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Responsible fictions: recent studies in novel theory and practice

ROBERT ALTER, Motives for Fiction. Harvard University Press, 216.00 KATHRYN HUME, Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature. Methuen, 216.00 (hardback), 26.95 (paperback) JOHNVERNON, Money and Fiction: Literary Realism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Cornell University Press, $19.95 RUTH DANON, W o r k in the English Novel: the My th of Vocation. Croom Helm, 217.95 JOSEPH KESTNER, Protest and Reform: the British Social Narrative b y Women, 1827-1867. Methuen, 215.00 GII l IAN B E t R , George Eliot. Key Women Writers, Harvester Press, 215.95 (hardback), 24.95 (paperback) JULIA SWINDELLS, Victorian Writing and Working Women . Feminist Perspectives, Polity Press, 219.50 (hardback), 26.95, paperback

First paperbacked in Britain in 1968, in the heady era of Northrop Frye‘s comprehensive intertextual schemata and just before the structuralist dawn, Auerbach’s monumental study Mimesis managed to combine at once for a generation of students the qualities of anachronism and pioneering enterprise, a paradoxical confluence which has characterised all subsequent attempts to explore the imitation of reality in literature. It takes a brave critic to swim against the stream, even when armed with the belief that there is something worth saving; and what might have seemed an undertow in the late 1960s has since surfaced as the dominant current. The seeker after verisimilitude can seem like the most desperate salvager in the modern world of dissolved connection between literature and reality. Robert Alter is engaged in just such salvage work. In his latest collection of essays, Motives for Fiction, Alter offers a richly comprehen- sive definition of mimesis in fiction, aiming to disclose by shrewd and engaged close reading and empirical sampling, rather than by tendentious system-making, just why the novel matters. His is a determinedly unfashionable assertion of the objective status of reality and a reading of representation in literature set in deliberate opposition to the view that the literary text is just one more text encoded alongside other written or culturally inscribed texts - restaurant menus, bus tickets, fashions in dress or sexual mores - on the elaborate grid of global textuality. More than a self-referential system of signs (though in some initial but ultimately sterile sense it is this), the novel matters, Alter asserts, because it represents reality: not in the simplistic sense of Charlotte Bronte’s unworkable definition, a ‘Something real, cool, and solid‘, a seamless authenticity: nor in the unambiguous moral terms of F. R. Leavis’s transparent medium; but because,

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through self-conscious and highly mediated similitudes, it provides a complex record of moral and psychological experience at work in the lives, minds and desires of people like us. Problematic in its vraisernblance, the novel nevertheless requires a correspondingly engaged response to its committed imaginings, to the belief that reality antecedes and supercedes textuality. Consequently, reading itself enjoins an emotional as well as cerebral involvement. One aim of Alter’s challenge is to bring the professional reader, the critic, to the bar of his non- professional self, the neatly termed ’real’ reader (p. 211, by whom the reading process is never undertaken with such determined affective and experiential disregard. It is surely a pertinent fact that structuralism and its aftermath have fashioned from the levelling of universal textualities a platform on which to raise higher the coterie status and esoteric privileges of the initiated reading few.

It follows from Alter‘s thesis that if recent criticism has failed to take seriously its responsibilities, then so too have some contemporary exponents of the novel. In an essay entitled ’History and the new American novel’, Alter takes to task the fantasists Barth, Pynchon and Vonnegut, the gurus of the campus in the 1960s and 1970s, not for their deployment of anti-realist modes, which as extensions of the formal properties of realism can be in other hands potent in the exposure of reality, but for the essentially arid and self-regarding manner of their pressing of history to the service of private fantasy. Retreating into the comfortingly circumscribed dualistic world of fantasy, the new American novelists reveal their inability to confront the mixed moral phenomena of historical circumstance, the challenge that Dickens and George Eliot negotiated so impressively in the nineteenth century and writers as different as Nabokov and the Latin American Manuel Puig have taken up in recent years. On the contrary, the cynical-sentimental visions of Vonnegut, the ’mere verbal vaudeville’ of Barth, and Pynchon’s albeit fertile reductiveness, are all born of the fashionable ’dehistoricisation of history’, ‘the absence of a sense that history provides mixed possibilities for achievement and change, as well as repeated occasions for disaster’ (pp. 29, 30). To address the varieties of human experience with complex differentiation, fantasy needs to intersect with mimesis, other- wise its energies are confined to some unconvincing Manichean scheme - the war of good versus evil - and its imaginative engagement is consumed in a ‘closed-circuit poesis’, ‘self-indulgent and mechanically repetitious‘ (pp. 11, 35) .

Mostly written over the last fifteen years, these essays juxtapose comments on the critical ’signs of the times’ with insights drawn from an apparently unlikely range of texts and writers, from the self-conscious artifices of Sterne and Nabokov to the ‘realist’ stances of Dickens and early Norman iMailer. Diverse in their subject-matter and local conclusions, they nevertheless contribute to one abiding concern: the duty to write and read within the world of felt historical complexity is laid upon writers and critics with all the old-fashioned force of

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a moral imperative, while at the same time Alter’s own close readings persuade by their subtle discriminations and their lively attentiveness to the literary potential within the particular moment. (He returns again and again to the America of the 1930s and after.) The tenet shared by the ’New Critics’ of the 1940s and the ‘New New Critics’ of the 1960s and 1970s, that professional reading must be purged of all that is extrinsic to the text, has had the dangerous effect of relegating human values to extra-textual oblivion. In exposing the sham of literary and critical autonomy (at work most aggressively in the anti-historicist trends of contemporary North American criticism, he feels) Alter offers a timely and intelligent plea for the re-entry of the human into the text.

As if in reply to Alter’s bid for a heterogeneous mimesis, Kathryn Hume (Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature) asserts a counter-argument for the potent mythological and metaphoric dimensions which fantasy opens up beyond the world of objective reality. To offer an initial if only partially workable distinction, mimesis dwells upon the ultimate union of analysis and experience, while fantasy exposes their irrevocable disjuncture. Where recent theorists, notably Tzvetan Todorov, foreground a notion of disjuncture to define fantasy as the most ’literary’ of all literary modes in its drawing attention to its practice as a linguistic system and so undermining the reality of the real, Alter would subsume effective opposition within the capacious bounds of a theory of imitation, of competing realist and anti-realist modes. Apparently steering a middle course, Hume proposes instead the interpenetra- tion of ’twin impulses‘ in most works of literature: ‘Fantasy and mimesis seem more usefully viewed as the twin impulses behind the creation of literature. . . . Their powers overlap, but are also often complementary and sometimes synergistic, rather than competitive’ (p. 195). And in contradistinction to the exclusive definitions of Todorov and Christine Brooke-Rose, for example, her inclusive formulation skilfully avoids that tendency to relegate fantasy to a minor if disturbing subgenre, a separable fictional practice. She writes: ’We need not try to claim a work as a fantasy any more than we identify a work as a mimesis. Rather, we have many genres and forms, each with a characteristic blend or range of blends of the two impulses’ (p. 20).

The belief that works can be precisely categorised is usually fallacigus. Labels serve the short-term interests of consistent theorising but tend to take colour specifically from the example at hand and apply only loosely or intermittently to any adumbrated group. And given that little literature is written prescrip- tively, the group will disperse and reform according to the theoriser’s prior sense of pattern. This is certainly the case when it comes to classifying the rich diversity of Victorian prose fiction. Recent Dickens scholars, intending to inaugurate a movement away from fixed categorisation, have argued not that his novels are realist social narratives, or moral fables, or fairy tales, or melodramas, as earlier

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critics had done, but that they are multi- or anti-generic. Feminist theory, committed to exploring textual interstices, has uncovered competing internal discourses in Charlotte Bronte‘s and George Eliot’s novels. But now the ’mixed’ text is itself in danger of becoming a ‘fixed category. Theories do not inhere in works, but signal the historical perspective and needs of the categoriser; and the ’mixed’ text, like Hume’s ‘twin impulses’, may be a reflection of our late twentieth-century cultural experience of duality. Like our relatively new awareness of right and left hemisphere brain functions, to label fantasy and mimesis as equal and co-existent legitimate impulses promises to free from a constricting dependence upon consensus reality the truth-telling powers of the imagination while avoiding that historical abdication which Alter senses in the new American fantasists.

Within a commodious framework, Hume examines the fantastic non- generically, as it appears in literature as various as the Odyssey, the Icelandic sagas and Malory, the novels of Kafka, Robbe-Grillet and Ursula Le Guin. She addresses such large questions as ‘how is fantasy used?’ ‘why is it used?’ ‘what is the interrelation between fantasy and form?’ and ‘how does fantasy find new frames of value for writer and audience?’. Advancing certain broad arguments about the perception of reality at different historical moments and the function of literature through history, she locates three key cultural stages: a pre- Renaissance religious consensus, Enlightenment scepticism and empiricism, and modernist and post-modernist meaninglessness. According to this scheme, realism, stripped as it is of the shared mythic dimensions of traditional literature and rigorously refusing the symbolic and metaphoric pluralism of the modern reaction, is little more than a short detour into the object world in the journey from a transcendent primordial fantasy to the alien realms of inner subjective experience. In Hume‘s phrase, realism is a ‘blind alley’ (p. 50). The fruitful interplay promised by a theory of ‘twin impulses’ is quickly eroded by a series of reductive assumptions about the possibilities within a mimetic tradition. At the same time, the argument, for all its apparent range of reference and anti- generic bias, turns increasingly for evidence to a limited, recognisable group of recent American novels: Alter’s formulist exponents of a world outside history - Barth, Pynchon and Vonnegut - figure largely. In practice arrogating to the fantastic everything that is not an untransfigured record of social reality, Hume tends to forfeit all but the loosest critical distinctions. For example, she levels with Pynchon et al. the politically engaged work of Garcia MArquez, finding no more sophisticated means for separating its historically informed insights from their compensatory idealisms, their all-consuming nostalgia - what other theorists, most recently Fredric Jameson, have defined so usefully as the diffference between ‘magic realism’ and the anti-historicist fantasies of contem- porary post-modernism.

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In withdrawing from the flexible potential of her initial thesis, one of the large assumptions Hume makes is that nineteenth-century realism held no possibility for extending reality or for reordering or presenting competing realities. On the contrary, Dickens‘s realism characteristically enjoins a metamorphosis in things perceived, a surrealism; while the web of hidden affinities which science revealed to George Eliot makes for no socially confirming method, no endorse- ment of fixed cultural assumptions, but a multiplicity of subjective viewpoints and unseen worlds. As Lydgate observes, this is a ’world made new . . . by a presentiment of endless processes filling the vast spaces’ (Middlemarch, ch. 15).

Several recent studies of nineteenth-century fiction presuppose the novel’s mimetic function while at the same time introducing the possibility that it can by the self-conscious failure of its intersection with reality alert us to other forms of representation operating largely unrecognised in the real world. According to Marx, ’Money is the external, universal means and power ~ derived not from man as man and not from human society as society - to turn imagination into reality and reality into mere imagination‘. In Marx’s theory, money is the only medium allowed this generalised symbolic function, but as it develops into the nineteenth century, the novel’s commitment to the dominant mode of realism presents the proper economy of literature in terms of a similar correspondence. John Vernon (Money and Fiction: Literary Realism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries) sets out to trace the connection, arguing that the disappearance of gold coins from circulation between 1797 and 1821 to be replaced by paper money is directly comparable to the contemporaneous social force exerted by that further paper substitution - the nineteenth-century novel’s claim to represent material reality. The introduction of paper money signalled a changed understanding of the nature of wealth and of the relation of self to society. The movement was away from the stability and security of fixed property - the landed estate and feudal obligations ~ towards a precarious and volatile agency which was to exert a consuming material and spiritual dominance individually and collectively. The mutual and problematic ground of economic and literary representation is charted in the nineteenth-century novel’s persistent reworking of the theme of money and the nature of reality. Central to its reflexive concern is the resistance of reality to the aspirations and dreams of its protagonists, and the tendency of money, so ardently pursued, to discredit rather than fulfil those dreams. In both cases, the representation so nearly replaces the object of desire that i t is in danger of disappearing in the process. We need seek for an example no further than Great Expectations.

For the most part, Vernon sticks close to specific texts, citing examples from Balzac, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, George Eliot, Trollope and James, among others. Locally persuasive, he is also irritatingly pretentious in style and displays a disconcerting lack of curiosity to establish an overall system to his study or

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to make connections between these authors and the large contemporary body of writings about money which poured out throughout the century from De Quincey, Mill, Ruskin and Marx, for example. The recent work of Marc Shell and Kurt Heinzelman, re-establishing what the Victorians well understood was the shared ground of aesthetic and commercial economies, hangs over this haphazard study and is drawn on for the odd illuminating comment, but Vernon does little to push the investigation further.

Even less convincing is Ruth Danon’s treatment of the related topic of work as portrayed in the novel (Work in the English Novel: the Myth of Vocation). Reiterating the familiar connection between the rise of the novel, the bourgeois revolution and the growth of industrialism in Britain, she notes how in Robinson Crusoe work assumes for the first time a central literary significance signalling a shift in Western cultural values. On his island, Crusoe learns slowly and painfully to find happiness and spiritual ease through work; and in Danon‘s words, ’Robinson Crusoe provides a model of the way that life can be made integral by work (p. 14). Danon proceeds to test Crusoe’s lesson against the treatment of work in three Victorian novels - David Copperfield, Great Expectations and Jude the Obscure - tracing first the domestication of work and then its subsequent divergence from human fulfilment. But while she is right to note the reverberation of the Crusoe story through the nineteenth-century novel, she fails to distinguish its important contrary implications. Crusoe is essentially an infantile and asocial myth. Enclosed on his island, alone for most of the time, Crusoe can do without the two great means of exchange, language and money: he privatises language in his diary and he buries money. And it is in terms of exchange that work is rendered meaningful in the nineteenth- century novel. Wemmick’s attempt at recreating Crusoe‘s island retreat in the London suburb of Walworth is to the point here. An embattled oasis amid the corrupt and bankrupt relations of London business, the Castle represents less the primitive defence of the early labourer than that very notion of time out, of play, which is the antithesis of modern work with its concomitant mutual obligations and has no part in a self-sufficiency programme. The ego-enforcing structures of Crusoe’s island reappear in the intersubjectiv.e world of the nineteenth-century novel as regressive fantasy, as Wemmick‘s Castle and the Peggotty family’s boat/house attest. To see in the latter a working-class model, as Danon does, is historically and socially offensive. Where Danon goes wrong is in attempting to explore the representation of work in fiction while wholly neglecting the enabling environment of work as lived experience. With no recourse to Victorian social or economic conditions, she treats her four novels to four separate, sprawling and over-simplified traditional close analyses, in which overall cogency is compromised by historical ignorance of the most naive kind and by startling aberrations of critical judgement (’Dauid Copperfield is

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a profoundly optimistic novel’ [p. 831). To mention particulars; her arbitrary assignment of misunderstood social and class labels leads to some odd con- clusions: Miss Havisham, we are informed, is an ’aristocrat’ (p. 113); the Peggotty house is ’utilitarian’ (p. 112); Tommy Traddles and David Copperfield ’absorb integrated working class values into their middle class lives’ (p. 96); and to sprinkle about the term ‘alienation’, as she does, in such a context and with no clear understanding of its precise use in the criticism of capitalist modes of production is surely unforgivable (pp. 32, 59, 60, 105). At the least some critical lines need to be drawn to correct the assumption that the author and his society share a single, simple view. Such sloppiness extends to matters of presentation, too, where failures of argument are compounded by numerous inconsistencies in citation and by typographical errors. In short, this is another of those studies spun out to book length beyond the extent of its material.

Finally, three books which begin where Danon leaves off. In her conclusion Danon acknowledges the absence of the female voice and the woman’s point of view from her examination of work and speculates whether ‘If women writers do have a particular interest in work, do they function in the culture much as women characters do in novels, educating men and society in general to integration?’ (p. 202). One might ask further what constitutes ’women‘s work’ and how does it relate to that ambiguous domain of ’woman’s influence’? These are questions which vexed women in the nineteenth century and which political feminists and cultural historians are increasingly addressing themselves to in the late twentieth century. Joseph Kestner (Protest and Reform: the British Social Nurrufiue by Womm, 1827-1867) explains the prominence of women characters in the social and industrial novel from its inception in the late eighteenth century through its development into a powerful political tool in the 1840s and 1850s, and correcting the assumption that it was predominantly male writers who advanced the genre (Dickens, Disraeli, Reynolds, Galt and Kingsley), he emphasises the innovative use women made of social fiction to register protest, expose injustice and agitate for reform in a society which allowed all women, high and low, no more direct access to the machinery of government. In a thoroughly documented interweaving of social and literary history, Kestner rescues from neglect such socially committed writers as Hannah More, Charlotte Tonna, Frances Trollope, Elizabeth Stone and Geraldine Jewsbury, not to threaten the reputation of their better-known sisters - Maria Edgeworth, Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot - but to add their voices to and provide an enriching context for what deserves to be reconsidered as a peculiarly and necessarily female tradition. In the words of Martineau who wrote for them all: ’I want to be doing something with the pen since no other means of action in politics are in a woman‘s power’ (cited in Kestner, p. 16). Kestner addresses no large theoretic issues: resting content with

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the minimal and least formal definition of realism and avoiding feminist polemics, he sets himself the modest but valuable task of the old-fashioned literary historian - to reintroduce some authors who had things to say about their society.

In the context of a new series proposing to scrutinise the political stance of certain women writers in the light of their secure canonical status, Gillian Beer takes up a more ambitious topic, the much discussed subject of George Eliot’s feminism. Whether acceptance into the canon is necessarily a sign of capitulation to the male status quo is a questioq well worth asking both for what it suggests about ’greatness’ as a term applicable to women and for the limitations it may reveal in a certain brand of feminist thinking. While noting the two chief camps into which recent feminist theorists divide when reviewing George Eliot’s achievement - the Millett and Moers camp on the one hand, which takes moral objection to the apparent dismissal of women‘s aspirations at the novels’ close, and the Gilbert and Gubar camp on the other, which finds in narrative form and structure evidences of a rebellious counter-impulse, of women’s vengeance at curtailment - Beer adds further complicating perspectives to the debate. Her analysis draws upon extraordinarily subtle and sympathetic portraits of the woman and the writer and provides a more pertinent account than has so far been given of George Eliot’s relations, intellectual and personal, with the Victorian women’s movement. The interweaving of life, work and environment asserts both the contextualily and the neutrality of George Eliot’s contribution. In an excellent chapter on Middlemarch and ’the Woman Question‘, what appeared to some of her first readers (men and women) and has resurfaced in recent feminist debate as the cruel extinguishing of Dorothea’s potential, is vigorously defended by Beer in the light of the novel‘s implicit comparison between conditions in the 1830s (when it is set) and in the 1870s (when it is written). Such internal comparison works to erase complacency that after the intervening years of campaigning the actual conditions of women‘s lives have improved. To have rescued Dorothea from the determining context of society and history would have been to sentimentalise and even ignore the urgent need for change, an act of fictional irresponsibility which George Eliot’s high demands of the novel could not accommodate. Reading George Eliot can be a disturbing experience for the modern woman reader. Unseduced by the charms of neat answers and the temporary satisfaction of righteous indignation, Beer gives full scope to George Eliot’s troubling equivocations. Capitalising on her refusal to polarise, her insistence on complicity between self and society, between author and reader, between men and women, Beer finds in George Eliot’s woman a greater representational victory and the expounder of a new realism: ’George Eliot effortlessly takes the woman as the general figure containing within it the human dilemmas of men as well as women‘ (p. 42). Eloquent, challenging and

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intelligently imaginative, with new insights on every page, this economically worded book must be among the best recent studies of George Eliot.

Barbara Bodichon, George Eliot‘s friend and a tireless campaigner for female education, argued for women’s rights to full and equal identity with men in terms of the right to work: ‘Every human being should work‘ (cited in Beer, p. 156). Finding work and being denied work pinpoints the axis around which Middlemarch society is arranged. Julia Swindells (Victorian Writing and Working Women) sets out to trace the links, and more pertinently, the divi- sions between the formative development of professional structures in the nine- teenth century, the place of women in relation to such ’professionalism’, and specifically of women writers in relation to the literary profession and the gender prejudices it established inside and outside fiction. Shifting focus in the second half of her study from the ’great’ Victorian novelists to the mainly unknown working women autobiographers - the domestic progressing through teaching to journalism, the factory worker aspiring to be a poet - she argues for the culturally inscribed differentiation between women’s and men’s work and their perceptions of it and of themselves through i t . A critique of certain entrenched nineteenth-century values/prejudices, this is not like Kestner’s book a sealed- off chunk of social and literary history but an astute summary of how things are. The powerful burden of Swindells‘s argument is ‘the past-present relation’, how gender, class and labour relations established in nineteenth-century society and promulgated in the novel (she looks in detail at the fiction and self-perception of George Eliot, Dickens, Gaskell and Thackeray) entail a particular legacy for working/writing women inside and (mainly) outside the professions now. ‘Indeed, I take the novel, in its history and in the past-present relation, to be crucial to the construction of gender relations and sexual ideology as we experience them now . . . I should say that I take the nineteenth century to be crucial to the formation of present-day gender attitudes and practices‘ (p. 6). According to this analysis, fictional representation is responsible for (conserving and enshrining and so seeming to prescribe as well as describe) far more than is suggested in any narrow mimetic brief. Swindells’s thesis has so many threads to be temporarily laid aside, taken up and interwoven that it is in places unavoidably repetitive and even clumsily articulated. That the argument outruns the structures available for it is a familiar problem in women’s writing and should not detract from the present study‘s importance as a vigorous and challenging reading of cultural history. For women writers, workers and readers living in Mrs (the exception that proves the rule) Thatcher’s neo-Victorian Britain it is only too relevant.

Note

Fredric Jameson, ’On magic realism in film’, Critical Inquiry 12 (1986), 301-25. 1