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Sympathy Time: Adam Smith, George Eliot, and the Realist Novel
Abstract
[N]ineteenth-century realist fiction makes most sense when it is viewed as an attempt to deal with situations which involve partial knowledge and continual approximation . . .
Talk about novel-reading and sympathy and you are likely to spend some of that time talking about omniscience. If your subject is the nineteenth-century realist novel, you will probably have something to say about the relationship between ethical feeling and free indirect discourse which suggests that peering into the secret hearts and minds of characters enables our sympathy for them, and thus that “sympathy” names that special ability to cultivate our identification with others through feeling what they feel and knowing what they know, or what they are thinking about. In this vein omniscient narration, shrinking the distance between ourselves and others, encourages sympathy: the assumption is that by knowing more—of what others know or think along with what they don’t—we draw closer and more inclined to sympathize with their conditions. The link between sympathy and knowledge is all but guaranteed in this formulation, as indeed it regularly goes without saying that facilitating our sympathetic identification with characters is what many English realists’ experiments in omniscience were designed to do. Sympathy in such novels, so the story goes, results from both seeing and knowing: the unique seeing into and knowledge of interiors afforded by the nineteenth-century novel’s most celebrated technical innovation, free indirect discourse.1 According to a standard claim, FID produces the effect of simultaneity by blending characters’ voices with that of the speaking narrator. Dorrit Cohn refers to the narrator’s “identification” with a “character’s mentality” as one so complete that “narrated monologue” replaces FID as the preferred term of analysis (112).
Simultaneity emerges as the temporal equivalent of “identification,” those brief pockets of time in which the voices of narrator and character merge into one, or where readers, in a taken-for-granted formulation, sympathize by identifying with characters, particularly those whose feelings are judged appropriate and can thus comfortably be shared. That “identifying with” should depend on the sort of knowing involved in “seeing into” is taken to mean that seeing and knowing a character’s “inside” point of view requires a position outside it, one that (at least temporarily) must also be overcome. In a discussion of Jane Austen’s Emma, Wayne Booth, by way of complicating this view, exemplified it. His comment that “only immature readers ever really identify with any character, losing all sense of distance and hence all chance of an artistic experience” carries the implicit charge that it’s hard to resist the pull of identification and that plenty of readers aren’t quite up to the effort (248). The suggestion is borne out in his account of the novel’s transition from Austen to Henry James. Where Austen’s “implicit apology for Emma said, in effect, ‘Emma’s vision is your vision; therefore forgive her,’” the modernist layers his characters with an irony so thick that ordinary readers, bound “tightly to the consciousness of the ambiguously misguided protagonist,” cannot see beyond it (324). Many of these readers “will go sadly astray,” missing ironies they ought to discover or discovering ones not there (325). By the time we get to modernism, in other words, the novel’s sympathy-generating machinery has traded total knowledge for radical unknowing, figured as that “sense of distance” necessary to “artistic experience”: omniscient “seeing into” from some outside position gives way to the “deep plunges of modern inside views” (324). Modernist not-knowing, the ironic effect of “deep” immersion in a character’s consciousness, dispenses with the middle-man and exposes the fraud at the heart of omniscience, or at least in the naïve confidence that similitude and proximity engender sympathy best.
Not much has been said to upset the conventional wisdom that nineteenth-century realism patterns sympathy on an identificatory model in which social feeling flows from the ability to stand beyond while “seeing into” others, and if modernists rejected the safety of the outside position, there has been less revision of the truism that identification is what readers undertake in order...
... She does not, however, go so far as to say that the other cannot be known, only that the movement into knowledge takes time and that Eliot acknowledges its limitation with regard to the reader: " Eliot had reservations about the degree to which such intimacy with others' thought prompted ethical responses in us. " " Sympathy Time: Adam Smith, George Eliot, and the Realist Novel, " Narrative 17, no. 3 (October 2009): 306. ...
Before achieving success as a novelist, George Eliot spent several years translating Spinoza’s Ethics. Previous scholarship on Spinoza and Eliot has generally assumed that Eliot’s novels are wholly influenced by Spinoza, or that they can even be read as ‘translations’ of Spinoza. In this article, I instead argue that Eliot’s shift from Spinoza translation to novel-writing reflects an initial repudiation of, followed by a contention with, unresolved problems in Spinoza’s social philosophy as regards the role of sympathy, fellow-feeling, and the knowledge of others as distinct and different beings. I also explore how Eliot’s own views develop between the early novel Adam Bede and the later Middlemarch to argue against a reading of ‘sympathy’ in Eliot as something wholly consistent or uniform. Her efforts to fashion a post-Spinozan art of sympathy in Adam Bede, in which a morality of fellow-feeling is emphasised and explored in narratives of love and self-renunciation, resulted in internal problems concerning the reliability of the imagination and the power of societal relations to condition how this fellow-feeling is experienced. The later Eliot draws on a conceptual imagery of ‘threads’ of relationality and a ‘fabric’ of opinion in Middlemarch to emphasise the integration of thinking and feeling, and the role of beneficent action, in a manner consistent with aspects of Spinoza’s social philosophy. I show that Eliot here makes useful progress through and beyond lacunae in the Ethics, contributing to a wider set of debates about sympathy, difference, ethics, and epiphanies through the concept of sympathetic knowledge.
If empathy is how bodies resonate with one another, and ethics is what we are meant to do with that resonance, consideration of the ethics of empathy must begin with the split-second, non-conscious resonance between bodies: first-blush empathy. By combining the expertise of academics and practitioners of bodily knowledge, martial arts studies can distinctively consider how to cultivate the most ethical responses to others. This disciplinary argument takes physical form through a reading of a practice from Shotokan Aiki-karate-do that opposes hyper-attention to self or other with cultivated non-attention. To unpack these principles, the essay then uses philosophy of mind from to illustrate how attention provides a more compelling description of this initial bodily response to other bodies than intention. To most ethically engage others without imposing our own knowledge or self-absorption, we should cultivate deliberate habits of receptivity around first-blush empathy.
The present paper aims to investigate the concept of compassion in George Eliot’s novella The Lifted Veil (1859). The central argument is that compassion is one of the essential conceptions that should take into awareness to probe and reveal the insight natural expressions of compassion in Eliot’s The Lifted Veil. The study sheds light upon the different forms of compassion such as sympathy, love and friendship and the major impact of each of them on the protagonists’ development. The study relies on the psychoanalytic perspective in analyzing the concept of compassion in Eliot’s The Lifted Veil. Psychoanalytic theories of compassion such as Personality Theory propose that compassion has significant impacts on the life of human beings. The study focuses on the various theories proposed by Sigmund Freud concerning early-childhood development which stress the seriousness of childhood stories and their struggles in the development of adults. In addition to that, the study is based on a close reading of Eliot’s literary texts and followed by a literary analysis of Eliot’s The Lifted Veil. The study focuses on Eliot’s The Lifted Veil and could be applied to other works. Moreover, the reading of Eliot’s novella The Lifted Veil could be used to promote her work as valuable to contemporary readers because of the ideas her work has on people.
In Women’s Tanci Fiction in Late Imperial and Early Modern China , Li Guo presents the first book-length study in English of women’s tanci fiction, the distinctive Chinese form of narrative written in rhymed lines during the late imperial to early modern period (related to, but different from, the orally performed version also called tanci) She explores the tradition through a comparative analysis of five seminal texts. Guo argues that Chinese women writers of the period position the personal within the diegesis in order to reconfigure their moral commitments and personal desires. By fashioning a “feminine” representation of subjectivity, tanci writers found a habitable space of self-expression in the male-dominated literary tradition.Through her discussion of the emergence, evolution, and impact of women’s tanci, Guo shows how historical forces acting on the formation of the genre serve as the background for an investigation of cross-dressing, self-portraiture, and authorial self-representation. Further, Guo approaches anew the concept of “woman-oriented perspective” and argues that this perspective conceptualizes a narrative framework in which the heroine (s) are endowed with mobility to exercise their talent and power as social beings as men’s equals. Such a woman-oriented perspective redefines normalized gender roles with an eye to exposing women’s potentialities to transform historical and social customs in order to engender a world with better prospects for women.
Polazno stanovište ovog istraživanja je hipoteza da umetnički konceptDžordž Eliot, iako se u biti podudara sa pretpostavkama realizma, sadržiu sebi brojne karakteristike romantizma. Oslanjajući se na tvrdnje samespisateljice, ali i na stavove kritičara kao što je Džordž Levin, u prvom delučlanka se obrazlažu sve osobenosti opusa Džordž Eliot koje su svojstvenerealizmu. Iz tih svojstava proizilazi zaključak da se njen književni metodmože definisati kao samosvesni, psihološki i moralni realizam. Iako jenamera realista bila da objektivno i nepristrasno predstave stvarnost,većina pisaca bila je svesna da je taj ideal nedostižan. Eliot je tvrdilada, baš zato što je nemoguće predstaviti neposredovano iskustvo,kazivanje istine treba da bude etički imperativ pisca. Cilj ovog rada jeda problematizuje tvrdnju da realistički metod, bar kad je u pitanjuDžordž Eliot, ne predstavlja suštu suprotnost romantičnom metodu, većpre reakciju na njega i njegovu nadgradnju. Od predstavnika francuskogromantizma primetan je uticaj Rusoa, a od nemačkih romantičaraFridriha Šilera i Volfganga Getea. Kada su pitanju predstavnici engleskogromantizma, primetan je izvestan uticaj Valtera Skota i Bajrona, ali sekao romantičar koji je najviše oblikovao umetnički koncept Džordž Eliotdefinitivno izdvaja Vordsvort. Pojašnjavanjem paralela sa Vordsvortomdolazimo do zaključka da je opus Džordž Eliot originalan i da se ne možeu potpunosti okarakterisati kao realistički. Kao i Vordsvort, Eliot je bilanostalgična prema prošlom, predindustrijskom dobu, kada je zajednicabila stabilnija. Pored toga, primetna je i sličnost kada je u pitanju odnosprema sećanju, kao i veličanje deteta kao oličenja prirodnog stanjačoveka.
Frameworks for the application of the arts in community settings tend to focus on the development of individuals’ empathy or social bonds. A commensurate level of consideration tends not to be given to the socio-economic, political, and institutional forces and processes that shape such development and to how the arts might help build capacities to manage the impact of such forces and processes. The recognition of persons as interdependent in systems reliant on mutual care has implications for applications of the arts in many specialised domains as well as in general public life. Especially in clinical or social interventions, unrecognised institutional dynamics may introduce or maintain imbalances of power in community and professional practice. Music, as a participatory and temporal activity facilitating social synchrony, can foster dialogic and reciprocal relations in social life. To systematise and study a participatory music activity on an organisational and community level, I designed and implemented two collaborative songwriting programs in clinical and social service settings carried out through the nonprofit organisation, Humans in Harmony. One activity, music corps¸ was a two-month program in New York City involving participants from colleges and social service organisations serving adults with disabilities, at-risk youth, and nursing home residents. Another activity, implemented through a Humans in Harmony chapter at Columbia University Medical Center, paired health professional students with patients in palliative care support groups. Ethnographic observations and participant interviews revealed that engagement in interpersonal processes aligned with a capabilities-informed approach which emphasised social reciprocity, well-being, and flourishing. Moreover, evaluations of the activities through pre- and post-program measures supported a hypothesis of enhancement of interpersonal closeness and in attitudes about empathy and care. Such participatory approaches may offer new frameworks for the application of the arts in response to current geopolitical and cultural challenges.
“Affective Transmission and the Invention of Characters in the Victorian Bildungsroman” reconsiders several novels about young women as they make their way into a larger social world. Rather than achieving self-discipline, as has frequently been argued, heroines such as Lucy Snowe, Maggie Tulliver, and Margaret Hale tend to be overpowered by interpersonal emotions. They distance themselves from these affects by attributing them to fictitious characters. The gendered variation of the larger tradition this article sketches out calls into question the premise of the bildungsroman as a whole, raising the possibility that the adjustment of the self to external realities is never as complete as it seems.
This article is the third of three on “Sources of Authority in Education.” All use the work of Amy Gutmann as a heuristic device to describe and explain the prevalence of market-based models of education reform in the US and the business-influenced Global Education Reform Movement. The other two are “Negating Amy Gutmann: Deliberative Democracy, Business Influence and Segmentation Strategies in Education” and “Neoliberalism and Four Spheres of Authority in American Education: Business, Class, Stratification and Intimations of Marketization.” All three are intended to be included together as chapters of my Democratic Education and Markets: Segmentation, Privatization and Sources of Authority in Education Reform.
The “Negating Amy Gutmann” article looks primarily at deliberative democracy. The “Neoliberalism and Four Spheres of Authority” article, considers its main theme to be the promise of egalitarian democracy and how figures ‘such as Horace Mann, John Dewey and Gutmann’ have argued it is largely based on the promise of public education. It thus begins with a consideration of what might be called a partial historical materialist analysis – the growth of inequality in the US (and other countries) since the 1970s that correlates with much of the basis for changes in the justifications and substance of education reform.
The present article, “The Odd Malaise of Democratic Education and the Inordinate Influence of Business,” continues the argument by offering some historical background and comparisons and ends by considering what happens to the philosophy of education when democracy and capitalism are at odds.
It thus starts with recent history, looking at how the content and context of educational policy have changed in the US since Gutmann wrote in the 1980s. Specifically, it concerns itself with the increasing prevalence of twin notions: that our system of education must be reformed because of global competition and that the educational system should emulate the market.
The article then goes back a little bit further, to the origins of the common school in the 1600s and Horace Mann’s articulation of the principles behind public education, which are shown to be in stark contrast to Education Reform. The narrative describes how the standards movement, variously, coalesced around George H. W. Bush’s America 2000 and Bill Clinton’s Goals 2000 programs, was reflected in a ‘21st-century schools’ discourse, found programmatic form in George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and it’s offspring, Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top. All of the preceding were, to a shocking degree, based on misleading and selective statistical analysis and sets goals that are unreachable even in the best of all possible worlds. The article concludes by considering paradigm change in education and its causes; I draw on both Peter Hall’s exposition of social learning ¹ and Antonio Gramsci’s conceptualization of hegemony.
Drawing upon Julia Kristeva’s linking of the ideas of the foreigner with women and the state of marriage in Strangers to Ourselves, and Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec’s thesis in “Of Other Spaces” that apparently quite ordinary sites can contest the ideologically normative, this article looks at patterns of alienation and domestication that shape the novel. For Kristeva, the foreigner is not confined to those deemed to be the enemy or an outsider but is produced in relation to crises that threaten the autonomy of the self through social mechanisms that are known, rather than alien. Similarly, Foucault examines the “lands of exile,” of crisis and deviation, which can develop within domestic social formations. These theoretical perspectives are used to analyze the fundamental differences in the structure and outcomes of the two narrative “streams,” as George Eliot called them, of Daniel Deronda: that of Daniel himself and, the main focus of the analysis, of Gwendolen.
Letty Garth's “favourite red volume” makes its appearance in Middlemarch at the beginning of Book 7, at the Vincy's New Year's Day party that draws most of the Middlemarch town characters together. It is a small passage that can easily go unnoticed – or, if registered at all, glossed as simply part of the fabric of dense, inconsequential details that realist texts deploy to produce verisimilitude. Roland Barthes describes such details as potentially “scandalous” from the point of view of structure in that they seem to amount to “a kind of narrative luxury ,” likely to threaten structural coherence, recoverable at best as “filling” or as giving “some index of character or atmosphere” (141). Such details might be said to reinforce the vices of nineteenth-century realism, including closing the gap between words and things: “ we are the real ,” these details say, producing “the referential illusion ” (148). They amount to bad narrative housekeeping, “increasing the cost of narrative information” (141). Since the detail of Letty's book involves a young child it is doubly likely, in a novel so clearly dedicated to the adult world of compromise and doubtful success, to be set aside as mere local colour. The potentially trivializing function of the paradox of small instances of excess is reflected in Barthes’ descriptive phrases for them: “useless details,” “insignificant notation” (142).
Readers have long noted the pervasiveness of sympathy in George Eliot's work. But why always sympathy? One cannot fully answer this question without attending to a crucial and yet still understudied context for Eliot's work: evangelicalism. It is from evangelical thought and practice that she gleaned the concept of what I will call sympathetic “insight,” which evangelicals privileged for its ability to “see” the real and to move between the dichotomous barriers of the in/visible and in/external. I want to suggest that even after Eliot no longer found compelling its accompanying theology, sympathetic “insight” persisted in her imagination as a way to see into and within her realist fictional worlds.
For almost a decade , George Eliot labored at a translation of seventeenth-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and Ethics , and although completed, it never saw the light of day; it was the subject of a petty fight between the proposed publisher, Henry Bohn, and her partner, George Henry Lewes. The result was that for more than a century it was tucked away, first, presumably, in a drawer, and eventually, in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Although critics and scholars have long known that she had completed this work – references abound in letters and journal entries – it wasn't published until 1981, and even then, in an obscure imprint of the Salzburg University press. Copies of this published edition, which is limited to the Ethics and capably annotated by Thomas Deegan, are quite rare and difficult to get ahold of.
In previous chapters, this book has suggested that capitalism is a space structured by moral irony, and that in capitalist society individual actions are not supposed to be judged on the basis of their immediate effects or the possibly evil intentions of the agent, but rather within a field that encompasses those actions’ many possible unintended consequences. The realist novels analysed here proceed from the premise (implied in Smith’s figure of the invisible hand) that a true understanding of moral action in this kind of social space requires a composite vision that somehow takes into account both the individual and an overview of the whole social system, and work out the implications of this vision by playing with different narrative forms. The discussion of these novels in Part II began with the question of genre, showing how Austen and Dickens attempt to encompass both fields of vision by toggling between the Gothic and realism (in Northanger Abbey) or between omniscient and self-consciously innocent narrators (in Bleak House). The next chapter proposed that one characteristic result of viewing individual tragedies as trivial from the point of view of the whole system is a mood of tortured irony, both in the somewhat strained triumphalism of Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy and in Dickens’s bitter rebellion against it in Hard Times. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair offers a more ludic kind of tortured irony in its combination of an abstract compassion with consistent mockery of both individual delusion and narratorial authority.
There is a paradox at the heart of literature that has not been sufficiently explored in theories of the novel, a paradox that could be expressed like this: if readers feel themselves into the fictive Other’s inner life they may simultaneously participate in the generation of the Other—or the Other’s Other. This paradox suggests that empathy in literature is not without its ethical costs. In asking us to empathize with certain characters, empathy is blocked for others. The ethical potential of literature is often assumed to originate in its appeal to our empathy; but if empathy in literature is intimately bound up with processes that create the Other, any straightforward connection between literature and ethics is disrupted. This article uses Silas Marner (1861) as a case study to explore what I call the paradox of narrative empathy, while also revealing an unforeseen ethical insight at the heart of George Eliot’s novel that has not previously been attributed to that “charming minor masterpiece.”
William Riley Parker Prize for an outstanding article published in PMLA "Some Time between Revisionist and Revolutionary: Unreading History in Dalit Literature" May 2011 issue of PMLA Untouchable Fictions considers the crisis of literary realism--progressive, rural, regionalist, experimental--in order to derive a literary genealogy for the recent explosion of Dalit ("untouchable caste") fiction. Drawing on a wide array of writings from Premchand and Renu in Hindi to Mulk Raj Anand and V. S. Naipaul in English, Gajarawala illuminates the dark side of realist complicity: a hidden aesthetics and politics of caste. How does caste color the novel? What are its formal tendencies? What generic constraints does it produce? Untouchable Fictions juxtaposes the Dalit text and its radical critique with a history of progressive literary movements in South Asia. Gajarawala reads Dalit writing dialectically, doing justice to its unique and groundbreaking literary interventions while also demanding that it be read as an integral moment in the literary genealogy of the 20th and 21st centuries. This book, grounded in the fields of postcolonial theory, South Asian literatures, and cultural studies, makes a crucial intervention into studies of literary realism and will be important for all readers interested in the problematic relations between aesthetics and politics and between social movements and cultural production.
Given the story of the intertwined writing of The Mill on the Floss and "The Lifted Veil," it has been compelling to think of the two as fitting together like pieces of a puzzle: two pieces of unequal size, "The Lifted Veil" as the little, jagged, dark piece. In George Eliot's intellectual world, in other words, there was a perhaps unusually high interest in, and optimism about, the knowability of the future. Both "The Lifted Veil," and The Mill on the Floss, however, derive a great deal of their pathos from the ways in which a commitment to predicting the future renders ever more acute an inability to prevent it. While The Mill on the Floss seems to cast vigilant, foreboding thinking as a form of protection and care for others, the question of who is protecting whom is always shifting.
In Victorian Sacrifice: Ethics and Economics in Mid-Century Novels, Ilana M. Blumberg offers a major reconsideration of the central Victorian ethic of self-sacrifice, suggesting that much of what we have taken to be the moral psychology of Victorian fiction may be understood in terms of the dramatic confrontation between Christian theology and the world of modern economic theory. As Victorian writers Charlotte Mary Yonge, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, and Mary Augusta Ward strove to forge a practicable ethics that would reconcile the influences of an evangelical Christianity and its emphasis on selfless charity with the forces of laissez-faire capitalism and its emphasis on individual profit, they moved away from the cherished ideal of painful, solitary self-sacrifice in service of another's good. Instead, Blumberg suggests, major novelists sought an ethical realism characterized by the belief that virtuous action could serve the collective benefit of the parties involved. At a mid-century moment of economic optimism, novelists transformed the ethical landscape by imagining what the sociologist Herbert Spencer would later call a “measured egoism,” an ethically responsible self-concern which might foster communal solidarity and material abundance. Bringing the recent literary turns to ethics and to economics into mutual conversation, Blumberg offers us a new lens on a matter as pressing today as it was 150 years ago: the search for an ethics adequate to the hopes and fears of a new economy.
Bringing together poststructuralist ethical theory with late Victorian debates about the morality of literature, this book reconsiders the ways in which novels engender an ethical orientation or response in their readers, explaining how the intersections of nation, family, and form in the late realist English novel produce a new ethics of hospitality. Hollander reads texts that both portray and enact a unique ethical orientation of welcoming the other, a narrative hospitality that combines the Victorians' commitment to engaging with the real world with a more modern awareness of difference and the limits of knowledge. While classic nineteenth-century realism rests on a sympathy-based model of moral relations, novels by authors such as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner present instead an ethical recognition of the distance between self and other. Opening themselves to the other in their very structure and narrative form, the visited texts both represent and theorize the ethics of hospitality, anticipating twentieth-century philosophy's recognition of the limits of sympathy. As colonial conflicts, nationalist anxiety, and the intensification of the "woman question" became dominant cultural concerns in the 1870s and 80s, the problem of self and other, known and unknown, began to saturate and define the representation of home in the English novel. This book argues that in the wake of an erosion of confidence in the ability to understand that which is unlike the self, a moral code founded on sympathy gave way to an ethics of hospitality, in which the concept of home shifts to acknowledge the permeability and vulnerability of not only domestic but also national spaces. Concluding with Virginia Woolf's reexamination of the novel's potential to educate the reader in negotiating relations of alterity in a more fully modernist moment, Hollanders suggest that the late Victorian novel embodies a unique and previously unrecognized ethical mode between Victorian realism and a post-World- War-I ethics of modernist form.
This article argues that George Eliot’s Romola theorizes large-scale sympathy as a way of ethically engaging large groups of individuals outside one’s immediate social ambit. Yet the failed attempts of characters like Savonarola and Tito to imagine the experiences of unknown others suggests that large-scale sympathy estranges the sympathizing subject from the specificity of individual experience. This leads us to see a fault line at the heart of George Eliot’s work, whereby the necessity of imagining the simultaneous experience of others is continually brought into conflict with the impossibility—and the danger—of doing so.
The complicated junctions negotiated by the novel during the eighteenth century reveal not only achievements but also exclusions. Misfit Forms offers a speculative reconstruction of roads less traveled. What if typographical emphasis and its associated transmission of sensuality and feeling had not lost out to "transparent" typography and its paradigms of sympathetic identification? What was truncated when cumulative narrative structures were declared primitive in relation to the unified teleological plot? What visions of the novel's value as an arena for experience were sidelined when novel reading was linked to epistemological gain?. Reading novels by Sterne, Charlotte Bronte, Defoe, Gaskell, Hardy, and Woolf in tandem with less-known works, Nandrea illuminates the modes and techniques that did not become mainstream. Following Deleuze, Nandrea traces the "dynamic repetitions" of these junctures in the work of later writers. Far from showing the eclipse of primitive modes, such moments of convergence allow us to imagine other possibilities for the novel's trajectory.
This essay argues that much of the continuing appeal of the ticking time-bomb scenario has to do with the way it exploits deeply held beliefs regarding the relation between pain, sympathy, and the definition of the human that originated in the nineteenth century. These beliefs include the notion that sympathy precludes the infliction of pain; that sympathy is constitutive of humanity; and that in relation to certain kinds of subjects, pain does, in fact, elicit truth.
While readings of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein often consider the creature's thematic centrality and sympathetic appeal, I argue that the creature's exceptional status is due largely to his prowess as a narrator of other characters' points of view. All three of Frankenstein's first-person narrators present characters' biographies and focalized perspectives in their narrative frames, yet it is only the creature whose sustains an intimate, internally focalized engagement with another character's interiority. Frankenstein's interest in this comparative identification is indicative of a larger approach to characterization that I call protagonism, a term that describes novels' impulse to distribute the kinds of deep interiority and intimate identification we often associate with one or two privileged heroes among many textually and thematically marginalized figures.
Silas Marner (1861) depicts a stolen hoard of glittering gold at a historical moment that saw an increasing displacement of coinage by paper money in one of the major developments of industrial capitalist modernity. Reading the novel as George Eliot’s aesthetic and ethical response to the modern processes of abstraction that absorbed nineteenth-century thinkers from Auguste Comte to Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx, I suggest that Silas Marner consoles for a potentially impoverishing process of abstraction by refiguring it as an opportunity for a new form of value, one that transcends material limitations and depends upon human networks for its realization. Associating the “abstraction” of gold with the creation of a post-Malthusian modern economy in which giving has little personal cost and, on the contrary, produces collective, practical benefit, Silas Marner reflects the possibilities for abundance, surplus, and shared wealth that could be glimpsed in England at the outset of the 1860s. As the novel shifts from describing money as an unchanging, inanimate object to describing it instead as an exchange-value whose meaning is expressed in relation to the natural growth and repeating cycles of human experience, George Eliot offers a historically relevant fable of moral progress dependent on the abstractions common to material exchange, social sympathy, and narrative itself.
Since modernism, narrative omniscience has been much attacked, yet little studied and understood. This in inverse ratio to the central role it actually plays in narrative discourse and metadiscourse alike: the telling, reading, grouping, evolving, conceptualizing of stories, invented (e.g., novelistic) or inspired (biblical, Homeric). Here I review the various old-new critical thrusts against epistemic superprivilege (outright denials, partisan judgments, attempted confinements, impairments, replacements, as well as genuine misunderstandings) arisen since my constructive theory of omniscience appeared, often in response to it. Those neomodernist challenges meet, multiply, and frequently run to extremes in Jonathan Culler's (2004) antitheistic critique, which accordingly presents an overall mirror-image to how and where and why omniscient narrative is (re)constructed. Nor is this key question of epistemic privilege vs. disprivilege alone at stake. The argument shows afresh its bearings on larger issues yet, especially narrative's open-ended art of relations. Thus the relations between axes of perspective, between perspective and plot, between power and performance, between mimetic and artistic sense-making, between factual and fictional storytelling. Equally involved, at a higher level still, are the relations between part and whole, form and force or function, typology and teleology, theory and history, (meta)discourse and ideology, the realities of literature and the desires of the literati. Throughout, the choice ultimately lies between freezing, even nullifying those relations via package deals and allowing them free play in the spirit of the Proteus Principle.
Although form and history are joined in reading, the profession of literary studies has regularly regarded formalism and historicism as opposites and even antagonists. When dichotomous terms replicate themselves without mediation, a phenomenological approach to resolving the stalemate is typically to reflect on how they interact in lived experience. Refocusing attention in this way, I offer five theses on how history and form are connected in the experience of reading: (1) Literary works are historical entities, but they are not reducible to their origins. (2) The historical meaning of a literary work includes the history of its reception. (3) Reading literature entails a response to value and form. (4) The form of a literary work is integral to its moral, social, and political meaning. (5) Unmasking is not an end in itself but a means to various kinds of revelations. I develop these theses by engaging the arguments of some of the best formalist and historicist critics, focusing mainly on well-known examples from the New Critics and the New Historicists, and by trying to bring out aspects of the reading experience that they ignore or insufficiently acknowledge. My goal is to recover the interaction of form and history by analyzing reading as an intersubjective experience in which literary works are preserved and passed on through our ever-changing engagement with their forms.
common critical approach to “The Lifted Veil,” George Eliot’s tale of a man cursed by powers of telepathy and premonition, is to read it as an allegorical investigation of the workings of fictional narrative itself. As this argument goes, Latimer’s magical access to others’ minds mimics authorial omniscience and in this respect, as some accounts further argue, allows for Eliot’s interrogation of her own artistic practice. 1 While agreeing that the story is a self-conscious fiction, I want in this paper to delineate that selfconsciousness not by viewing Latimer as a figure for the author, but rather by focusing on what he unambiguously is—a narrator—and by scrutinizing his capacities, goals, and effects in that position. Reading this story, I propose, we are invited to attend closely to Latimer as narrator, in the specific sense of deliverer or conduit of Eliot’s story— of the figure who relays her story to us. In this way, “The Lifted Veil” reflects the increasing cultural salience in the mid-nineteenth century of people who act as go-betweens in the dialogues of others—that is, people who mediate communications between senders and receivers. Perhaps the first new and noteworthy type of human-mediated communication in the Victorian period was the electric telegraph, which gained a foothold in Britain during the 1840s and required an operator to transmit messages between parties. An even more spectacular form of message-sending to emerge around this time was modern Spiritualism, the practice of using séances to contact the dead. The typical medium of Spiritualist communications was female, since women were supposed to possess traits vital to the enterprise: a ready relinquishment of personal will, which made them smooth thoroughfares for the spirits’ volitions; and nervously delicate constitutions, which attuned their bodies to subtle transmissions from the other world. The latter, nervous sensitivity facilitated what was sometimes called the medium’s sympathy with the thoughts and feelings of spiritA
Narrative 14.2 (2006) 118-131
The comparison of the traditional novelist to God has received many memorable formulations. While Flaubert and Joyce emphasize the author's ubiquity, invisibility, or silence, the quality usually adduced for comparison is omniscience, as in Sartre's complaint about Mauriac: like God, he "is omniscient about everything relating to his little world" (15). For Sartre, of course, this is a bad thing: "God is not an artist. Neither is M. Mauriac" (25). As Meir Sternberg has demonstrated, the god being compared in these formulations is specifically the God of the Old Testament: "Homer's gods," he notes, "like the corresponding Near Eastern pantheons, certainly have access to a wider range of information than the normal run of humanity; but their knowledge still falls well short of omniscience, concerning the past and present as well as the future" (88). Sternberg explicitly includes Jane Austen's narratives within this biblical model: "Surely . . . one assumes that, like all novelists, she enjoys the privilege of omniscience denied to tellers in everyday life. She invokes different rules, we say. But if it is convention that renders Jane Austen immune from all charges of fallacy and falsity, it is convention that likewise puts the Bible's art of narrative beyond their reach. For the biblical narrator also appeals to the privilege of omniscience—so that he no more speaks in the writer's ordinary voice than Jane Austen does in hers, but exactly as a persona raised high above . . ." (34). J. Hillis Miller explains how "This immanent omniscience is . . . like the knowledge traditionally ascribed to God. It is an authentic perfection of knowledge. The omniscient narrator is able to remember perfectly all the past, to foresee the future course of events, and to penetrate with irresistible insight the most secret crevice in the heart of each man. He can know the person better than the person knows himself . . ." (64).
But in the twenty years since Sternberg's book—and in significant measure because of the interest sparked by his book—the premise that all heterodiegetic narrators exercise Godlike omniscience has been questioned. Sternberg argues that "omniscience is a qualitative and therefore indivisible privilege. . . . The superhuman privilege is constant and only its exercise variable" (183). While this logic would doubtless be true of "real" omniscience, it does not seem compelling with regard to "pretend" omniscience, which might readily be imagined as divisible. The "demand for a God's Eye View or Nothing" (Putnam viii) may be a limiting dichotomy that prevents us from exploring alternative models. Omniscience might instead be thought of as a toolbox, with different novelists using the different tools within it in distinctive ways. My own survey of discussions of omniscience identifies four primary tools in that box: omnipotence, omnitemporality, omnipresence, and telepathy. To get ahead of myself for a moment, I'll argue that Austen's narrators are more accurately described as "infallible" than "omniscient": at least on the basis of these four features, the infallible narrator as defined here is not a type of omniscient narrator. I take no position on the larger question of whether "omniscience" is always a misnomer; Austen's narrators, however, utilize so few of these standard tools so sparingly that the label is not useful for discussing her practice. Indeed, it seems to have hampered prior analyses of Austen's method.
Austen's career, at least in her handling of point of view, has long been treated as the exemplification of Haeckel's Law that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," as her novels rehearse in perfect sequence all of the evolutionary stages of the genre. She begins with the early epistolary drafts, in which the novels have no omniscient narrators at all. Later, she revises them into third-person omniscient novels with engaging and judgmental narrators, effectively rendering extinct the earlier genre of the epistolary novel. During the course of writing these novels she gradually weans herself from what Marvin Mudrick calls her "early tendency to assert an arbitrary omniscience over the objects of her irony" (84). Finally, in Emma and Persuasion, she evolves from the daughter of Dr. Johnson into the mother of Henry...
ELH 72.2 (2005) 429-451
On the night of July 11 1790, a few days before his death, Adam Smith ordered his two literary executors, Joseph Black and James Hutton, to burn all of his manuscripts, with the exception of a handful of essays. He thus ensured that, barring these short pieces, no incomplete work would be posthumously added to the two monuments of his career, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1776).
While the contents of the lost manuscript volumes cannot be known with absolute certainty, the evidence points strongly to their containing versions, or portions, of two long works, one a treatise on the "History of Law and Government," and the other a study of "the different branches of Literature." These are the "two . . . great works" Smith described as "upon the anvil" in his letter of 1 November 1785 to the Duc de La Rochefoucauld. Detailed student notes from Smith's lecture courses on jurisprudence and on literature and rhetoric later surfaced, collected as the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres and the Lectures on Jurisprudence, and give us some access to Smith's thought on these topics. However, the absence of these two projected works on literature and legal-political history still makes for an enormous gap in Smith's oeuvre. In effect, I want to argue, this failure to complete the projects and the destruction of his papers mean that Smith's corpus can be seen as defined, to an extraordinary degree, by the major absences of these long-meditated works, as well as by the accomplishments of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations. These absences in Smith's oeuvre necessarily shape our understanding of the work that we do have from his hand, and generate a number of pressing questions. Why, for example, did Smith find it so difficult to bring his thinking on literature and history to fruition in a major work—a Theory of Literature or a History of Civil Society—that would be companion works to his two other great treatises on ethics and economic systems?
Looking at his early career, one would indeed have far sooner expected major works on literature and history from Smith than on economic theory. His education at Oxford had consisted in large part of steeping in classical and recent European literature, he began his career as a man of letters, giving three series of public lectures on rhetoric in Edinburgh from 1748 to 1751, and by all accounts Smith made the study of rhetoric and literature an important part of his classes throughout his career at the University of Glasgow (1751–1763) after he was appointed Professor of Logic in 1751, and then Professor of Moral Philosophy in 1752. Smith was similarly deeply involved in thinking about questions of historiography from early on in his career. His thinking about the history of forms of government had occupied him from at least 1759 on: the study of law and government he mentions to La Rochefoucauld had in fact been promised to the public in the closing lines of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and he lectured on jurisprudence at the University of Glasgow throughout the 1750s and early 1760s. From 1754 to 1762 he also had the great example of his friend David Hume's six-volume History of England appearing in installments, to progressively greater public acclaim. Why then, given the quality of his surviving contributions to the theory of history in the Lectures, did Smith fail to complete the projected treatise on the history of laws and political institutions?
Critical commentary on Smith has of course frequently lamented these absent works, but with few exceptions has tended to treat them as unfortunate gaps in the record rather than as significant silences. However, our own historical moment, with its legacy of poststructuralist...
This essay returns to James's intertwined roles as reader, critic, and writer, analyzing Eliot's Middlemarch with James and within contemporary discussions of sensational reading. The brain is, after all, an organ, as James himself emphasizes in "Is There Life After Death?" And the form of the novel is not ideal or abstract but, as "The Art of Fiction" tells us, that of "a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism."
Narrative 12.1 (2004) 22-34
"Omniscience" is a notion I have used in discussing narrative, without giving it much thought but also without having much conviction that "the omniscient narrator" is a well-grounded concept or really helps account for narrative effects. Looking into the matter, I find this situation is not untypical. Critics refer to the notion all the time but few express much confidence in it. The idea of omniscience has not received much critical scrutiny.
This past year I have spent time working on this problem, in a return to narratological matters, which I had rather neglected in recent years. Studying omniscience while observing a president who espouses Total Information Awareness, manifestly thinks he has nothing to learn from anyone, and is convinced of the infallibility of his judgment of evil in its accordance with God's, I have tried to keep my rising repugnance from attaching to the concept of omniscience in narrative poetics. I have endeavored to separate the concept of narrative omniscience from current political fantasy, and I hope I have succeeded. I am reminded, though, of Virginia Woolf's comment in a letter to her sister after receiving a visit from T. S. Eliot, who talked of his religious conversion: "I mean there's something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God" (3:457-58).
I do not think the idea of omniscience is obscene, but I have reached the conclusion that it is not a useful concept for the study of narration, that it conflates and confuses several different factors that should be separated if they are to be well understood—that it obfuscates the various phenomena that provoke us to posit the idea. Wallace Martin writes, "'omniscient narration' becomes a kind of dumping ground filled with a wide range of distinct narrative techniques" (146). I believe that we should try to recover and recycle what we have dumped there. In one of the alternatives I have seen, Nicholas Royle, in a new book titled The Uncanny, proposes to replace the idea of omniscience with that of telepathy—an idea about which I will say more later. "Telepathy" does have certain advantages, especially that of estrangement. "Omniscience" may have become too familiar for us to think shrewdly about it.
The basis of "omniscience" appears to be the frequently articulated analogy between God and the author: the author creates the world of the novel as God created our world, and just as the world holds no secrets for God, so the novelist knows everything that is to be known about the world of the novel. This is all very well, but if, for instance, we do not believe in an omniscient and omnipotent God, then we cannot draw on what we know of God to illuminate properties of narrative. Even if we believe in God, there is precious little knowledge about him on which to rely. If you look into theological discussions of omniscience, you will quickly be dissuaded of any idea that God's omniscience could serve as a useful model for omniscience in narration, for discussions of divine omniscience are generally based on what is called "Perfect Being Theology." God is by definition perfect, and since to lack knowledge of any kind would be to fall short of perfection, God must be all-knowing. The main problem for theological discussions of omniscience then becomes whether the perfection of divine omniscience is compatible with free will, both of which are taken for granted as necessary and desirable. Since criticism need not presuppose either the perfection of the author or the freedom of characters, it seems unlikely that criticism can learn much from these theological debates.
The fundamental point is that since we do not know whether there is a God and what she might know, divine omniscience is not a model that helps us think about authors or about literary narration. On the contrary, one could say that the force of the analogy works the other way: the example of the novelist, who creates his world, peopling it with creatures who come to seem to us autonomous and who have interesting adventures, helps us to...
This chapter contains section titled: Some General Characteristics The Example of Vanity Fair Secularity, Money, and Virtue References and Further Reading Some General Characteristics The Example of Vanity Fair Secularity, Money, and Virtue References and Further Reading
MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 61.1 (2000) 157-180
One of the criticisms leveled at formalist criticism is that it claims to be a universal method but that its practice belies those claims. Skeptical commentators on the New Criticism have regularly conceded its effectiveness with a variety of poetic texts and have granted that a Cleanth Brooks might have had a few useful things to say about the poetry of well-wrought urns and other similarly small and obviously formed objects, but they have at the same time suggested that formalism was out of its depths when it tried to deal with prose. The looseness, bagginess, and monstrosity of the novel, they have said, were more than formalism could swallow.
This dissatisfaction with formalist criticism's purchase on the novel is especially striking because many Russian formalists -- including Shklovsky, Propp, and Bakhtin -- took the novel and the tale as their special projects. How are we to understand the charge that they somehow failed to deal with the novel when their criticism occupied itself with the novel and fictional narratives more often than not? One explanation is that some Russian formalists, Shklovsky in particular, treated language as if its highest form were poetry, understood as an intense figurativeness rather than an overarching formal structure. When Shklovsky identified poetry and prose as the twin poles of literary language, poetry could be said to appear in novels whenever one released the surprise lurking in language. "Defamiliarization" meant that the novel could be infused with such poetic moments and, indeed, that the very success of a novel at achieving such "estrangement" seemed to militate against a consciousness of the novel as a long prose narrative. Shklovskian formalism's ability to uncover the poetic in the novel came to appear as a denigration of the prosaic and quotidian in the novel. By contrast, Propp's account of narrative, based on the anonymous prose of the folktale, stressed the relationship between a whole narrative action and its parts, so that issues of sequence and variation loomed large. Propp's formalism explicitly argued that the anonymity of the folktale's authorship -- the sense that anyone and everyone in a community had had a role in the tale's development and preservation -- applied to the agents of the tales themselves: agency became such a capacious and formally empty notion that one no longer needed human actors or characters to achieve it; animals and pots and kettles could carry the narrative action as well as a human could. Action, in other words, displaced character, and any sense of characterological depth looked misplaced in an analysis in which both animals and inanimate objects might play active roles.
This essay argues that what formalist criticism has missed in the novel is character and, indeed, that the criticism developed in response to Foucault's work has been formalist not only in its way of identifying discourses but also in its efforts to dispatch character to the shadows. In his classic Foucauldian study The Novel and the Police and even in his earlier Narrative and Its Discontents, for example, D. A. Miller argues that the novel's self-reflexive operations that give readers the sense of entering a character's consciousness are discursive structures rather than the products of individual consciousness. Discursive regimes, that is, become the pots and kettles of Proppian analysis, the actors that make it clear that activity in no way requires actual persons. Insofar as self-consciousness is identified with policing, the project of inventorying and distribution that Adam Smith describes as a basic function of civil society, self-consciousness does not provide an independent standpoint from which to judge one's society but is instead one of that society's most flexible and effective tools.
As a critique of the techniques of self-reflection that have been formalized in the social sciences, Foucauldian criticism found a new set of grounds on which to eliminate character. It seized on that peculiar novelistic formal invention--style indirect libre, also known as "free indirect style" or represented speech and thought -- in such a way as to stunt the force of its identifiability as a form. Since I believe that free indirect...