying degrees” suggests one way to understand the investigations her novels make possible.16 James’s formulation points to what we might think of as the Eliotic interest in variable solidity—characters who are present in all their knotty particularity in one moment and seem nothing more than a metonym for a general class in the next. One of Eliot’s distinctive achievements as a novelist is her capacity to “scale” her characters in this way, to present them as they appear at a given moment to a particular observer. Thus Celia can one day seem to Dorothea nearly an extension of herself. Yet on the next day, informing Dorothea that Sir James is in love with her, she can appear to Dorothea as the repellent personification of the small-minded world: “How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty thoughts!”17
Eliot takes evident pleasure in playing out the various ways in which a character can switch roles in the eyes of other characters—or of the reader. What seems worth stressing about all the ways that Eliot varies the viewpoint, however, is that they depend upon the novel’s capacity suddenly to shift not just direction of gaze but even axis and orientation. The novel’s art may be to conceal its artifice, but (as Eliot herself suggests in her 1868 “Notes on Form in Art”) elaborate infrastructures of tacit knowledge nonetheless underlie what looks like an effortless move in the narratorial standpoint. Eliot approaches the problem of how such shifts can and should occur with a subtlety that noticeably increases throughout her career.
For evidence of how much changes between Mill on the Floss and Eliot’s later fiction, consider an early scene from Middlemarch in which Will comes to visit Dorothea, a scene that positions the reader in several highly unexpected and original ways in relationship to each character’s viewpoint. As the scene begins, Will has successfully plotted a way to see Dorothea alone:
“Sit down.” She seated herself on a dark ottoman with the brown books behind her, looking in her plain dress of some thin woolen-white material, without a single ornament on her besides her wedding-ring, as if she were under a vow to be different from all other women; and Will sat down opposite her at two yard’s distance, the light falling on his bright curls and delicate but rather petulant profile, with its defiant curves of lip and chin.18
The first half of this sentence is presumably from Will’s viewpoint: not only because it locates the brown books behind her, thus establishing an angle from which Dorothea is seen, but also because Will (like the narrator, perhaps, but presumably unlike Dorothea herself) is unable to specify what that woolen-white material might be. The second half is just as clearly from Dorothea’s viewpoint, delineating Will’s profile and conveying to the reader not just Will’s good looks but also Dorothea’s attention to them.
The result of that highly personalized account of looking is not immersion in one viewpoint, but an extremely odd pivoting of the viewpoint into something like a common consciousness.
Each looked at the other as if they had been two flowers which had opened then and there. Dorothea for the moment forgot her husband’s mysterious irritation against Will: it seemed fresh water at her thirsty lips to speak without fear to the person whom she had found receptive; for in looking backward through sadness she exaggerated a past solace.19
Each looking at the other as a flower is straightforward, but “two flowers” is something else: the plural form poses a serious discursive problem. After all, neither Will nor Dorothea can be thinking of two flowers; each has only one flower (one profile, one woolen-white dress) in mind and sight. Only the narrator can bring us each appearing to the other as a flower.
That mutuality is rendered fragile partly by the fact that each must be a flower in the other’s eyes, and yet also remain a person seeing the other as a flower. As soon as the effect is defined as shared, moreover, the axis of perception shifts; the floral perception also becomes individuated, and in a way that drives a wedge not only between the two characters but also between the characters and their own past experiences as they recollect them. Dorothea gazes as she does at Will because he has been “receptive,” but the narrator reminds us immediately that in fact she has misremembered because of her sorrow since; she has “exaggerated a past solace.” The exclamation point in Austen functions as a nuanced signal that the narrator has a viewpoint distinct from Harriet Smith’s juvenile glee; Eliot, though, is willing to spell out explicitly not only the feeling that Dorothea has but also its mistaken roots. Eliot is concerned with establishing what it means to see things from somewhere but also to underscore the history behind the particular viewpoint from which sense-claims are made.
Middlemarch took on its final form (the merging of two pieces of fiction that Eliot had been working on separately) when characters antipathetic to one another were forced into contiguity and coexistence. As Welsh points out, the “first chapter [of Middlemarch] drafted with something like the final design in mind” is the election scene where Lydgate casts a vote against Farebrother. The resulting “network of circumstances, opinion and individual motives over time” results in “an intertwining of alien modern beings” such as Bulstrode and Lydgate.20 One way to think about that suturing together of distinct plots would be to analogize it to the pseudo-interpolated tales that (I argued in chapter 1) are crucial to how Victorian realism operates. In each case, seemingly distinct stories are revealed as part of one big baggy world after all—while nonetheless remaining marked as distinct from one another.
Alongside that forced contiguity of unrelated plots in the same space and time, we also ought to note in Eliot a different kind of pressure: the discrepancy that arises even between characters’ current and past feelings. One result of that discrepancy not only between persons but even within one person’s consciousness is that memories, even at such moments of intimacy, are inherently unreliable—as when readers are reminded by the narrator that Dorothea “exaggerated a past solace.”
The net effect of that intersubjective and intrasubjective shimmer is that every event, no matter how slight, comes to the reader with epistemological uncertainty attached to it.
“I have often thought that I should like to talk to you again,” she said immediately. “It seems strange to me how many things I said to you.”
“I remember them all,” said Will, with the unspeakable content in his soul of feeling that he was in the presence of a creature worthy to be perfectly loved. I think his own feelings at that moment were perfect, for we mortals have our divine moments, when love is satisfied in the completeness of the beloved object.21
The “two flowers” that Dorothea and Will see in one another are the perfect exemplification of the challenge the novel always takes on—not to provide definitive “raw data” on the subjectivity constituted by an event, but to struggle to make sense of what different things a single event may mean, and then continue to mean, to people who briefly share a space but who also then have to move onward with their lives.
Such passages signal something highly distinctive and ultimately influential about Eliot’s ways of representing her characters’ thoughts, a shift in available levels and vantage points, so that the narratorial movement out of the consciousness of Will and Dorothea leads readers to reflect as well on the nature of the consciousness that focalizes their experiences. Not just as a tricky narrator (who rests his arms on a bridge and an armchair simultaneously) but as the placeholder for some kind of detached viewpoint on one’s own life: the “I” who thinks that Will’s feelings were perfect is perhaps something like the “I” who tries to look at one’s own life from a partial remove.
MAGIC PANORAMAS, FOCAL SHIFTS
In what we have seen so far, perspective has changed, but the temporal axis has remained untroubled: Dorothea’s memory of her past is wrong, but the narrator is there to set it right. However, Eliot’s characters are constantly trying to make sense of their place with regard to their past and future selves as well as their present one. Like people in the real world, characters find themselves with only limited access in either direction: the past is a fixed quantity (albeit with edges that shift as pieces of it become visible to oneself or to others), while various possible futures necessarily branch out from the present.22 Yet the contingency of such plausible future outcomes does not prevent characters from looking toward their futures in many of the same ways as they look into one another’s lives. The subtlety with which Eliot reckons with such forecasting of contingencies signals an innovation: her novels concern themselves not simply with possible outcomes but also with what difference it makes to people to live their lives precisely by concerning themselves with possible outcomes. When “destiny stands by sarcastic” it is not just “dramatis personae” but also future actions that remain “folded in her hand.”23
For example, after the melodramatic “discovery” scene in which Dorothea finds Will with Rosamond, he is moved fatalistically to contemplate his future fate. Lydgate and Will both at this moment seem to be slipping into a miserable future caused by provincial exigencies, social tyranny, and the particular brand of bovarysme that Rosamond has inflicted on them. Still uncertain of the eventual result of all this, the reader, like Will, fears the worst. At this dark moment, Eliot depicts Will providing a narrative template within which all that has happened can be fitted into that plausible worst-case outcome.
It seemed to him as if he were beholding in a magic panorama a future where he himself was sliding into that pleasureless yielding to the small solicitations of circumstance, which is a commoner history of perdition than any single momentous bargain.24
Understanding what it means for Will to forecast his future based on the glimpses he has from the present involves grasping both Will’s capacity to forecast and the danger that can arise from taking a forecast as something more than the illumination of one possible pathway. The narrator casts Will’s mistake in moral terms: “We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves.”25 (Mr. Ladislaw, we might say, is acting as if he lacked Will.) The road leading from this “magic panorama” does not actually lead Will to perdition: in fact, if anyone in the novel treads that path, it turns out to be Lydgate.
This scene’s capacity to help Will forecast his future based on present circumstances also raises the possibility that there is an implicit antidote to such magic-panorama thinking. After all, Middlemarch, too, offers us some glimpses of what it must be like to be ourselves, or to be people close to us, at crucial moments in our life. Viewing the state of these characters, we view ourselves at a partial remove; just as Will steps back here, puts together the pieces, and tries to figure out in what direction his narrative tends, conjecturing a life of Lydgate-like failure. By charting the various ways in which characters look toward things that may yet come to pass (and to do so in essence by gazing inward), the novel, unlike the magic panorama, allows readers to catch sight of a series of hypothetical, or virtual, worlds.26
Chapter 6—a Visual Interlude centered on the use William Morris made of the magic lantern in designing Kelmscott Press books—explores in detail what exactly novelists might have had to fear or envy in new technologies of visual projection and illumination. Here, it is enough to note that Eliot invokes the counterexample of the magic panorama—like the “images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze” during Dorothea’s moment of sublime disorientation in Rome—in order to clarify a capacity of the novel by contrast to a conceptual deficit in what visual technologies have to offer.27 She sees the capacity to hypothesize about future outcomes—to see in one’s mind a set of pictures that may or may not apply to oneself—as a mechanism that in fact returns the solitary dreamer to a social world. Even if that dreaming never itself finds a social outlet, the very fact of hypothesizing about how one’s path may or may not resemble paths traveled by one’s contemporaries is an attempt to make sense of oneself through their fates and of their fates through one’s own possible futures.
Lukacs suggests that the modernist novels err by grounding their accounts of the human experience in solitude and neglecting the inevitable sociability of human interaction. Eliot, however, is already grappling with a subjectivity that, though formed out of a social self, struggles intermittently or continually to retreat from that social world. Sociability hinges on particular personages who have to be acknowledged in all their distinctiveness—which also means that the work of the novel is to find ways to approach them in their prickly idiosyncrasy, their inherently unsympathetic distinctiveness. Like the narrator in The Mill on the Floss, such characters belong both in the social world of the novel and also back inside some hermetically sealed space. Like the Oliphant characters discussed in chapter 4, they are at once irritated by the necessity of leaving solitude for social life and brought to life by just that obligatory semi-detachment.
One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea—but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage? I protest against all our interest, all our effort at understanding being given to the young skins that look blooming in spite of trouble; for these too will get faded, and will know the older and more eating griefs which we are helping to neglect.28
This memorable rupture renders visible the tacking required in order to form a sense of the world that will be not only consistent (a single character’s viewpoint could be consistent) but also complete and persuasive. Even the notion of the imagination-engendered mirror introduced in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (that we know other’s feelings by imagining ourselves inside their bodies) might seem a sufficient mechanism to force readers to put themselves in faded as much as in blooming skins. In that sense, this paragraph may initially seem structurally comparable to chapter 41 in Emma, which leaves Emma Wodehouse to focalize through Knightley entirely. However, a reading that saw this passage only via its links to past ways of managing viewpoint in the realist novel would fail to account for the force of the interjection itself. The surprise, the rupture that it adduces, marks the narrator’s surprise, even perhaps a slight sense of shame, at her own way of narrating. Without that first, suspenseful half-sentence that found Dorothea about to do something (what she is in the middle of doing is never revealed to the reader) this turn toward Casaubon would be entirely different.
The gaps Eliot labors to describe are discernible in various directions, even in these brief passages: between characters who only guess at what they see in one another; between the narrator and characters who still conceal even from that narrator some vital aspects of their selves and thoughts; between characters and their own pasts; and the culmination of all such gaps, between what can be known inside the world of the novel and what readers can know of these characters from outside. It is not that any one of these categories is the definitive index of how the Eliotic narrative handles the problem of other minds; rather, they comprise the whole array of problems Eliot presents as the logical outcome of an admirable but ultimately circumscribed effort to use fiction to form definitive judgments about characters, or about people in the world.
SEMI-DETACHED FICTIONALITY IN THEOPHRASTUS SUCH
The challenges posed by sudden shifts from one viewpoint to another also play a crucial role in Impressions of Theophrastus Such. That work is Eliot’s final set of experiments with the ways in which understanding—of self, of others, and of fictional characters available only through a textual world—can fail. Especially in “Looking Inward” and “So Young!” Eliot tests the limits of knowledge about others by exploring sites at which a social environment begins to shape what looks like the closed inner world of character formation. The book’s opening sentence contains its crucial question:
It is my habit to give an account to myself of the characters I meet with: can I give any true account of my own?29
Here the “habit” of giving an account “to myself” of the characters I meet suggests that the question of whether I can give an account of my own (also to myself?) reveals how inward-looking the practice of narrative description has become. Equally habitual, too, has become the necessary self-revelatory disclaimers that are required to ground the sketches that will follow.
I am a bachelor, without domestic distractions of any sort, and have all my life been an attentive companion to myself, flattering my nature agreeably on plausible occasions, reviling it rather bitterly when it mortified me, and in general remembering its doings and sufferings with a tenacity which is too apt to raise surprise if not disgust at the careless inaccuracy of my acquaintances, who impute to me opinions I never held, express their desire to convert me to my favorite ideas, forget whether I have been to the East, are capable of being three several times astonished at my never having told them before of my accident in the Alps, causing me the nervous shock which has ever since notably diminished my digestive powers.30
This second sentence, with all its odd trailings-off and unexpected turns (“surprise” and “disgust” seems at first to refer to his friends’ view of Theophrastus, only to be revealed as the reverse), charts the ways in which characters are constituted not just from the inward out nor solely by their public appearance in the world, but by the internalization of the outward into the inner, so that what others think of us becomes a significant portion of our inner lives.
This is also the problem at the center of a short later chapter, “So Young!” That piece turns on the way that an enfant terrible “Ganymede” has lost touch with what his public actually thinks of him—lost touch because he remains wedded to a conception of himself as a talent known mainly for his remarkable youth. The central point of “So Young!” is about the quality that Eliot in other contexts refers to as the “inwrought”; that is, the set of exterior sensations that over a time are drawn into one and, for good or ill, come to shape one’s experience. As a young man, writes Theophrastus, Ganymede was “only undergoing one form of a common moral disease: being strongly mirrored for himself in the remarks of others, he was getting to see his real characteristics as a dramatic part, a type to which his doings were always in correspondence.”31
The result is that “Ganymede’s inwrought sense of his surprising youthfulness had been stronger than the superficial reckoning of his years and the merely optical phenomena of the looking-glass,” even when his age and body type have changed so much that “a stranger would now have been apt to remark that Ganymede was unusually plump for a distinguished writer, rather than unusually young.”32 The writer who continues to be “so young” in his own mind after he has become objectively old and principally plump in the eye of the beholder is an instance of the person for whom what is “wrought back to the directness of sense” is of no benefit in making sense of those around him. Self-awareness is here understood as a problem that hinges upon one’s capacity to feel oneself present as it were on both sides of the glass at once: looking out at the world through this face, and looking in on oneself by way of it. To imagine the face as youthful (or as plump) is to conceive it from two sides at once.
The introduction discussed the implicit doubleness of Ford’s image of the brightly lit glass: it both reflects what is behind one and also allows one to peer through it into the world beyond. Eliot’s version of the half-silvered, or half-reflective, glass is the question of one’s person and one’s persona. How does the youthfulness or the plumpness of Ganymede matter? As it really is? As I apply either label to myself? As those around me apply it to me? Indeed, even the name Ganymede itself is a fictional sobriquet, one of these real-life fictions out of which actual lives are constituted: is Ganymede a moniker attached to him by the narrator, or does it exist in his own social world?
There is no end to such recursion once it has begun; this is the insight Theophrastus Such pursues. Its spirals—those complex turns and twists that deny Theophrastus Such the designation of novel though it is clearly fiction—shed light on the ways that Eliot’s earlier fiction, too, resolves around such comparison between one’s inward vision of oneself and one’s public character. The argument in the remaining third of this chapter credits James—especially on account of his masterful use of free indirect discourse—with a peculiarly subtle awareness of the way gaps open up between what I perceive myself to be (first-person perspective) and what others make of me (third-person perspective). James’s subtlety notwithstanding, free indirect discourse is just one weapon novels have in approaching a problem of keeping one’s experiential interiority and one’s social actuality congruently related to one another, despite one’s awareness of the enormous gap between experience and actuality. We should not forget, however, that the problem of squaring the external conceptions of oneself with the inward ones—and recognizing the discrepancies that such attempted squaring produces—is an important one to Eliot long before she turns to the not-youthful, perhaps-plump Ganymede. In Theophrastus Such, Eliot is not so much uncovering new ground for fiction as exploring the implications of the ground that her novels had already mapped out.
When Robert Merton decided in 1960 that science’s best hope for anatomizing subjective experience lay in an “introspectometer,” which could measure not the facts but the experience of a modern life, he traced that machine’s lineage not to the electron-detecting cloud chamber nor the seismograph nor even the stethoscope, but the modernist novel. Merton was convinced that only James Joyce had come up with a mechanism for recounting the ordinary experience of someone whose subjective experiences would in ordinary life remain a profound mystery to everyone not dwelling inside their skull. Merton’s conception of such a novelistically underwritten introspectometer helpfully lays bare a certain modernist aspiration: to make inward thoughts, understood as existentially individual in nature, externally shareable.33
What might such sharing look like? In his introduction to John Ruskin’s Sesames and Lilies, Marcel Proust proposes that mere physical meetings are in crucial ways inferior to encounters mediated through reading alone.
Reading, contrary to conversation, consist[s] for each of us in receiving the communication of another’s thought, but while we remain all alone, that is to say, while continuing to enjoy the intellectual power we have in solitude, and which conversation disperses immediately.34
Reading calls into being an alternative universe, doomed to disappear or shrink to a few square inches when the book ends.35 In Proust and Woolf as much as in James, the subjectivity effect within a text never leads to pure temporal flux. The falls into flashback or jumbled hysteron proteron begin somewhere in the reader’s actual world. In Virginia Woolf, too, two warring tendencies tug at the novel. They often appear as a war between the present (at least partially shareable, as the intermittently legible skywriting and the universally audible booms of Big Ben suggest) and the recollected past, which interjects an inescapable subjectivity into any moment’s sensations. Mrs. Dalloway’s exasperation with her own memorializing tendency epitomizes the tension perfectly:
She remembered once throwing a shilling into the Serpentine. But every one remembered; what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab.36
Mrs. Dalloway’s dismay when forced to choose between past and present is in some ways as distinctively modernist as is the capacity of Marcel in Proust’s novels to flicker from place to place and time to time like a magic-lantern show, with recollections and a sense of time dependent on an always internally preserved, paratactic logic. However, there is a far greater debt owed by such experiments than is often acknowledged to the palpably experimental semi-detachment Eliot is perpetually refining in her writing. The similarity between Woolf here and George Eliot’s depiction of characters’ uneasy meditations on their partial or imperfect view of the world they share with others suggests that Lukacs underestimates the rapprochement between mid-Victorian and early modernist aesthetic ways of conceiving of the force that the external world manifests in a modernist novel.
The problems of mutual regard in Middlemarch and the problems of deformed or temporally disjointed self-regard in Theophrastus Such show that Eliot understands characters in her novels as a series of limited vantage points onto a world that the reader comes to know through a mixture of third-person axioms and first-person observations. Novels that seem to offer the possibility of an impartial and complete third-person vantage point always contain hints of the arms cramped by watching; the flower into which beloved faces are transformed always contains a hint of the peering eyes, the fading skin, beneath. From the numb forearms of The Mill on the Floss to Theophrastus’s admittedly incomplete attempts to understand his own character through an investigation of others, Eliot’s aesthetic enterprise is predicated on the implications of living in a world where everyone is making imperfect inferences, not just about the lost past and the imperfectly foreseen future but also about how the present world appears from others’ vantages. Flowers everywhere.
HENRY JAMES’S RAT-TAT-TAT-AH
Henry James discerns in Eliot a way to preserve from the realist novel a commitment to a shared public world coupled with an attunement to the way that the characters who share that world often, like Bulstrode, are haunted by images that rise before their eyes, temporarily blocking out an otherwise common reality. James’s understanding of the novel’s capacities precisely arises from his effort to account for that ongoing sensation of partial detachment from and ultimate return to a current reality.
In James’s account, especially late in his career, there are almost infinite variations on the play of analogies by which a reader reconciles the experiences depicted within a book and those that a reader actually has when reading that book. Unlike other genres, James asserts in the New York edition preface to The Ambassadors, novels at their most “elastic” and “prodigious” are a mixture of the “dramatic” and the “representational” and their representational successes are made up of “disguised and repaired losses” and “insidious recoveries.”37 James’s aesthetic credo helps clarify the significance of his praise, many decades earlier, for the “varying degrees of solidity” in Eliot’s characters. James’s late novels create characters neither entirely removed from nor entirely immersed in their social and physical surroundings. James’s distinctive use of free indirect discourse and the shifting focalization that accompanies it produces a fascinating uncertainty about where and when a particular sentence is produced: uttered, thought, or written down. That uncertainty is tellingly signposted not just in The Ambassadors and its preface but also in the dictated notes that accompany James’s 1915 revisions to his never-completed final novel, The Sense of the Past.
In the James passages that follow, three sorts of semi-detachment, each with an attendant set of possibilities, are discernible. One is the mental dislocation that allows reverie and social interaction to coexist. Another is the play of reported and inferred speech that underscores the semi-dislocation that is involved when characters are shown inferring other’s thoughts and intentions. A third explores James’s use of warped onomatopoeia to highlight the reader’s relationship to the “happy semblance” that words in a realist novel are committed to produce. Taken together, these three instances allow us to reconstruct James’s intention of making the reader attend to the partial dislocation and deceptive reorientation that the reading experience itself can produce.
(HALF) BEING THERE
James’s interest in the way in which a character’s thoughts can be divided between present social realities and some kind of interior space with quite different properties can be grasped by returning to the passage from The Ambassadors (1903) I discussed in the introduction. To set the scene: almost on the book’s final page, Maria proposes marriage to Strether. The sentences that follow that proposal, however, drift subtly away from the social scene itself, tracing Strether’s train of thought, filling in what he thinks she means—until the moment in which his wandering internal supposition is interrupted:
“Shall you make anything so good—?” But, as if remembering what Mrs. Newsome had done, it was as far as she [Gostrey] went.
He [Strether] had sufficiently understood. “So good as this place at this moment? So good as what you make of everything you touch?” He took a moment to say, for, really and truly, what stood about him there in her offer—which was as the offer of exquisite service, of lightened care, for the rest of his days—might well have tempted. It built him softly round, it roofed him warmly over, it rested, all so firm, on selection. And what ruled selection was beauty and knowledge. It was awkward, it was almost stupid, not to seem to prize such things; yet, none the less, so far as they made his opportunity they made it only for a moment. She’d moreover understand—she always understood.
That indeed might be, but meanwhile she was going on. “There’s nothing, you know, I would n’t do for you.”38
In Strether’s mind, Gostrey’s proposal has been received, considered, rejected, and his refusal accepted. As Strether thinks “she’d moreover understand,” the reader can sense him already readying a new topic of conversation, the proposal itself already having become a thing of the past.
The next sentence therefore comes as a rude shock: “That indeed might be, but meanwhile she was going on.” Strether has not simply been caught daydreaming while the proposal unfolds around him. If it were that simple, Strether would be like Lord Jim: too late to rescue drowning men at sea because he was fantasizing about rescuing drowning men at sea. Strether’s case, though is subtler. Conrad’s Jim may not be aware that he has chosen to stay on deck while he’s still dreaming, but once he’s made the choice, its implications become clear. Strether, by contrast, confronts a permanently muddied terrain: what she has said and what he thought she said are not unpacked as two clear alternatives. Instead, the reader must confront a text that provides only intermittent glimpses of Maria’s actual speech—only the words he’s been able to attend to have broken through the wall of words produced by Strether’s own thoughts. Thinking that he’s listening to Maria Gostrey, Strether has nonetheless gotten the subtext—and perhaps even the text—of her proposal wrong. Because Strether’s thoughts have clearly drifted away from Gostrey, both he and the reader may have missed one or more sentences (just as in James Joyce’s “The Dead,” Gabriel, brooding on Greta’s behavior, misses key details in the story that Mrs. Malins is telling about “the beautiful big big fish”: his missing them means that the reader is never told what those details might be39).
Strether is not allowed to remain in the dark, however, about the divergence between his thoughts and Maria’s actual words. The phrase “that indeed might be” jolts him out of his mistake. It does so in a revealing way, by creating a quasi-impersonal interlocutor. It is not enough here to say, following Dorrit Cohn’s crisp anatomy of free indirect discourse’s various distinctive possibilities (“psychic narration,” “quoted monologue,” and “narrated monologue”), that the passage sequentially lays out various viewpoints.40 Cohn’s account would allow us to posit that at one moment the reader is located inside Strether’s head (“she’d moreover understand”), but at the next (“that indeed might be”) entirely outside it. The slide between impersonal and personated speech is subtler than Cohn’s model allows. “That indeed might be” is Strether’s own sense of an impersonal narrative voice, an interjection that reminds him of the gaffe he’s made, allowing Maria Gostrey to continue proposing while he assures himself she will—no, actually does—understand his rejection. The phrase is a glimpse of the character’s subjective understanding of the world, rebuked by his own (perhaps equally subjective) sense of what the objective correcting world would say to mark his lapse in concentration.
Strether’s embarrassment about his temporal misfire arises from James’s notion that the novel creates a virtual world, a site where readers can come to understand the interplay between the elements of their thought that are social (dependent on direct interaction) and those (like losing oneself in a book or in a daydream) that are divorced from social intercourse. One of the clearest ways James has to demarcate the difference between reality found inside characters’ minds and the reality made up of their shared social universe is to show the divergence between characters’ thoughts (what Strether thinks Gostrey is saying) and real-world events (what she actually does say).
The result of those interplays—something like a moiré pattern, in which two sets of waves meet and produce their own distinctive new pattern—is that characters will sometimes be brought up short by a sentence like “that indeed might be, but meanwhile she was going on” uttered by a speaker who is and is not the narrator himself. From such a lapse, a sly unobserved recovery is possible in the real world; indeed, nothing is more common. The novel, however—so expert at capturing those losses and recoveries and suspending them in the viscous, infinitely dilatable time of prose narration—allows the character’s losses and recoveries to float inescapably, even cruelly, before the reader.
UNREAL PERSONS, UNSPEAKABLE SENTENCES
Sharon Cameron has made the case that Henry James “dissociates consciousness from psychology” and elucidated ways in which James is fascinated with thoughts and words that travel from one person’s mind to another, or that show up in the novel in ways that make their source ambiguous.41 Who exactly, then, is doing the experiencing? In James, as in George Eliot before him, what’s most fascinating about the novel is not that it presents the reader with an accurate account of other people who share our objective world while differing from us in their subjective stances. Instead, the novel presents the sort of accounts of the world that can only ever be offered from a particular and partial viewpoint—even though no actual human being exists to inhabit that viewpoint. To press the logic of Catherine Gallagher’s resonant phrase, “nobody’s story,” we might say that novels work by revealing ways in which subjectivity is present even without any actual person being there: feeling without feelers.
This chapter concludes by offering a somewhat new way of thinking about the question of impersonality. Henry James is acutely interested, especially in his final few works, in detailing what it may mean to think of oneself in such a situation: to be aware, that is, that one’s life is as much virtual as it is actual.42 And that realization—of one’s own partial remove from the actual world—is one that James ultimately means to apply to his readers every bit as much as it applies to his characters.
James also approaches the conundrum of comparing the life of characters to the lives of actual people in his account of what exactly makes him jealous of a rival novelist’s character: John Halifax, Gentleman—eponymous hero of a bestselling 1856 novel by the pious moralist Dinah Craik. “He is infinite, he outlasts time; he is enshrined in a million innocent breasts; and before his awful perfection and his eternal durability we respectfully lower our lance.”43 By James’s account, the character thrives neither in Craik’s mind nor on the physical pages of her novel, but because readers have taken him in, they have yielded to him. John Halifax is a novel-borne meme, a set of subjective sensations that can take up their dwelling in any breast. James’s later critical writing makes clear that such an afterlife for characters depends on the novelist granting to characters sufficient autonomy that their reactions to the events of the novel will be plausibly separable from the novelist’s own thoughts.
There is a revealing link between James’s criticism of the outré formal experiments of George Eliot’s late works and his own “late style” three decades later. On the one hand, James resembles Eliot in his wish to push away from a narrowly delimited conception of mimetic prose. On the other hand, Eliot’s is an experiment with expression: how to find a place for authorial ideas to take shape within the confines of the novel. At a similar juncture in his career, James, by contrast, is thinking in readerly terms. He is not as interested in the expression of a thought as he is the kind of thinking that will be produced in a reader given access to two different sorts of information: on the one hand actions, on the other, the experiences that such actions produce in characters.
Accordingly, as James explains in his 1908 preface to The Ambassadors, the novels he set out to write should be thought of as double. Unlike other genres, a novel can be both “dramatic”—it can stage scenes plausibly—and “representative”—it can enter into how particular people feel and experience the world.44 In fact, its capacity to keep the scenic and the mental both afloat within the text is the novel’s unique strength (drama only supplies scenes; perhaps we can also infer that in contradistinction poetry supplies only mental states). A scene in which the reader gains a sense of what a minor character is thinking but not saying, writes James, is
an example of the representational virtue that insists here and there on being, for the charm of opposition and renewal, other than the scenic. It wouldn’t take much to make me further argue that from an equal play of such oppositions, the book gathers an intensity that fairly adds to the dramatic—though the latter is supposed to be the sum of all intensities; or that has at any rate nothing to fear from juxtaposition with it. I consciously fail to shrink in fact from that extravagance—I risk it, rather, for the sake of the moral involved; which is not that the particular production before us exhausts the interesting questions it raises, but that the Novel remains still, under the right persuasion, the most independent, most elastic, most prodigious of literary forms.45
By James’s account, intensity is to be found not in the dramatic or scenic (the mere surface of things), but in the juxtaposition of such scenic/dramatic events to the representational. The coexistence of the “dramatic” and the “representational” within a single apparently continuous text is a mark of the novel’s generic strength: accordingly, the preface should be understood as making explicit the ways in which occurrences have been transformed into experiences.46
Furthermore, James stresses in the same paragraph the novel’s enviable capacity to reveal the gaps that open up between an occurrence and a character’s subjective experience of that occurrence—as they do, for example, in the case of Strether’s mangled reception of Maria Gostrey’s marriage proposal. “The book,” writes James
is touchingly full of these disguised and repaired losses, these insidious recoveries, these intensely redemptive consistencies.47
We might say that the novel works by revealing disguised losses and making sure the reader notices the insidious recoveries of the sort Strether pulls off in front of Gostrey. James’s novels are not, then, the acme of baroque self-referentiality, but acute registers of a rarely remarked aspect of everyday life: that our attention is far less uniformly focused than we like to pretend upon the physical and social facts right in front of us. The attention of his characters does not wander because they are peculiarly Jamesian subjects of an experiment in pure linguistic mediation.48 Rather, it wanders because they, like their readers, only partially attend to their immediate surroundings.49
This is akin to moments in Eliot where characters see their own deeds, or their own lives, taking place as if they were outside themselves: a semi-detachment predicated on historical remove. Here, James turns up the magnification on the moment of removal itself: to be busy at work with one’s own inward thought process is also to have experienced a measurable gap, a moment of blank tape in one’s social being. Viewed one way, this kind of tuning-out and then tuning-in again looks like a unique formal property of the novel, depending as it does upon the felt discrepancy between what James calls its “dramatic” and “representative” aspects. Viewed another way, though, such intermittent disattending is representative of the way that a reader’s own consciousness might find itself in a state of semi-detachment even at the moments when full and complete attention might seem inevitable.
DISARRAYED DICTATION AND ONOMATOPOEIA
Jamesian narration provides not so much a refuge from the world as a way to recognize some part of our experience that is invisible to us in ordinary experience: those insidious recoveries. If that is so, then the work of the novel is to establish its own strangeness just enough to arrest the reader’s attention, while still retaining an underlying mimetic resemblance to the everyday experience of partial removal from one’s actual world. Strether’s wandering consciousness during Maria’s speech is unlike the actual world in providing a form of insight into insidious loss and disguised recovery that is unavailable in reality. Yet it is also like the actual world in resembling the reader’s own mental vagaries. The effect is to generate a first-person account of (nonexistent) third persons who turn out to have a form of consciousness that we know ourselves to have—but can only infer in others.
Related issues around fictive semi-detachment works also arise in a pair of related moments—one turning on free indirect discourse, the other on onomatopoeia—in James’s The Sense of the Past, an unfinished novel begun in 1900, put away, then picked up and worked on in a sustained way in 1915, just before his death. A close look at his 1915 essay “Within the Rim” and contemporaneous correspondence suggests James returned to the manuscript just before his death because wartime had sharpened his sense of the key issues involved in the leap backward in time that lies at the story’s heart.
The novel’s most memorable scene is the first that James wrote in 1915, with World War I front and center in his consciousness. The protagonist, Ralph, in the novel’s present moment of 1900 is about to enter a doorway that he knows will take him back to 1820. Having climbed the steps, Ralph looks back over the abyss he is leaving behind, including the person who came to register his departure, the American Ambassador:
Our young man was after that aware of a position of such eminence on the upper doorstep as made him, his fine rat-tat-tat-ah of the knocker achieved, see the whole world, the waiting, wondering, the shrunkenly staring representative of his country included, far, far, in fact at last quite abysmally below him. Whether these had been rapid or rather retarded stages he was really never to make out. Everything had come to him through an increasingly thick other medium; the medium to which the opening door of the house gave at once an extension that was like an extraordinarily strong odour inhaled—an inward and inward warm reach that his bewildered judge would literally have seen swallow him up; though perhaps with the supreme pause of the determined diver about to plunge just marked in him before the closing of the door again placed him on the right side and the whole world as he had known it in the wrong.50
Anne Banfield’s account of “unspeakable sentences” and James’s own notion of the novel’s capacity to contain both the “representational” and the “scenic” virtue are both illuminating here. In the sentence in which Ralph sees the Ambassador seeing him vanish, James wants to map three distinct things: the state of actual affairs unfolding in the world, the way they seem to a viewer whose full consciousness is not registered, and the way they seem to the focalizing subject. The key sentences for this movement from one world to another (Ralph is literally plunging or diving into the past as he crosses the threshold) make it plain that “his bewildered judge” has a perspective that Ralph only reconstructs hypothetically: and in fact, James’s working note for this moment asserts that “the very law of my procedure here is to show what is passing in his excellency’s mind only through Ralph’s detection and interpretation, Ralph’s expression of it.” The transition from Ralph’s “interpretation” to “expression” of the Ambassador’s thought that James notes down here is especially striking.51
Still, can even the most elaborate combination of interpretation and expression explain the unspeakable phrase “an inward and inward warm reach that his bewildered judge would literally have seen swallow him up”? It is the “reach” that swallows Ralph up, but the reader is as bewildered by that fact as is the Ambassador—bewildered because the syntax turns away, midsentence, from the feel of what pulls Ralph into the question of what that pull looks like to the befuddled onlooking Ambassador.52
The bewilderment is further qualified by the subsequent clause, because the temporal uncertainty Ralph has been experiencing (am I moving fast or slow? he wonders) also leaves him uncertain how he appears to the Ambassador: “Though perhaps with the supreme pause of the determined diver about to plunge just marked in him before the closing of the door again placed him on the right side and the whole world as he had known it in the wrong.” Three positions are at stake here: the scenic fact that he paused (which he is uncertain about); the (representational) Ambassador’s perspective, from which his pause may have looked like evidence of determination; and finally a representation of Ralph’s own perspective from which, though he is unsure if he is moving quickly or slowly, he can be sure that if the judge has seen him pause, he will be speculating as to whether that marks the determination of a diver pausing before the plunge, a third-order representation since it is Ralph speculating on the Ambassador’s speculating on his own mental state, as evidenced by the perhaps nonexistent pause.
There is also a revealing textual codicil. In dictating an earlier part of this particular scene (Fig. 5.1), James segued without notice from dictating the novel itself to dictating a “working note” to Theodora Bosanquet, his typist and interlocutor.53
“It’s wonderful for me,” the Ambassador soon replied, “by which I mean it’s quite out of my common routine, to have the share to which you invite me in such adventures—mixed, as I understand you I may regard myself, in your friend’s down there as well as in yours.
What I want here is to accelerate the pace for what remains of this to the end of the chapter.54
In a scene in which the Ambassador discusses how he feels to be invited to witness young Ralph’s slip from one world into another, it is striking that James would slip imperceptibly from dictation into schematics—as if he feels his own role shifting here. I say imperceptibly because although Bosanquet knew James and his dictation style extremely well she did not—as evidenced by that sheet—perceive the shift from fiction to planning immediately. It seems worth pondering the difficulty that Bosanquet had in drawing the line between a character speaking about another character’s adventures and the novelist’s musing on the pace at which his plot advances.55 Bosanquet may not have doubted the identity of the man speaking to her, but the persona who spoke through him remained in doubt. Bosanquet certainly perceived a gap between the James who dictated the words of his novel’s narrator and the James who remained just behind the fictional mask, ready to pop out at any moment and replace the words of the novel with words about the novel. Yet that shift between diegesis and metadiegesis proved difficult to spot even for such an old and seasoned acquaintance as Bosanquet—all the more difficult because in a Henry James novel the words of the novel are so often themselves words about the novel.
The final puzzle this passage poses is in its most anomalous word of all: “rat-tat-tat-ah.” James’s interview with Preston Lockwood of the New York Times in March 1915 provides a useful perspective. James (who begins the interview by “asking that his punctuation as well as his words should be noted”) worries that
FIGURE 5.1. Dictating, but dictating what? Bosanquet, as she typed, was not sure what was fiction and what was conversation. Henry James, discarded sheet from The Sense of the Past (1915; MS Am 1237.8, Houghton Library, Harvard University).
the war has used up words; they have weakened, they have deteriorated like motor car tires; they have, like millions of other things, been more overstrained and knocked about and voided of the happy semblance during the last six months than in all the long ages before.56
Deformed as they have become by wartime shocks, words are no longer capable of functioning as transparent signs. It is also worth noting at this point that only a month earlier James had written “Within the Rim,” an essay that begins by explicitly comparing the advent of World War I to his youthful memories of the Civil War:
The first sense of it all to me after the first shock and horror was that of a sudden leap back into the life of the violence with which the American Civil War broke upon us, at the North, fifty-four years ago, when I had a consciousness of youth which perhaps equaled in vivacity my present consciousness of age. The illusion was complete, in its immediate rush; everything quite exactly matched in the two cases.57
With that leap in mind and with the sense that words have been voided of their signifying capacity (“Happy semblance”) in the same way a tire is voided of the air that allows it to function as a tire, we are better poised to understand what it means that James picks up The Sense of the Past where he had been forced to break off fifteen years earlier; forced to break off because in 1900 he could find no way to write the scene by which its central character falls (or plunges or leaps) “back into” a bygone nineteenth century that—like the “American Civil War” that suddenly leapt on him with the onset of war four months earlier—is both fantastically detached from actual life and somehow inescapably real.
In his working notes for the scene of the plunge or leap, James congratulates himself on grasping “what I remember originally groping for, having groped for, when I broke this off just here so many years ago.”58 His description of why he broke off, though, gives some insight of what may have changed in the interim. James recalls that when he last worked on the story fifteen years earlier, “I gave up taking time to excogitate my missing link, my jump or transition from this last appearance of my young man’s in the modern world, so to speak, and his coming up again, where we next find him, after the dive, in the ‘old.’”59 In peacetime, under no particular pressure, the process of “excogitation” had not shown James the “missing link.”60
It would be oversimplifying to think of “rat-tat-tat-ah” as a supreme instance of James marking the failure of language any longer to have “the happy semblance” to reality. Still, it is worth noting that the word is a one-off, never used in any language before or since James dictated it to Bosanquet in March 1915.61 What does the addition of “ah” in James’s variant do to the limits of rat-tat-tat’s onomatopoeia?62 It may, like James’s palpable anguish in lamenting the failure of language during wartime, relate to the corrosive effect of machine gun fire itself, as if the rat-tat-tat of the guns were beating its way even into James’s dictation. Or it may be that James is tinkering with the word to represent more accurately what the “fine” knock sounded like, so that the added “ah” suggests additional confidence, or assertiveness? Would we even want to hear a more musical cadence to the sound?63 These multiple valences, divergent pathways toward some kind of cloudy meaning, may well be the point of this word, coined, though never assimilated, at a moment when James fears that words have lost their “happy semblance.” Given that James himself described his late novels as aspiring toward the “concentrated notation of experience,” it may make sense to read “rat-tat-tat-ah” as the marker of another sort of dialogue, the one that continually takes place between a writer’s exterior world and the mimetic universe within which he or she suspends her characters.
Roman Jakobson’s “What Is Poetry?” proposes that a famous poet’s private scribbles might be as meaningfully poetic as his published works.64 It may make sense to think of the dictated notes from James’s final years as a different sort of test case of the line between “artistic” and ordinary utterance. These dictated notes comprise both the “typescript” (that is, the original compositional record of novels that never had traditional manuscripts) of James’s late novels and also a record of what James happened to say to his “typewriter,” Theodora Bosanquet, while he was in dictating mode. This is an odd and in some ways poignant instance of the novelist as chronicler of the everyday, since what we have is Bosanquet’s accidental record of Jamesian conversation (or even musing) recorded as if it were destined for publication as a novel. What are we to make of the grounding of words that (like Strether’s mistaken interior monologue about Maria Gostrey’s proposal) exist within a speaker’s mind as an instance of his subjective misapprehension of an objective state of affairs? Words that—as with the “inward warm reach”—call into being two different subjective positions nearly simultaneously and perhaps interchangeably? And finally, what of rat-tat-tat-ah, balanced between Ralph’s 1900 and 1820, as well as on the cusp between exquisitely modulated knocking and deformed gunfire?
Rat-tat-tat-ah foregrounds the semi-detachment of the reading experience not simply because a later scholar can do the detective work to recreate the moment of composition, but because at the instant of the plunge, the “missing link” serves to make the reader acutely aware of what sort of medium it is through which her own interpretive process also moves. That James produces that awareness without dispelling the illusion—that his dictated fiction generates detachment as well as absorption—may be the best evidence we have of his interest in creating a virtual world that is built up not of alternating states of detachment and absorption, a movement into and out of the fictional realm. Rather, what we see everywhere from Strether’s absentminded reception of a marriage proposal to James’s half fictional, half metafictional notes to Bosanquet is evidence of the utterly inescapable and ordinary business of moving through a world in which the “objective knowledge of subjectivity” and the knowledge of objectivity itself can prove breathtakingly hard to disentangle.
CONCLUSION: LITERARY SUBJECTIVITY
How should we interpret Eliot’s recursive, self-conscious consideration in Theophrastus Such of what it means to be a character in and of the world? Or James’s self-conscious exploration of how the dramatic and representative capacities of the novel (including time travel plots, free indirect discourse, perhaps even onomatopoeia) can model the distinctive admixture of inward and outward life that shapes experience in the everyday social realm? Simon During has recently proposed a category that may shed light on Eliot’s notion of what interiority may look like, for both literary characters and actual persons. “Literary subjectivity,” writes During,
involves a certain styling of a life around reading (and often writing too). . . . It involves recognition of oneself as a distinct type who takes literature seriously. At a more general level though, literary subjectivity is a disposition to engage intensely with particular modes in two larger formations which help drive modern culture: the production of fictions and simulacra, and the provision of spaces and occasions for individuals to be communicated to or to fantasize alone and without a belief in supernatural agency.65
Literary works can prove crucial in constructing that sort of “secular mimesis,” During argues, either in a traditional sense—literary greatness allows one to regain inherited values even without transcendental authority—or in a self-reflexive way—literature is that which allows individuals to undertake the modes of reflective analysis, finding answers by looking within themselves, with no assurance that such answers are generalizable. If literary subjectivity arises from the latter route, During suggests that problems of legitimation and autonomy remain to be adjudicated: how can we be sure such subjectivity derives from or is secured by objectivity or some other form of universal truth?
The experiments in semi-detachment that James pulled through such baroque divagations at the onset of World War I may seem centuries rather than decades removed from the split-mindedness of Lizzie Hexam in Our Mutual Friend. Yet the distance traveled begins to make more sense if Middlemarch and Impressions of Theophrastus Such are understood as intermediate stops. In such works, Eliot focuses her attention (much like Ford’s image of the half-reflective glass) on the puzzling and incomplete nature of a story’s “pertinence” to the world in which it is told—and upon the incomplete gaps that open up between fictionality and actuality, between story-world and “real world.”
This chapter has traveled from Lizzie Hexam’s double-mindedness through Eliot’s explorations of the split inner life of Bulstrode, down through James’s spiraling syntax as he attempts to make sense of the gap between what is seen from outside, what is felt from inside, and what constitutes the sum total of the represented world. It is tempting to conclude that what each case demonstrates is the authorial intervention, the absence of actuality in this artifice of a fictional world. Instead, semi-detachment may be helpful in reminding us how crucial a role “literary subjectivity,” as During describes it, must play in the actual social world that each of these novelists imagines. Without a conception of individuals as already living semi-detached from their own experiences, aware of the discrepancy between what they do and what they think, as well as the space that opens up between how I think about my actions and how others think about them, the formal gyrations of each of these novelists would be incomprehensible. “Where every one feels a difference, a difference there must be,” writes Mill in his first attempt at literary criticism; it is an observation that applies well to all three novelists examined in this chapter.66 Aware of the problem of fictionality, each of them unpacks formal conundrums about what it means to be moving rapidly between possible positions with regard to one’s own experience of the world.
Semi-detachment in Dickens’s fictional worlds as in Eliot’s and James’s opens up the concept of “literary subjectivity” in its broadest sense. It is not simply that readers may be drawn to model their own lives after the immanent forms that fiction makes available. Rather, the effect of such partial pulling away, like the pseudo-interpolation of stories into novels, is to offer readers ways of seeing themselves operating within the world’s own busy fictional machinery. Although few of us can name ourselves like Pip, all of us must imagine that like Ganymede we bear a name and a character not of our own choosing, with stories about us circulating elsewhere that we can either own up to, or fitfully disavow.67