CHAPTER 1

WHAT FEELS RIGHT: ETHICS, INTUITION, AND THE EXPERIENCE OF NARRATIVE

Georg Lukács, in a 1935 essay on Balzac’s Lost Illusions, offers a defense of the “old-fashioned … methods of plot-building” against naturalist accusations of clumsy contrivance.1 Realist novelists like Balzac and Dickens, Lukács claims, produce such “subtle and multiple interconnections” in their novels that the events in their narratives take on a “poetic necessity,” which is more important than the plausibility of any individual event:

Introduce an accident, however well-founded causally, into any tragic conflict and it is merely grotesque; no chain of cause and effect could ever turn such accident into a necessity. The most thorough and accurate description of the state of the ground which would cause Achilles to sprain his ankle while pursuing Hector or the most brilliant medico-pathological explanation of why Antony lost his voice through a throat infection just before he was due to make his great speech over Caesar’s body in the forum could never make such things appear as anything but grotesque accidents; on the other hand, in the catastrophe of Romeo and Juliet the rough-hewn, scarcely motivated accidents do not appear as mere chance. (56)

Here Lukács makes archly explicit something that lies implicit in most discussions of narrative. Not all events are created equal; some seem right and some seem wrong, even if it is difficult to say precisely why or how. Still, Lukács claims, with what might seem like an almost naive insistence, there is really no alternative: “Romeo and Juliet’s love must end in tragedy” and “Lucien must perish in Paris.” These outcomes represent the “true necessity” that inheres in Shakespeare’s tragedy or Balzac’s novel.

But, of course, this “true necessity” is not truly necessary. There is no logical reason to assume that Lost Illusions could not have ended with Lucien staying in the country. What Lukács means is that, if such a novel were to exist, its conclusion would “appear grotesque.” Is this just hindsight bias—the belief that because something happened, it had to happen—or an overreliance on teleology? While Lukács might be willing to subscribe to the latter, I would argue that it points to something far more basic in the way that critics discuss, write about, and read novel narrative. Novel theory in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, for all its sophistication of critical metalanguage, has long rested on an important but largely unexamined premise: that certain directions in novel narrative will seem—or “appear,” or “feel”—right, and others will seem wrong. The language that critics use to make these claims will usually involve some metaphor of vision, or physical sensation, or nonrational intuition. After all, there is no logical or rational reason Achilles could not have sprained his ankle. At the base of narrative theory has been a largely tacit agreement not only that narrative is a system of representation that we respond to in some nonrational way but also that we ratify narrative as either successful or unsuccessful at this nonrational level. If narrative “works,” it does so because of how it makes us feel—and, so the story seems to go, there is no way to tell just how it will make us feel without actually engaging in the experience.

In this chapter, I will attempt to sketch out the history and consequences of this connection between novel narrative and a felt, intuitive experience over time. What I hope to show is that this hard-to-define quality of narrative—its ability to engage a reader and mobilize expectation toward a certain state of affairs—is intimately connected with the moral concerns of the nineteenth century. This is not only an issue for understanding individual narratives; since literary studies depends on distinguishing a few model texts for close study, the question of how we recognize a successful or well-formed narrative has a great impact on the discipline as a whole. This will be a theme in later chapters in this book: how these concerns helped to form the novelistic tradition into its recognizable shape by conflating certain morally inflected experiences with what we have come to see as satisfying narrative structure. First, though, it will be useful to reflect on how our own understanding of narrative form has been shaped, through and through, by a reliance on intuition—and just how much implicit morality that intuition has brought along with it.

NOVEL INTUITIONS

If we wish to look for the root of this reliance on intuition, a good place to start would be the principal metalanguage of narrative theory over the last half-century or so: linguistics.2 Linguistics depends, in large part, on the unreflective judgment of the competent speaker as its court of highest appeal. As Chomsky puts it, “linguistics as a discipline is characterized by attention to certain kinds of evidence that are … readily accessible and informative: largely, the judgments of native speakers.”³ These judgments are not based on a consciously held set of rules. Instead, as one popular linguistics textbook claims, “all the linguist has to go by … is the native speaker’s intuitions.”⁴ While it is true that literary studies have been a good deal more influenced by a Saussurean social model than a Chomskyan model of deep grammar, the field still makes use of the idea of the native speaker. In fact, at the heart of a good deal of twentieth-century literary study is Chomsky’s reformulation of the Saussurean distinction between langue and parole as competence and performance.⁵ “Performance,” as Jonathan Culler explains it, would allow a speaker to utter an ungrammatical statement through distraction or to make an effect of some sort; “competence” is based more on a “judgment”: “Competence is reflected in the judgment passed on an utterance or in the fact that the rule violated is partly responsible for the effect achieved.”⁶ Culler’s choice of emphasis here makes clear that a central inheritance that literary study takes from linguistics is the idea that we can understand the “rules” by imagining a judge—native or competent—who can tell when those rules are broken. More to the point, we can understand rules by imagining the “effects” they will have on the reader when they are broken.

This method is, by Culler’s account, an essential element of literary study. As he puts it, “One cannot … emphasize too strongly that every critic, whatever his persuasion, encounters the problems of literary competence as soon as he begins to speak or write about literary works, and that he takes for granted notions of acceptability and common ways of reading” (124). We speak of a langue underwriting the narrative parole, in other words, but we prove it through the intuitive judgment that a competent reader passes on a literary performance. Obviously, Lukács is not claiming that all readers, everywhere, will react with disgust to the examples he offers. It may well be possible for someone to view Antony’s sore throat with pleasure, but it would be someone lacking in competence and therefore not worth analyzing.

The problem that arises when this procedure of intuitive judgment is applied to literature, though, is that while most of us can easily imagine how to construct a sentence that we could intuit to be faulty—a glaring subject-verb disagreement would probably suffice—it is quite a bit harder to say what an “incorrect” narrative might be. Take, for example, Seymour Chatman’s suggestion that all of the elements of a narrative must eventually be shown to be “relevant”: “otherwise we object that the narrative is ‘ill-formed.’”⁷ The way Chatman proceeds here is through a standard method of argument in narrative theory: argument by contradiction, or reductio ad absurdum. Assume something to be the case, and then claim that this would lead to an unsuccessful narrative. And yet we note that, in order to classify the narrative as unsuccessful, Chatman has to imagine readers—“we” competent readers—“objecting” to it. The problem with this approach is one that I imagine many of Chatman’s actual readers faced, if they paused over this: allowing he had a point, working through a few possible counterexamples, and ultimately concluding, “I’d have to read it and see.” It is quite difficult to judge a narrative ill-formed, in other words, absent the intuition that only comes with the experience of reading it.

Novel theory generally tries to explain away its reliance on intuition and experience by reference to an underlying constraint based in a theoretical metalanguage. Thus, for example, Barthes will claim, in S/Z, that the narrative is propelled onward “by the discourse’s instinct for preservation.”8 Barthes is here referring to a point in the Balzac story “Sarrasine,” when the protagonist receives a mysterious warning, instructing him not to visit the castrato Zambinella. He chooses to disregard this warning, and the story continues. But, as Barthes tells us, there really never was a choice. For if Sarrasine does not make the right decision, “there would be no story.” Again, “I’d have to read it and see,” but it seems that there could very well be a story; this moment could produce something no more significant than a suspenseful delay. Counterfactual, to be sure, but what I have been suggesting is that discussions of narrative consistently turn to the counterfactual and then suggest that this course could not have been taken. Yet whatever their choice of metalanguage may be—Marxism, linguistics, psychoanalysis, history—narrative theorists do not actually mean that an underlying structure made a certain outcome necessary. What they mean is that, had another outcome come about, it would have somehow felt wrong.

My intention here is not to say whether these critics are right or wrong about the specific plot points that they analyze. Rather, what I wish to point out is that, for all their differences in theoretical approach, each implicitly assumes that given a traditional (realist, old-fashioned, readerly) narrative and a competent reader, that reader will feel that the narrative exerts some sort of compulsion, which necessitates that something “must” happen, or which “constrains” the direction of the story to one goal. But at the same time, they all are forced to allow that this compulsion, this felt necessity, only exists as a feeling that readers will intuit. What “should” happen in novel narrative, in other words, becomes a question of what feels right.

The idea persists in the language used—Lukács’s sight metaphor, Barthes’s reference to constraint—that there is something essentially physical in this feeling. Perhaps the most familiar physicalization of the experience of reading, in the twentieth century, is Peter Brooks’s drive-based description of the experience as “narrative desire”: the “desire that carries us forward, onward, through the text.”⁹ The idea of being somehow carried, though, stretches back to the nineteenth century. Thackeray, as we have seen, describes Dickens’s “power” in similar terms of compulsion: the “reader at once becomes his captive, and must follow him.”10 Desire offers one way of describing an experience that seems almost physical; Thackeray takes the more direct approach of suggesting that the writer has simply taken the reader in hand.

Indeed, nineteenth-century England probably offered the most serious attempts to describe the seemingly physical nature of narrative experience. Nicholas Dames argues that “physiology was the metalanguage of nineteenth-century novel theory, as perhaps linguistics is of twentieth-century novel theory.”¹¹ The philosopher and physiologist Alexander Bain, to take one example, offers the classification of the “mental attitude under a gradually approaching end, a condition of suspense” as either “Pursuit” or “Plot-interest.”¹² As the first term suggests, Bain understands this to encompass all sorts of movements toward a desired goal, in animals as well as humans. As the second term suggests, though, the engagement with narrative is the example par excellence of this sensation. After a discussion of the various physical and mental effects of this phenomenon, Bain offers the following: “the composer of fiction and romance studies how to work up the interest to the highest pitch. The entire narration in an epic poem, or romance, is conceived to an agreeable end, which is suspended by intermediate actions, and thrown into pleasing uncertainty” (273). The fact that Bain feels comfortable using the engagement with narrative to encapsulate a wide array of physical phenomena with only a minimum of explanation suggests that there was some contemporary agreement on the idea that narrative mechanics such as suspense and delay could have a physical effect on a novel’s readers.

The idea of the nonrational draw of narrative thus has a long—and, I think, familiar—connection with the reading experience. Yet this experience, call it what you will, has rarely received much consideration in the twentieth century as more than a guilty or, at best, empty pleasure. While novels’ formal techniques could produce the sensation of being led or compelled, and make their readers intuit some sort of necessity, this was just the spoonful of sugar that made the more important work of the novel—intersubjective character studies, and examinations of relations with other intelligences—go down.

For, come the twentieth century, it was this relation to the lives of others that would be the central ethical lens through which the novel would be viewed. As Dorothy Hale has convincingly shown, post-Jamesian theories of the novel, despite their varied differences, largely agree that “the novel’s primary ideological work [is] the promotion of sympathy.”¹³ Such theories are “committed to a moral belief in the intrinsic good of alterity—that humans are most fulfilled when they come to know sympathetically persons who are substantially different from themselves” (8). Novel reading, then, becomes an ethical act insofar as it becomes about the reader’s relation with another person. Or, to be more precise, it becomes an ethical act when it induces the reader to respond to trope and convention in a way that resembles—and hopefully educates the reader in preparation for—encountering flesh-and-blood humans. In fact, some have gone so far as to suggest that this “ideological work” is not only the ethical dimension of novels but the novelistic domain of ethics. Martha Nussbaum, for example, argues that “the narrative styles of writers such as James and Proust” are at least as well suited as, if not better suited than, “abstract philosophical style” for exposing the reader to “the truths about human life.”14 Richard Rorty, meanwhile, goes even further, stating that narrative expression, especially that offered by novels, is the superior vehicle for expressing these truths:

This process of coming to see other human beings as “one of us” rather than as “them” … is a task not for theory but for genres such as ethnography, the journalist’s report, the comic book, the docudrama, and, especially, the novel. Fiction like that of Dickens, Olive Schreiner, and Richard Wright gives us details about kinds of suffering being endured by people to whom we had not previously attended.¹⁵

For Rorty, the central ethical categories of novel narrative are “us” and “them”: our relation to others beside ourselves. Though not quite as explicit, Nussbaum suggests as much as well, by her reference to “human life”—presumably, exposure to lives other than our own offer us the potential for improvement. The ethical dimension of narrative methods, and particularly novel narrative methods, is at its base a social one.

Though Rorty lists a number of different genres, he accords pride of place (“especially”) to the novel. This fits in well with the tradition that Hale describes. This “ideological work” is specific to the novel, according to the theorists that Hale discusses, because its effect derives from certain generic formal elements. Hale refers to this theoretical tradition, at once formal and concerned with our relation to others, as “social formalism.” So for James and Lubbock, the key formal category becomes “point of view”: a formal strategy that allows readers insight into human relations that they might not otherwise be able to obtain. For Bakhtin, it becomes the carnival and the dialogical: a formal strategy that allows characters and social classes to speak in their own voices, freed from the monological control of the author’s own voice and identity.¹⁶ As this latter example shows, the novel’s moral work need not be strictly confined to sympathy after the fashion of Adam Smith. That is, it need not be only “our fellow-feeling with any passion” felt by another.¹⁷ We can go even further and suggest that theoretical work that specifically refutes the value of intersubjective sympathy, as in the application of Emmanuel Levinas to novel criticism, still continues in this “social formalist” tradition.18 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in an essay dealing with J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, focuses on the “inability” of David Lurie, the novel’s main character, to “‘read’ [his daughter] Lucy as patient and agent” after she has been brutally raped.¹⁹ She sees this as part of the novel’s Levinasian approach to Lucy (21–22n). Yet even so, this refusal to allow for sympathetic identification ends up being a central technique of “[l]iterary reading [that] teaches us to learn from the singular and unverifiable”—in fact, she even goes so far as to say that if the neo-conservative Paul Wolfowitz, the architect of the wars in the Middle East that have spanned most of the last fifteen years, “had had serious training in literary reading and/or the imagining of the enemy as human, his position on Iraq would not be so inflexible” (23). The very formal techniques that work against sympathy in the novel, Spivak claims, would encourage a practice of reading, “literary reading,” with the possibility of a deeply significant social impact. From the promotion of sympathy to its refutation, then, we can say that novel theory has been linked by a belief that the novel form’s methods of encountering other intelligences—their thoughts, language, experience—are what makes the reading experience ethical.

What we should notice here is that these formal techniques are essentially different from the sort used to produce “narrative desire” or “plot interest.” In social-formalist approaches to the novel, the key moments usually involve the sight of other people, represented in an essentially synchronic fashion. This has its roots, I believe, in the visual metaphors that surround the idea of sympathy. Smith founds his theory of moral sentiments on the figure of the “impartial spectator,” who is able to imagine the experience of someone else—say, someone in pain. The encounter here is not one of empathy; the spectator does not actually experience the sufferer’s pain as well. Instead, upon viewing it, “the spectator represents to himself the sentiments and sensations of the sufferer through a deliberate act of the imagination.”²⁰ I am passing over a number of the fine points of Smith’s theory here, because I want to stress the following: the interaction between the spectator and the sufferer in this case takes the form of a static representation. Traditionally, this form of representation has been taken to be visual. Audrey Jaffe, for example, stresses the importance of the visual sense for a Victorian novel-reading public: “sympathy in Victorian fiction takes shape in, and as, a series of visualized narratives.”²¹ Now, certainly, this “series” occurs over time, but the series that Jaffe describes is less the experience of moving through time, and more a comparable series of visual encounters. In other words, it is more a multiplicity of synchronic moments than any sense of the diachronic. Rae Greiner objects to this “questionable practice of characterizing Smithian sympathy as a predominantly visual affair,” pointing to the importance of “imaginative reflection” in Smith’s philosophy.22 Greiner does so, though, in the service of a relation to other intelligences—chief among them what she calls “fellow-feeling”—that firmly places literary realism in the social-formalist tradition.

In the experience of narrative, though, the social engagement that gives social formalism its moral charge is largely absent. This is clearly true in the psycho-physiological cases of Brooks and Bain. And I would argue that it is present as well in Thackeray’s metaphor of “following” the author’s lead; there is no sign that he is particularly interested in what we might call the narrator’s “point of view.” Instead, his point is that the narrator makes us want to see what happens next. Our relation, therefore, is not with the narrator himself but rather with the compulsion to move through a sequence of events. The figure who leads is not so much a personified narrator as it is the compelling force, the personification of Brooks’s psychic drives or Bain’s animal instincts. The point is that this sort of experience of narrative necessity, instead of having something to say about our relations with other intelligences, is largely understood as an internal experience.

THE INTERNAL PRINCIPLE

In 1832—five years after Pelham, five years before Pickwick, during the period that with the benefit of hindsight we can designate as the dawning of the Victorian novel—the Reverend Adam Sedgwick delivered a sermon attacking the moral education at Cambridge.²³ A Discourse on the Studies of the University, as it was titled when published, was largely a critique of utilitarianism. This is not surprising; it fits nicely with the novelistic tradition which was then coming into being, a tradition that would, in its major works, return repeatedly to a pointed and explicit denunciation of the principle of utility. In the early 1830s, though, utilitarianism was less associated with Bentham or the Mills and more with the religious system of William Paley, whose Moral and Political Philosophy was the textbook of moral philosophy at Cambridge. And what concerned Sedgwick in Paley’s work was not those points we now associate with an opposition to utilitarianism: dangers of egoism, irreducible dignity of the individual, artistic creativity. Rather, Sedgwick criticized Paley for his denial of “the sanction and authority of the moral sense.”²⁴ As Sedgwick put it: “to reject the moral sense is to destroy the foundation of all moral philosophy.” The public reaction to the Discourse, both positive and negative, was strong. The Times of London praised its “great and varied excellence”;²⁵ John Stuart Mill, on the other hand, quickly penned a scathing review: “We shall show that Mr. Sedgwick has no right to represent Paley as a type of the theory of utility; that he has failed in refuting even Paley; and that the tone of high moral reprobation which he has assumed toward all who adopt that theory is altogether unmerited on their part, and on his, from his extreme ignorance of the subject, peculiarly unbecoming.”26 He still had harsh words for Sedgwick in his autobiography, decades later.²⁷ Whether positive or negative, Sedgwick’s message, it seems, had found resonance.

But what is this “moral sense” that Sedgwick is so anxious to defend? The term seems a naive one in the context of the rational utilitarianism identified with the period. In fact, when discussed today, the moral sense is most often associated with eighteenth-century philosophy, and the work of Francis Hutcheson in particular. A theory of the moral sense claims, in rough outline, that there are certain impressions that correspond to moral ideas. Such impressions are not compounded out of simpler impressions; to feel that something is “good” is not just another way of saying that we feel approbation, pleasure, or sympathy at the sight of it. Instead, we possess a faculty that allows us to perceive, or sense, the ethical quality of an action or a state of affairs, just as we can perceive the color of an object. Such moral sense theory was often also called “intuitionism,” with the slightly different connotation we have already seen the term to possess. The idea that humans possess such an a priori faculty stood in direct opposition to the causation-based principles of utility put forward, most importantly, by Bentham and Mill.

If such an instinctive approach to ethics now seems rather naive, this is due in no small part to the eventual triumph of utilitarianism in academic circles. What opposition there may have been to the philosophy of Bentham and Mill now seems to be located in writers viewed as less strictly philosophical, such as Carlyle and Ruskin. In what follows, however, I will attempt to sketch out the development of the antagonistic relationship between ideas of the moral sense and utilitarianism. My claim will be that the academic debate between these two schools of thought is actually indicative of a deep-seated cultural uneasiness about the possibility of a connection between an individual’s internal intuition and the external social world. The philosophical debate can thus offer us a clearer picture of what the specific stakes were in placing oneself in opposition to utilitarianism. Positions that have been viewed as simply a negative response to utilitarianism, in other words, can be viewed as more subtle positive arguments in favor of a specific sort of internality.

Victorian moral philosophers inherited a tradition of internally oriented moral thought from the British philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As Stephen Darwall puts it, “British moral philosophy of [that] period saw the development of some of the first internalist theories of moral obligation and practical normativity in the history of ethics.”²⁸ Some of the most influential intellectual descendants of these internalist thinkers, in the period from the 1830s to the 1880s—from the time of William Whewell to that of Henry Sidgwick—claimed, with some variation, that the rightness or wrongness of a given action or state of affairs could be located in a sensible or psychological faculty, with little or no reference to questions of advantage or consequence. And while intuitionists and utilitarians agreed on little, they did agree on the deeply drawn lines in ethical thought between moral sense theory and utilitarianism—or, as they were alternatively known, “intuitionism” and “inductivism.”29 William Whewell, in an 1854 lecture on the history of English moral philosophy, claims,

Schemes of morality … are of two kinds:—those which assert it to be the law of human action to aim at some external object …, as for example, those which in ancient or modern times have asserted Pleasure, or Utility, or the Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number, to be the true end of human action; and those which would relate human action by an internal principle or relation, as Conscience, or a Moral Faculty.³⁰

Whewell’s focus is on the aim, or object, of different moral systems. In their modern forms, these different systems are classified by their dependence on “Utility, or the Greatest Happiness …” on one side and a “Moral Faculty” on the other. This division of moral theories into those based on utility and those based on an internal faculty becomes a commonplace among Victorian moral thinkers. H. L. Mansel reiterates it in an 1854 lecture: “The various principles which have been at different times advocated as forming the foundation of Moral Philosophy, may ultimately be reduced to two.”³¹ One “starts from the assumption that right and wrong are positive qualities, discernible in individual acts by a peculiar faculty of the intuitive consciousness”; the other only believes in such qualities “as they finally lead to a greater amount of happiness or misery … to the individual committing them.” W.E.H. Lecky opens his History of European Morals with a reference to “the great controversy, springing from the rival claims of intuition and utility to be regarded as the supreme regulator of moral distinctions.”³² This “great controversy” was no less clear to foreign explicators; in his Morale anglaise contemporaine, Jean-Marie Guyau refers to “l’opposition de la «morale inductive» et de la «moral intuitive», sur laquelle insiste si souvent l’école anglaise contemporaine.”³³ There was, it seems, no single dominant Victorian moral outlook so much as a single dominant division in moral thought.

Given the seeming starkness of this opposition, though, it can be startling to turn back to the eighteenth-century roots of moral sense philosophy, where utility seems to reside rather comfortably. Though the term “moral sense” had been used earlier by Shaftesbury, it is in the works of Francis Hutcheson that we find the first attempt at a systematization of the concept. In his Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, he defines the term as “that Determination to be pleas’d with the Contemplation of those Affections, Actions, or Characters of rational Agents, which we call virtuous.”34 Such a “determination,” though, meets with some difficulty when an agent is forced to choose between a number of possibly virtuous actions. To address this, Hutcheson offers a formulation that now seems quite familiar: “that Action is best, which procures the greatest Happiness for the greatest Numbers; and that, worst, which, in like manner, occasions Misery” (125). This is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, instances of the principle of utility in its Benthamite form.³⁵

How, then, in the space of little more than a century, does the moral sense go from accommodating utilitarianism to opposing it? The difference, it turns out, lies in the priority that utility assumes in the ethical formula. Hutcheson’s use of the principle of utility comes only when questioning which of two possible actions one should take. The greatest happiness, therefore, is not the source for every moral decision but rather the means for deciding between two already morally valid decisions. Even more important, perhaps, is Hutcheson’s reason for invoking the principle of utility in the first place: “we are led by our moral Sense of Virtue to judge thus” (125). Utility is not the ultimate sanction of moral actions; rather, it is our moral sense that sanctions the application of utility. Furthermore, the happiness that this utility produces is, for Hutcheson, of a very specific sort. For the moral sense is founded in “a benevolent universal Instinct,” and “a little Reflection will discover … that this Benevolence is our greatest Happiness” (133–34). The sort of principle of utility that Hutcheson puts forward, then, extends our internal moral sense, almost by analogy, to the external world. That which feels right to us—in the sense of moral feeling—will feel right to others, in the sense of happiness. Unlike later utilitarianism, this connection is not something that the individual agent has to learn. Nor, conversely, does the outer world have to somehow accommodate itself to the individual’s correct intuitions. Rather, the feelings of the inner and outer world seem to share a basic relation with one another. This connection of moral sense and utility can in fact be read as a gloss on Locke’s highly ambiguous statement that “Good and Evil … are nothing but Pleasure or Pain, or that which Occasions or procures Pleasure and Pain to us.”³⁶ Here moral quantities seem at once to be discoverable, in good empiricist fashion, only in our own sensations, while at the same time they are seen as those things which bring about those sensations. In other words, that which is indistinguishable from a sensation—we should note that Locke uses the existential verb “are”—will also be that which “occasions” that sensation. This seems to be at the base of Hutcheson’s use of the principle of utility. That which we can find in our own sensations will bring about the same sensations in others.

It was in severing this analogy that the two schools of thought become separated in the nineteenth century. Whewell, as we have seen, bases morality on an “internal principle or relation.” Though an “internal principle” had certainly been present in the previous century, there is now also a “relation” that is, in Whewell’s terms, “independent” of any external end. There is no longer a reason to believe, in other words, that moral intuition will bear any relation to the world of others. Mansel goes so far as to classify even sympathy as ultimately based in an external calculation: “There is the theory of Sympathy, as maintained by Adam Smith, who tells us that we are so constituted as to feel pleasure or pain at an act which gives pleasure or pain to others … a theory which … is yet, in principle, identical with the ultimate form of the Utilitarian theory” (366). Thus even a theory of moral sentiments which relies on the relation of one’s own feelings with the feelings of others is placed in opposition to the independent faculty of the moral sense. The issue here is using an external measuring stick as the mark of the good. As Whewell puts it, “Since we are … led directly to moral Rules, by the consideration of the internal conditions of man’s being, we cannot think it wise to turn away from this method, and to try to determine such Rules by reference to an obscure and unmanageable external condition.”37 Mansel offers a similar opinion, claiming that the focus of the moral philosopher should be “the facts and laws of the soul within him.” Such an approach is only possible through “psychological inquiry,” which offers us a wholly internal subject for analysis: “Moral Science is possible, if an internal sense, call it by what name you please, presents us with the facts of moral approbation and disapprobation of this and that action in itself and for its own sake: and it is possible in no other way.”³⁸

And yet, in spite of all that, it would be overly simplistic to classify utilitarianism as strictly outward-facing, and intuitionism as strictly internal. Certainly they find the deciding voice of moral action in different places—utilitarianism in external effects, intuitionism in internal sense—but when we look at the sort of community they presuppose, the places are oddly reversed. Schneewind makes the point that “Utilitarianism presents a morality which is primarily impersonal, appropriate to the life of the large society or city and to the relation between strangers, while Intuitionism speaks more clearly for a personal morality, drawn from the life of the small group or the family, from the relations between old acquaintances or close friends.”³⁹ Utilitarianism, then, offers an ethical solution in plural situations, in which people might be bringing different values or beliefs—or where their beliefs remain unknown. Intuitionism, on the other hand, functions best in situations in which people have a set of shared values or conventions. So while intuition is asserted, insistently, in the nineteenth century to be an internal faculty, it is one that, at the same time, seems dependent on a tacit sense of community.

CASE STUDIES: MARY BARTON AND HARD TIMES

My account thus far of this debate, while focusing on philosophy, is reflective of larger issues particular to a developing nineteenth-century episteme.40 That is, it offers terms, in the language of philosophy, to describe the opposition we can see in other discursive forms. In what follows, I will offer a couple of short readings that illustrate how the intuitionist position—what I have suggested is also an “internalist” position—provided the grounds for an alternative to utilitarianism. In particular, what I want to suggest here is that the experience of diachronic narrative becomes the method the novels use for realizing this particular ethical opposition.

Victorian novelists concerned with the condition of England, from Disraeli to Eliot, frequently included more or less overt critiques of utilitarianism within their works.⁴¹ I would like to start by looking at two works that put this issue front and center: Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 Mary Barton and Charles Dickens’s 1854 Hard Times. Both novels are examples of what we have come to call the “industrial novel,” or the “social problem novel”: a set of novels that focus on the condition of the working class. There is a strongly felt, if sometimes vague, ethical message in these novels’ focus on the human misery inherent in capitalism: a general sense that it is necessary to treat other humans by some other standard than the bottom line. While the political message of industrial novels can range, as Ruth Bernard Yeazell puts it, “over a broad spectrum of Victorian belief,” there tends to be greater consensus on the importance of protecting the ethical realm from the economic realm.⁴² These novels are invested in distinguishing ethical relations from the ends-oriented teleological thought of laissez-faire political economy. In Mary Barton, Gaskell frequently measures her criticism, but she still has the saintlike Job Legh gently set human duty in opposition to the “higher good” of progress: “I have lived long enough, too, to see that it is part of His plan to send suffering to bring out a higher good; but surely it’s also part of His plan that as much of the burden of the suffering as can be, should be lightened by those whom it is His pleasure to make happy.”⁴³ Dickens, in Hard Times, is a good deal blunter and more explicit. Sissy Jupe is asked in school to remark on the proposition that “this schoolroom is an immense town, and in it there are a million of inhabitants, and only five-and-twenty are starved to death in the streets, in the course of the year.” Her answer, that “it would be just as hard upon those who were starved, whether the others were a million, or a million million” is “of course” wrong, in terms of the greatest-happiness principle taught in the Benthamite Coketown schools.⁴⁴ Readers with competence in sarcasm, though, will know that Sissy is, of course, right. When Dickens sums up utilitarian political economy with “the Good Samaritan was a Bad Economist” (207), it is clear enough that it is better to be on the good side of the equation than the bad.

Now, it might seem like choosing these two novels at the outset is stacking the deck a bit. After all, who needs to turn to novel form when the content states the case so clearly? Yet the opinion that has long attached to both novels is that this content, clear though it might be, leaves something to be desired; Gaskell and Dickens, by this account, do not go far enough in imagining an alternative to the social ills they represent. Here the classic reading comes from Raymond Williams. Williams starts his discussion of Mary Barton by pointing out that, according to Gaskell, the title character was originally not going to be Mary but rather her father, John Barton: “Round the character of John Barton all the others formed themselves; he was my hero; the person with whom all my sympathies went.”45 This observation has become an essential part of the novel’s twentieth-century reception history, due to Williams’s short but influential reading. For Williams, John Barton is the site of the novel’s most compelling social imagination; looking at the novel in terms of Mary leaves us only with a “Victorian novel of sentiment, … of little lasting interest.”⁴⁶ Williams’s reading thus presents the novel as a missed opportunity: a failure of nerve that ends up shying away from political difficulties in favor of a conventional romance plot. Hard Times, meanwhile, seems to Williams little more than a blunt, but effective, parody of utilitarianism. In this reading, Dickens’s critique “is really negative”: “There are no social alternatives to Bounderby and Gradgrind.”⁴⁷ The attitudes in Hard Times, Williams concludes, “cancel each other out”: Dickens “will use almost any reaction in order to undermine any normal representative position.” In both cases, then, there is a sense that an original opposition to exploitative material conditions stops short of actually imagining—much less representing—a solution to those problems.

My larger argument, though, is that a good part of the ethical interpretation of novels in the nineteenth century did not derive strictly from explicit representation or exhortation but also from the experience of their narrative form. The polemical thrust of these novels lies not only in what they say, in other words, but also in how they feel. To a certain extent, this sounds like the work that sentiment has long done in literary representations of abjection: tugging on the heartstrings to produce feeling, instead of putting forward arguments. Here, though, it’s worth stressing a point I made earlier: the experience of narrative is not the same as the experience of literary sympathy. Rather than responding to an imagined projection of “If I were in their place …,” narrative experience is a process over time, a relation between what is present in the text and what is suggested or withheld. We don’t have to see characters, or even particularly identify with them, in order to experience the pull of narrative: its compulsion toward change. We should recall here Mansel’s insistence that a theory of moral sentiment—an ethics of sympathy—is ultimately utilitarian in nature, since it assumes a connection between one’s own ends and the ends of people in the outside world. In the intellectual landscape that I described in the previous section, the opposition to utilitarianism retreated from externality and representation and toward an ethics based on internal sense. Williams is right, perhaps, to characterize these novels as retreats from a representation of social conditions or their solutions. But it would be incomplete to read them simply as negations. Mary Barton and Hard Times struggle with the question of how to represent a solution precisely because they come to characterize external representation itself as a problem. Now, this might seem like a fairly serious problem for a realist novel. As we have seen, though, synchronic description is only one axis of the novelistic representation; there is also the internally felt experience of diachronic narrative. So, as we will see, these novels move away from moral sentiment. Indeed, they are both rather suspicious of sentiment altogether, insofar as it takes the form of static representation. But this doesn’t mean that the novels turn away from an ethical project altogether. Instead, it means that the debate is shifted toward the internal.

Mary Barton offers a striking illustration of this shift away from sympathy to a more internally founded ethics. When John Barton is called to the side of a dying woman, the novel confronts us with a scene of abjection, clearly structured around provoking a sentimental response: “She sat up and looked round; and recollecting all, fell down again weak and passive despair. Her little child crawled to her, and wiped with its fingers the thick-coming tears which she now had strength to weep.”48 Yet for all the evocative power of this tableau—and it is considerable—the novel interrupts it with a scene that seems to complicate John’s experience. Sent to the druggist for medicine, John is struck by the contrast between the death he has been witnessing in the cellar, and the well-fed middle-class obliviousness at street level:

He thought they all looked joyous, and he was angry with them. But he could not, you cannot, read the lot of those who daily pass you by in the street. How do you know the wild romances of their lives; the trials, the temptations they are even now enduring, resisting, sinking under? You may be elbowed one instant by the girl desperate in her abandonment, laughing in mad merriment with her outward gesture, while her soul is longing for the rest of the dead, and bringing itself to think of the cold-flowing river as the only mercy of God remaining to her here. You may pass the criminal, meditating crimes at which you will to-morrow shudder with horror as you read them. You may push against one, humble and unnoticed, the last upon earth, who in Heaven will for ever be in the immediate light of God’s countenance. Barton’s was an errand of mercy; but the thoughts of his heart were touched by sin, by bitter hatred of the happy, whom he, for the time, confounded with the selfish. (63)

The passage highlights the failure of representation: we cannot know the internal experience of others from their outward appearance. The way that the passage wraps up, foreshadowing the murder of Harry Carson, can leave the final impression that the entire passage is an indictment of John: with his heart “touched by sin,” he is unable to do anything but project his “bitter hatred of the happy.” But though the passage starts and ends with a description of John, the majority of the passage is taken up with a description of “you.” This is a familiar move in Mary Barton: Gaskell’s narrator frequently brings the reader into the narrative, either with the second-person singular (“you”) or the first-person plural (“we”). These are not just terms to refer to the general case (“you” meaning “one”) since, as Robyn Warhol points out, Gaskell “frequently refers very openly to information she has previously related that the reader might have forgotten.”49 The novel’s “you,” in other words, often refers to its implied middle-class reader. And since Gaskell is not implying—I should hope—that her reader is “bitter” and “touched by sin,” the limitation of sympathy is one that extends beyond either the personal failings of John or the collective failings of his class. Rather it is a limitation that affects the reader just as much in the present-tense act of reading: “he could not, you cannot, read …” John is misled, just as we readers are frequently misled, by a sentimental belief in the knowledge of others that can be gained from representations.

If we react to the people around us then—or to figures depicted in a novel—we are apt to be misled. But what else can we react to? In Mary Barton, the answer seems to be that we react more properly, and more meaningfully, to things and people that are not present. This is certainly something implicit in the novel’s reception history, which, since Williams, has seemed to stress what the novel is not about. One of the first things any student studying the novel will learn is that it is a novel that should have been about John Barton but is not. By this reading, the social problem novel comes about by removing the “social”—public, political, male—figure, and leaving a conventional romance-novel romance that sketches his outlines. What is striking about this reading, and a large part of the reason why it seems to stick around despite so many critics pushing back on it, is that it points not just to the novel’s history of composition but also to the mechanics of its plot. Most of the action happens offstage: the narrator does not describe Harry Carson’s murder, and John Barton and Jem Wilson, the two characters Mary has the greatest emotional investment in, are absent for a large part of the novel. The character of Esther, Mary’s fallen aunt, remains what Carolyn Lesjak has called an “absent presence” in the novel, who is at the same time largely responsible for the progress of the plot: “So insinuating is her influence that, in the end, Esther is directly or indirectly linked to every major event in the novel.”⁵⁰ We don’t need Gaskell’s revelation of the novel’s early form in order to sense that the novel is sketching the space around its absent figures. The plot of the novel is consistently structured around reactions to figures that are not present.

And here we can start to see the alternative to the sorts of sympathy that the novel presents as impossible. Mary spends a good deal of the novel isolated from the characters she feels the most strongly about, and yet this does not seem to inhibit the development of her feelings: in fact, she seems to be able to feel more truly and dependably when others are absent. To the extent that the novel displaces the political onto the romantic, it does so through the transfer of Mary’s affections from the rich Harry Carson to the working-class Jem. Yet such a shift can hardly be said to be brought about through any sort of gradual narrative development. Mary is attracted to Carson; Jem proposes to her; Mary rejects him, spurred on in no small part by a desire to contradict her father: “one thing she was sure of; nothing he could say should make her have him. She would show them all who would be glad to have her” (129). And yet, as soon as Jem is out of her sight, she realizes that she loves him: “Her plan had been, as we well know, to marry Mr. Carson, and [rejecting Jem’s proposal] was only a preliminary step. True; but it had unveiled her heart to her; it had convinced her she loved Jem above all persons or things” (131). It is hard to say whether or not this is unrealistic, exactly—the world is wide, after all, and love is strange—but it is certainly abrupt, and finds little preparation in what comes before it in the novel. It is not Jem’s absence that is surprising here. We are prepared, in the nineteenth-century novel, for love to ripen in absence: think of Elizabeth Bennet alone in the portrait gallery at Pemberley. But we know why Elizabeth falls for Darcy (embarrassment over her misjudgment of Wickham, gratitude for the discreet assistance rendered to her family, admiration of his skill as landlord and employer); the reasons had been accumulating, and she has only now become aware of them. In Jem’s case, no such reasons are represented. Mary seems to love him mainly by virtue of his absence.

This does not make for much of a romance, but then I imagine most readers understand that Mary’s internal feelings are supposed to map onto a set of social concerns. Jem is the right person to love, in both moral and social terms. The novel encourages us to elide the emotional probability of Mary’s change of heart altogether and implicitly switch tracks over to the social plot. Such a reading is supported by the fact that the relationship between Mary and Jem shares its signifiers with the more political story surrounding John Barton. Jem is accused of Harry Carson’s murder—the murder that John committed—and it is only at the trial, testifying on his behalf, that Mary publicly states her love for him.51 Far from being merely a private affair, then, Mary’s preference for Jem—a love that seems a lot more like a moral choice—becomes a matter of public record. This is all to say that the novel does eventually put its vague moral argument into a politically meaningful form, but it only does so by refracting it through Mary’s internal feelings. And it is when they are in this internal form that they produce the novel’s most strongly felt compulsion: Mary’s drive to appear at the trial. This compulsion—which is tied to the guilty knowledge that her father is a murderer—increasingly isolates her from the social world around her: “she’s gone out of her wits!” says one observer (286). Social conscience takes the form of a sort of non-amorous love: a sort of desire for resolution. And this, in turn, produces a deeply internal drive.

It is important that Mary is responding here to a false accusation. Tzvetan Todorov, among other formalists, has pointed to this situation as one of the elements of an uncompleted narrative; a satisfying conclusion will generally require this accusation to be dismissed.52 Todorov, following Viktor Shklovsky, offers this convention in a discussion of narrative techniques that draws from linguistics. The false accusation is, for Todorov, productive of the draw toward a complete narrative sentence. The reader, in other words, desires a correct syntactic resolution. But, of course, the implications of a false accusation are not just formal but ethical—to an extent that makes it quite difficult to disentangle the two. The feeling that something ought to happen is intuitive enough that Todorov would see it as the native speaker’s tendency toward the well-formed (narrative) sentence. The compulsion has its root in the formal, in other words, but because of the ethical overtones, the interpretation of the affect that this technique produces is ethical. The reference to narrative syntax offers Todorov a way of describing the sense that the parole of Gaskell’s narrative is controlled by some sort of underlying langue that determines what ought to happen next in the narrative sentence. But, since this langue is not present, what Todorov is saying is that narratives with a false accusation make it feel like some unconscious rule set is dictating what ought to come next. Just as Mary is compelled to go to Liverpool by an internal drive, the reader too feels the formal compulsion of the novel.

My point here is not to say that Mary’s internally motivated love for Jem produces a useful alternative to politics. But Gaskell does seem to be committed to contrasting Mary’s private and deeply felt drive—one that does not even need much in the way of an object—with the sort of false understandings of others that doom her father. John’s corrupted sentimentalism gets it wrong, in other words, and Mary’s romantic love-without-object gets it right. In the novel’s conclusion, the reliably right-minded Job Legh discusses with Harry Carson’s grieving father what is to be done. He repeatedly stresses that incommunicable feelings are a better guide to ethical action than a frank assessment of external social conditions:

“Still, facts have proved, and are daily proving, how much better it is for every man to be independent of help, and self-reliant,” said Mr. Carson thoughtfully.

[Job replies,] “You can never work facts as you would fixed quantities, and say, given two facts, that the product is so and so. God has given men feelings and passions which cannot be worked into the problem. …

…

“What you say is very true, no doubt,” replied Mr. Carson; “but how would you bring it to bear upon the masters’ conduct,—on my particular case?” added he, gravely.

“I’m not learned enough to argue. Thoughts come into my head that I’m sure are as true as Gospel, though may be they don’t follow each other like the Q.E.D. of a Proposition. … It’s no business of mine, thank God. John Barton took the question in hand. … Then he grew bitter, and angry, and mad; and in his madness he did a great sin, and wrought a great woe.” (385–86)

Job, then, provides the language for the opposition that we’ve seen between John and Mary: facts in opposition to feelings, propositional reason in opposition to incommunicable truth. But since the nature of incommunicable truth is that you cannot communicate it, Job has to preface his conclusion with a refusal to answer Mr. Carson’s question directly. We are therefore left with an ethical solution that evades representation—not just because it is difficult to represent but because external representation would work against its more internal basis. We can take Job’s rectitude on faith, perhaps, but we are not going to get any sort of definite proposition that we can share in. What we can share in, though, is the formal desire to see a false accusation removed: a formal desire that the novel uses to represent an internal state that is at once an emotion and a moral position. The experience of diachronic narrative, then, becomes the means by which the novel represents Mary’s moral experience.

Turning to Hard Times, we see this opposition between fact and feeling taken to an extreme. Sissy Jupe is a character of “fancy” as opposed to “fact,” and her “idle imagination” is presented as equivalent to an “idle story-book” (25). Similar to Mary, though, Sissy finds in her capacity for imagination and stories the ground for a moral faculty. Such a faculty becomes evident when Stephen Blackpool is falsely accused of theft. Sissy then joins Rachael in believing Stephen’s innocence, against all inductive evidence to the contrary. This is certainly not due to any traditional sympathy for Stephen. Just like Jem—and John Barton and Esther, for that matter—Stephen is kept out of sight at the very moment when he is most motivating the narrative. (In the next chapter, we will see a similar fundamental moment of motivating intuition in Oliver Twist: Brownlow’s vague recognition of Oliver, which only occurs after Oliver has been taken out of his sight.) Sissy’s strength, in other words, is not just that she represents literature and the imagination but that these qualities lead her, later in life, to intuit correctly about moral matters. This link between stories and moral judgment echoes the point from Hutcheson’s Inquiry (offered as an epigram to the current volume): “The Universality of this moral Sense, and that it is antecedent to Instruction, may appear from observing the Sentiments of Children, upon hearing the Storys with which they are commonly entertain’d as soon as they understand Language.”53 Children, Hutcheson claims, will naturally support the virtuous characters in stories. Sissy does so in Stephen’s case as well. This offers an example of the sort of wisdom that Thomas Gradgrind refers to as a “wisdom of the Heart,” in contrast to a “wisdom of the Head.” Such wisdom of the heart, according to Gradgrind, is the “instinct” that he has lacked, or ignored, due to his utilitarian doctrine (217–18).

A character’s position on Stephen’s guilt or innocence becomes a moral measuring-stick of sorts in Hard Times. James Harthouse quickly comes to the conclusion that Stephen is guilty based on the evidence at hand; as he says to Louisa, “you saw and heard the case. … I only say what is reasonable, nothing worse” (198). This same character plainly admits later in the novel, “I am not a moral sort of fellow … and I never make any pretensions to the character of a moral sort of fellow. I am as immoral as need be” (226). This does not mean that he is immoral as a direct result of his belief in Stephen’s guilt. Instead, the suggestion is that an immoral character specifically lacks the “instinct” to which Gradgrind refers, which would allow him to ignore external evidence. Louisa’s redemption, on the other hand, is indicated by her statement, “I have once believed [in Stephen’s guilt]. … I do not believe it now” (246).

This instinctive reaction, once again, comes as a product of neither sympathy nor sentiment. Hard Times is certainly sentimental enough, and its presentation of Stephen’s hardships seems designed to make its readers sympathize with the hardships of the working class. But none of the characters who instinctively believe in his innocence do so because they identify with him or feel sorry for him. Some, such as Louisa, do in fact feel sorry for him, but this is not the source of their belief. Notably, the only character who bases his judgment on an imagined projection of “If I were in his place …” is Harthouse, who draws the wrong conclusion. It is precisely the character most willing to assume a consistency between his own feelings and those of others—“Fellows who go in for Banks must take the consequences. If there were no consequences, we should all go in for Banks” (180)—who is farthest from feeling correctly. The fact that Stephen is entirely absent during the part of the novel that I am discussing emphasizes the point; the instinctive belief in Stephen’s innocence is based internally and has little to do with Stephen himself.

This emphasis on internality that I have been discussing, though, now leads us to a representational question. Just how internal can this instinct be if it is only presented externally? Dickens shows his prized characters making internal judgments with little regard for inductive evidence, but the only way that their intuitions can actually be shown to be correct is to have a conclusion that proves them to be so. In other words, the ultimate validity of the internal sense can still only be proved through the demonstration of external events. Dickens further hedges his bets here by making the reader privy to a conversation in which Tom Gradgrind tricks Stephen in order to make it seem that he robbed the bank. As a result, the characters’ intuitions will not only be eventually shown to be correct; the reader knows they are correct from the moment suspicion falls on Stephen. I have already discussed the theme of the false accusation in relation to Mary Barton. We see something similar in Hard Times, where the reader intuits a felt necessity that Stephen should be vindicated.

Hard Times, for all its focus and social engagement, is not one of Dickens’s finest productions of plot. Change occurs either abruptly or not at all. Outside of the related question of whether the young Tom Gradgrind will be found guilty of his crime, the plotline detailing Stephen’s suspicion and ultimate, albeit posthumous, acquittal is one of the few sustained examples of narrative engagement in the novel. After Louisa returns to her father’s house and Harthouse exits the scene, there is little movement of the other characters. The narrative of Stephen’s accusation, then, carries the final third of the novel—carries the novel, that is, to its conclusion. This conclusion is repeatedly delayed, as Stephen, for various reasons, is unable to return to Coketown and face the charges against him. The reader’s sense that the accusation ought to be dismissed, and desire for that dismissal to come about, grows with each delay. The reader’s sensible reaction to the novel, then, produced through Dickens’s narrative mechanics, mirrors the feelings of Rachael and Sissy. Dickens produces in the reader the intuitive moral desire—or, at least, a feeling that mimics it—that he depicts in his most valorized characters. Narrative method becomes the means by which the novel represents internal intuition. The specific objection that was raised numerous times to utilitarianism was that by basing its system on a calculable system, it denied the very existence of morals. The alternative to this that we see in the example of narrative was not only to make the case for a pre-existing morality. Rather, the alternative was to make the reader feel the internal, and sensible, existence of morality.

THE THEORETICAL ARGUMENT

My discussion of Mary Barton and Hard Times suggests the general two-part form that my readings in this book will take: first, locating the site of some sort of “poetic necessity,” the formal technique that motivates the narrative progress of the work in question; and, second, demonstrating the moral implications of that site in the novel. I should say here that my goal will not be to show that reading actually produces a moral intuition, any more than reading Clarissa or Uncle Tom’s Cabin would actually produce sympathy for another human being. In both cases, formal procedures are used to produce a readerly affect which, even though it is literally a response to tropes, is understood in ethical terms.

This claim about the relation of the formal and the ethical, though, can actually be taken a step further. It is not only the case that formal techniques of narrative compulsion may be understood in ethical terms; they can be understood more clearly, more precisely in ethical terms. In other words, ethics—and I will say a good deal more about what I mean by this term in a moment—is not just one metalanguage among others, at least not when it comes to Victorian narrative art. To be more precise, ethics is of particular use as an analytic tool whenever we are dealing with literary objects in which there is some sense of a controlling compulsion, a necessity, an “ought.” I am not claiming that all work need be interpreted in an ethical light, or even that it necessarily could be. What I am claiming, though, is that readings that produce a “naive” sense of necessity already take the step of seeing in narrative a link between what exists and what should be—between, to use Hume’s famous distinction, “is” and “ought.” This binary distinction is present in most discussions of narrative, through one set of terms or another: synchronic and diachronic, paradigmatic and syntagmatic, the descriptive and the narrative, the discursive and the teleological. To the extent that the sort of narrative that we are used to in the Victorian novel brings these terms together, narrative form seems to offer in practice, if not in theory, an answer to Hume’s question of how existence and obligation can be linked.54 Geoffrey Galt Harpham, who has written well on the subject, offers a nice formulation: narrative, according to Harpham, is “a principle of formal necessity that governs the movement towards the union of is and ought.”⁵⁵ We can say, in other words, that in Mary Barton and Hard Times, a false accusation is a state of affairs that ought to be rectified; the accusation ought to be dismissed.

I have thus far been using the term “ethics” in a highly general way, to describe the relation of “that which is” to “that which ought to be,” or “that which one ought to do.” This formulation—which is essentially the “O” operator in a deontic modal logic⁵⁶—is too abstract for our purposes, since it could include something like the table of laws in a dogmatic society. Now, we could probably consider that table of laws ethical as a determining background to some sorts of narrative forms: highly traditional, conventional tales that always follow through a set series of events. But that does not work very well to describe the experience of the Victorian novel. Whether it is or is not the “most lawless” of all forms, as Gide called it,⁵⁷ or a Bakhtinian carnival, there is certainly a sense that the form allows at least some degree of freedom.

So, to describe the Victorian novel, a rather more refined sense of ethics is necessary. In particular, it has to be one that accounts for the seeming freedom of the novel, joined together with a sense of necessity that seems to shape the free play of events. The ethical tradition that I would like to turn to now, then, is the one that has concentrated most deeply on this joint sense of freedom and necessity: a tradition which can be described, broadly, as Kantian, and which is summed up well by John Rawls: “acting in accordance with a law that we give to ourselves.”58 Rawls here means to link Kant with the contractarian tradition of Rousseau, but the idea, taken broadly, can extend in some form to describe not only Kant and Rawls, but also such seemingly contradictory figures as Nietzsche, Hegel, and even the late Foucault.

These may seem an odd assembly of names, so I will say a few words on each. First, Nietzsche: I am taking his notion of the eternal return here, perhaps contra Nietzsche, more as a thought experiment than a statement of scientific fact. In particular, I take it as an attempt to solve the root problem of ressentiment: that “the will cannot will backwards.”⁵⁹ To say “yes” to his demon’s challenge—“This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more”—is, in effect, to will the present moment into existence: to will backwards.⁶⁰ There is therefore a loopback effect: I am a product of, and subject to, only my own will. Hegel is perhaps an easier case, since in the Philosophy of Right, he specifically deals with the idea of institutional laws as a further step in our moral development. That is, the Hegelian state of Sittlichkeit is quite literally following laws that we have given ourselves. However, even at the level of the notion of the will—“the free will which wills the free will”—we see the a conception of freedom that overlaps with both Kant and the “loopback” I described above in Nietzsche.⁶¹ The final example is what has come to be called “late” Foucault: the Foucault of the last two volumes of The History of Sexuality. Though he is not exactly consistent over this period, his Kantian education does show through in his understanding of ethics as a means of relating to oneself. He defines ethics, in one particularly nice phrase, as “the conscious [réfléchie] practice of freedom.” This he opposes to a simpler “liberation,” which he disowns.⁶² The key point here is that his definition of ethics ends up being a freedom that is free precisely because one is always keeping a watch over oneself.

It is this tradition that allows us to address what I take to be the antinomy—the structuring paradox—of narrative theory: a sequence of events (or story, or fabula) comes logically prior to its telling (or discourse, or sjuzhet). The story is what gives the telling its coherence. But of course, rigorously speaking, the story, the fabula, is not there: all we have is the telling. All useful narrative analysis tries to address this problem in some way—stressing the interrelation between reader and text, but almost always ultimately favoring one side or the other as prior. But, as Harpham explains, when viewed in ethical terms, the reader does not just construct the meaning of the text; the reader constructs the “law of the text” that the reader then follows:

An “ethical” approach to the dilemma of narrative theory would begin by conceding the strength of both formalist and reader-centered positions, and making of these apparently incompatible claims the cornerstone of its understanding. Plot is a construction of a particular narrative that uses only materials in that text. In one sense external to the narrative, arising from within and yet not precisely as its own, since the narrative is regulated by the plot. Interestingly, this account also describes the reader. The reader is free and autonomous, and responsible for his or her construction of the text; but in order to make a plot at all, readers must believe that they “perceive” it; they must submit to the text and try to understand it “on its own terms.” Readers thus construct the text freely but construct it as the law of the text. Where, then, is the law? In both, that is, in the relation between the two: the relation of reader to narrative text provides a compelling instance of the free submission of the subject to the law.63

As we freely read, we produce the structure that dictates how we read. Of course, we do not do this completely arbitrarily; there are a number of formal indicators that point us in certain directions. But they point us to be compelled by a structure that we impose.

This relation between law and freedom helps to explain what is perhaps the most marvelous of realist effects: the fact that an assemblage of literary tropes, used to advance a pre-arranged plot, can take on the shape of a freely deciding human agent. Literary criticism has a long tradition of subordinating the character—which, after all, is not a real person—to the workings of underlying structure. We can find this idea, as Seymour Chatman has pointed out, in works ranging from Aristotle’s to twentieth-century formalism.⁶⁴ Characters in classical tragedy, according to Aristotle, exist “for the sake of their actions” (9); the hierarchy he assigns here is strict: “plot is the origin and as it were the soul the tragedy, and the characters are secondary.” Boris Tomashevsky echoes these sentiments nearly two and a half millennia later in “Thematics,” though “motifs” now occupy the place of Aristotle’s “action” and “plot”: “The usual device for grouping and stringing together motifs is the creation of a character who is the living embodiment of a given collection of motifs. The assignment of this or that motif to a given character holds the attention of the reader. The character is a guiding thread which makes it possible to untangle a conglomeration of motifs and permits them to be classified and arranged” (87–88). Here too, characters exist only due to vulgar necessity: the reader’s inability to pay attention to the actual thematic work of the narrative. Still, as Tomashevsky is at some pains to point out, they are nothing more than a means to an end. Lest there be any misunderstanding of his intention, Tomashevsky reiterates his point, with some evident distaste, asserting that this, alone, constitutes the purpose of character: “The reader must know how to recognize a character, and the character must attract at least some attention” (88). The language here is that of necessity: the reader must, the character must. Whatever readers might think about their relationship with the character, they are ultimately determined by the structure.

The ethical theorization of narrative laid out here can mediate between a naive sense of reader and character freedom, and the theoretical sense of the form’s determinant nature. In this sense, it echoes the problem of free agency that Kant offers in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: “reason for speculative purposes finds the road of natural necessity much more traveled and more usable than that of freedom; yet for practical purposes the footpath of freedom is the only one on which it is possible to make use of our reason in our conduct.”65 I will return to Kant at greater length in my discussion of the Bildungsroman in chapter 4. For now, though, suffice it to say that Kant attempts to solve this problem by finessing the distinction he makes in the first Critique between the appearance of consciousness (which we have access to) and consciousness as thing-in-itself (which we do not). In a sort of idealistic precursor to the psychoanalytic unconscious, Kant suggests that our noumenal self—inaccessible to our reason or our senses—manages to be free of the laws of causal determinism as well.⁶⁶ Christine Korsgaard, in her introduction to the Cambridge edition of the Groundwork, offers a helpful gloss: “we must suppose that in our capacity as members of the world of understanding, we give laws to ourselves as members of the world of sense” (xxix). In other words, then, the law that we give to ourselves is the mediation between theoretical determinism and felt freedom.

We see this mediation in a number of forms throughout Victorian narrative; it is an essential part of realism’s simultaneous demands for robust characters and compelling, forward-moving plots. The demands of a seemingly autonomous character would require that choices not be determined by a chain of causation; the demands of plot—“a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality,” in E. M. Forster’s formulation—require that we be able to causally interpret events and actions.⁶⁷ As one way of approaching this problem, it will be useful to turn to Victorian intellectual autobiography: “a genre,” as Jonathan Loesberg puts it, “that transforms philosophy into narrative.”⁶⁸ My interest in these sorts of texts—Cardinal Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua, along with John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, which I will discuss in chapter 4—is that they attempt to narrate fundamental reorientations of self, and thus face the same essential antinomy as novelistic realism. Change must seem necessary and not merely capricious; but, at the same time, the autobiographical form must narrate a development that exceeds the confines of determinism.

This point is especially pressing when it comes to the Apologia, which, as Newman describes it in his preface, was written to refute accusations that, while still in the Church of England, he had already secretly converted to Catholicism and had been using the Anglican pulpit to preach Catholic doctrine. In other words, his book is an attempt to show that he had not always been a Catholic but had, by slow and imperceptible processes, come to change his mind:

I will draw out, as far as it may be, the history of my mind; I will state the point at which I began, in what external suggestion or accident each opinion had its rise, how far and how developed from within, how they grew, were modified, were combined, were in collision with each other, and were changed; again how I conducted myself towards them, and how, and how far, and for how long a time, I thought I could hold them consistently with ecclesiastical engagements which I had made and with the position which I held. … I shall account for that phenomenon which to so many seems so wonderful, that I should have left “my kindred and my father’s house” for a Church from which once I turned away from dread … as if forsooth a Religion which has flourished through so many ages, among so many nations, amid such varieties of social life, in such contrary classes and conditions of men, and after so many revolutions, political and civil, could not subdue the reason and overcome the heart.⁶⁹

This passage spells out the two joint aims that Newman has in his memoir. He has to show that on the one hand, he came to Catholicism by a series of accidents and insights, not through any predetermined plan, since a plan would be the sort of Romish dishonesty he is trying to defend himself against. But at the same time, he needs to show that Catholicism exerted a sort of draw—subdued his reason and overcame his heart—that moved him to it out of necessity. His progression, in other words, was not arbitrary; he could not have just as easily become, say, a dissenter. So the prose project he has assigned for himself in the Apologia is this: to depict a series of free and unconditioned choices that seem to lead by necessity to a certain conclusion.

And indeed, if we try to hunt down the actual moment of conversion—which certainly seems like it should be a significant moment in the Apologia—we find ourselves lost in a mess of tenses and subordinate clauses. In the midst of a discussion of warnings from other Anglican clergymen and related theological debates, Newman mentions a tract he had been working on:

I had begun my Essay on the Development of Doctrine in the beginning of 1845, and I was hard at it all through the year till October. As I advanced, my difficulties so cleared away that I ceased to speak of “The Roman Catholics,” and boldly called them Catholics. Before I got to the end, I resolved to be received, and the book remains in the state in which it was then, unfinished. (181)

At the beginning of the second sentence, Newman is an Anglican, if a rather controversial one. He is still engaged in debates about doctrine and writing essays as a member of the Church of England. By the end of the third sentence, he is a Catholic. Of course, he is a Catholic before he begins writing the Apologia, but his textual presentation of himself, of his “mind,” was of someone not yet Catholic. The conversion happens here, but it occurs in the middle of a sentence that is largely about an essay that Newman never finishes. To be more precise, it happens before the first clause in the sentence: “Before I got to the end …” In other words, by the time Newman references his “resolution,” the resolution has already been made and has had an effect in his narrative—that is, his inability to get to the end of his essay. The combined dictates of freedom and necessity that underwrite Newman’s Apologia lead him to imply that his surface narrative is determined by an underlying decision-making process that occurs prior to its manifestation in the text. Remember, as I said, that this served a rhetorical purpose: Newman’s conversion was to seem understandable, even necessary, by the time it occurred—it had to be in keeping with a reader’s expectations. By forcing the reader, for the sake of comprehension, to project back a change that would only manifest itself later in the text—to in effect will backwards—Newman made the reader provide the law that Newman would, himself, then follow.

MORAL FEELING AND ETHICAL EXAMPLES

What is at work in this passage from the Apologia, and what is implied by the discussion in the section preceding it, is something we might call an ethical unconscious. Newman acts in accordance with a decision he already made, though he does not yet know that he made it. For Kant, this is specifically a noumenal self that we do not have access to. But how can something that we do not have access to act as a moral incentive? Here, Kant introduces a rather fuzzy term: a “moral feeling,” that is the “incentive” to moral action.70 And this moral feeling takes the form of guilt. A human being, he writes, may see an act as necessary and yet, all the same, “he nevertheless finds that the advocate who speaks in his favor can by no means reduce to silence the prosecutor within him.” In other words, when Kant wants to force the awareness in his agent of something going on behind the scenes, he does it in the form of the failed ethical experience, one that goes wrong. He implies that it is precisely our “moral feeling” about what went wrong that makes us aware of our ethical consciousness.

Kant also refers to this moral feeling as the “incentive” to moral action (5:79). This incentive, he takes great care to point out, must be separated at all costs from material incentives, which always have an object. The particular incentive to which Kant refers here, on the other hand, must have no object other than duty. Hence, for the sake of clarification, he also refers to it as “respect” (5:73). Still the usage of the term “incentive” should have some significance for us due to its close relation with the Freudian notion of the “drive”—in German, Triebfeder and Trieb, respectively. This terminological similarity points to the close relation between Kant’s moral feeling and Freud’s death drive; both produce in the subject desire without object. This is what Lacan means when he writes that Kant’s “theory of consciousness, when he writes of practical reason, is sustained only by giving a specification of the moral law which, looked at more closely, is simply desire in its pure state.”⁷¹ It pushes forward, without object, only to push forward.

The drives are similar as well in that they both produce narrative. Brooks bases his theory in Reading for the Plot on the death drive and its interaction with the pleasure principle, both of which move in opposite directions toward satisfaction: “Between these two moments of quiescence, plot itself stands as a sort of divergence of deviance, a postponement which leads back to the inanimate” (103). Kant’s moral feeling produces narrative in a different manner. This can perhaps be best understood through the fact that Kant, who begins his Groundwork with the demand that morality be “carefully cleansed of everything empirical” (4:388), still finds it necessary to demonstrate his principles through four examples (4:421–25). This may seem to be a dispensable clarification for some of his less abstractly oriented readers, but the fact remains that Kant, and ethical discourse in general, are drawn repeatedly to the illustrative example. J. Hillis Miller puts it well: “Narrative as a fundamental activity of the human mind, the power to make fictions, to tell stories to oneself or to others, serves for Kant as the absolute necessary bridge without which there would be no connection between the law as such and any particular ethical rule of behavior.”⁷² The law itself, since it has no content, must always be instantiated in concrete actions. The respect for the law, the moral feeling, is what pushes the agent toward this instantiation. Ethical discourse, then, is always pushed forward by this moral feeling, this Triebfeder, to produce narrative.

This formulation gathers its full meaning when we consider the other thrust of Kant’s moral feeling, as seen by its manifestation as guilt in the second Critique. There it functions to point out the immorality—the “pathological” nature—of this instantiation. Instantiations of an abstract ethical law in concrete situations, in other words, never quite work. As Miller argues in his Ethics of Reading, the examples that Kant seems compelled to provide at the same time go “against the grain of [his] argument” (32). Such moments provide ample fodder for deconstruction, certainly. But rather than settling on the “unreadability of the example” as Miller does (38), we could also see this as an iterative procedure, which Harpham thus describes: “a process of reciprocal probing and stressing that tests the capacity of theory to comprehend and regulate practice, and the power of ‘actual life’ … to elude or deform theory.”73 Ethical argument takes place in the sphere of examples and counterexamples, speculative narratives of concrete situations that put ethical rules to the test.

It is this understanding of the relation of ethics and narrative, underwritten by a “moral feeling,” that allows us, finally, to turn back to the debate between intuitionism and utilitarianism. As I mentioned earlier, the specific tradition of intuition that I have been discussing has not been in high academic repute since the publication of Sidgwick’s Method of Ethics in 1874. But narrative methods—as described above—have actually made the notion of “moral feeling” axiomatic enough that they can continue this debate. The theoretical, in other words, has become formal.

By way of example, let us look at a more recent moment in the debate over utilitarianism, well past the high point of British moral intuitionism. In his entry in Utilitarianism, For and Against—he takes the “against” position—Bernard Williams points out that following utilitarian rules often “alienates one from one’s moral feelings.”⁷⁴ And to demonstrate this point, he offers two object lessons: about George, who is offered a job in chemical and biological warfare, which would help him support his family and would prevent someone with less compunction from taking the job; and Jim, who finds ten sympathetic prisoners about to be executed, and is offered the opportunity to kill one himself, with the effect that the other nine would go free (97–99). Though the examples are not very long, Williams spends a striking amount of time on details: George “is not very robust in health” and is “very attached” to his wife, who has fewer concerns about the job than he does; while Jim, “with some desperate recollection of schoolboy fiction, wonders whether if he got hold of a gun, he could hold the captain.” The point is that Williams goes out of his way to make these proper names into some sort of literary creations, characters with implied backstories and pasts. The effect, for Williams, is to remove the discussion from the schematism of a blunt utilitarian rule—which would state, say, that one dead peasant, though regrettable, is a morally superior outcome to ten dead peasants75—and place it in the realm of people, possessed of some sort of “moral feeling,” and protective of their “moral integrity” (104). George and Jim are not people, of course, any more than Sissy Jupe is a person, and so they do not actually possess these qualities. But Williams makes use of the techniques of literary mimesis to make them at least into somewhat “round” characters—enough so, at least, to make it clear that we are dealing with a familiar literary object.⁷⁶

These literary objects, though, are also philosophical arguments. Miller suggested that this was the case with Kant: though he might have claimed he was just illustrating a theoretical point, he still needed recourse to instantiation. In Williams’s case, it seems to me, the point is rather more clear. The stories not only have pride of place in his response to his utilitarian interlocutor, but the experience of reading them—he might say, “thinking through them,” but it comes to the same thing—functions to introduce an important part of his disagreement with utilitarianism: the idea that certain choices can “feel wrong.” In each case, Williams ends with a question to his reader, familiar from any introductory ethics course: “What should he do?” This is not a neutral question. Williams is asking with the knowledge that his reader will know the correct utilitarian response. He is also making the assumption that this response will feel wrong to the reader, that there will be some sort of resistance to it:

To these dilemmas, it seems to me, that utilitarianism replies, in the first case, that George should accept the job, and in the second, that Jim should kill the Indian. Not only does utilitarianism give these answers but, if the situations are essentially as described and there are no further special factors, it regards them, it seems to me, as obviously the right answers. But many of us would certainly wonder whether, in (1), that could possibly be the right answer at all; and in the case of (2), even one who came to think that perhaps was the answer, might well wonder whether it was obviously the answer. (99)

In other words, he does not mean this to be a completely open-ended narrative. We play out the wrong ending in our head and are unsatisfied with it. This lack of satisfaction with the narrative—this sense that the story should not end this way—offers a response to a utilitarian calculus. Williams uses narrative methods here to produce a reminder of a necessity that does not seem to be present in the assumed theoretical structure.⁷⁷ At the same time, since it is a “dilemma,” this feeling of necessity only comes about through being offered a choice, through the sense that the story could go in more than one way. The experience of narrative serves to bring together freedom and necessity in a way that would be absent from a static formulation.

To characterize Williams’s work in terms of its relations to literature is to stay in keeping with the general thrusts of many of his arguments. Among Anglo-American philosophers, Williams shows a particular awareness of the literary nature of his approach, and of an example-based philosophical approach in general. Certainly, we get a sense of this in his famous essay “Moral Luck,” when instead of choosing a George or a Jim, he focuses on Anna Karenina.78 Implicit here seems to be the question of why a philosopher should bother making up an example from life, when someone else has already done such a good, and robust, job of it. Elsewhere, he makes this point explicit:

In seeking a reflective understanding of ethical life … [philosophy] often takes examples from literature. Why not take examples from life? It is a perfectly good question, and it has a short answer: what philosophers will lay before themselves and their readers as an alternative to literature will not be life, but bad literature.⁷⁹

Williams’s point certainly seems to open up the discussion to the sort of post-structuralist analysis that would see the rhetorical base of writing across disciplinary lines. What I would like to concentrate on here, though, is simply the way in which a philosopher so adept at writing the micro-narratives of “ethical life”—ethical examples—understands these as connected with literature. Further, he suggests that even when philosophers deny this connection, it does not lead to something beyond or separate from literature; it just leads to literature that is not particularly effective.

The effective “literature” of the philosophical example, then, bears a relation to the sort of narrative literature that this book will be considering. Furthermore, this narrative-literary form of philosophical discussion becomes mobilized, as in the examples of Jim and George, against utilitarianism in particular. The alternative to the systematic argument, in other words, is to use the principles of narrative literature to produce an experience in the reader, a reaction which will stand in opposition to the stated rules of a utilitarian system. Williams’s approach thus recalls the intuitionist stance of the nineteenth century, as we saw it in Mary Barton and Hard Times. This is the heritage of those philosophical debates: the idea that the argumentative response to a rational deliberative style is an internal argument, and that it works through a felt response to the experience of diachronic narrative.

I opened by pointing to the ways in which the critical tradition of the novel has implicitly made use of this same idea: that “poetic necessity” works because it “feels right” or, perhaps even more precisely, because something else would “feel wrong.” Whether this is accurate, or whether it expresses a sort of naive confirmation bias, is ultimately beside the point—what matters is that it significantly represents the way that the phenomenology of novel reading has been understood over the last two hundred years. And in the nineteenth century, this experience of reading over time, motivated and sustained by the promise of an unknown conclusion, was understood to be a moral experience. We may have forgotten this, just as philosophical history has largely forgotten the intuitionist philosophers, but it is part of the novels, it is part of the way we talk about novels, and it is part of the way that we—intuitive, naive readers all—read even still.