Misfit Forms: Paths Not Taken by the British Novel 9780823263455

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MISFIT FORMS

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MISFIT FORMS Paths Not Taken by the British Novel

Lorri G. Nandrea

Fordham University Press New York

2015

Copyright © 2015 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the per sistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nandrea, Lorri G. Misfit forms : paths not taken by the British novel / Lorri G. Nandrea. — First edition. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-6343-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. English fiction—18th century—History and criticism. 2. English fiction— 19th century—History and criticism. 3. Sensitivity (Personality trait) in literature. 4. Sympathy in literature. I. Title. PR851.N36 2015 823'.509—dc23 2014030498 Printed in the United States of America 17 16 15 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

To my extraordinary sister, Wendy Nandrea rest in peace

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: The Novel, Education, and Experience 1. 2. 3. 4.

ix 1

Typing Feeling: Sympathy, Sensibility, and Sentimentality

31

The Science of the Sensible: From Sterne to Charlotte Brontë

70

Sense in the Middle: Teleological vs. Cumulative Plotting

111

Verisimilitudes: Curiosity, Wonder, and Negative Capability

144

Conclusion: Woolf ’s Fin

185

Notes Works Cited Index

203 245 269

vii

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Acknowledgments

Many people have helped me along the rather circuitous paths of my personal, intellectual, and academic development, and opened vistas for me that would otherwise have remained closed. Although I’ve abandoned the hope of naming everyone to whom this book is indebted, I would particularly like to thank Michal Peled Ginsburg, my mentor and friend. Her perceptive readings of both primary sources and my arguments have shaped whatever is most cogent in these chapters. I would also like to thank the other professors with whom I was fortunate to work at Northwestern University, especially Jules Law, Scott Durham, Julia Stern, Helen Deutsch, Helmut Müller-Sievers, David Marshall, and J. Paul Hunter. I have benefited greatly from their expertise, insights, and ability to impart both complex material and curiosity about it. I am also very grateful to have had the opportunity to work with Hélène Cixous, whose writing continually nourishes and inspires me. I would also like to thank my wonderfully supportive former students and colleagues in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin– Stevens Point, especially Dejan Kuzmanovic, who patiently read and listened and offered helpful suggestions; Michael Williams, who went out of his way more than once to facilitate my progress; and all those who carved time out of busy schedules to read and comment on portions of this project: Dave Arnold, Mark Balhorn, Mary Bowman, Patricia Gott, Tomoko Kuribayashi, Sarah Pogell, Robert Sirabian, Michael Steffes, Rebecca Stephens, Jim Stokes, and Chris Williams. I am truly fortunate to have had the opportunity to write and teach in such a congenial English department. A much-appreciated sabbatical leave from the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point helped me complete this book. My sister Wendy was unfailingly ix

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Acknowledgments

enthusiastic about this project, even when I was not; I am so grateful to her and so very sorry she is not here to see it finished. I am also grateful to Deidre Lynch for her advice and support as I attempted to conceptualize this project; I learned so much about the eighteenth century from her and my fellow participants in the Tristram Shandy seminar at the National Humanities Center in 2005. For welcoming me into the community and supporting my business, Periscope Books & Tutoring LLC, I want to thank the residents of Forest Grove, Oregon, especially Alan Roth, Nancy Graham, and J. Preston Alexander. For timely acts of encouragement that meant more to me than I probably indicated, I want to thank Karin Fry and Jody Greene. I am also deeply grateful to Rachel Ablow; Sarah Kareem; Thomas Lay; the late, much-missed Helen Tartar; and the editors at Fordham University Press, whose extremely perceptive suggestions certainly improved the book’s rigorousness and readability. Inside and outside of academia, I have been exceptionally lucky to fi nd friends who enrich and sustain my personal life while introducing me to new idioms and perspectives. Temporal and geograph ical distances notwithstanding, my work is much indebted to my longtime friends, especially Kelly Wheatley, Steve Goodfriend, Tanya Hinkel, Gayle Fornataro, and Donny Lee. For supporting me in so many ways, through thick and thin, I want to thank my parents, Ann and Larry Nandrea. For bringing to the middle of my life happiness utterly unexpected and probably undeserved, I am forever grateful to Steve Sill. An earlier version of the third section of Chapter 2, “Sympathy and Sensibility in Jane Eyre,” was published in Novel as “Desiring Difference: Sympathy and Sensibility in Jane Eyre” (Novel 37, no. 1/2, 112–34. Copyright, 2003, Novel, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the present publisher, Duke University Press). For their helpful feedback at that stage, I would like to thank Nancy Armstrong and the readers at Novel. Portions of my article “Objectless Curiosity” (Narrative 15, no. 3, October 2007: 335–56) appear in revised form in the first section of Chapter 4. I would like to thank Jim Phelan for his generous and insightful suggestions on that essay, and for giving me permission to reprint. I would also like to thank Floating Island Publications for permission to reprint Cole Swenson’s poem “Now the Eye” (It’s Alive She Says, Point Reyes Station: Floating Island Publications, 1984), and the Laurence Sterne Trust for allowing me to use the image of the marbled page that appears on the cover.

MISFIT FORMS

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Introduction The Novel, Education, and Experience

[B]e they good or bad, useless or necessary, [novels] circulate over the land in every possible form, and enter more or less into the education of almost every one who can read. They hold in solution a great deal of experience. It would therefore surely be a most useful thing to provide rules by which the experience might be precipitated. . . . We are not so vain as to suppose that we have done much towards the accomplishment of such a task. —James Fitzjames Stephen, “The Relation of Novels to Life,” 1855 (118)

Today’s scholars agree that the origins of the English novel were messy and heterogeneous: As a form, the novel emerged in fits and starts from a primordial soup of other textual kinds. Yet the story of the relationship between eighteenth- and nineteenth- century English novels is often narrated as a more linear, sequential progress or rise: Trials and errors on the part of novelists like Fielding and Richardson gave rise to the more perfect aesthetic achievements of writers like Austen, who opened the door for the novel’s full flowering during the Victorian era. Conceptualized in this way, the history of the novel resembles narratives of biological evolution that situate the homo sapiens as a culminating triumph, a quasi-inevitable outcome that subsumes and explains a series of struggles and problems. Yet scientifically rigorous understandings of evolution challenge the inevitability of this outcome by highlighting the role of accidental variations and the perennial presence of alternative paths. Likewise, a closer look at the complicated junctions that were negotiated during the eighteenth-century development of the novel in England illuminates not just achievements but also exclusions—roads less traveled, or divergences overshadowed by 1

2

Introduction

dominant trends in the nineteenth- century novel. As Franco Moretti puts it, “the course selected by Eu ropean audiences ( . . . the canon) is only one of the many coexisting branches that could also have been chosen (and weren’t).” Using graphs, maps, and diagrams to re-examine patterns of selection and reproduction in literary history, Moretti concludes: “What the [diagram] says is that literary history could be different from what it is. Different: not necessarily better” (“Slaughterhouse” 303).1 While heeding the caveat that different is not necessarily better, this book traces a few such divergent paths, roads less traveled by the British novel but also less mapped by the novel’s subsequent cadre of critics. My goal is to identify variant forms that have not been fully recognized as such, to bring out later re-emergences of forms or ideals that seemed to die out in the eighteenth century, and to theorize their characteristics and effects. My approach is less empirical than Moretti’s; though I work closely with a range of primary materials, this project also engages in a kind of speculative reconstruction. What if sense-based practices of typographical emphasis, and the correlated understanding of feeling as a sense-based communication, had not lost out to the idealizations of “transparent” typography and correlated paradigms of sympathetic identification? What was lost when process-based cumulative narrative structures were declared primitive in relation to the unified teleological plot? The latter development was closely linked to the nineteenth-century novel’s subordination of wonder, with its dynamics of attraction and passive absorption, to active curiosity as an end-oriented desire to know. What visions of the novel’s value as an arena for experience were eclipsed, or truncated, when novel reading was linked to epistemological gain? To avoid making the alternatives sound as though they have always depended on opposition to accepted norms, I have tried to use a vocabulary of divergence, variation, and selection rather than subversion, particularly in discussing eighteenth- century texts. Once nature or culture has selected and propagated a par ticu lar form as the dominant one, the species, it becomes difficult to recognize rival forms as such, or to remember that the species originated as one variant among others.2 Darwin’s model is useful in this respect. Concluding that it is impossible to draw rigorous categorical distinctions between a species, a variety, and “mere individual differences” (67), Darwin uses the terms heuristically. He sometimes situates varieties (“less distinct and more fluctuating forms”) as “incipient

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3

species,” though not all varieties “necessarily attain the rank of species. They may whilst in this incipient state become extinct, or they may endure as varieties for very long periods. . . . If a variety were to flourish so as to exceed in numbers the parent species, it would then rank as the species, and the species as the variety; or it might come to supplant and exterminate the parent species; or both might co- exist, and both rank as independent species” (67). Of course, literary texts are not biological organisms and the mechanisms of inheritance do not work in exactly the same way. For me, Darwin’s work provides only a model or analogy, not a direct link between literature and biology. The broad outlines of the evolutionary framework suggest an understanding of historical development that can function as a useful corrective to more teleological narratives of literary history, without subsuming literary studies to science. In claiming that certain novelistic practices or ideals “were selected” over others, I mean to embrace the interaction—which is only roughly calculable—between forces exerted by individuals and broader forces that exceed the consciousness or will of any individual: language, power, cultural milieu, technology, historical circumstances, and so on. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, a book is best understood as a “nodal point,” a dynamic, unstable intersection of forces that includes, of course, those of readers— even generations of readers (A Thousand Plateaus 3–25). If we understand the less-favored practices and ideals as divergent alternatives whose independent possibilities have been largely eclipsed, rather than primitive stages that were absorbed into the novel’s central lines of development, studying these practices allows us to imagine other possibilities for the novel and its reception. This book explores the character and fate of four such variant forms in the history of the genre. First, texts printed in England during the seventeenth and early eighteenth century routinely display a heavy use of typographical devices designed to create variations in emphasis. Later in the century, this practice was called into question and associated more exclusively with the literature of feeling. By the early nineteenth century, it had dropped out almost completely: Pages perceived by earlier readers as beautifully ner vous came to appear “confused and tiresome to the eye” (Hansard 373). Far from being an incidental effect of technological progress, as is sometimes assumed, this choice rested on the question of whether or not texts ought to communicate affect through the channels of the senses. In Chapter 1, I draw on an

4

Introduction

array of printer’s manuals and printed texts, together with philosophical arguments by Adam Smith and David Hume, to trace the ways competing understandings of the production and transmission of feeling informed changes to typographical practices. Adam Smith’s influential re-theorization of sympathy, which roots our feelings for others in private, subjective acts of imaginative identification, became the dominant model of feeling and a central principle by which the moral and literary value of the novel could be asserted. Two other models of feeling, both more closely tied to physiology, simultaneously lost credibility. Though the terms are slippery, I draw a distinction between “sentimentality,” which relies on the repetition of familiar tropes or structures to elicit emotion, and “sensibility,” which centers instead on the repetition of difference, aligning affect with provocation and the production of intensities. As the texts of John Dunton and other writers demonstrate, typographical variations produce affect in the latter manner. The suppression of typographical emphasis can be understood as actively instrumental in promoting sympathetic identification, with all its consequences for the practices most widely embraced by nineteenth-century British novelists. Yet unlike biological forms, which may go extinct once and for all, literary forms remain physically and culturally accessible to later generations, and may be regenerated. In Chapter 2, I trace re-emergences of one losing model of feeling: “sensibility.” Through readings of Tristram Shandy, A Sentimental Journey and Jane Eyre, I analyze the patterns of desire, sexuality, and narration that correspond to this understanding of feeling. Sterne was able to exploit the aesthetic, erotic, and ethical implications of sensibility in a uniquely forceful and overt manner that was not reproduced by later writers. However, applying Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of “dynamic repetition” to literary history helps us glimpse and analyze relationships between historically disparate works that repeat not each other, but the same virtual problem under different sets of historical conditions. This perspective makes it possible to understand the peculiar tensions in Jane Eyre as products of a confl ict between the dynamics of sympathy, which had become mainstream, and those of sensibility, which had become subversive. In Chapters 3 and 4, I take up questions of plot and structure, focusing on eclipsed alternatives to the teleological understandings of plot so closely associated with the nineteenth-century English novel. First, I examine

The Novel, Education, and Experience

5

the eighteenth-century roots of the nineteenth- century value on closed, unified forms and the teleological structures that produce closure. One context in which we find detailed discussion of these structures is the work of eighteenth-century philologists, or grammarians. The grammarians praised “periodic” sentences because they withhold the main idea, cultivating a sense of incompleteness that is finally erased by the closing provision of suspended information. The fi nal clause retroactively completes the sense and unifies the whole. By contrast, the grammarians discouraged the use of “cumulative” sentences, which begin with the main idea and then add information. Cumulative structures operate via conjunction; because they lack principles of hierarchy and closure, the grammarians viewed them as, specifically, formless. These value judgments are closely paralleled in Victorian discussions of novelistic plots. Historians of the novel have often identified the maturation of the genre with the development of a unifying plot that resembles a periodic sentence writ large. In recent decades, this style of plotting, together with the very premises of teleological thought, have been deconstructed and variously critiqued.3 However, the enormous aesthetic and epistemological power of teleological patterns has made it difficult to recognize alternative structures as independent alternatives—variant forms— rather than failures, primitive precursors, or deliberate subversions. As I try to demonstrate in Chapter 3, the grammatical distinction between periodic and cumulative sentence structures provides a useful tool for recognizing and analyzing a strategy of “cumulative” plotting. Cumulative structures work as formal analogues of processes whose ends are immanent rather than deferred. Motored by “interest” (as theorized by Silvan Tompkins) rather than desire or suspense, they encourage readers to associate pleasure with process itself— activity—rather than activity’s deferred aim. Through readings of Robinson Crusoe and Mary Barton, I analyze the specific capacities of this alternative style of plotting, and suggest the special relevance of cumulative structures to representations of work and the working class. Teleological plots engineer a reader’s desire to know, whether this desire is oriented toward the future (suspense: what will happen next?) or the past (curiosity: what has happened here?).4 Because the answers to both questions are located in the pages yet to be read, both suspense and curiosity, thus defi ned, drive the reader’s desire to reach the end. In the taxonomies

6

Introduction

of the passions still central to eighteenth- century discourse, curiosity was opposed not to suspense but to “wonder”: a passive state of absorbed attraction associated with the marvelous. In Samuel Johnson’s analysis, the “incredibilities” of “romance”— giants and dryads—might provoke wonder, but not the prosaic world of everyday life that newer, more realistic novels sought to depict. From this perspective, the transition from romance to realism is marked by an affective shift from wonder to curiosity. However, in Chapter 4 I argue that it is possible to trace in Victorian realist novels an intermittent interest in the project of representing the ordinary world in the key of wonder. These moments suggest the novel’s capacity to achieve a special kind of verisimilitude: to provide for readers the simulacrum of sensory experience by representing the par ticu lar as such—that is, by representing the phenomenal world as something that cannot be simply assimilated to the novel’s economies of meaning or the subject’s economies of desire. As I will show, such moments occur with some regularity in scenes that trace a character’s recovery from a faint or fever—moments at which the ego is too depleted to interpret everything in terms of its own interests. Yet Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge provides more extended exploration of the relationships between desire’s teleologies and pleasurable sensory apprehension, both within the diegesis and on the level of narrative structure. Hardy’s novel suggests that such experience requires a passive openness akin to wonder, made possible for characters and readers by the failure or derailment of teleological patterns and the end-oriented desires with which they are associated. In attempting to articulate a literary history that takes into account the futures of forms that did not win the struggle for acceptance, I have found Deleuze’s model of dynamic repetition and the “virtual” most useful. Deleuze’s work suggests that unrealized outcomes of “virtual” problems make up a past that has never been present, and therefore remains charged with potential to return, to become the new. His paradigm helpfully stresses the non-linear, dialogic relationships between pasts, presents, and futures, facilitating studies that cross the boundaries of literary periods.5 I have also drawn on Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of sexuality, which has helped me delineate one of two underlying distinctions that factored into each of the divergences just outlined and into the processes of selection that favored certain forms over others. This first distinction lies be-

The Novel, Education, and Experience

7

tween “oedipal” and “anti- oedipal” (or simply non-oedipal) patterns of desire. Following Deleuze and Guattari, I use the term “oedipal” to signify not just the Oedipal crisis, but a model that roots desire in lack, loss, or “want.” Positing lack as the origin of desire grants it a teleological trajectory aimed at an “object” (thing, person, sensation . . . ) that will fi ll the lack and hence put an end to desire, itself experienced as a state of tension. Nineteenth-century British literature and culture strongly favored forms and styles that work to reproduce oedipal patterns of desire. Yet many eighteenth-century forms and styles did not reproduce oedipal patterns, as the much-maligned novel of sensibility demonstrates quite vividly; these came to constitute roads less traveled in the nineteenth century. In ways that are not always obvious, the historical preference for forms that reproduce oedipal desire, and the rejection of those that do not, shaped the course of the British novel in the nineteenth century. However, as I have suggested, one can locate par ticular cases in which nineteenth-century writers take up the rejected alternatives and use them subversively in relation to oedipal patterns that had become powerfully normative. The same is true of the second distinction, which concerns the relationship between knowledge and experience (including feeling and sensation). As Richard Eldridge puts it, Within modernity, the stresses that force themselves into consciousness . . . come increasingly from the late eighteenth century on to involve confl ict between the claims of the sensible (what we discern and attach ourselves to through embodied feeling) and the intelligible (what we discern and attach ourselves to via distantiation and the controlled measurement of what there is). Claims of intimacy, solidarity, and cathexis to daily routine jostle against claims to knowledge, objectivity, and clearsightedness. . . . Feeling is itself internalized, by being cast as something “subjective” with mea surable intensities and durations, and its claims to being a mode of responsive knowledge are challenged. (7–8)

Eldridge’s formulation indirectly reflects his Hegelian orientation (which I do not share), a point of view that values literature for its ability to mediate between the sensible and the intelligible, or form and content, or the par ticu lar and the universal. Bracketing dialectics, however, the confl ict Eldridge indicates between the claims of the sensible (feeling, duration,

8

Introduction

embodied experience) and the intelligible (knowledge, understanding) played a crucial role in the competitions between structures and values that underwrite the junctions outlined previously. In par ticu lar, during the early nineteenth century, the novel came under increasing pressure to justify itself by subordinating the sensory and affective experience of reading to the gain of knowledge—including the learning of moral lessons.6 For both readers and characters, experience was increasingly situated as a means to such ends, not an end in itself. To put it otherwise, embodied, time-bound, or process-based experience was subordinated to knowledge understood as outcome or discrete product, something that completes and negates the process that led to its acquisition. The nineteenth- century subordination of experience to knowledge or instruction worked together with the preference for oedipal patterns: Both emphasize a deferred end as a moment of closure that subsumes the process and relieves the tension of anticipation or uncertainty. By contrast, the less favored forms—the roads least traveled out of the eighteenth century— situate experience (feeling, sensation, process) either as something fundamentally inseparable from knowing (not just necessary precursors), or as something that has moral or ontological value in itself. These texts privilege the claims of the sensible by “conducting”—in both musical and thermodynamic senses— experiences that resist translation into epistemological gain. The novel is a famously capacious, polymorphic genre that encompasses numerous species, variations, and individual differences. I certainly do not want to claim that I have enumerated all of the variations, not even just for the English novel in the eighteenth century. Likewise, I do not want to claim the variations I do identify can only be found in the small set of texts presented here as examples. Yet the selection of texts is not arbitrary, if “arbitrary” means that every text could be read in the same way. These novels, particularly when read together, stood out to me as vivid instances that might help us recognize similar forms elsewhere. My pairings of writers that may seem odd bedfellows (Sterne and Charlotte Brontë, Defoe and Gaskell) is not mere whimsy. If we take seriously the Deleuzian proposition that virtual problems haunt literary history, returning to be re-articulated by different writers under different historical circumstances, we can use the resonances between historically disparate texts to discern forms that are difficult to apprehend, precisely because they diverge from

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9

the novel’s central lines of development. Conversely, this perspective may help us recognize neglected aspects of even widely studied, solidly canonical Victorian novels. Indeed, what has been neglected in these widely studied novels are dynamics that require non-canonical practices of reading. In this respect, my project aligns with the recent work of scholars such as Amy King, Elaine Freedgood, and Amanpal Garcha, all of whom bring out the ways that late twentieth- and early twenty-fi rst-century critical interests and instruments have reduced or distorted the diverse appeals of Victorian novels.7 When Victorian writers were called upon to defend the novel, they often did so by situating it as an instrument of education. Today, the link between literature and the gain of knowledge (whether historical, psychological, social, political, cultural, or linguistic) more often functions as a rationale for the study of the novel, or of literature more generally. In classroom settings, reading for epistemological gain, or to acquire skills in analysis and critical thinking, is sometimes contrasted to “reading for plea sure” (a more experience-based motive). Reading for pleasure is often associated with passivity— allowing oneself to be swept up in the fiction— as opposed to the active critical reading that is more productive (of “readings,” learning, searching discussions). Perhaps literary study in the twenty-fi rst century is characterized by too much production and too little pleasure, and perhaps we are too quick to dismiss the value of pleasure, especially the complex, absorbed pleasures of reading literary texts. Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine how the pleasure of reading literature could possibly work to justify the existence of literature courses in today’s academy. On the contrary, the increasing pressure to implement empirical measurements of educational achievement (“outcomes-based assessment”) is likely to further reinforce the situation of literature as an epistemological instrument: a means to acquire pre-defi ned, empirically demonstrable knowledge or skills, which are positioned as educational ends. This situation forms a context for my project not only because it is happening as I write, but also because it is the actual outcome, in direct and indirect ways, of the history I trace. The trend toward assessment can be understood as one manifestation of two broader historical developments: the ascendency of the social sciences and the growing dominance of “instrumentalization” or “means-end reasoning” in the culture at large, both of which are squeezing out other understandings of value and legitimacy.8

10

Introduction

As instrumental reasoning permeates the culture, elements and relationships traditionally exempted on an aesthetic or ethical basis (other people, for example, are not supposed to be treated as merely a means to one’s own end) become vulnerable to it. More locally, the instrumentalization of education that assessment practices reflect, together with the strong orientation of recent literary scholarship toward cultural critique, risks occluding something we might loosely call literature’s experiential dimension: the “positive” value of the experience of reading literary texts, in contradistinction to both the skills one gains from literary study and the “negative” ways texts construct readers as ideologically desirable subjects. Within English studies, we see the ascendency of social science methodologies reflected in the recent popularity of cognitive approaches (including, for example, the use of MRI machines to measure reader responses). Scholars who have embraced cognitive approaches express diverse aims,9 but have in common an attempt to substitute empirical evidentiary standards for longstanding protocols of literary argumentation (such as the use of reasoning and “literary evidence” to support an interpretive claim). Yet as the early theorists of new historicism were at pains to point out, when another discipline or topos (history, science) is taken to provide a ground for literary study, the other discipline’s own riven ontology and epistemological circularities have to be suppressed or ignored. In other words, one mistakes for ground what is itself an unstable and fundamentally discursive figure. At the same time, adopting scientific evidence, methods, and objectives entails relinquishing, at least in part, the critical perspective on the discourses of science (including the discourse of assessment) that literary studies— and literature itself—might otherwise provide. New historicist critics have been careful not to position history as a stable ground against which literature can be read, yet this approach carries its own risk, which is to exaggerate the time-boundedness of literary texts. From a Deleuzian perspective, novels defi ne a set of potentials— concretely, a set of potential readings—but the set is not limited by the context of origin. A reading depends on the relation between a text and the forces with which it comes in contact: an individual reader, other texts that resonate or form a constellation with this one, a set of historical circumstances that select from the set of potential readings a set of possible readings—readings that can be actualized in a par ticu lar place and time. Because the accidents of history cannot be known in advance, the set of potential readings re-

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11

mains indefi nitely expandable. From this perspective, a literary text is neither “timeless” nor altogether and forever bound for its sense to its moment of production. Where the former neglects the impact of historical context, the latter posits the moment of origin as a center that grounds and limits possible interpretations—limits what Derrida calls “play.” Such an approach marginalizes questions about the serial reception of a text over time and suppresses consideration of what we might call the “literary present”: the manner in which the present of a literary text—the event of the text—is repeated each time we read it. To suggest that a text is fully circumscribed by its moment of origin also mutes or denies the limited autonomy of the literary imagination. Yet this autonomy might be said to make the difference between history and the literary. It renders the literary text not “timeless” (i.e., located in a realm of the ideal that transcends history, culture, and ideology), but to some degree untimely: capable of being placed into communication with the specific dynamics of an indefinite series of future presents. Finally, in their less nuanced versions, both cognitive and historicist approaches illustrate an observation made by Paul de Man: In a manner that is more acute for theoreticians of literature than for theoreticians of the natural or the social world, it can be said that they do not quite know what it is they are talking about, not only in the sense that the whatness, the ontology of literature is hard to fathom, but also in the more elusive sense that, whenever one is supposed to speak of literature, one speaks of anything under the sun (including, of course, oneself ) except literature. (“Hypogram and Inscription” 30)

In one sense, “formalism” signifies a resistance to this impulse to speak about anything else instead: It is an attempt to address the literary per se. If the great difficulty of locating or defining “the literary” makes formalism always a gamble, it also makes the impulse to talk about anything else instead a kind of abdication. Cognitive, new historicist, and the wide array of cultural and socio-political approaches to literature do not necessarily exclude formal analysis, but they do compete with it for limited time, space, and attention. If we take form to be a locus of specificity in the literary text, the eclipse of formal analysis basically flattens literary discourse into information or polemic. Diminished attention to form (which has prompted recent calls for a “new formalism”10) has traveled hand in hand

12 Introduction

with a pedagogical emphasis on teaching critical thinking and social awareness (as opposed to, for example, poetics). Because critical thinking skills can be learned and practiced in relation to a wide range of materials, this goal really does not justify asking students to read long, difficult literary texts. Also, to the extent that the literary text is situated as an appendage of damaging ideological forces, and the critical analysis as a kind of prophylactic (protecting the reader from falling prey to oppressive reinscriptions), the question logically arises: Why read literature in the first place? As Mark Roche puts it, Culture studies often operates with a negative model of culture, seeking to uncover and expose the mistaken ideologies that drive the production and reception of cultural artifacts. . . . [W]hen we do not introduce a relationship to culture that is at least partially positive, we are at a loss in justifying the study of culture to students who aren’t already invested in it. . . . This negative approach ignores the extent to which culture is also the source of collective identity, which is not only to be despised. (105– 6)

If critical approaches oriented toward the “hermaneutics of suspicion” make it difficult to posit the “positive” value of reading literature, it is also the case that the value of teaching critique is less clear today than it seemed in previous decades. In many contexts, teaching today’s college students to think critically—if this means, as it often does, a habit of skepticism about the apparent message; the assumption that one must probe a text to discern the “real” message or motives that underlie what it seems to be claiming—resembles shooting fish in a barrel. The negativity of critique is now routinely embraced in popu lar culture, especially television; students come pre-jaded. Modes of critical reading that seemed important and purposive when the culture was in the habit of seriously asserting false values are less obviously effective or relevant when the culture is in the habit of mocking its own hypocrisies.11 Mark Edmundson argues that, paradoxically, when academic discourse simply mirrors the saturation of culture in irony, “we are leaving our students where we found them. And if we leave them in the grasp of current social dogma, we are probably leaving them in the world of the normal nihilist” (60). Meanwhile, the door opens more widely for religious fundamentalism as the only place to fi nd positive assertions of value, the only opportunity for affirmation.

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13

Both Edmundson and Roche advocate returning to literary pedagogies that were more widely embraced before the influx of theory: Idealist, Romantic, or humanist paradigms that defend the value of great literature as a source of beauty, moral insight, and individual self- development. Yet the fundamental assumptions of such paradigms (the unique essence of the individual person vis-à-vis social and political forces; the existence of the transcendental Ideal, universal or normative standards for aesthetic judgment, the dialectical movement of history toward an absolute synthesis) have been rigorously discredited by the massive intellectual work of twentieth-century theory and criticism. From this perspective, the task is to fi nd ways of attending to the positive aspects of the experience of reading literature without simply repressing the insights of recent intellectual history. This task may also provide opportunities to re-assert the value of the arts and humanities as a preserve for the non-instrumental: a place where that which defies the subordination of means (process, experience) to ends can be engaged and appreciated.12 To echo James Fitzjames Stephen, I am “not so vain as to suppose that I have done much toward the accomplishment of such a task.” However, as an attempt to set the stage for the readings that follow, I will devote the rest of this introduction to sketching an approach to reading literary texts that may help attune us to their non-instrumental, experiential dimension. If the mainstream or dominant lines of development in the British novel point toward linking literature with knowledge (and oedipal desire), what we might call the virtual history of the novel’s misfit forms points instead toward linking literature with singularity, an important concept that can carry us beyond, without invalidating, the hermeneutics of suspicion. To support this claim, I will explicate three lines of thought about singularity before exploring the way certain novels help readers learn to recognize and value the singular.

Style as Singularity That the word “singularity” is difficult to define seems wholly appropriate. In physics, the term denotes a point at which mathematical description breaks down, and is sometimes used as a synonym for “black hole.” In math as well as physics, a singularity is something that eludes formalization; it

14

Introduction

cannot be fully described, or inscribed, within the given symbolic system. In common parlance, the word may mean, to cite a few OED definitions, “a solitary instance” (II4b); “the fact or quality of differing . . . from others or from what is generally accepted” (7); “individual character or property; individuality; distinctiveness” (8a); “a peculiar, exceptional, or unusual feature or characteristic” (9c). Keeping these defi nitions in view, we can draw into the mix three related philosophical uses of the term. First, for Deleuze, singularity names a relation between the actual and the virtual, and also relations within the actual that have their basis in the virtual. The dynamics of desire, of difference and repetition, motor a process by which a virtual idea is differentiated and actualized, “repeated.” Because the virtual idea does not precede its actualization, the repetition that actualizes it is not a copy, but a “singularity.” At the same time, as the virtual idea is repeatedly differentiated and actualized, the actual singularities that repeat the same virtual idea form series that Deleuze sometimes calls “simulacral” (the actual singularities are simulacra of the virtual idea).13 What we sense in simulacra (if we are not too blinded by a quest for identity) is difference, or as Deleuze puts it, “that which can only be sensed, the very being of the sensible, difference, potential difference, and difference in intensity as the reason behind qualitative diversity” (Difference and Repetition 57). In The Singularity of Literature, Derek Attridge develops a different definition of singularity as part of his endeavor to specify art and literature, with a focus on the conditions of possibility for artistic or literary invention. Attridge argues against associating singularity with the unique par ticular: “Singularity . . . is generated not by a core of irreducible materiality or vein of sheer contingency to which the cultural frameworks we use cannot penetrate but by a configuration of general properties that, in constituting the entity . . . go beyond the possibilities pre-programmed by a culture’s norms” (63). For him, singularity designates a special event of difference that allows a work of art to transfigure a historically and culturally specific set of possibilities: “The singularity of the artwork is not simply a matter of difference from other works . . . but a transformative difference, a difference, that is to say, that involves the irruption of otherness or alterity into the cultural field” (136). In his analysis, singularity occurs within the dimension of representation, or “writing” in the large Derridian sense; thus, singularity is subject to iteration and imitation:

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what is singular about any artwork is its redeployment of the resources of the culture, understood as sets of relations rather than concrete objects; and this redeployment, because it introduces new perspectives and relationships which can be understood as the implementation of new codes and norms, always offers the possibility of imitation, translation, parody, and forgery. (73)

Like other poststructuralist theorists, Attridge does not posit thinkable alternatives to the realm or paradigm of the sign and its “codes and norms.” The work of Deleuze and Guattari does posit such alternatives: For them, representation is not all-encompassing. Representation is defined by its subordination of difference to identity: Difference only enters repre sentation to the extent that it is mediated by identity, resemblance, similitude or analogy. This definition of representation is congruent with poststructuralist paradigms of writing or the sign, in which identity or presence appears to precede difference (but does not). However, for Deleuze and Guattari, neither the sensible nor the work of art is necessarily limited to or by representation. In other words, they do not exclude from consideration, or from the realm of possible experience, what is outside of representation. Positing, as they do, a “subrepresentative domain” permits us to re-introduce the possibility of apprehending something that is too par ticu lar to be signified; in fact, to suggest that we do this all the time. We can make this assertion without disputing structuralist and poststructuralist accounts of the way sign systems work. Saussure famously gives the example of “two ‘8:25 p.m. Geneva-to-Paris’ trains . . . We feel that it is the same train each day, yet everything—the locomotives, coaches, personnel—is probably different. Or if a street is demolished, then rebuilt, we say that it is the same street even though in a material sense, perhaps, nothing of the old one remains.” The street remains the same “because it does not constitute a purely material entity”; rather, its identity is determined by its position in a system or structure, its differential relationship to all other elements in that same structure. Saussure contrasts these examples to the completely different case of a suit which has been stolen from me and which I fi nd in the window of a second-hand store. Here we have a material entity that consists solely of the inert substance— the cloth, its lining, its trimmings, etc. Another suit would not be mine regardless of

16

Introduction its similarity to it. But linguistic identity is not that of the garment; it is that of the train and the street. (108– 9)

Here, Saussure draws a distinction between two types of identity, one of which is structurally determined in ways that overwrite, so to speak, the material particularity of a thing (street, train, or word). However, the fact that each of these things has material particularity is not in question. If I can recognize my suit in the secondhand store, I can also recognize this train car, with the piece of green bubble gum stuck to the seat and “Julia loves Diego” scratched into the window, when it comes again, perhaps as part of the #17 train, or perhaps as part of the #13. Par ticular material features do not stop streets, trains, or words from functioning as elements in sign systems, but by the same token, the fact that streets, trains, and words derive identity from sign systems does not stop them from having material particularity, or singularizing features. Simply, these features are irrelevant from the point of view of structure or sign systems: In the most multivalent sense, they do not signify. Rather, they belong to the nongrammatological dimensions of style and singularity, which are related to problems of recognition rather than signification. Like Attridge, Deleuze and Guattari are interested in the type of experience that literature can provide, the type of event it can become, and the different ways it might work together with whatever it encounters: “the book as assemblage with the outside, against the book as image of the world” (A Thousand Plateaus 23). Unlike Attridge, however, Deleuze and Guattari argue that literature— art in general—has the potential to orient us toward the subrepresentative domain, “the intense world of differences” that cannot be signified (Difference and Repetition 56–57). This world of intensities, of difference differing and producing repetitions, is what we apprehend on the outside of representation. For example, in the essay “He Stuttered,” Deleuze uses the phrase “minor mode” to discuss writers who “invent a minor use for the major language in which they express themselves completely: They minorize language, as in music, where the minor mode refers to dynamic combinations in a state of perpetual disequilibrium . . . they cause [language] to bifurcate and to vary in each one of its terms, according to a ceaseless modulation.” This minorization of language “tends toward a limit that is no longer syntactic or grammatical . . . [it] fi nds the destination of its own tensions in these gasps or pure intensities that mark the

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limits of language. . . . The asyntactic limit is not external to language . . . : it is the outside of language, not outside of it” (27–28). In the domain of the subrepresentative, on the outside of language, resides the dynamic quantum dimension of micro- experiences, including all the transient and unmemorable contacts between, say, my fi ngers and a stone, the way that touching this stone with this hand at this time produces, among other things, a sensation. This is the experimental, experiential dimension that contains, alongside encounters that may become significant, all the trivial encounters and relations, all the singular surfaces that defi ne each other through differences so minor and pointless that they cannot be identified or said to contribute to the production of identity. They are oriented, instead, toward the formation of temporary connections, “assemblages,” and the production, or dynamic repetition, of (sensory) singularities. Such assemblages are always open to further additions (for example, an ant might crawl across my hand as I touch the stone) but because they have no identity, defi nition, or teleology, it is not possible to call them incomplete or lacking. To say that these singular encounters take place in the domain of the subrepresentative is to set them at a distance from the subject, and the subject’s discursive projects— especially its epistemological projects. From the point of view of the subject, much of this activity takes place “off the record,” as it were, in a mode of inattentiveness. In other words, minor experimental encounters are taking place while the subject (more precisely the cogito, the I who thinks itself ) is “elsewhere,” as it almost always is, otherwise occupied, absorbed in some pursuit. Meanwhile, the body’s myriad bits and capacities, its microforces, engage in exploratory libidinal connections with the foreign surfaces of the world, activities too peripheral to subjectivity to require repression. This dimension of experience is part of what makes the individual so much more complex than the subject, whose bids at bundling up and marshalling its forces will always be imperfect, whose self-presentation as a whole is just waiting to come undone when attention is re- directed and the body’s singularities can vacantly explore sheer tangibility, trying if the label peels off and rolling it up in little balls, breaking straws in pieces and poking them into the ground.14 From a Deleuzian perspective, we do not read singularity as a signifier for something else. Indeed, recognizing singularity as such precisely stops

18

Introduction

us from treating it as a signifier and opens up other possible modes of encounter: attraction, connection, repetition, differentiation. For example, if I repeat with my own physiology the manner in which another person shrugs her shoulders, this might not signify a wish to have or be her, or something else that she (or her shrug) represents to me, but rather a somatic attraction to that movement or to moving in that new way (what does it feel like? What effects can I produce with it? How does it alter my physical vocabulary?). Rather than signaling a desire to become that other or whatever she seems to signify, such adaptations can be (not merely represent) minor experimental tropisms of becoming- other. To make this claim is not to deny that powerful economies of identification, representation, and oedipal desire are operative in the culture and determine large swaths of subjectivity and signification, but rather to assert that they do not exercise a monopolistic hold on bodies, desire, or writing— on either literature or lived experience. The work of Deleuze and Guattari shows us one line of thought about singularity; Attridge indicates a second. In a third line stemming from phenomenology, phi losophers have worked to substitute singularity for subjectivity as the central point of reference in ethical projects, including the projects of recognizing and respecting otherness, and forming communities that do not rely on acts of exclusion.15 In their work, the emphasis on the other’s singularity—the other’s “face,” in Levinas’s figure— derives much of its force and poignancy from its connection to mortality. That is to say, the singular is quintessentially mortal: that which does not return, because it is only once. Alphonso Lingis, for example, has worked to replace the central existential relation to one’s own mortality with an ethical relationship to the mortality of others: “Nietz sche has identified love of the world with affi rmation, the affi rmation that a life utterly, excessively, affi rmative of each of its own moments puts on the fragmentary, contingent, and enigmatic events outside itself as a blessing spread singularly over each. But these things concern one, and affect one, by distressing one with their mortality” (Deathbound 190). Whatever is singular, from this perspective, will disappear when this one dies, as opposed to whatever is common: a common nature that will be preserved in other members of a type or species. The ethical challenge, then, is to recognize or witness what is mortal

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in the other, not shared, particularly when it is on the point of disappearing. Lingis writes: The alterity of the other is that with which he or she faces me. The respect for the other is a superficial contact, tangency of surfaces of exposure. . . . This surface of susceptibility appeals to me, contests me . . . one approaches the surfaces of alterity not as a surface of reflection upon which one can oneself be recognized but as a surface of susceptibility that orders me to come to its assistance, that alterity become possible, that it be able to depart. . . . The relationship with the dying of the other is prior to language and to silence, insofar as silence among humans is a punctuation of, and invitation to, discourse. It is not a relationship that brings out something common, a common nature, or the common understanding which discourse both establishes and presupposes. For it is upon the evidence of his alterity that he is divined, is respected, as an other. . . . The touch of the other, the touch of a mortal alterity is a contact, a contagion, and not a communication of information or of understanding: it is the transmission of a trembling on the limits of beings. (Deathbound 188–89)

Here, the ethical dimension of singularity depends on its asymmetrical relationship with the subject and the sign, the iterable and the discursive; that is to say, with the structured domain of exchange and substitution, of the replaceable. Without denying important philosophical differences, we can draw on all three lines of thought to renovate a rather dilapidated category, “style.” In a 1726 defense of his idiosyncratic use of English, Cotton Mather wrote, “After all, Every Man will have his own Style, which will distinguish him as much as his Gate [gait]” (qtd. in Hartman 36). Though Mather uses the word “style” in reference to writing, which is its original etymological context,16 his comparison implicitly extends the idea of style to the realm of persons and bodies. The OED’s twenty- sixth defi nition of style does this more explicitly: “a person’s characteristic bearing, demeanour, or manner, esp. as conducing to beauty or striking appearance.” Style applies to both persons and literary texts; it renders them singular, but also connects them to others— and to each other— along the many lines of the series that comprise them.

20

Introduction

With respect to the individual, or perhaps as a way of respecting the individual, we can use the idea of style to reference the dynamic wholeness and cohesion of the individual as a nodal point where myriad series intersect. These series include the marks and forms specific to a generation, genealogy, historical period, culture, region, habitat, and many other voluntary or involuntary social affiliations. The intersecting series also include one’s encounters with, for example, nature, people, art, books, institutions, illnesses, technologies; milieus through which one has moved: all the simulacra that “haunt” one’s style and make it a nexus, a complex tissue of intersections.17 These series— some of which we choose or cultivate, some of which choose us; some of which are purely contingent, others almost unavoidable— conjugate each other, yielding predilections, attractions, revulsions, habits, attitudes and points of view that, in turn, shape the series (what one eats, wears, says, does, knows, chooses . . . ).18 “Style” describes the total, the ever- shifting mathematical combination, of all these singularities, despite their contradictions and dramatically heterogeneous origins. Within the point of intersection, the junction that is the individual, the series cycle or evolve at different rates of speed and with different degrees of magnitude: Some are transient where others have remarkable longevity and reliably return as the same. The latter grow familiar over time; they become the unmistakable points by which one individual recognizes another. Understood in this way, “Style” designates the par ticu lar quality of this individual’s presence: not the list of her subject positions and not a stable metaphysical essence, but the way she moves, laughs, pushes out her lower lip; the tones of her voice, the texture of her hair— all the things that make this person recognizable, which it is almost embarrassing to enumerate because we so closely associate this kind of apperception with love. Introducing Grace Melbourne in The Woodlanders, Hardy’s narrator asserts that “it would have been difficult to describe [her] with precision, either then or at any other time”; she is a woman “whose true quality could only be approximated by putting together a movement now and a glance then, in that patient attention which nothing but watchful loving-kindness ever troubles itself to give” (35–36). As the phrase “patient attention” connotes, recognizing Style is a process that requires a certain degree of commitment: It does not come to us in one piece; it takes place in time. Moreover, as asserted previously, Style exceeds the socio-historical construction of

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the individual as subject. Though this process may work to reform singular differences or ascribe them to social categories, the multifarious disciplines of subjectification can never succeed in mapping all the singular differences that constitute every body as a pure deviation, all the tiny fi sh that swarm with their peculiar gestures through the nets of ideology. Althusser’s famous metonym of being hailed by a policeman encapsulates the process by which the individual subject is interpellated: “It’s me!” By contrast, the moment in which you recognize your friend amidst the crowd of people at the airport might be said to encapsulate a totally different kind of event, the “It’s you!” of Style. Style is dynamic, propelled by the force of attraction itself, which exceeds style and keeps it in motion. Attraction functions as a field of force that promotes encounters and connections that cross categorical boundaries between (for example) humans, animals, plants and things; it is what opens a body to transformations, to all kinds of singular and singularizing relations. Style is often actualized in relation to the world of things, the body’s diverse accoutrements. The domains of fashion and design trope or even fetishize Style’s enmeshedness in material. Yet though the things one wears or buys form tributary series, they are not, in themselves, Style. As we know, everyone wears that scarf in their own weird way. The massproduced scarf constructs a series of women who choose it, but in the dimension of micro- deviations, the scarf encounters each neck singularly, projects different lines of force into its par ticu lar surround (the surround of hair and shoulder, of the place into which one wears it, etc.). The fact that this is a trite commonplace does not make it untrue; moreover, as suggested previously, such minor variations should not inevitably be understood as expressions or signifiers of the hidden depths of the individual. Operating on the subatomic level, as it were, where chaos starts, Style is what renders every body, even twins, distinctive, singular. With respect to literature, style has become a problematic category, tied to impressionistic, quasi-mystical approaches such as that of Walter Pater, to discredited models of biographical criticism, or to “Zeitgeist” understandings of history that reified “period styles.” Moreover, the longstanding defi nition of “style” as “manner of expression” relies on a problematic opposition between a prelinguistic “substance” of thought and language as its secondary “expression.”19 Yet the fact that writing styles are recognizable, even without aid of specialized analysis, is undeniable. Derek Attridge

22 Introduction

remarks, “One of the pleasures of coming to know a singular oeuvre well is the feeling of familiarity we obtain when we read a work that has all the hallmarks of the author in question: characteristic ways of handling syntax and rhythm, immediately recognizable similes, well-known devices of plot, and so on” (Singularity 76). As the Harper Handbook to Literature puts it, “highly individualistic” styles are immediately recognizable, “so that we understand rather quickly, without much consideration, that we have come upon a passage, say, by Faulkner or Dickens— or at least that the passage was written by someone using a Faulknerian or Dickensian style” (Frye, Baker, and Perkins 447). Indeed, improbable as it may seem, Cotton Mather was (partly) right: Writing styles vary as much as a person’s gait, fingerprints, or handwriting, to the point that it is possible to use writing style to identify and apprehend criminals.20 Yet as Mikhail Bakhtin’s work implies, it is a mistake to posit a one-to-one correspondence between a style and an individual author. Styles, like gaits, are singular, but as the novel particularly demonstrates, individuals are capable of writing in more than one singular style. Bakhtin argues that where poetry encourages a writer to cultivate and explicate one style, to develop it as fully as possible by working it through other series, including the resources of a language, the novel encourages a writer to cultivate or actualize many styles; this is part of the novel’s heteroglossia (259–302). We also see this capacity when writers work across genres: T. S. Eliot the poet vs. T. S. Eliot the essayist; Matthew Arnold as poet vs. as critic; Thackeray of Vanity Fair vs. Thackeray of his personal letters, and so on.21 As these cases illustrate, situating a writing style as the product of an encounter between an individual and a language does not fully explain it, even if we take into account what Bakhtin calls “the heteroglossia within a language” (67). Writing styles are the products of more complex intersections, between the series that comprise the individual but also a form or genre, an envisioned audience, a purpose, literary and other histories, and so on. Yet novels also show us writers’ ability to apprehend—in the sense of catch, capture—the styles of (real, virtual, imagined) others. Part of what makes fictional characters plausible as such is the fact that the writer has been able to construct for them recognizable singularity— even, sometimes, singular style (the character “takes on a life of his own”; we would never mistake him for the author; we can hardly believe that he is not real).22

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This understanding of style may help us think particularity and individuality without regressing to a deconstructed discourse of essence. Style is not the expression of an essence that exists prior to and independently of its dynamic repetitions. It inheres in its realizations, material practices, and transactions, from which it cannot be abstracted. In both life and writing, style is performative or “pre sentational”: It occurs on the outsides of repre sentation and signification; it cannot be divorced from its par ticular instantiations, or represented through paraphrase, analytic diagram, description, summary. One can certainly produce these versions for other purposes, but the act of recognizing style is precisely what they exclude. Linguistic patterns, such as the familiar gestures and features of another person, help us recognize a style (“it’s you!”). But a more capacious understanding of style also includes other features, especially perspectives or points of view, modes of relating. Alongside the novel’s ability to encompass a plurality of viewpoints and styles— or to put it otherwise, its ability to pluralize style—the novel’s very length, the fact that reading it takes time, gives the genre a special relationship to the act of recognizing style (an act that, as suggested previously, requires duration, repeated exposure, returns). It may even make it possible for novels to verse us, as it were, in this process.23 As a striking concrete instance, take Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, starting with the marbled page, Tristram’s “motley emblem” (176). The marbling process ensures that a (real vs. mechanically reproduced) marbled page is “a solitary instance”: It occurs only once. Produced by an aleatory process— the repeated act of laying a sheet of paper over a vat of swirling inks— a marbled page is neither a model nor a copy, and is not identical to any other; it is, in some sense, an original. Yet we recognize its oddly insignificant originality only by comparison, seeing the page in different copies. The “moral” of the marbled page, which, Tristram says, we will not be able to “penetrate” without “much reading, by which your reverence knows I mean much knowledge” (176), must lie in this difference, which the reader could discover only through “much reading”—though perhaps it is not “much knowledge,” exactly, that one gains from such reading. In this fi rst reading, then, singularity is less a legible property of the individual page in itself than a mode of relation to other pages (including the verso, which in the first edition was also marbled) with which it forms a series. No single marbled page grounds the series as its norm, model, or

24

Introduction

origin: The pages differ absolutely, not on a scale of degrees or curve of deviation from a standard. In relation to the other pages, we can see that each is different, and of course this is one basis for their resemblance (each page resembles all the others by virtue of the fact that it differs from all the others). At the same time, as a series, the marbled pages might be said to produce, through the resonances between them, a virtual singularity: what is dynamically repeated in each page. The virtual singularity is not an ideal; it does not pre-exist the series it defines, and is itself dynamic. Because the virtual is a posteriori, each actualization will alter the virtual singularity (as Deleuze says, differentiate the virtual). Clearly, though, each marbled page participates in more than one series: not just the series of marbled pages across copies of Tristram Shandy but also, for example, the series of special pages within one copy of the novel (the black page, the marbled page, the white page—which together suggest a reversal of usual narrative relations between beginning, middle, and end). We might add the series of all the pages in the novel (the numbering of the marbled page highlights its membership in this series) and also the series of all non-Sterneian marbled pages, the marbled end papers common in other eighteenth-century books, upon which Sterne’s marbled page also plays. Turning slightly the line of thought, we can say that the marbled page belongs to the series of its many commentaries, a series that stretches from the eighteenth century to the present and shows no signs of exhausting itself. In that the marbled page participates simultaneously in all of these series and connects them, it functions as a “nodal point” through which many series pass, including the less readily itemized series of individual readings and readers. As a nodal point where series intersect, unfold, and/or are generated, each singularity opens onto the incalculable. From this point of view, it is not difference and variation that is rare or surprising but rather the opposite: constancy, sameness, familiarity. If we recognize what is singular relationally, via difference (this marbled page differs from the others), we recognize a singularity when it returns as the same: an act of recognition that depends on memory (this marbled page is my marbled page, the one that belongs to the copy I bought). In social contexts, including fictional ones, the return of the same singularities permits the recognition of an individual person. Consider the following example from Hardy’s The Woodlanders: “Mr. Melbury’s long legs, his gaiters drawn

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in to the bone at the ancles [sic], his slight stoop, his habit of getting lost in thought and arousing himself with an exclamation of ‘Hah!’— accompanied with an upward jerk of the head, composed a personage recognizable by his neighbours as far as he could be seen. It seemed as if the squirrels and birds knew him” (48). In other cases, a singularity may be presented for the reader to recognize independently of further exposition or another character’s act of recognition. For example, in The Old Curiosity Shop, the Marchioness’s habitual cough alerts the reader to her presence in Swiveller’s sickroom before Swiveller himself puts this together (476). In these cases, the return of the same singularity helps us identify a familiar person or object, and does not seem uncanny. Yet the potential for uncanny returns is vividly illustrated in Wilkie Collins’s novel The Law and the Lady. When Misserimus Dexter, whose “sensibilities [are] frightfully acute” (203), fi rst meets Valeria (his friend Eustace’s second wife), he apprehends a resemblance to the fi rst wife, Sara (whom Dexter loved): “ ‘Where is the resemblance which has brought her back to me? In the pose of the figure, perhaps? In the movement of the figure, perhaps? Poor martyred angel!’ ” (200). When Valeria returns for a second visit, Dexter fi nds pretenses to make her walk across the room, twice. Valeria thinks he is engaged in “the closest scrutiny of [her] dress.” Yet it is not her dress, and not her face, that he has “noticed very attentively—too attentively, perhaps.” Rather, as he puts it, “I couldn’t resist the temptation of seeing her again, in seeing you. It was her movement, her sweet simple unsought grace (not yours) when you walked to the end of the room and returned to me. You raised her from the dead, when you fetched the chair and the screen.” (217–18)

The resemblance Dexter discerns is the opposite of general; it is very specific, a singular something in the way she moves. Though Dexter situates Sara as the original owner of the movement, this attribution is clearly a contingent product of his own partiality and personal chronology, having seen Sara first. Because the two women never meet, the resemblance cannot be a question of imitation; because they are not related, it cannot be attributed to genealogy. Rather, the two instances are connected through the series of Eustace’s attractions: He seems to have chosen this singular movement twice. Because Eustace did not love his fi rst wife, the second

26

Introduction

choice is not presented as a compensatory gesture (an attempt to fi nd Sara in another). Jenny Bourne Taylor remarks, “It is Dexter . . . who perceives the disturbing similarity between Valeria and Sara, suggesting a pattern of perverse behavior in Eustace’s choice of his second wife” (“Later” 92). Of course, the attraction is only “perverse” from the point of view of an oedipal model of sexuality that cannot accept singular attractions as a norm, or that would see the singularity as metonym, metaphor, or signifier for some other, “deeper” desire. Yet this scene points toward another reading of sexuality wherein it is precisely singularities themselves that attract us. As Elspeth Probyn writes, “desire points us not to a person, not to an individual, but to the movement of different body parts.” To illustrate, Probyn cites Suzanne Westenhoefer’s monologue “about her desire for Martina Navratalova, a desire not for the whole of Martina but as an overwhelming longing to lick the coursing vein that pops out on the inside of Martina’s forearm” (14).24 From this angle, what is unusual in Collins’s scene is neither Eustace’s attraction nor his blindness to it (it is not the subject’s conscious ego that is attracted to that singularity, fi rst in one, then in another), but Dexter’s canny insight: He recognizes the singularity when it returns, and by finding it twice, fi nds it out. In other words, if the return of the same singularity within the series of the same individual permits us to recognize a person, its reappearance elsewhere, in another series, permits us to recognize the singularity as such. The latter case highlights the distance between the singularity and the individual.25 It does not undermine the notion of individuality, but does suggest a dizzyingly complicated picture of the individual as a nodal point at which numerous heterogeneous series intersect. It also highlights the link between singularity and per for mance: what is (can only be) repeated, as it were, verbatim. Discussing the importance of endings in the nineteenth- century novel, Peter Brooks remarks: “All narrative may be in essence obituary in that . . . the retrospective knowledge that it seeks, the knowledge that comes after, stands on the far side of the end, in human terms on the far side of death.” Likewise, he argues that the many deathbed scenes found in novels “offer the promise of a significant retrospect, a summing-up, the coming to completion of a fully predicated, and readable, sentence” (Reading 95–96). If so, real-life obituaries are often extremely disappointing. A typical newspaper obituary, for those of us who lead “ordinary” lives, resembles

The Novel, Education, and Experience

27

not, of course, a fully developed novel but a novel’s plot summary, the SparkNotes version. With respect to both obituaries and plot summaries, one feels that the representation is terribly inadequate—not only because they are too short and selective, but because the mode of the summary highlights the general difficulty of re-capturing what is of special value in either an individual life or a literary work. In fact, we might say that plot summaries leave out both “the literary” and “the work.” This is precisely what tempts students to read the plot summary instead of the book: It leaves out the work. One tries to persuade students that by leaving out the work—bypassing the experience of reading, the encounter with the text in all its particularity—they have missed everything important. But what, exactly, have they missed? By analogy, what is it, exactly, that the obituary leaves out? Tristram Shandy has often been called an “anti-novel”; perhaps it could as well be called an anti-obituary, in part because it so vividly highlights the notion that you cannot articulate the meaning of (a) life by way of a plot, let alone a plot summary. Sterne’s rejection of plot as a principle that would guide the writing of a life is one of several conduits through which he can be connected to modern novelists (especially Woolf, Joyce, and Proust). Making this connection, Jean-Jacques Mayoux argues that Sterne resembles the moderns because he realized that “life was lived in the mind . . . and each microcosm has its own time-dimension, enclosed and separate, with its own structure, rhythm, and flow. Life, Sterne has discovered, as it is lived mostly inside, is carried on in solitude” (572). Mayoux fi nds in Tristram Shandy not only the Modernist trope of subjective isolation, but also the “voice of the passionate individualism that we connect with our own century, the voice of André Gide about ‘l’individu irremplaçable’ ” (581). Yet he also argues that Sterne’s “pity for the general human plight, for the horrible equation in it of time and change, ceaseless, ruthless change and decay” connects him to the Romantics, specifically to Alfred de Vigny, who wrote, “ ‘Aimez ce que jamais on ne verra deux fois’”: Love what you’ll never see twice (581). Mayoux does not explicitly distinguish between, or compare, Gide’s “irreplaceable individual” and Vigny’s poignant imperative. Yet one of the most perennially striking features of Sterne’s novel, capably brought across in Michael Winterbottom’s fi lm, is how little represented is the life (or, for that matter, the opinions) of Tristram Shandy, as an individual

28

Introduction

subject. Almost all of the information provided in a typical obituary is missing. For the most part, this information designates the subject’s positions; that is, it names precisely what is replaceable about the individual. She was an English professor. You are certain to see an English professor twice, and, barring budget cuts, an English professor is eminently replaceable. At the other end of a spectrum, Vigny’s line summons up the irreplaceable as the unrepeatable instance, the unique par ticu lar that does not return— and thus, structuralist logic tells us, cannot be signified. If the obituary gives us the subject— so easy to signify, so difficult to love— Gide, Vigny, and Sterne all gesture toward an idea of the singular as something that opens itself up to recognition and dynamic repetition, but not to exchange; as something that exceeds the categories of the subject and the sign, and can only be conveyed through style. As Tristram demonstrates to his readers, it is not the story that communicates his singular style, but what happens as the story is being told (or not told). Style is meanwhile being performed as tone, gesture, rhythm, turns of thought, modes of perceiving, irrational attractions: the constellation of singularities we apprehend in another slowly, over time, and which require our apprehension, because they cannot be signified. Yet as a per for mance, the book keeps happening again. Even a second or sixteenth reading, for a fi fth or five millionth reader, is still, in some sense, an “original” experience. From this perspective, Tristram cheats Death not by telling the story of his life (which indeed he fails to do), but by leaving behind a repeatable per for mance of a singular style.26 Moreover, it is not only his own style that Tristram relates: As a narrator, Tristram succeeds in relating the styles of others. Indeed, he allows us to glimpse the relational process by which a style is formed, as Walter, for example, adopts from Slawkenbergius, or Tristram from Toby. To the extent that Tristram offers readers an affectionate point of view through which other Styles appear as singular, the literary work that we do when we read Tristram Shandy involves learning how to recognize singular styles, in general. Returning to the example of the plot summary, we can say that it is not meaning that the summary leaves out. It is not the meaning that a student misses by reading the plot summary instead of the novel. When a student asks what a poem means, or is about, it is possible to put aside caviling and tell her, as long as one pluralizes and leaves open the possibility that the poem might yield up other meanings, in other contexts. Our habitual re-

The Novel, Education, and Experience

29

luctance to do so signals a sense that we would thereby foreclose something. One of the things that would be foreclosed is the students’ participation in the act of interpretation: the fi rst-hand process of deriving meaning from a text and learning interpretive methodologies. Without denying the importance and validity of this aspect of literary study, we might add to it the project of reading for style. As I have argued, literary style is best understood as a performative dimension of textuality that accompanies but exceeds the structural regime of the sign. Style can only be apprehended via its differences—hence, in relation to other singularities— and recognized via its returns. Thus, the act of recognizing style is a relational endeavor that requires duration: something the novel, by virtue of its length, is especially well suited to provide. Recognizing style requires, as Tristram would have it, “much reading”: Repeated and extensive reading is what permits us to recognize singular features of a style. Coming to know a style also means learning to recognize the points at which this style intersects with other series. Like a living person, a literary text is a nodal point that conjugates many series: ancestries, histories, environments; cultures, languages; experiences and observations of the author, or of others s/he has known, read, or overheard on trains—but also series that continue after its publication: reception, criticism, adaptations, influence. The study of style offers opportunities to affirm the uneven durations over which styles transpire, and the different ways a present can connect to its pasts, its ancestries, its for-better-or-worse inheritances. Knowing where certain features come from—the various series in which the work participates—helps one understand the way style works, and attunes one to the complexity of intersections, mixtures, dynamic repetitions as they occur both within and beyond a par ticu lar text. This mode of attention also makes it possible to glimpse series that cross, perhaps uncannily, the line between literature and life: to encounter, for example, the singular manner of a Dickens character in one’s landlord, and so on. Reading for style thus reverses the dominant relationship between knowledge and experience. Knowledge becomes the precondition for a special experience of recognition, an experience that literary texts are very well suited to occasion, and in a sense ask us to perform. Style is written under the assumption, or in the hope, that there is or will be someone to receive it; that, as Nietz sche puts it, “there are ears—that there are those

30

Introduction

capable and worthy of the same pathos” (Ecce 721). Indeed, any act of recognition has an ethical dimension, not separable from the act itself: It is the attempt to make the self register the other. As such, recognizing style might be an end in itself, or it might provoke response: imitation or parody (a demonstration of recognition that may function for writers as a form of training, even purging 27), dynamic repetition (the incorporation of a singularity that we call “influence” when it appears in the work of later writer), the reconfigurations involved in critical interpretation, or the type of “close writing” that D. A. Miller performs in Jane Austen, or, The Secret of Style, a wonderful example of a singular encounter between a critic and a style.28 As Woolf writes of a literary theme, the encounter with another style “gives a chance to one’s peculiar qualities.”29 It provides opportunities for the production of new singularities, chances for a reader to unfold or differentiate style, to actualize new forces and capacities. I want to suggest that “reading for style” is a practice that can be chosen by readers in relation to any literary text. Ultimately, this line of thought points toward affirming “the literary,” per se, as a specially protected area for the recognition and cultivation of styles, although that argument lies beyond the scope of this project. However, some novels stand out as particularly intense, highly conductive experiments with the charged intersection between style and singularity, including those of Sterne and, as I will argue in the book’s conclusion, Virginia Woolf. Throughout this book, I discuss a range of canonical and non- canonical texts, but Sterne has been my touchstone, in part because his refusal to situate experience as a means to an end (closure, sexual climax, epistemological gain, mea surable learning outcome, and so on) invites us to explore the value of the non-instrumental, including the forms of interest, pleasure, and ethical behavior that belong to the defeat of teleology. In fact, another way of framing this project would be to situate it as a series of responses to the question: What would the novel, literary history, literary criticism, the act of reading, and the idea of education look like if Sterne’s works were paradigmatic, not of their failures and contradictions, but of their highest ideals? As I hope will become clear, this question is not as fantastic or perversely willful as it might sound given that actual literary history has been shaped, in part, by the repeated emergence and eclipse of just this question.

1.

Typing Feeling Sympathy, Sensibility, and Sentimentality

History has left its residue in punctuation marks, and it is history, far more than meaning or grammatical function, that looks out at us, rigidified and trembling slightly, from every mark of punctuation. —Theodor Adorno, “Punctuation Marks” This is one of those moments when I get to say, “HA!” (Please quote me on that accurately, with “Ha” being capitalized, italicized and followed by an exclamation point.) —Interview with Mark Danielewski (McCaffery and Gregory 117)

Over the past decade, scholarly interest in the history of books and printing has risen markedly, possibly as a result of the resonances between an age in which print was new and our own age of new electronic media.1 An upsurge of interest in the novel of sensibility dates back a bit further; as Markman Ellis notes, the new critical approaches that became available in the 1980s led critics to reappraise the genre’s formal qualities and yielded a new set of historical, political, and cultural questions: “There is a sense in which the sentimental novel is ‘readable’ again now for the first time since the eighteenth century, after nearly two centuries of being perceived as of marginal interest and negligible importance” (Ellis 3). Yet while scholars of this genre regularly acknowledge the typographical play found in novels of sensibility, on the whole typography has been perceived as, to borrow Ellis’s phrase, “of marginal interest and negligible importance.”2 In fact, the dearth of studies of typographical practices— especially of typographical norms and the reasons why norms changed over time—has sometimes led critics to imply 31

32

Typing Feeling

that typographical effects were added onto the novel of sensibility, when in fact the evidence points the other way: Typographical effects were subtracted from other kinds of writing in the mid–eighteenth century.3 As I will try to show, this shift in printing practices traces incipient fractures between types of texts or types of reading, one associated with mind or knowledge and the others with the sensory intensities of feeling. This fracturing itself reflects, and participates in, struggles to reconfigure the relationships between mind and body, and also between author, printer, reader, and text. Indeed, reading printer’s manuals and the graphic dynamics of printed pages alongside arguments made about feeling by physicians and philosophers allows us to re-map eighteenth-century controversies over feeling, and then to re-evaluate their consequences for the history of the British novel. Much recent scholarship on the novel of sensibility focuses on analyzing relations between the novel, the “culture of sensibility” (to borrow the title of G. J. Barker-Benfield’s book), and various aspects of political, social, medical, sexual, and economic discourse in eighteenth-century Britain. In some cases, this new generation of critics has condemned on ideological grounds what past generations condemned on the grounds of taste or aesthetic achievement.4 Such verdicts have not been unanimous, however: Patricia Meyers Spacks has explored the ways a value on feeling and relationships granted women a degree of cultural authority (Desire and Truth); Chris Jones has argued that while some sentimental novelists lent conservative support to the dominant classes, others in fact envisioned a more equitable and communal society, stressed activism and intervention, and lent support to revolutionary feeling. Both John Mullan and Ann Jessie Van Sant bring out the counter-hegemonic potential of “sensibility” in studies of its relation to eighteenth-century understandings of the body. Synthesizing a wide range of period texts, Barker-Benfield’s history establishes the multifariousness of the connections between the discourses of sensibility, gender, plea sure, consumerism, politics, manners, and sexuality in eighteenthcentury Britain, and indicates the complicated ways in which the literature of sensibility participated in social change. In fi nely textured studies, both Ellis and Lynn Festa highlight the profound ambivalences of sympathy/ sensibility/sentimentality when used as tools, or weapons, in social or political controversies.5 The awkward slash construction used in the preceding sentence reflects a problem that is endemic to both primary and secondary sources on this

Sympathy, Sensibility, and Sentimentality

33

topic. In eighteenth-century texts, the three terms are often used inconsistently or interchangeably, and do not reliably carry the same connotations from one text to another. As Ellis puts it, “ ‘sensibility’ and ‘sentimental’ denote a complex field of meanings and connotations in the late eighteenth century, overlapping and coinciding to such an extent as to offer no obvious distinction” (7–8). Eighteenth-century writers themselves drew attention (sincerely or sarcastically) to the difficulty of defining sentiment, sympathy, and sensibility, sometimes aligning the denotative elusiveness of these terms with the ineffability of feeling itself.6 Yet beneath this slippage of diction, I want to argue, one can, in fact, discern three fundamentally different “dynamics” of feeling in play in eighteenth-century discourse, and identify moments when they come into confl ict. The dynamics are not exclusive to fiction; they may be found to a greater or lesser extent in many different kinds of texts; also, a single text may display instances of more than one. By using the word “dynamics,” I mean to imply that these are processes rather than static formations or genres; they are processes that cross lines between categories we now recognize as the literary, the social, the psychological, and the physiological. In the interests of clarity, I have assigned each dynamic one name. My distribution is chiefly heuristic and does not always mirror the way the terms are used in the primary texts I analyze. At the same time, it is not random: It accords at least approximately with the connotations the terms take on as the dynamics evolve in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The fi rst dynamic, “sympathy,” was influentially and systematically theorized by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). In this work, Smith articulates a significantly new understanding of feeling that privileges the role of imagination and moves toward containing the experience and production of feeling within the boundaries of the individual subject. Smith opposes a much older understanding of “sympathy” as the quasi-mystical, quasi-medical phenomena of co-responding bodies or body parts. The latter understanding of feeling underlies printer Joseph Moxon’s understanding of the relationships between author, text, reader, and compositor in Meckanick Exercises on the Art of Printing (1683–84). Views expressed later, for example in John Smith’s printer’s manual (1755) and Hugh Blair’s lectures on rhetoric (1783), oppose Moxon’s and work to steer practices of reading, writing, and printing toward the dynamics of sympathy articulated by Adam Smith. However, the older model of sympathy

34

Typing Feeling

persists alongside the new model; in medical discourse, it persists well into the nineteenth century. In the world of texts, particularly novels, one can trace two dynamics of feeling that stem out of this older understanding of sympathy and retain closer relationships to it than to Smith’s new model. One, which I will call “sentimentality,” foregrounds the harmonic, communal, fundamentally physiological experience of feeling, highlighting sameness and agreement in accordance with medical models of harmonic sympathetic correspondences. The other, which I will call “sensibility,” foregrounds the body’s capacity to alter in relation to stimuli, emphasizing the potential for divergence or differentiation that was implied but suppressed in older understandings of sympathy. This understanding of feeling underwrites David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). Its textual and sexual implications were exploited most fully by Laurence Sterne, but we can also trace them in his lesser-known predecessor, John Dunton. Each of these three dynamics correlates with particular practices of reading, representation, and textual production; each also inscribes a distinctive set of assumptions about identity, history, desire, and sexuality. Toward the close of the century, one dynamic—Smith’s sympathy—gained dominance; it has shaped cultural and aesthetic norms in ways that remain powerful today. The other two dynamics and the practices with which they were associated were decisively marginalized. Sentimentality came to be associated with popu lar culture as a denigrated “other” to the novel in its literary form. Sensibility becomes the road least traveled by the British novel, though as I will show in the next chapter, it retains subversive force in relation to dominant sympathetic dynamics.7 By the same token, the shift away from the heavy and varied marking of emphasis and the new value on uniform, transparent typography worked together with a new metaphysical model of reading that stressed the mind’s superior distance from the body, as opposed to an older understanding of reading that involved the body’s senses, nerves, and passions in accordance with a physiology that did not separate body from mind. In her pioneering work on book history, Elizabeth Eisenstein argues that “print culture” is characterized by standardization, dissemination, and fi xity. In making this argument, she indirectly echoes seventeenth and eighteenth-century arguments that themselves emphasized these qualities.8 Yet as Adrian Johns demonstrates in The Nature of the Book, these

Sympathy, Sensibility, and Sentimentality

35

characteristics were polemically claimed by early print historians, rather than inherent to print. Before the nineteenth century, most printed books defy description as either standardized or fi xed, and dissemination was a vexed cultural ideal rather than a simple corollary of the press. The fact that we now take these characteristics for granted and associate them with print per se rather than a par ticu lar style of printing (or specific set of practices) is the end result of a history of struggles over what books were to be. It is also a side effect of the practice of editorial modernization. When we read modern editions of seventeenth and eighteenth- century texts, we simply do not perceive the matrix of textual practices within which they were fi rst written, printed, and read.9 Without arguing against editorial modernization, and without claiming that modernization inevitably damages a text or skews its interpretation, we should ask when and why modernization— as, fundamentally, an act of translation—became necessary: that is, when and why textual practices changed to such an extent that their typography came to seem foreign. Preserving only “substantive” as opposed to “accidental” features, to use W. W. Greg’s terms, may indeed be of no consequence for a text’s meaning, but sidesteps these historical questions by assuming that the non- semantic features of a text were never important.10 Though the changes in printing practice I trace in this chapter are sometimes erroneously chalked up to technological advances, in fact they preceded and were not determined by the technological innovations that greatly increased the speed and volume of the press’s output in the nineteenth century.11 Nor can these changes be adequately understood in terms of teleological development, as though technological innovations finally permitted print to reach the ideals toward which it was always striving.12 Rather, our habit of disregarding the specific material properties of texts— which we cannot take for granted as holding true for other eras—may have prevented us from recognizing a coherent set of practices, guided by particu lar understandings of feeling, bodies, minds, and reading, that have since been transformed.13 As Anne Vila argues, understanding eighteenthcentury medical discourse requires us “to reach back to a time before Freud—to a moment in the history of thought when the body was not defi ned by the social and the psychic, but rather, vice versa” (4). Likewise, understanding the dynamics of eighteenth- century typography requires us to reach back to a time before ideals of “transparent” typography had

36

Typing Feeling

become hegemonic, before good typography was defined as what allows “the mental eye [to focus] through type and not upon it” (Beatrice Warde, qtd. in Gutjahr and Benton 2).

Architects of the Word As other scholars have established, authorship was a truly collaborative activity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.14 Printers exercised a great deal of what we would today call “creativity.” The manner in which they envisioned their role is suggested by frequent comparisons to architecture. For example, the frontispiece to Biographical and Literary Anecdotes of William Bowyer (1782) features a portrait whose legend reads “Gulielmus Bowyer / Architectus Verborum.” In Regule Trium Ordinum Literarum Typographicarum: or The Rules of the Three Orders of Print Letters (1676), Joseph Moxon models his efforts on the work of Vitruvius; the book is dedicated to Christopher Wren, “Lover of Rule and Proportion.” He carries this comparison further in Mechanick Exercises on the Art of Printing (1683–84), a book that was extensively excerpted, referenced, or simply plagiarized for the next 150 years.15 Here, Moxon claims that, like architecture, typography is a “Mathematical Science,” based on mathematically describable lines and curves; thus, a good typographer needs all the “accomplishments” of an architect “and some more” (10–12).16 Typography directly contributes to architecture (Moxon provides patterns for masons who carve inscriptions on buildings or monuments), but the relationship is also one of analogy. Like buildings, printed texts are fabricated objects subject to both practical exigencies and aesthetic judgments; like architects, printers and compositors are not mere workmen but play important roles in the object’s design and constitution. In par ticu lar, the compositor who set the text from the author’s manuscript “copy” was often largely or wholly responsible for determining punctuation (“pointing”), emphasis, and other conventions belonging to the realm of what we now call “mechanics” or “document design” (spacing and indentation, italicization of proper names, capitalization of noun substantives, use of rules, brackets, quotation marks, placement of graphics, illustrations, printer’s ornaments, and so on). Emphasis was not confi ned to today’s binary opposition between Roman and italic. Printers had

Sympathy, Sensibility, and Sentimentality

37

a rich pool of resources for inscribing variable emphases, including the use of small or large capitals, different sizes of the same character, a different character (for example, English Roman with Great Primer or Double Pica), “English” type (a.k.a. Gothic, Black Face, which could be “used with Roman and Italic together, to serve for matter which the Author would particularly enforce to the reader” [ John Smith 18–19]); spaces of varying sizes to place between letters, words, or lines; brackets, marginal “manicula” or hands (“a Mark, that directs us to something very remarkable, that should particularly be taken notice of ” [Baker 54]), and various permutations thereof (see Figures 1 and 2). Before the mid– eighteenth century, all of these devices were used across the entire spectrum of printed texts.17 At this stage in history, then, the routine use of typographical emphasis (variation, inflection) is indifferent to content and not at all inimical to instruction or the communication of fact-based knowledge. One does not fi nd systematic typographical distinctions between texts that appeal to the feelings and texts that appeal to the mind, or to make a more complicated claim, between the various senses of “sense.” In his discussions of typographical choices, Moxon sometimes associates them with expression (“For Capitals express Dignity wherever they are Set, and Space and Distance also implies stateliness,” 216), sometimes with “fancy” or fashion (in designing a title page, the compositor may choose a type “which best pleases his fancy, or is in present mode,” 212– 13), sometimes with semantic hierarchy, and sometimes with syntactical clarity. As the compositor works, he considers which words deserve “great Emphasis” and which “smaller Emphasis.” The latter may be given an initial capital. Moxon advises an initial capital together with varied type when “the Emphasis bear hard upon the Word to be exprest as well as the Thing to be expressed” (216). He shares a rather murky example involving five uses of the word “that”: “that that That that that man would have stand at the beginning of the Line should stand at the end,” explaining that “the middlemost That” should be both italicized and capitalized because it is “both thing and word” (217). In Rules for True Spelling and Writing English (1724), William Baker also makes the point that emphasis may be connected to, as it were, disambiguation. He notes that “a Sentence hath oftentimes a very different Meaning or Acceptation, according as the Accent or Emphasis is placed upon different Words; for thereby, the

Figure 1 (above and opposite). Pages from William Baker’s Rules for True Spelling and Writing English (Bristol, 1724), illustrating early- eighteenth- century typographical practices (and also a precedent for Sterne’s famous flourish). (Source: Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale. University of Wisconsin, Madison.)

Figure 2 (above and opposite). Pages from A Voyage Round the World, by John Dunton (London, [1691]). (Source: Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale. University of Wisconsin, Madison.)

42

Typing Feeling

true End and Design of the Writer or Speaker is either distinguished and explained, or so obscured, that the true Sense thereof cannot easily be perceived” (41). Using the example of the question “May William go into the school now?” Baker demonstrates that the meaning changes if we lay the emphasis on “William,” vs. “go,” “school,” or “now,” concluding “here we may abserve how obsurd [sic] these Answers would be, if the Inquirer did not lay the Emphasis on the proper Word, for thereby it is, that the true negative Answer is given to the Question, and the Meaning thereof perceived” (41). Baker defi nes emphasis as “a strong and vigorous Stress or Force of Sound, that is laid on some par ticu lar Word in a Sentence; whereby the Reader, by pronouncing that Word with a more than ordinary strength of Voice, shews which is the Emphatical Word, and what the express Signification of his Intention is” (40). Later, he acknowledges that there may be two or three “emphatical words” in a sentence, and goes on to explain that “the Emphasis or Accent . . . is that which gives Force and Beauty to the whole sentence: And to read any Sentence without its proper Emphasis, is to obscure the very Design and Meaning of the Writer, and render the most ner vous and excellent Discourse dead and insipid” (40). Likewise, Brightland’s widely used and frequently reprinted Grammar of the English Tongue (1746 edition) states: “well-turn’d, and rightly plac’d Accents: In these consists the Life of Language, these being the Enchantments, which being justly apply’d to well-chose Words, lead all the passions captive, and surprise the Soul itself in its inmost Recesses” (157). Both of these articulations seem to refer primarily to reading aloud. We know that “to read” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often, though not always, meant to read aloud.18 Perhaps typographical emphasis functioned chiefly as a visual cue for vocalization. Yet upon closer examination, we can see that the relationship between vocal and visual emphasis is complex. Both vocal stress and typographical variation serve to show “which is the Emphatical Word.” Whether vocal or visual, emphasis incarnates something— difference—that ambiguously precedes and follows from it. The placement of emphasis is wholly context-bound, and thus cannot be rigorously codified or subjected to general rules. Yet with respect to a par ticu lar case, a par ticu lar sentence, one can either get the emphasis right, thereby giving Life—“force and beauty”—to the “nervous” discourse, or murder it. Clearly, the vocabulary used to discuss em-

Sympathy, Sensibility, and Sentimentality

43

phasis constructs reciprocal affective relationships of innervation (or, potentially, enervation) between the “ner vous” body of the text and the impassioned body of the reader. As the person choosing among the many typographical resources for the production and/or transmission of emphasis, none of which were firmly governed by either rules or conventions, the compositor obviously had a great deal of impact on the text: He or she19 was, in the fullest sense of the word, “composing.” As Moxon explains it, “a good Compositor is ambitious as well to make the meaning of his Author intelligent to the Reader, as to make his work shew graceful to the Eye, and pleasant in Reading” (Mechanick 211). Thus the compositor reads his Copy with consideration; so that he may get himself into the meaning of the Author, and consequently considers how to order his Work the better both in the Title Page, and in the matter of the Book: As how to make his Indenting, Printing, Breaking, Italicking, &c. the better sympathize with the Author’s Genius, and also with the capacity of the Reader. Nor does a Compositor the least shew his skill in the well ordering and Humouring of a Title Page. . . . (212, bold added)

Moxon’s description of the compositor’s work clearly does not match the models we now most readily associate with the process of textual reproduction: faithfully copying an original; transmitting a signal with the least possible noise; adhering to accepted rules, standards, or conventions (“house style”); even adhering to authorial “intent,” per se. Moxon’s compositor fi rst reads carefully in order to “get himself into the meaning of the Author”: He then considers how to make “his Indenting, Printing, Breaking, Italicking, &c. the better sympathize with the Author’s Genius, and also with the capacity of the Reader.” In this context, “Genius” probably meant “Characteristic disposition; inclination; bent, turn or temper of mind” (OED 3a). Thus, it is not exactly a question of a “sympathetic” understanding between persons (author, compositor, and reader). Rather, the compositor is a kind of vanishing mediator whose role is to establish sympathetic relations between the disposition conveyed by the author’s writing, the printed text (the expressive face of the page), and the reader’s “capacity” (an ambiguous word that might refer to knowledge, reading skills, understanding, senses, sensitivity, emotional capacity, or some combination thereof ).20 We can see that the ideal compositor must have been a man of

44 Typing Feeling

feeling before that persona was self- consciously represented, celebrated, or derogated. We can also see that this conductive circuitry of sympathy— which the compositor, as it were, wires up and renders live—is circling around something that does not exist as an origin/al, as would be the case if the author had simply scored the copy.21 In other words, in orchestrating the text’s affective dimension, the compositor has nothing to imitate. Emphasis is constructed on a purely relational basis as the material embodiment, at once retrograde and proactive, of a virtual “sense”; this materialization was understood to be necessary for the sense to be transmitted from text to reader (who may or may not be transmitting the sense to others by reading the text aloud). One could say, then, that emphasis—the whole panoply of textual inflection—is the essentially non-identical repetition of something that does not have an original: that does not exist except in and as repetition. As used in Moxon’s passage, the words “sympathize” and “Humouring” are important indicators of the paradigms within which readers, writers, and printers were operating. Both words register the intimate relationship between the body and the page; their co-presence also signals a historical transition in understandings of the body that was in progress during Moxon’s lifetime. The humoural paradigm for explaining temperaments, moods, disease, health, and madness that Western Eu rope inherited from Classical Greece was exploited to the full by Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), but would have been on the wane by 1683. As Ray Porter puts it, “Late-seventeenth-century elites were more or less aware that the old ways of talking about one’s body and its experiences—in terms of humours, ‘substantial forms’ and qualities—were on the way out, being challenged by new models, metaphors, and focuses of attention (for instance, the nerves)” (Flesh 60). The manner in which the nerves were understood was also shifting. Initially conceptualized as tiny tubes carrying “animal spirits” (the body was like a hydraulic machine), they came to be understood as vibrating fibers (the body was like a stringed instrument). As Foucault explains, In the course of the eighteenth century, the image, with all its mechanical and metaphysical implications, of animal spirits in the channels of the nerves, was frequently replaced by the image, more strictly physical but of an even more symbolic value, of a tension to which nerves, vessels, and

Sympathy, Sensibility, and Sentimentality

45

the entire system of organic fibers were subject. . . . [T]he old idea of truth as “the conformity of thought to things” is transposed in the metaphor of a resonance, a kind of musical fidelity of the fibers to the sensations which make them vibrate. (Madness 126– 7)

Neither the primary nor the secondary literature makes it easy to identify exactly when these shifts took place. 22 They were culturally, temporally, and geograph ically uneven: Raymond Williams’s model of the coexistence of dominant, emergent, and residual discourses applies especially well. Moreover, European phi losophers and physicians did not all depart from the humoural paradigm in the same way; they disagreed, in par ticu lar, over how to understand the nature, locus, and operations of the soul(s).23 However, a long-lived concept that remains relatively constant across seventeenth- and eighteenth-century discourse is that of the “passions.” Foucault writes, “Before Descartes, and long after his influence as phi losopher and physiologist had diminished, passion continued to be the meeting ground of body and soul” (Madness 86). As Adrian Johns explains, “passions” were understood as responses excited equally and indiscriminately by external (empirical) and internal (intra-personal or “mental”) stimuli. Though typologies of the passions typically list seven— admiration (or wonder), curiosity, love, hatred, desire, joy, and grief—these were believed to mix with each other to form an infi nite variety, impossible to specify exhaustively. Johns shows that this discourse provided a framework for understanding reading: “Human beings perceived letters on a page through the mediation of their bodies; the passions were the emotional, physiological, and moral responses of the human body to its surroundings, and thus played an unavoidable part in the reading process” ( Johns 386). Though classical thought advocated “conquering” the passions, by the eighteenth century passions were accepted as simply part of human being, neither good nor bad in themselves. However, they could become dangerous in excess; thus, it was necessary to control and regulate the passions. Proper education aided one in this endeavor, as did certain kinds of reading or reading material (especially mathematical treatises). However, immoderate reading, reading in the wrong way, or reading the wrong things could harm one’s health, perhaps permanently.24 It is important to note that none of these concepts—humours, passions, animal spirits, tube nerves, or string nerves— suggest that the mind and

46

Typing Feeling

body are separate or separable entities. They do not inscribe categorical distinctions between internal and external or mental and physical stimuli, and do not suggest a privileged monadic force that would control, organize, or unify the person’s parts (even the Soul can be “surprised,” as the quote from Brightland’s Grammar suggests). In his Essay of Health and Long Life, the influential physician George Cheyne explains: The Soul resides eminently in the Brain, where all the Ner vous Fibres terminate inwardly, like a Musician by a well-tuned Instrument, which has Keys within, on which it may play, and without, on which other Persons and Bodies may also play. By the inward Keys, I understand those Means by which the Thoughts of the Mind affect the Body; and by the outward, those whereby the Actions or Sensations of the Body affect the Mind. Both these Affectations may be called Passions in a general View, as either Part of the Compound is acted upon. (144–45)

In Cheyne’s account, the person as “compound” is animated by a highly sensitive, multidirectional circuitry that connects mind and body to each other and to the “outward” world of “other persons and bodies.” Sensations or thoughts travel through this circuitry, becoming each other, producing “passions.”25 Though the tone of this passage is harmonic, Cheyne’s use of the qualifier “well-tuned” seems to acknowledge, in the act of warding off, the disturbing potential for discord and disjunction inherent in this image. As Jerome McGann and Patricia Meyers Spacks put it, “the image of even a well-tuned piano played by multiple players (particularly if one thinks of someone inside the instrument) suggests cacophony as easily as it does harmony. The brain, the body, and other persons and objects are simultaneously playing us. The music won’t always be nice” (Dictionary of Sensibility). However, this potential was mitigated, at least in the abstract, by the notion of harmonic “sympathetic” affi nities. Derived from classical writers such as Plato and Pliny, this longstanding notion of “sympathy” was used to explain instances in which one entity changes in response to a change in another, or when a stimulus is applied to another, apparently without an independent cause or observable means of transmission. “Sympathy” indicated a quasi-magical, quasi-medical, poorly understood force, substance, or mechanism that produced these mutual effects.26 In

Sympathy, Sensibility, and Sentimentality

47

late seventeenth and eighteenth- century medical discourse, the notion of sympathy was employed to resolve vexing questions about how passions traveled, how they were manifested and communicated, and how the body’s parts communicated amongst themselves. In the 1660s, Thomas Willis argued that “a mechanically transmitted ‘sympathy’ ” linked the regions of the brain to each other and to the body’s various organs ( Johns 306). Almost a century later, Robert Whytt wrote, “we know certainly, that the nerves are endued with feeling, and that there is a general sympathy which prevails through the whole system; so there is a par ticu lar and very remarkable consent between various parts of the body” (Whytt, qtd in Mullan 229).27 Like Cheyne’s word “well-tuned,” Whytt’s word “consent” reflects the assumption that sympathetic co-responses are based on agreement or harmony. This assumption also undergirds Moxon’s description of the sympathetic relationships that the compositor constructs. The possibility raised by Baker of getting the emphasis wrong and thus skewering the sense highlights the importance of composing the text properly so that a printed text, a reader’s capacity, and an author’s “genius” will sympathize or be in tune with each other. It also highlights the importance of the material appearance of the page in stimulating a response in the reader (a sympathetic response). Yet if, as McGann and Spacks claim, the potential for discord haunts Cheyne’s image of the person as stringed instrument, the same potential clearly haunts the world of print. The problem is rooted in this older understanding of sympathy, which insists at once upon both a par ticu lar body’s impassioned responsiveness—hence, its ability to differ from itself, to alter— and the immanent availability, even inevitability, of agreement, harmony, or “consent.” That the power of sympathy could not be relied upon to produce accord between communicating parties is made apparent in John Smith’s 1755 Printer’s Manual.28 In words that prefigure a grounding assumption of Adam Smith’s 1759 theory of sympathy (“we have no immediate experience of what other men feel”), John Smith urges authors to mark their copy carefully and systematically because “not every one can guess where an Author intends an emphasis, either in speaking, or in writing, unless he intimates it either by voice, or by distinction of letters in printing” (168). He repeatedly expresses his exasperation with the expensive and

48 Typing Feeling

time-consuming process of re-setting pages when authors object to the compositor’s choices: “The loss of time, and consequently of gain, which the Compositor sustains by not having the emphasis of words pointed out to him, till in the Proof-sheet, is often very considerable; and takes away a good Workman’s credit besides, who has taken care to space his matter well” (51). John Smith’s remarks point toward the substitution of authorial intent for sympathy as the controlling principle for compositional (later, editorial) choices. This shift is made more explicit in Smith’s discussion of punctuation, or “pointing.”29 Echoing his remarks on emphasis, Smith urges authors to point their own copy: since punctuation “is become a mere humour . . . it is impossible for a Compositor to guess at an Author’s manner of expressing himself, unless he shews it in pointing his Copy: and if he would have the Reader imitate him in his emphatical delivery, how can a Writer intimate it better than by pointing his copy himself ?” (86). That way, the compositor can simply copy the Copy, enabling readers to copy the writer. Differing in important ways from the circuit of sympathy Moxon describes, the grounding principle of authorial intent— now understood, unlike authorial “genius,” as unguessable, hence, private, subjective, contained within a closed mind— shifts textual production toward, fi rst, a single controlling subjectivity; second, a centered model/ copy paradigm that operates via dynamics of imitation. At about this same time, we see a marked diminishment in practices of typographical emphasis across texts printed in England. In the absence of a systematic study of emphasis frequencies, to obtain a working profi le of typographical practices, I counted the use of capitals, italics, and other varied fonts in a sample of texts printed between 1690 and 1800. The results show a marked drop in use of emphasis between 1740 and about 1760, as illustrated by six printings of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (see Table 1). By 1783, Hugh Blair could refer to the practice of typographically distinguishing significant words in every sentence as a custom that “prevailed very much some time ago” (424). It might be tempting to suggest that as authors gained control over the printing process, compositors lost their interesting privilege of playing with fonts. However, I want instead to argue that gains in authorial control themselves reflect changing understandings of what is most significant in a text, and the kinds of communication that should take place in print.

Table 1: Uses of Italics and Capitalization for Emphasis in Six Printings of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, 1705–1800

Italics Capitalized words, other than proper nouns, start of sentence, or following a colon Decorations / title format

Word count in fi rst two paragraphs (the content remains the same)

Edition/Printing 1705 (London) All the Histories and Novels Written by the Late Ingenious Mrs. Behn . . .

1718 and 1722 (London) Histories and Novels Written by the Late Ingenious Mrs. Behn . . . [These two printings are typographically identical.]

1735 (London) Histories and Novels Written by the Late Ingenious Mrs. Behn . . . Published by Mr. Charles Gildon

1770 (Doncaster) The history of Oronooko; or, the royal slave. Published by Charles Gildon

1800 (London) English Nights Entertainments. The history of Oroonoko; or, the royal slave. Written originally by Mrs. Behn, and revised by Mrs. Griffiths. [No revisions to fi rst two paragraphs]

4

4

4

0

0

39 “Royal Slave” capitalized and italicized

35 “Royal Slave” in all capital letters with extra spacing and italicized

42 “Royal Slave” in all capital letters with extra spacing and italicized

2 “Royal Slave” capitalized

2 “Royal Slave” capitalized

Plain border at top; “The History” all capital letters, extra spaced; “Royal Slave” in Black Letter; drop cap for fi rst letter.

Ornament at top; italics and extra spacing in title; decorated drop cap begins the chapter.

Ornament at top; italics and extra spacing in title; decorated drop cap.

Ornament at top; decorated drop cap; title uniform, all capital letters.

No ornaments; title uniform, all capital letters; text close set in smaller typeface.

50

Typing Feeling

Communicating Affect In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith asserts that all humans have an innate tendency (differing in strength) to feel for others. Yet because “we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation” (1). In Smith’s account, the act of sympathizing with another requires a vivid imagination: “It is by the imagination only that we can form any conception” of another’s sensations (1). Smith’s paradigm invokes both a new primacy of mind over the body’s senses and a new division between the two. Despite his opening image of “our brother on the rack” (1), Smith argues that we are more able to sympathize with psychological pain— suffering that is rooted in mind— than with physical pain, which is sense-based and difficult to recreate through imagination or memory (15). Sympathy, for Smith, may be instantaneous but is not automatic or involuntary; often one must consciously “endeavor” or “strive” to make it happen, especially when one’s perspective or temperament differs from the other person’s (10). Unlike the somatic resonances previously associated with sympathy, in which the person is not closed off from the experience of what other men feel, for Smith sympathy depends on the mind. It depends, specifically, on the individual psychological process of identification: one’s ability to imagine oneself in another’s place. As Smith himself appears to have realized, the act of identification central to his model of sympathy is ambiguous and paradoxical. Throughout The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith uses the language of substitution. Most often, the emphasis falls on an imaginative exchange of situations: “We place ourselves in the situation of ” another (7). In these instances, the logic appears consistent: We are imagining ourselves, as ourselves, in the other’s place. As Edmund Burke put it, “Sympathy must be considered as a sort of Substitution, by which we are put in the place of another man, and affected in many respects as he is affected” (1). Yet what is meant by “in the place of ”? At times, Smith represents a more radical kind of substitution. When we read about historical heroes, for example, “in imagination we become the very person whose actions are represented to us” (6). On the opening page, Smith claims that although our senses are strictly individual (“they never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person”),

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the imagination can transcend such limitations: “By the imagination we . . . enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him” (1). At the end of the book, counter-arguing against phi losophers who attribute sympathy to selfishness or self-love, Smith acknowledges that if sympathy arose merely from “bringing your case home to myself,” it would be properly regarded as self-centered. However, this is a “misapprehension”: though sympathy is very properly said to arise from an imaginary change of situations . . . yet this imaginary change is not supposed to happen to me in my own person and character, but in that of the person with whom I sympathize . . . I consider what I should suffer if I was really you, and I not only change circumstances with you, but I change persons and characters. My grief, therefore, is entirely upon your account. . . . It is not, therefore, in the least selfi sh. (35)

Smith does not entirely explain how, while limited to the input of one’s own senses, one might achieve this radical exchange of persons. Yet whether one imagines the self in the other’s situation, or imagines the self becoming the other, the model poses unresolved questions about what happens to difference in the process of sympathetic identification. If differences make sympathizing more difficult, it seems also to be the case that sympathy— seeing oneself “in stead of ” the other—eclipses otherness, precluding apprehension of differences and promoting misrecognitions.30 In many rather obvious ways, Smith’s theory of sympathy lends itself to mimetic models of representation.31 Indeed, the processes and values sympathy inscribes, together with the various paradoxes and deconstructions it produces, supported important developments in eighteenth-century fiction. In novels, the vivid depiction of emotionally charged scenes and situations became a way of transacting emotive commerce between text and reader: The reader imagines him/herself in the place of the suffering victim, or, more often, in the place of the suffering witness of the suffering victim. As Janet Todd, Claudia Johnson, and other critics have shown, in English literature “men of feeling” tend to be positioned as spectators, while women of feeling are positioned as spectacles. The presence of a spectator in the fiction works to transmute relations of substitution into relations of reflection. It is not much of a stretch for a reader to imagine him/herself in the place of the fictional spectator given that this is, basically,

52 Typing Feeling

the reader’s actual position. Yet Smith’s model suggests that such relationships are multidimensional and multidirectional: Readers imagine themselves in the place of the witness imagining himself in the place of the suffering victim who is, according to Smith, sympathizing with the witness. A scene from Sterne’s Sentimental Journey may serve as a preliminary example of a representation governed by the dynamics of sympathy. In this widely discussed scene, the narrator seeks out the mad Maria, a beautiful and virtuous young woman who lost her mind when her lover left her and now wanders about the countryside playing on a pipe and weeping. Pointedly, in this one instance, Yorick, who “seldom [goes] to the place [he sets] out for,” is not wandering; he actually arrives at his predetermined destination, and his reasons for going are clear. “ ’Tis going, I own, like the Knight of the Woeful Countenance, in quest of melancholy adventures—but I know not how it is, but I am never so perfectly conscious of the existence of a soul within me, as when I am entangled in them” (137), he writes prior to the encounter; after sitting weeping with the suffering girl, he adds, “I felt such undescribable emotions within me, as I am sure could not be accounted for from any combinations of matter and motion. I am positive I have a soul . . .” (138). In relation to the wounded female victim, then, the narrator experiences a sense of his own inmost being, his transcendent and immaterial soul. Multiple references to melting and melding compound an image of watery dissolution, an affective alchemy of decomposition. Yorick’s tears blend with Maria’s, which he wipes away with a handkerchief—“I then steeped it in my own— and then in hers— and then in mine— and then I wiped hers again”— and then the handkerchief gets washed in the brook, creating an image of a homogeneous natural space in which everything merges together. Yorick feels he is united with Maria in sorrow; he then fantasizes about fully incorporating her: “She should not only eat of my bread and drink of my own cup, but . . . should lay in my bosom and be unto me as a daughter” (140). The incestuous undertone here furthers the impression of non-differentiation, and indeed when Yorick leaves, everything he sees turns into a monotonous repetition of Maria’s image: “In every scene of festivity I saw Maria in the background of the piece, sitting pensive under her poplar; and I had got almost to Lyons before I was able to cast a shade across her” (140).

Sympathy, Sensibility, and Sentimentality

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As other critics have pointed out, the pleasure derived from this type of vicarious suffering is sexist and morally suspect. The paradigmatic sympathetic exchange is rooted in another’s pain; it seems to require a wounded victim.32 The pleasure of the onlooker, which the reader is invited to mirror, thus carries both masochistic and sadistic implications, as the narrator seems to suspect at another point: With what a moral delight will it crown my journey, in sharing in the sickening incidents of a tale of misery told to me by such a sufferer? to see her weep! and though I cannot dry up the fountain of her tears, what an exquisite sensation is there still left, in wiping them away from off the cheeks of the first and fairest of women, as I’m sitting with my handkerchief in my hand in silence the whole night besides her. There was nothing wrong in the sentiment; and yet I instantly reproached my heart with it in the bitterest and most reprobate of expressions. (66)

Beyond its quasi- sadistic implications, however, sympathy involves an exchange between depths: between wounds or souls, which almost become synonyms. Maria is “shorn indeed! and to the quick”: Her surface is peeled away and “bruised” (140); Yorick wishes to pour “oil and wine” into her “wounds” (140). Though the shape of her body is loosely described (140), her face is not; it is as though she consists entirely of exposed depths, and the narrator’s ultimate response is to cover her—“to cast a shade across her.” At the same time, it is his own depths he encounters in the interaction, his “emotions within,” his soul. Common suffering seems to unify the participants and work to eradicate difference, yet beneath this apparent “concord” lies distinct inequal ity. The two participants are cast in quite different positions in the exchange, positions that are gendered masculine and feminine. Maria, the narrator recounts, has “so much . . . about her of all that the heart wishes, or the eye looks for in woman” (140)— all that the self-indulgent masculine gaze seeks in the feminine victim/pathetic spectacle. The position of mastery in the sympathetic exchange, the ability to indulge in another’s pain that permits the sense of a soul within, is defi ned as the masculine subject position while the woman is the object who permits him to feel—the object who cannot join but can only be joined with (or abandoned), who is difficult to turn away from but who cannot turn herself away at all. In such scenes it is not pain per se, but vicarious or

54 Typing Feeling

sympathetic pain—the weaker “reflected” pain a spectator feels—that consolidates a subjectivity around its soul. Primary or immediate pain, Maria’s pain, has the opposite effect of deranging, “unsettling,” or “disordering” the subject; it results in the “loss of [her] senses” (137), while it seems to awaken his— or at least, to awaken his sense of himself. As illustrated in this scene, sympathy—with its denial of difference and deviations—provokes the illusion of unity, communion, stasis, and agreement: a pleasing but wholly imaginary sense of accord. As Alphonso Lingis writes in another context, this type of sympathetic encounter involves drawing “over the divination of an other, an autonomous one, the image of a nature, another one of my nature” (Deathbound 179). Sympathy puts me in touch with my “nature,” defi ned as what I recognize of myself in the encounter with the other—what, for that reason, I can reproduce, comprehend, and master— and thus precisely what is not other, not foreign about them. This fundamentally dialectical relation to the other permits the consolidation of a subject position via that of a negated or ablated object. Moreover, in Sterne, more clearly than in Smith, we can see the sexual dynamics of this relationship (one source of Yorick’s guilty feelings). This passage obliquely presents an oedipal logic in which desire, founded in lack (especially the want of/for being) aims to affi rm the independent Being of the subject via an object that, whatever it is, can never finally fi ll the hole. The logic of sympathy thus proposes the wound as a figure for the soul—but in the end it is she who has the wound, and he who seems to have the soul. As I have suggested previously, two other dynamics of feeling can be discerned in eighteenth-century discourse; these dynamics survive alongside the understanding of sympathy articulated by Smith and can be traced forward through the history of the novel. In his cornerstone study, Virtue in Distress, R. F. Brissenden posits two lineages descending from Richardson to the present: The fictive patterns established by Richardson were capable of almost immediate vulgarisation; and the rapidity with which they degenerated into melodramatic and superficial clichés is an indication of the depth and broadness of their appeal. . . . [T]he harsh tragedy of Clarissa was soon softened and transformed into a “delicate distress,” and the papier-mâché terrors of the Castle of Udolpho were substituted for the unbearably

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authentic claustrophobia of Harlowe Place. But if the tradition established by Richardson ran rapidly to seed in one direction in others it was to prove richly and enduringly fruitful. Through Jane Austen it led on . . . to the central tradition in English fiction. (96– 97)

Brissenden figures the legitimate literary line as a creative development (Austen’s work “grows out of,” reacts against, and assimilates what came before). This line, “the central tradition,” is characterized by “psychological veracity, . . . emphasis on thought and feeling, on the inner life [of the individual], . . . and . . . moral seriousness” (138). The second vector is figured as a degraded but widely disseminated serial replication (“ran rapidly to seed”). Here, Richardson’s “mythology and method” is “vulgarized,” becomes “melodramatic,” “trivial,” and “clichéd.” This line, Brissenden implies, runs from Richardson to Radcliffe to the mass-market romance of the twentieth century: It is the literary history of sentimentality. Though Brissenden does not say so directly, the “seedy” sentimental strand has been gendered feminine, or to use Robyn Warhol’s more precise term, deemed “effeminate.” Though sentimentality briefly enjoyed a certain cultural prestige in late- eighteenth-century England,33 it was condemned at the turn of the eighteenth century; the stigma of the sentimental and of the effeminate have conjugated each other ever since.34 In her recent study of this genre, Warhol critiques the hegemony of psychoanalytic analyses of affect and, more broadly, the now dominant “container” model of emotion (wherein feeling is located inside the individual, then expressed by the body). Though Warhol sources this model to modernism, it has deeper roots in Smith’s theory of sympathy. Arguing that this model endorses “catharsis” as the only culturally sanctioned way of responding affectively to literature, Warhol acknowledges that sentimental fiction does not produce catharsis. Rather than purging emotion, it “encourages us to rehearse and reinforce the feelings it evokes” (18; also see 41). Discussing a scene from Sleepless in Seattle, Warhol remarks: “None of it is plausible, none of it is surprising; none of it is original—indeed, the effectiveness of the moment depends on its intertextual resonance . . . with a whole . . . tradition it emulates” (48). Clearly, the presence of a certain kind of repetition— a repetition of the same— leads Brissenden to choose adjectives like “clichéd.” Yet as Warhol suggests, this clichéd and repetitive quality is not a failure, a mishap

56 Typing Feeling

resulting from ineptitude and naïveté on the part of writers and readers, but precisely what constitutes the sentimental’s perennial appeal. Sentimentality means playing to the audience’s expectations; as Warhol points out, this holds true even for plot twists, because the audience expects certain plot twists to occur (47–48). Such expectations are formed by exposure to other representations of the same kind; thus we can say that sentimentality involves the relatively direct, often self-conscious or acknowledged imitation of something that is already familiar from other sentimental representations (the “tradition it emulates”). Mass-market romance series, for example, repeatedly re-incarnate the same stylized structure,35 which as many generations have noted bears a false correspondence to reality. More accurately, it bears a precise correspondence to a utopian reality that does not exist. This realization does not diminish the appeal of such texts. It would be unforgivably condescending to suggest that the readers of romance believe—really believe—that these fictions mirror life. Rather, the pleasures of sentimentality operate on a fundamentally different basis from those of mimetic— or sympathetic—realism. Sentimentality is a specific dynamic with its own aims, processes, and rewards; it is not well understood when thought of as a naïve, degraded form of mimesis, or a failed attempt to achieve sympathetic effects. The concept of fetishism may help account for the specificity of sentimental pleasure. Deleuze outlines Freud’s understanding of fetishism as a double process of disavowal and suspension: “On the one hand the subject is aware of reality but suspends this awareness; on the other the subject clings to his ideal” (“Coldness and Cruelty” 33). In contrast to repression, “the knowledge of the situation as it is persists, but in a suspended, neutralized form” (32). Rather than standing in a relationship of surface vs. depth, or conscious vs. unconscious, the two states of mind are co-present, though we withdraw our attention from one in giving it to the other. This model offers us, fi rst, a way to understand the syncopation or alternation between cynicism and emotional engagement that many readers experience in response to sentimental fiction.36 Just as the fetish functions to protect the subject from a perception of loss— or difference— sentimentality suspends without erasing the acknowledgement that what it represents does not exist. It does so by repeating the same plots, scenes, and roles in a rhythmic serial progression: Beyond content, this repetition of the same functions to fetishize on the level of form a utopian reality in which dif-

Sympathy, Sensibility, and Sentimentality

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ference can be defeated (something familiar reliably returns). The pathos of sentimentality is thus composed of a par ticu lar and powerful blend of hope, nostalgia, and plea sure in the representation of a world in which all may be saved, or recuperated— all losses materially or at least morally redeemed. As Deleuze points out, fetishism’s double process of disavowal and suspension carries a certain subversive potential: It is “an operation that consists neither in negating nor even destroying, but rather in radically contesting the validity of that which is: it suspends belief in and neutralizes the given in such a way that a new horizon opens up beyond the given and in place of it . . . [it is] experienced as a protest of the ideal against the real” (31).37 In Freud’s classic case of the shoe, the fetish functions to stall the movement of the eye; likewise, sentimentality’s ongoing repetition of the same allows us to suspend our knowledge that ideals of truth, love, justice, reconciliation, or family bonds routinely fail to instantiate themselves in reality. The sentimental stall is thus imbued with nostalgia, right from the start because “on some level,” as we say, we know that it is no longer possible to believe these things. Moreover, precisely because utopian ideals, as such, exclude the forces of difference, deferral, and negativity, the ideals can only be repeated: posited, insistently, again and again. As publisher’s guidelines for writers of romance make clear, the pleasure of sentimentality requires just enough change to permit us to suspend the knowledge that we are once again reading the same book, whose ending is only a prelude to beginning the next one. Sentimental pleasure invites chain reading because it can only be obtained from sentimental representations. Sentimentality is, to apply perversely T. S. Eliot’s phrase, an “art emotion” (810). As I have defi ned it here, sentimentality, as a dynamic, can be found to a greater or lesser extent in many types of fiction. Scenes that function through sentimental dynamics (including scenes widely recognized as sentimental, such as the death of Little Nell, but also any “happily ever after”) occur throughout canonical as well as non- canonical literature. However, the category we call “genre fiction” is dominated, rather than punctuated, by sentimentality. By defi nition, genre fiction repeats previous repetitions in a “formulaic” manner. That is, genre fictions are structurally determined as repetitions that emphasize what remains the same from one occurrence to the next, playing to established expectations for plot, characters, style, types of setting, kinds of scenes, and so on.38 In this sense, sentimental

58

Typing Feeling

dynamics can be located in genres we do not usually call “sentimental” (or gender feminine), such as Westerns, mysteries, and sea stories. The broad exclusion of genre fiction from “Literature” or “the literary” reflects the manner in which the identity of literary fiction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been shaped by opposing sentimentality and embracing originality. Yet the strongest gestures of repudiation are directed toward sentimental fictions of feeling, perhaps indicating special re sistance to— even revulsion from—the model of feeling such fictions inscribe. 39 Where sympathy locates emotion within the individual subject, and thereby works to confi rm the individual’s own inner being and authenticity (Yorick’s sense of his soul), sentimentality is associated with feeling that is precisely not individual. Words like “tearjerker” connote an absence of originality, or perhaps individual autonomy, on the level of response as well as content and structure. Warhol uses the phrase “technologies of affect” to indicate structures and tropes that are designed to produce emotion, and to produce more-or-less reliably the same emotion within and across readers or viewers (41–50). Such “technologies” work especially well for “willing and cooperative” audiences, but sometimes they work on unwilling, critically resistant ones as well (56–57; 122). In contrast to sympathetic emotional responses—the willed acts of imagination that allow an individual to produce independently and thereby to control his/her own emotional responses— sentimental emotions seem automatic or “mechanical,” triggered almost involuntarily by certain features or patterns. From the perspective of sympathy, then, sentimental emotion looks inauthentic, excessive, unwarranted, embarrassing, ridiculous, and so on, but also profoundly threatening. The strength of the reaction against sentimentality—which is even pathologized in the nineteenth century—may measure the extent to which it threatens sympathy’s emerging claims to normativity and naturalness. Mechanically jerking tears from our eyes, sentimental fictions tell us that emotion is not always produced by imagination and reflection in moments that affirm us as authentic beings with inmost selves; that emotion is not always connected to truth, mind, meaning, personality, or insight. Instead, it might connect us simply and quite superficially to other people: other human bodies that react the same way, unmindfully repeating the same feelings (tears, thrills, laughter, pride, relief ). After all, sentimental “formulas”

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are made up of elements that reliably and repeatedly elicit the same response in the “mass” audience. This response is powerfully programmed into us by culture—that is to say, by a densely layered history of sentimental representations.40 Unlike sympathy, then, sentimentality bypasses individual subjectivity; the self loses its specificity as the body is brought to enact or realize the most general, most cultural, least individual aspects of its constitution. The resistance to sentimentality can thus be understood as a reluctance to identify, not with another individual, but indirectly and indiscriminately with whatever is, within a given cultural context, the most commonly human. Where sentimentality emphasizes sameness and commonality, sensibility emphasizes difference and singularity; it is, in a sense, the other side of the same coin. Samuel Johnson defined “sensibility” as “quickness of sensation” or “quickness of perception” (Dictionary). As a fundamentally physiological quality, sensibility was closely linked to the medical paradigms discussed previously, specifically the notion that nerves might respond of their own accord, without the mediation of mind. This image of the sensitive body pervades Hume’s Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals.41 Hume writes: The very aspect of happiness, joy, prosperity gives plea sure; that of pain, suffering, sorrow communicates uneasiness[.] The human countenance . . . borrows smiles or tears from the human countenance. Reduce a person to solitude and he loses all enjoyment, except either of the sensual or speculative kind; and that because the movements of his heart are not forwarded by correspondent movements in his fellow creatures. The signs of sorrow and mourning, though arbitrary, affect us with melancholy, but the natural symptoms, tears and cries and groans, never fail to infuse compassion and uneasiness. . . . In general, it is certain that wherever we go, whatever we reflect on or converse about, everything still presents us with the view of human happiness or misery and excites in our breast a sympathetic movement of plea sure or uneasiness. (47–48)

In Hume’s analysis, affective “communication” refers not to expression (something experienced within the hidden depths of the subject and manifested or signified by the body) or imagination, but to a less mediated process of conduction, infection, or spreading (as in, a “communicable” disease). As Adela Pinch argues, for Hume “feelings are not mimetic nor

60 Typing Feeling

semiotic nor in any way subordinate to statements of fact. They are quantities of force” (33). Rather than being private and internal, feelings are thoroughly public and social; they are also unwilled, produced almost automatically in response to the sensation of others. This “forwarding” of feeling does not require effort, understanding, or any detour through consciousness.42 Hume even uses the word “magic”: “Every movement of the theater, by a skillful poet, is communicated, as it were, by magic to the spectators, who weep, tremble, resent, rejoice, and are inflamed with all the variety of passions which actuate the several personages of the drama” (49). Clearly, this paradigm is based on physical, sensory interactions with other bodies: more precisely, among bodies’ parts. Rather than remaining within the closed whole of an individual subject, feeling moves, of itself, from part to part (countenance to countenance, or heart to heart), suggesting the dynamic formation of open intersubjective constellations, parts pulled into relationship by the attractive power of affect itself. Hume’s model thus highlights the capacity of parts to be, so to speak, affected: to alter in response, even when the signs of feeling are “arbitrary.” The latter point highlights the extent to which feelings are here understood to be literally superfi cial: moving from surface to surface. Because affect and sociability are inseparable for Hume, it is difficult to say whether pleasure (“enjoyment”) inheres in the experience of affect itself, or the sense of fellowship and connection that shared feeling provides: “A man who enters the theater is immediately struck with the view of so great a multitude participating of one common amusement, and experiences, from their very aspect, a superior sensibility or disposition of being affected with every sentiment which he shares with his fellow creatures” (49). On the other hand, Hume was well aware of the implications of shared, “contagious” feeling for mob behavior: “Popu lar sedition, party zeal, a devoted obedience to factious leaders—these are some of the most visible, though less laudable, effects of this social sympathy in human nature” (51). In both laudable and less laudable manifestations, this sense-based dynamic of affective communication might seem at odds with “print culture”: that is, the distance between bodies that writing in general, and print in particular, seems to introduce or assume. However, as we have seen, in the eighteenth century, the human body and the body of the text were closely connected. In particular, typographical emphasis and variation carried the potential to recreate variables involved in the face-to-face communication

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of feeling, making the text itself a forceful stimulus that would act directly on the reader’s senses, almost like another countenance.43 Several of the numerous books written (and in many cases printed) by John Dunton in the late seventeenth century provide especially striking examples of the use of typographical effects to communicate affect in ways that exceed or defy both Adam Smith’s emphasis on imaginative identifi cation and the repetitions of the same that belong to sentimentality. Largely forgotten today, Dunton was a prolific London writer, projector, printer, and bookseller. His moderately popu lar work was parodied by Pope and Swift for its quantity, digressiveness, and autobiographical content; also, more obliquely, for Dunton’s status as a commercial writer who lacked a classical education, and his hopelessly modern fascination with the new.44 As Jody Greene points out, Dunton’s oft-used term “rambling” functions as an apt descriptor for his exceptionally digressive texts, with their impulse to be all encompassing; the term also captures a potential of print more generally, evoking in a variety of registers the new forms of mobility that print made possible.45 It is likely that some of Dunton’s work, particularly A Voyage Round the World, served as an inspiration or even source for Tristram Shandy, with its more self-conscious digressivity and more famous typographical play.46 It is difficult to know exactly how unusual Dunton’s elaborate typography would have seemed to his original readers; after all, even Pope and Swift engaged in their own kinds of typographical games.47 Overall, my research suggests that that Dunton’s books are unusual in the frequency and amplitude, but not kind, of typographical variations they employ. As a flamboyant writer and printer motivated by a love of novelty and invention, he exploits more enthusiastically the many resources at the disposal of most seventeenth- and eighteenth- century compositors. Dunton uses different sizes and styles of type to indicate varying degrees of emphasis as well as something more like tone, inflection, or (to borrow Moxon’s term) “humouring.” For example, the use of Black Letter for the phrase “summer-friends” on page 356 of Voyage Round the World (see Figure 2) does more than simply stress the importance of the phrase; it provides a kind of tonal flavoring. Dunton also uses white space on the page to set off par ticu lar words or passages, and makes liberal use of rules, boxes, ornaments, brackets, marginal notes, and manicula. In historical retrospect, these devices allow him to open up or deregulate what Glyn

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White calls “the graphic surface,” the inscribable space of the page. Dunton’s pages move from Roman to italics to large print to larger print or to different fonts, sometimes approaching a state of pure variation. They embody differences in intensity that would be difficult to mea sure on a unilinear scale; instead, they must be understood as relationally defi ned modulations. In other words, these emphatical practices work more like a tuning dial than a digital on/off mechanism. By contrast, the modern reduction of typographical variation to the (occasional) use of italics serves to trap the play of intensities within a binary opposition between emphasis and norm. In general, Dunton’s typographical choices do not seem intended to clarify or disambiguate— certainly they do not function in that way. Just as for Hume feeling spreads infectiously from body to body, Dunton’s typographical devices seem oriented toward transmitting a kind of mobile affective energy from page to reader, making the page function like an expressive body. Exactly exterior to the text’s “meaning,” which can be and is routinely separated from them, such typographical effects do not signify. Constituting the empirical surface of representation, literally “the outside of the text,” these accidentals resist interpretation. One can, and does routinely, separate what is said from the appearance of a text, but it is very difficult to reverse that operation. Typography is, in the most rigorous sense, insignifi cant; and yet, as anyone who has tried printing in, for example, Impact, Harrington, or Lucida Bright can see, it does make a difference. This is not to say that it would be reasonable to assign par ticu lar feelings to par ticu lar typefaces (Courier is solemn or Times New Roman avid, and so on): No typeface has, in itself, a par ticu lar affect that belongs to it as a quality. Though par ticu lar faces accrue cultural associations, these are purely contextual. Italics, for example, do not express emphasis in themselves, through some inner essence that determines once and forever the value of the slanting letter, but solely through a relational difference from surrounding words. Importantly, then, difference is the source of emphasis or intensification. It will not be possible to specify typographical affects categorically or ontologically, as states of being: Emphasis references, rather, differences in intensity, or perhaps the intensity of difference. Likewise, affect is not located “in” the letters but “in” the experience of reading, as something that transpires between reader and page.

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In “Shame and the Cybernetic Fold,” Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank criticize Ann Cvetkovich for her undifferentiated use of the word “affect,” claiming that she relies too heavily on an outdated psychological model wherein basic physical excitation is common to all emotional experience; people subsequently identify a specific feeling (anger, sadness, and so on) by reference to context. In my view, however, the general word is quite useful in designating differential flows of intensity that are primarily physiological and experiential; hence, par ticu lar: too par ticu lar to be captured by signifiers. To adapt a metaphor from Deleuze, language is a net whose mesh is too large to catch these tiny fish, though they swim through it at every turn.48 For precisely this reason, the affect produced by the personto-person sensory encounters described by Hume, and here applied to the effects of typography, really cannot be formalized. The effects of typography elude representation, despite the fact that they are spread across the surface of all printed representations. We can talk about them, but we cannot substitute for them a name. Typography gives the reader a sense. Its infectious affects work in the domain of experience, not representation, and are thus, so to speak, non-semantic, sub-representative, “asignifying,” and “performative.” Here, I use the word “performative” in a quite basic, pedestrian sense: “to perform an action,” to do, to accomplish, to make something happen.49 As a case in point, consider the passage reproduced as Figure 3, taken from the fictional editor’s introduction to Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling. The blank space after “But” seems to open onto gesture, a gesture that must either be enacted by the reader’s body or realized as a kind of virtual kinesthesis, a want-to-move. Gesture is called for or called out by the text, not represented or described. Text and body here stand in a relation of mutual “flexion” or bending. The text is shaped to accommodate a body: It leaves space for a body that will face it. In doing so, it gestures toward or invites motion, summons it forth; the body must respond to accommodate the text, to complete its sense.50 This moment clearly defies a model/ copy paradigm: The text does not copy anything, nor does it model something for the reader to copy. We might be inclined to consider the reader’s gesture an “original,” were it not so clearly scripted by the text, and were it not the case that every reader of the text would “repeat” the gesture. However, this does not imply that each reader’s gesture will be the

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Figure 3. Expressive space from the fictional editor’s introduction to A Man of Feeling, by Henry Mackenzie (Dublin, 1771). (Source: Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale. University of Wisconsin, Madison.)

same: On the contrary, every body is different. Thus, part of what is performed when the passage is read is the differentiation of the aperture itself, as its potential to produce myriad singular embodied responses is unfolded over time.51 Here, then, we are “moved” in a very different sense than we are moved when we sympathize with Harley as, alternately, virtuous sufferer and

Figure 4. The closing passage of A Man of Feeling, by Henry Mackenzie (Dublin, 1771), fractured by dashes. (Source: Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale. University of Wisconsin, Madison.)

66 Typing Feeling

virtuous spectator. Yet as a character, Harley is himself a kind of blank openness, who even figures his soul as a superficial organ—indeed, as a printable page (66). This close relationship between body and print is reflected in the passage shown in Figure 4, which issues in Harley’s death. As you can see, dashes of varying length connect almost all of the sentences in the paragraph, a device that serves to orchestrate the rhythm of reading, even of silent reading. The dashes stress or fray what would otherwise be pauses, preventing the release that would be brought about by a full stop, semicolon, or even comma: They thus build and elongate a sense of tension. Moreover, even as they establish a certain visual continuity, the dashes break up the sentiments expressed, to the point where what we might call the physical simulacrum produced by the text almost eclipses the expository sense of the passage. It is important to register the interactivity of such pages, whose effects belong only to the interaction between text and reader, and cannot be isolated from this interaction or located on one or the other side. Wolfgang Iser’s “two poled” understanding of the interaction between text and reader is useful here, though we might substitute the word “body” or “senses” for Iser’s “subjectivity”: “The work itself cannot be identical with the text or with its actualization but must be situated somewhere between the two. It must inevitably be virtual in character, as it cannot be reduced to the reality of the text or to the subjectivity [body, senses] of the reader, and it is from this virtuality that it derives its dynamism” (291). As we have seen, older notions of sympathetic co-responses—which, unlike Smith’s model of sympathy, do not work according to principles of imitation or identification—tacitly inscribe difference, and thus the potential for discord, between responding parts or parties, though this potential is repeatedly denied through assertions of harmonic agreement. When an organ responds “sympathetically,” it does not imitate or mirror another organ; rather, each organ repeats in its own idiom the innervation of the other, responding with its own par ticu lar resources and morphology to the invitation of the other, as it were, or the resonance produced between the two. Harmonic or discordant, the responses are fundamentally rooted in difference or disparity (stimulating a woman’s breast to induce uterine contractions because of the sympathy between those two organs, for example, can hardly be read as resemblance or copying, or as relying upon imagination). It is not only the difference between the organs that is in play, but the pro-

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cess by which each organ differs from itself in responding to the other. The dynamic of feeling I am calling sensibility can be situated as a re-reading of this older notion of sympathy that dispenses with the presumptions of agreement and instead embraces the potential for differentiation. The centrality of disparity to sensibility is captured— almost—in another scene from Sterne’s Sentimental Journey. During his encounter with the beautiful Grisset, Yorick remarks: “There are certain combined looks of simple subtlety—where whim, and sense, and seriousness, and nonsense, are so blended, that all the languages of Babel set loose together could not express them—they are communicated and caught so instantaneously, that you can scarce say which party is the infector” (77). This look, woven between faces, destabilizes identity, transgressing the boundary of each subject (as well as other boundaries, such as that between sense and nonsense, or infector and infected). The relation between self and other turns on alteration rather than imitation or identification. In such a scene, it is unthinkable to put oneself in the other’s place, because there is no stable “place” in which to put oneself; rather, one would simply join in. There is nothing exclusively dual about the type of interaction here described: The combined look is unfi nished for as long as it lasts; it has no trajectory and remains open to others, to further transformations. Affect is here figured as fluid, dynamic, contagious, without clear origin or ownership. Partly because it defies discrete categories, moreover, the look that “communicates” seems to elude linguistic expression. The passage that represents it for us stresses language’s limits, its inability to make itself large enough, or small enough, to capture the body’s singular twists and turns.52 Such encounters with the limits of language further highlight the role of typographical variations that “perform” difference. As I will show in the next chapter, similar per for mances can be accomplished through means other than typography. But just as language has served as a paradigm for analysis of the functioning of sign systems in general, typography may serve as a paradigmatic instance of the “rambling” affective performativity that belongs to sensibility. We do not know what it was like to be an eighteenth-century reader looking at an eighteenth-century book. The pages are, for us, inevitably patinaed by the passage of time; we see them in contrast to styles of printing unknown to their original readers. It would be untenable to suppose that past textual practices, interwoven as they were into the whole fabric

68 Typing Feeling

of a culture, shot through with understandings of body and feeling quite alien to ours, could or should be repeated or recaptured as they were. On the other hand, electronic media have re-opened the possibilities for experimenting with the sensory dimension of texts. Today’s software makes it possible to use a huge assortment of fonts, ornaments, and textual effects, some of which are new and some of which have been unavailable since the eighteenth century. Thus, the problem of the relationship between graphic, affective, and semantic dimensions of reading and writing has returned to be dynamically repeated in the work of contemporary novelists such as Mark Danielewski. Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory describe Danielewski’s House of Leaves as “a stunning, mind-and-genre expanding work” that is, among other things, “deeply concerned with exploring what a novel is (or might be)” (100). As the title suggests, the novel invokes architecture in figurative, performative, material, and thematic dimensions, obliquely echoing early printers like Moxon; in fact, earlier textual practices were a source of inspiration for Danielewski. As he remarked in an interview, “It wasn’t uncommon for me to wander into the library looking for any old book that looked different. . . . These bits somehow thrilled me with their sense of textual life, of participation, even of collaboration” (MaCaffery and Gregory 119). Danielewski, moreover, is truly an “Architect of the Word,” having written the novel in pencil and then typeset it himself (118). As he put it, “I simply said, ‘Okay, I can place text this way on the page, so it has that effect. And I can use the shape and design of the text not just to conjure up some static visual impression but use it to further enhance the movement of meaning, theme, and story’ ” (106). Danielewski deliberately situates himself as the beneficiary of a kind of literary lineage, or zig zag; what Deleuze might call a bastard or “transversal” line. Disputing reviewers who praise the novel’s originality, Danielwski remarked: Anyone with a grasp of the history of narrative can see that House of Leaves is really just enjoying the fruits of a long line of earlier literary experimentation. The so-called “originality” claimed by my commentators must be limited to my decision to use the wonderful techniques developed by Mallarmé, Sterne, B.S. Johnson, cummings, Hollander, etc., etc.— and of course Hitchcock, Welles, Truffaut, Kubrick, and so on. (106)

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The word “experimentation,” of course, connotes divergence, a road less traveled; without claiming that all of these writers and fi lmmakers took the same road, the inclusion of Sterne in the list especially warrants our situating Danielewski’s work as a dynamic repetition of the virtual potential of sensibility. In par ticu lar, Danielewski sets up relationships of “flexion” between readers and the performative forces of books. As he puts it, “I’ve always wanted to create scenes and scenarios that verge on the edge of specificity without crossing into identification, leaving enough room, so to speak, for the reader to participate and supply her own fears, his own anxieties, their own history and future” (119–20). If the dynamics of sympathy come to defi ne “the central tradition” of the English novel, and sentimentality continues to reproduce the familiar patterns of genre fiction, we might situate Danielewski’s novels as one future of sensibility, whose intermittent history I pursue in the next chapter.

2.

The Science of the Sensible From Sterne to Charlotte Brontë

Eros tears virtual objects out of the pure past and gives them to us in order that they may be lived. —Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (103)

As I have argued in Chapter 1, rather than mapping difference between self and other, the textual practice of sensibility is capable of diff erentiating both self and other, engaging specific features, forces, capacities, and micro-movements whose relations transgress social and symbolic categories and sift through repre sentation. As Sterne’s fiction particularly illustrates, sensibility is also a radical sexual dynamic that differs markedly from oedipal patterns. If sympathy points us toward psychoanalytic models of desire, identity, and identifi cation, sensibility points us toward Deleuze and Guattari, in whose work the unnamable intensities of difference are virtually synonymous with desire or libido in its least oedipal form. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze argues that representation cannot capture difference except insofar as it is mediated by identity. This subordination of difference to identity defines representation for Deleuze, which he contrasts to “a different kind of formation” capable of including “the lived reality of a sub-representative domain” (68– 69). Such a formation, Deleuze proposes, is not attained by multiplying repre sentations and points of view. On the contrary, each composing representation must be distorted, diverted and torn from its centre. Each point of view must itself be the object, or the object must belong to the point of view. The object must therefore be in

70

From Sterne to Charlotte Brontë 71 no way identical, but torn asunder in a difference in which the identity of the object as seen by a seeing subject vanishes. Difference must become the element, the ultimate unity; it must therefore refer to other differences which never identify it but rather differenciate [sic] it. Each term of a series, being already a difference, must be put into a variable relation with other terms, thereby constituting other series devoid of centre and convergence. Divergence and decentering must be affi rmed in the series itself. Every object, every thing, must see its own identity swallowed up in difference, each being no more than a difference between differences. Difference must be shown differing. (56)

Deleuze goes on to argue that “modern art tends to realize these conditions: in this sense it becomes a veritable theatre of metamorphoses and permutations. . . . The work of art leaves the domain of repre sentation in order to become ‘experience,’ transcendental empiricism or science of the sensible” (56). In this “superior empiricism,” “the being of the sensible reveals itself in the work of art, while at the same time the work of art appears as experimentation” (68). In other words, the sensible is presented neither as “what can be represented” nor as “that which remains once representation is removed (a contradictory flux, for example, or a rhapsody of sensations)” (56), but rather as dynamic repetition or simulacrum, “the instance which includes a difference within itself, such as (at least) two divergent series on which it plays, all resemblance abolished so that one can no longer point to the existence of an original and a copy” (69). At various points in his work, Deleuze discusses Kafka, Proust, and Klossowski as exemplary modern artists in this regard, writers whose work “indicates to philosophy a path leading to the abandonment of representation” (69). While Deleuze investigates the philosophical, social, and political history of this aesthetic, he does not propose that it might also have a literary history. In fact, he argues that the specific historical conditions of modernism produce its first literary articulation. Yet as I will try to show, this aesthetic (“superior empiricism” or “science of the sensible”) has a longer literary history; it is the intermittent, unfinished literary history of sensibility. This chapter traces a short portion of that history, from Sterne to Charlotte Brontë.

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Texturing Eros in A Sentimental Journey In Volume II of his illustrious autobiography, Tristram Shandy recounts the “accidental impression” left upon his mind by his Uncle Toby’s kindness to a fly. Tristram reflects: I was but ten years old when this happened;—but whether it was, that the action itself was more in unison to my nerves at that age of pity, which instantly set my whole frame into one vibration of most pleasurable sensation;— or how far the manner and expression of it might go towards it;— or in what degree, or by what secret magick,— a tone of voice and harmony of movement, attuned by mercy, might find a passage to my heart, I know not;—this I know, that the lesson of universal good-will then taught and imprinted by my uncle Toby, has never since been worn out of my mind. (87)

The language Tristram uses to describe the “impression” he receives clearly echoes that of Hume and Cheyne.1 Using the vocabulary of nerves, vibration, pleasure, and sensation, he speculates about whether the “action itself ” prompted his response, or the “manner and expression,” or the accentual (accidental, prosodic) qualities, “tone of voice and harmony of movement,” which have passed sensation to his heart by some “secret magick.” In any case, the physiological, sense-based aspect of this encounter is presented as a precondition for moral learning: The impression travels through the nerves, frame, and heart to the mind, the last stop on the line. Yet if such a formative lesson is the effect of an encounter between bodies, Tristram as a writer, and Sterne by extension, must fi nd ways to overcome the distances between bodies writing introduces. Tristram addresses the problem of translating between bodies and texts in the fi rst chapter of Volume IV, “The Intricacies of Diego and Julia,” as he sets out to translate the 10th Tale of Slawkenbergius: . . . how can this ever be translated, and yet if this specimen of Slawkenbergius’s tales, and the exquisitiveness of his moral should please the world—translated shall a couple of volumes be.—Else, how this can ever be translated into good English, I have no sort of conception.—There seems in some passages to want a sixth sense to do it rightly.—— What can he mean by the lambent pupilability of slow, low, dry chat, five notes below the natural tone,—which you know, madam, is little more than a whisper? The moment I pronounced the words, I could perceive an

From Sterne to Charlotte Brontë 73 attempt towards a vibration in the strings, about the region of the heart.—The brain made no acknowledgment.—There’s often no good understanding betwixt ’em.—I felt as if I understood it.—I had no ideas.—The movement could not be without cause.—I’m lost. I can make nothing of it,—unless, may it please your worships, the voice, in that case being little more than a whisper, unavoidably forces the eyes to approach not only within six inches of each other—but to look into the pupils—is not that dangerous?—But it can’t be avoided—for to look up to the cieling [sic], in that case the two chins unavoidably meet— and to look down into each others laps, the foreheads come into immediate contact, which at once puts an end to the conference—I mean to the sentimental part of it.——What is left, madam, is not worth stooping for. (215–16)

In the end, Tristram never provides the type of translation he has just executed with the ninth tale (an English translation of the imaginary Latin original). Rather, Tristram recounts his physical response as a translator to the text he is reading. The “attempt towards a vibration” Tristram perceives is produced by a resonance between the words of a text and the body of a reader; this communication bypasses “the brain,” producing “understanding” without “ideas.” These lines imply that the text inflects itself upon the physical sensibilities of the reader; it affects the senses directly, becoming less a sign for a stimulus external to it than a stimulus in itself. While the semantic content of the passage is not unimportant here, I want to suggest that the effect of the passage is at least “forwarded,” to use Hume’s word, from Tristram as reader to Tristram’s own reader by a careful orchestration of his text’s material body, or sensory attributes. In this category, we might include the sound effects of words (“lambent pupability of slow, low, dry chat”), their typographical appearance, the kinetic rhythms established by sentence lengths and breaks on the page, the percussions of punctuation; above all, the visual and temporal “scoring” provided by the varied dashes, the length of which Sterne specified in printer’s ems.2 Instead of describing or representing bodies, Tristram/Sterne uses the resources internal to print to “repeat,” in simulacral fashion, and thus communicate, sensation. In this light, the “sixth sense” wanted to translate rightly refers not to the task of translating from one language to another, or from the world of bodies to the world of words, but of translating sensations through a text, to the body.

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As many scholars have shown, Sterne exerted an unusual degree of meticulous control over the “accidents” of his texts, carefully constructing interfaces between their typographical, affective, and semantic dimensions.3 In most cases, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to describe systematically the minor tropisms, sensory innervations, or minor derailings prompted for readers by these typographical arrangements. However, the placement of the break between pages 76 and 77 in the fi rst edition of Tristram Shandy offers an unusually clearcut, because unusually mimetic, example. The break happens mid-sentence, between “for to look up to the” and “ceiling”; “ceiling” appears as the guideword at the bottom of page 76. Sterne disliked guidewords, but as he was unable to talk his publishers out of them, he sometimes positioned them deliberately (together with page breaks).4 In this instance, the reader looks up: He or she must “look up,” i.e., move her/his eyes up to the top of the next page, in order to continue reading. The presence of the guideword sets a kind of trap for the reader, who is (at least potentially) thereby made aware in advance of the fact that his/her next movement implicates her, willy nilly, in the dynamics of the scene. The reader is essentially forced into resolving, or breaking off , the play between possibilities Tristram presents (looking up or looking down). The “intricacies” of Diego and Julia are structurally repeated as an interaction between the body of the reader and the body of the book, which is even comically capable of meeting the reader’s chin or forehead (particularly when we consider the small size of the original volumes, which would likely have been held up for reading). Though I cannot offer evidence for or against the deliberateness of this par ticu lar instance, Sterne’s texts offer numerous examples of such subtle typographical orchestrations: pages that perform, though much of this play gets erased in modern editions. Sterne clearly valued such nuances, and his readers’ ability to register their effects. As Tristram puts it, “These attacks of Mrs. Wadman, you will readily conceive to be of different kinds; varying from each other. A general looker on, would scarce allow them to be attacks at all——or if he did, would confound them all together----but I write not to them” (449). Unlike the more conventionally “sentimental” encounters also present in Sterne’s fiction—the snuff box scene, for example, the story of the sword (SJ 105– 6), or the peasant supper (SJ 141–44)—this passage does not attempt to “move” the reader in the conventional sense, to tears; nor does it encourage imaginative identification

From Sterne to Charlotte Brontë 75

with a character (as opposed to a kind of physical mimicry).5 It certainly does not model virtue; in fact, it does not offer a model at all, but something more like a pattern, or a signal: an occasion for the production of experience. As with Mackenzie’s “But ,” one might be tempted to call the reader’s experience the “original” to which Tristram’s translation refers, were it not for the fact that every reader will repeat it. But every body’s response will vary, since every body is just as different as every marbled page. The interactions between book and reader, moreover, are not solely one-way (text to reader); the book is also open, subject to be affected by the reader. Sterne signals this reciprocity most loudly when he provides a blank page for the reader to draw the Widow Wadman (375– 76). The fact that few readers do draw the Widow Wadman, however, may suggest that the novel cultivates a pleasurable passivity in its readers—passivity in the Nietz schean sense: capable of being of affected, interpreted, “moved.” Sterne’s texts, I wish to argue, define “sensibility” in just this way: as an attraction to being affected. In the last sentence of “The Intricacies of Diego and Julia,” Tristram writes: “The foreheads come into immediate contact, which at once puts an end to the conference—I mean to the sentimental part of it” (216). “The sentimental part” here seems to involve a certain region of time (dilatory suspension or hesitation), language (equivocal), space (charged proximity, like that between reader and book, or the distance between hands that “opened a communication large enough for any sentiment to pass or repass” [448]), and even punctuation (the dash, which holds things both together and apart). In each case, one can say that what is “sentimental” is what is most provocative and least stable. To the extent that provocation is always erotic in Sterne’s work, what is “sentimental” is already sexual, and vice versa. If, as Jerome McGann puts it, “the literatures of sensibility and sentiment . . . [explore the experience of ] the body’s elementary and spontaneous mechanisms” (Poetics 7), Sterne’s texts realize the erotic quality of this experience in a particularly vivid manner. Paradoxically, sex itself rarely happens in Sterne’s fiction, but neither is it precisely elided— readers feel vaguely as if it is happening all the time, and also uncomfortably implicated.6 Indeed, “confounding them all together,” closing the gap, losing différance, puts an end to “the sentimental part.” If eroticism is not opposed to sensibility, sexual intercourse at its most phallic—its most

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literal, we might say—with its consequences of climax and closure, is opposed to both. It brings about the fall, “the end of the conference”: the end of arousal, equivocation, play: “What is left, madame, is not worth stooping for.” The mockingly disdainful tone of this last sentence heralds a further reconfiguration, whereby Eros is aligned with virtue and the social, while phallic sexuality is set apart from both.7 In A Sentimental Journey, for example, Yorick explains, “if I ever do a mean action, it must be in some interval betwixt one passion and another: whilst this interregnum lasts, I always perceive my heart locked up—I can scarce fi nd in it, to give Misery a sixpence; and therefore I always get out of it as fast as I can, and the moment I am rekindled, I am all generosity and good will again” (57). Likewise, “A Fragment” recounts the way “the vilest and most profl igate town in all Thrace” was transformed by a poet’s speech, “O Cupid! prince of God and men, &c.”: “The fi re caught— and the whole city, like the heart of one man, opened itself to love . . . Friendship and Virtue met together, and kissed each other in the street” (58). Clearly, this passage paints a Humean image of affective communication: affect spreads, even concatenates, from one to another. Far from running counter to virtue, Eros provides its very conditions of possibility; the social fabric does not emerge in the place of desire’s repression, displacement, or sublimation, but is woven from the very threads of the erotic as the direct product of passion. At the same time, Sterne belittles the central event of phallic sexuality as “little better than a convulsion,” and refuses its temporal or narrative patterns (SJ 112).8 He refuses to subordinate Eros to orgasm, as “foreplay” or the space of stimulating delay that serves only to prepare a satisfying end. What might elsewhere be framed as foreplay (and is sometimes misread as such in Sterne) is instead removed from that structure and made into the whole story. For example, standing before the door of the Remise with an unknown woman, and finding his attempts at conversation rebuffed, Yorick concentrates on the sensation of holding her hand. He describes a tenuous, purely differential communication between exquisitely sensible surfaces: The pulsations of the arteries in my fi ngers pressing across hers, told her what was passing within me: she looked down. . . . I must have made some slight efforts towards a closer compression of her hand, from the

From Sterne to Charlotte Brontë 77 subtle sensation I felt in the palm of my own—not as if she was going to withdraw hers—but, as if she thought about it— . . . instinct more than reason directed me to . . . hold it loosely, and in a manner as if I was every moment going to release it, of myself . . . (42–43)

The tenuous, purely superficial communication that takes place between hands in this scene is neither building toward nor substituting for a more “adult” kind of sexual activity. It becomes an end in itself, a transient plea sure that seeks simply to continue. It is at once a purely selfish and a generous pleasure that is not oriented toward mastery, possession or appropriation.9 The incipient contact of hands that might at any point withdraw or grasp, but refuse both resolutions, instead constitutes an interstitial limit that defi nes new territories of sensation. Likewise, during his encounter with the beautiful Grisset, Yorick reports that she “looked sometimes at the gloves, then sideways to the window, then at the gloves— and then at me. I was not disposed to break silence—I followed her example: so I looked at the gloves, then to the window, then at the gloves, and then at her— and so on alternately” (77). Both parties try to catch a glimpse of the other unawares, to catch the other face by surprise: “I found I lost considerably in every attack,” Yorick writes, “she had a quick black eye, and shot through two such long and silken eye-lashes with such penetration, that she looked into my very heart and reins—It may seem strange, but I could actually feel she did—” (77). This lateral turning of traveling glances is not going anywhere, not building toward anything; the penetrating looks do not gather toward some climactic end. Like the activity of counting pulses which precedes these glances (75), and the structure of the novel that recounts these encounters, the intermittent contacts form an open series that might continue indefinitely, just stop, or be disrupted by something else. They will not, ever, arrive at “closure.” Such encounters do not produce meaningful ties; unlike his visit to Maria, they do not confirm for Yorick the existence of his soul, or assert conventional sentimental ideals. Rather, they seem to promote a heightened development of bodies’ surfaces and motilities, enhancing each body’s conductive capacity and affirming each person’s potential to inflect (be inflected) and translate (be translated) “in turn.” By the same token, these encounters are the opposite of monumental. They are immemorial, even enabled by forgetting. Yorick, after all, only makes his journey because

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he “forgets” that England is at war with France (92); he stops to ask the Grisset directions, which he forgets so he can return and ask again, and again (74). The purely serial relations of pulses and glances evoke forgetting as well: Rather than accumulating in memory to build anticipation, they are momentary pleasures in themselves, disremembered, unsummed up, which can only be repeated unproductively— and it is certainly the case that Sterne’s erotics are unproductive by all the standards of phallic sexuality. Clearly, any discussion of the relation between sexuality, sensibility, and “virtue” in Sterne’s novels must acknowledge the suggestion that Yorick, Uncle Toby, and Tristram (and perhaps their author) are impotent. Some critics have situated the eros and ethos of Sterne’s novels as the outcome of an inability to participate fully in phallic sexuality.10 For these critics, the type of “virtue” Sterne advocates— benevolence combined with tolerance, for short—is associated with debility, ineffectiveness, and a condemned, often feminized passivity. Yet this interpretation of virtue and impotence in Sterne significantly underestimates one of the most sustained challenges to phallic sexuality ever propounded in Western literature, for both Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey can be read as creative experiments with what happens to sexuality, to narrative, and also to “virtue” if a phallic organization is subverted, suspended, or refused. To further this claim, I would like to examine the most obviously sexual scene in A Sentimental Journey, the chapter entitled “The Temptation” (see Figure 5). In this scene, Yorick is at odds with himself. He is attracted to the fille de chambre, who appears to be either seducing him or willing to be seduced by him, but he is resisting: It was a fi ne still evening, in the latter end of the month of May— the crimson window- curtains (which were of the same colour of those of the bed) were drawn close— the sun was setting, and reflected through them so warm a tint into the fair fille de chambre’s face—I thought she blushed— the idea of it made me blush myself—we were quite alone; and that super-induced a second blush before the fi rst could get off. (116)

In this passage, affect is woven between externalities; it moves from outside to outside to outside, from the sun to the curtains to the face of

From Sterne to Charlotte Brontë 79

the chambermaid; this movement eventually infects an inside as the “idea” of the blush provokes Yorick to blush himself, doubly. The spreading blush does not originate as an outward expression of a psychic interior; rather, it is conducted like warmth from one surface to another: Even the “thought” of the blush serves only to conduce its movement onto another physical surface. Yorick then describes his own blush in terms of moral and physical flows that take place on the same plane: There is a sort of pleasing half-guilty blush, where the blood is more in fault than the man—’tis sent impetuous from the heart, and virtue fl ies after it—not to call it back, but to make the sensation of it more delicious to the nerves—’tis associated.— But I’ll not describe it.—(116)

Blood moves fi rst, and “virtue” follows—not to condemn or repress but to intensify the sensation. The chapter traces a process of erotic disintegration in which the characters seem to come apart into parts (hands, lips, socks, shoes, buckles, and so on); the parts are clearly attracted to each other, but Yorick and the text work to keep them at a certain distance. As Yorick refuses to “describe it,” Sterne orchestrates typography and punctuation to convey the physical patterns of the “association,” as though an arrangement of spaces, marks, breaks, lines, and stops could transmit a specific physical rhythm of breaths, holds, pulses, pauses, fleeting deflections, and impulsions, conveying to the reader the physical tensions or intensities that spread over the surface of the text. In the early printings (Figure 5), dashes of varying lengths and forms “score” the passage, marking each “turn” of the text.11 Each dash sustains hesitation and holds off the moment at which the tension would collapse into closure (surrender, release), even as Yorick grows increasingly disordered and frayed: —I sought five minutes for a card—I knew I had not one—I took up a pen—I laid it down again—my hand trembled—the dev il was in me. I know as well as anyone he is an adversary whom if we resist he will fly from us—but I seldom resist him at all; from a terror, that though I may conquer, I may still get a hurt in the combat— so I give up the triumph for security; and instead of thinking to make him fly, I generally fly myself. (116)

Figure 5 (above and opposite). Early printing of the fille de chambre scene from A Sentimental Journey, by Laurence Sterne (London, 1768). (Source: Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale. University of Wisconsin, Madison.)

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This convoluted statement suggests that rather than either acting upon or suppressing his sexual impulses, Yorick uses them to propel him elsewhere. Such a conclusion is reached only after a series of reversals that lead the reader to expect that Yorick will give in, that the reversals and hesitations will have been foreplay. But what follows, in fact, is a delicate, almost choreographed series of approaches and withdrawals on the part of both characters involved in the exchange, in which, like the earlier communication between hands, neither acts decisively either to “have” the other or to leave. These approaches and withdrawals, which take place both within and between the characters, produce less confl ict than a kind of orbiting, and a further series of oscillations: The fair fi lle de chambre came close up to the bureau where I was looking for a card—took up fi rst the pen I cast down, then offered to hold me the ink; she offered it so sweetly, I was going to accept it—but I durst not—I have nothing, my dear, to write upon.—Write it, said she, simply, upon any thing.— I was just going to cry out, Then I will write it, fair girl! upon thy lips.— —If I do, said I, I shall perish— so I took her by the hand and led her to the door . . . she turned about, and gave me both her hands, closed together, into mine—it was impossible not to compress them in that situation—I wished to let them go; and all the time I held them, I kept arguing within myself against it— and still I held them on.—In two minutes I found I had all the battle to fight over again— and I felt my legs and every limb about me tremble at the idea. (116–17)

Across the course of this passage, the tension produced by oscillation spreads to the reader, who is held in a state of suspense. Within the passage, Sterne evokes a kind of writing on the body—writing “upon [the] lips” of the one who waits— but in fact the writing of the passage does not occur in this way, for such a sexualization of inscription requires a polarization into active and passive partners in a metaphor which leads directly to the equation of the male penis with the pen, which imprints the receptive feminine surface. This polarization does not occur in this scene; rather, activity is produced between passive but passionate bodies:

From Sterne to Charlotte Brontë 83 The foot of the bed was within a yard and a half of the place where we were standing—I had still hold of her hands— and how it happened I can give no account, but I neither asked her—nor drew her—nor did I think of the bed—but so it did happen, we both sat down. (117)

The passage that follows is frequently taken to be a rather unsubtle trope for sexual intercourse; certainly its elements can be read as signifiers for male and female genitalia. Yet the passage can also be read as subverting or convoluting the roles and positions of phallic sexuality. After all, it is the fi lle de chambre who puts her purse into his hand; he does not put his hand into her purse or pockets. Subsequently, it is she who “[threads] a small needle” and sews up the “gathers of [his] stock” (117). If the purse can be read as a signifier for the vagina, so can the stock; if the crown in the purse can be read as signifier for the penis, so can the needle: The passage works to multiply sexual signifiers and to make them exchangeable, gender-transient. More important, though, the most sexually charged elements in the passage are not these “gross” symbols but its wavering rhythms and suggestions of coming undone, the slow-motion falling apart of things conveyed in the broken stitches of the stock, the broken strap of the shoe and the “just falling off ” of the shoe—followed by the falling of the fille de chambre. All this equivocation is not, I would argue, concealing while revealing the “real” sexual activity. Rather, the ambiguity is itself erotic: The playing between and resistance of impulses communicates superficial sensations, spreads sensual excitation and erotic intensity not only between two partners but between all the part objects that compose the scene, in multiple and shifting configurations of openings: the open hand, the open purse, the open lap. These openings do not desire closure. Rather, they attract or produce other openings— unraveling stitches, loosening shoes—with which they form an open whole— a constellation, a figure, or a “facing” in the sense of a transient communication between mobile, conductive surfaces held together/apart by attraction.12 In this sense, the question of what is conquered in the following chapter, “The Conquest”— the fille de chambre, Yorick, or his sexual impulses—is immaterial: literally immaterial in that the passage has nothing “behind” it. It does not function to veil or unveil bodies which are or are not having sex, nor is it a “tease”: This is a term that only makes sense within the phallic economy of sexuality that is here being refused, a

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sexual economy orga nized around the genitals of two heterosexual persons. Sterne’s equivocation here, like the ambiguity in the preceding chapter, is pure, that is, purely superfi cial equivocation, and that is precisely the locus of its erotic charge. Thus, Yorick’s statement, “whatever is my danger—whatever is my situation—let me feel the movements which rise out of it, and which belong to me as a man, and if I govern them as a good one, I will trust the issues to thy justice” (118), certainly produces a hesitation—but not a hesitation between two readings, one sexual and one not, that we can decide between or call undecidable. “If nature has so wove her web of kindness, that some threads of love and desire are entangled with the piece, must the whole web be rent in drawing them out?” (118), Yorick asks, and indeed “some threads of love and desire” are entangled in any reading of the passage, which does not thereby become less equivocal— and this forces us to reframe the question of sexuality. Sexuality is not something that can be simply sorted out from other things, virtue or kindness or meaning—nor is it simply a question of one (apparently desexualized) meaning or activity being substituted for another (directly sexual) one. The more diff use and ambiguous sexuality becomes, the more sexualized are the openings in the text produced by equivocation, until openness itself— the quality of being open, indeterminate, subject to affection— can be seen, right there on the surface, as the process, the product, and even the aim of sexual desire. A reader’s ability to respond to such a text, then, depends on susceptibility— a willingness (or not) to repeat the sensations the passage scripts (or allow the sensations to be repeated through them). For Deleuze and Guattari, desire is oriented toward transformative connections, prompting a process of repetition in which desire itself is propagated. This trajectory would account for a textual practice that prompts a series of readers with their par ticu lar constitutions to embody the desire it traces, to re-produce it in an “impetuous” or extra-conscious manner. In this light, we might see the passage as a kind of machine that works with the material reader to produce sensation or susceptibility (to make every body vary). Another way to put this would be to say that the novel of sensibility works to produce the sensible reader, one who is attracted to being affected. Such an attraction is “passive” in a very specific sense. Hélène Cixous’s distinction between two types or degrees of passivity is helpful here:

From Sterne to Charlotte Brontë 85 As for passivity, in excess, it is partly bound up with death. But there is a nonclosure that is not submission but confidence and comprehension; that is not an opportunity for destruction but for wonderful expansion. Through the same opening that is her danger, she comes out of herself to go to the other, a traveler in unexplored places . . . she approaches, not to do away with the space between, but to see it, to experience what she is not, what she is, what she can be. (85–86)

This par ticu lar receptivity must be distinguished from the type of passivity one associates with stasis, inability, and ultimately death (the passivity embodied by sympathy’s objectified victims, for example). As Cixous points out, both types of passivity have been historically attributed to women, but are in no sense gender specific. Like Cixous, Yorick acknowledges the affective risks entailed by the receptive openness of sensibility, “source inexhausted of all that’s precious in our joys, or costly in our sorrows!” (141). He also aligns it with a certain attitude toward time, a kind of openended expectancy: “[walking] forth without any determination where to go” (73), the “besoin de Voyager” of the Sentimental Traveller (35) who goes without an end or goal apart from the wish for a certain kind of exposure. What is gained, in the process, is the process: “I get my labor for my pains—no matter—’tis enough—the pleasure of the experiment has kept my senses, and the best part of my blood awake” (51). In addition, however, it is precisely this blank expectancy that preserves the future’s chance to diverge. On a structural level, Sterne’s novels teach readers this openness: Reading them is not just a matter of not knowing what’s coming next, but of finding out that you always think you do. The passivity associated with sensibility is thus closer to Nietzsche’s understanding of passive force—force that is capable of being interpreted and differentiated, and is for this reason stronger than active force, which strives always to impose its own interpretation—than to Freud’s understanding of a passive sexual orientation, particularly in that it does not depend on the “active” as oppositional complement. In fact, as we have seen in Sterne, sensibility requires an active resistance to mastery. In contrast to masochism as Freud understood it, sensibility’s resistance is not a means of deferral; rather, surfaces and “epidermal” limits become at once the locus of encounter and a means of differentiation, of spreading impulse

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and intensity. Ultimately this resistance sensitizes and intensifies new surfaces, increasing, as it were, the amount of surface area innervated by libido, empowering the body’s ability to conduct and continually reconfiguring its attractions.13 If a body may be sexualized in this way, so may a text. A Sentimental Journey, for example, continually resists the desire to fi x meaning, or to tell all of the stories; it lets itself be traversed by others’ stories, which it does not try to fully contain (for example, the intriguing untold history of the woman Yorick contacts at Calais). The novel also leaves implicit and explicit openings for its readers to tell their own stories: “I leave [this] to the reader to devise; protesting as I do it, that if it is not the most delicate [way] in nature, ’tis the fault of his own imagination—” (148).14 At such moments, Sterne’s texts deliberately turn away from the desires inscribed by sympathy—with its insistence on the imperial power of the individual imagination— and sentimentality, with its affective attachments to sameness and familiarity. The texts do not always succeed in turning away; we also fi nd the other dynamics inscribed. Yet the practice of sensibility that is intermittently achieved in Sterne’s novels makes the texts themselves porous and susceptible surfaces facing out, open to the reader and even to the reader’s time. A. Alvarez remarks that A Sentimental Journey “is perhaps the most bodiless novel ever written” (9). This is so, but only because the bodies it invokes most forcefully are not described or represented: They live on the other side of the page.

Invisible Ink: A Genealogy of Transparency As suggested in Chapter 1, Sterne’s famous typographical play is less an aberrant invention of his own than a pointed recovery and re-purposing of practices that had been common in earlier decades, and were rapidly falling out of use.15 Today, despite conscientious editorial efforts to preserve at least the macro-features of the Sternean textual landscape, no edition manages to replicate the play with dashes, mise-en-page, guide words, page breaks, chapter divisions, page numbering, and so on.16 Yet part of Sterne’s achievement was to interweave these features so closely into the text that it is almost impossible to erase them completely. Thus, even in the early nineteenth century, critics had begun to see certain features of Sterne’s texts—the dashes, for example—as more unique or exceptional than they

From Sterne to Charlotte Brontë 87

actually were. This perception signals the rapid falling out of print and out of view of earlier, less popu lar texts (such as Dunton’s Voyage, Baker’s Rules, and the dashy first edition of Sarah Fielding’s David Simple), as well as a tendency to ignore or erase textual features present in early editions of canonical works like Clarissa.17 On the one hand, knowledge of such works makes Sterne’s look less “sui generis”; on the other hand, the impossibility of fully extricating Sterne’s novels from their print specificity indicates the extent to which Sterne succeeded in making typographical effects integral to the affective transactions his novels accomplish. As other scholars have established, the reaction against sensibility and sentimentality that got underway in the 1790s was strikingly heterogeneous: Contradictory attacks were launched on a variety of political, moral, social, and aesthetic grounds.18 The dramatic shift in attitude took place within a generation: Writers who had been practitioners and proponents of the novel of sensibility, including Mackenzie, later participated in its critique. One manifestation of this reaction was a widespread pathologization of the experience or display of affective intensity; as Suzanne Clark puts it, “there is a development from . . . a conception of passion as the basis of sociability, into a conception of passion as hypochondria and hysteria—that is, a turn from pathos as a rhetorical asset to pathos as . . . diseased and isolated” (21).19 This shift is nicely captured in the semantic migration of the word “ner vous”: A loosely masculine term of approbation became, in the nineteenth century, a term of feminine pathology. During and after the French Revolution, contagious emotion was also increasingly associated with irrational mob violence— a danger that concerned Hume. Such manifestations of “conductivity” within crowds might be seen as the dark side of sensibility, or as a harmful combination of the dynamics of sympathy and sensibility, in which sympathy’s machinery of identification and othering is supercharged by sensibility’s affective intensification. Horrific phenomena such as Nazism appear to involve as a precondition, collective identification with the same impossible ideal identity (such as the imaginary complete, coherent, all-powerful Aryan identity). As Lacan argued in “The Mirror Stage,” situated outside the subject, this “mirror” identity seems to require for its attainment the total negation of an other, and of difference. In these cases, the individual’s investment in identity is not lost or abandoned; it is staked, wagered, on the identity quest of a group. The distance of such situations from the erotic, aesthetic, or

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even social pleasures of sensibility becomes obvious the moment difference inspires hatred rather than attraction: the moment difference yields the impulse to eradicate (the other) rather than the impulse to proliferate (the self and its sensations). Adela Pinch has ably traced the tectonic shift in the cultural understanding of feeling in which emotion came to be seen as private rather than social— as strictly individual, arising from within rather than without, and as secondary in relation to the higher mental power of imagination. Feeling that travels in an unwilled manner from surface to surface came to seem “extravagant” or “superficial,” as opposed to the “authentic” emotion that originates within the subjective depths of a par ticu lar individual. Pinch notes the etymological doubleness of the word “extravagant,” which means both “that which strays beyond boundaries,” i.e., something which moves from one to another, or wanders vagrantly between, and “unrestrained, lavish, excessive” (4). She argues that the two senses are linked: Emotions, for example, appear excessive when they are not contained within the bounds of an individual (as is true of both “sensibility” and “sentimentality”). Typographical effects were subjected to exactly the same set of descriptive judgments; indeed, eighteenth- century practices of typographical emphasis came to seem “extravagant” largely because they locate the production of affective intensity on the surface, rather than within the “depths” of meaning or signification. This objection is clear in Hugh Blair’s 1783 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. Blair is an early proponent of two ideas that remain in place today: fi rst, that the overuse of italics robs them of their power to create emphasis by way of contrast; second, that typography is a fl imsy and/or fraudulent way to create emphasis.20 As Blair puts it, the frequent use of italics can produce no effect whatever, but to hurt the eye, and create confusion. Indeed, if the sense point out the most emphatical expressions, a variation in the type, especially when occurring so frequently, will give small aid. And, accordingly, the most masterly writers, of late, have, with good reason, laid aside all those feeble props of significancy, and trusted wholly to the weight of their sentiments for commanding attention. (424)21

From Sterne to Charlotte Brontë 89

For Blair, what is especially crucial is that the writer “attend to the manner in which nature dictates to us to express any emotion or passion, and that he give his language that turn, and no other; above all, that he never affect the style of a passion which he does not feel” (423). This concern seems inevitable from the moment that the writing of feeling is understood as “expression” (inscribing as it does temporal and spatial discrepancies between inside and outside, personal and shared, experience and representation). The paradigm of expression makes the writing of feeling a question of signs: textual signifiers pointing elsewhere (here, to the author’s prior internal personal experience) for their origin and guarantee, rather than functioning performatively as signals or prompts to the reader’s senses. In the latter case, questions of authenticity are essentially mooted, much less relevant than questions of propriety (as contemporary responses to Sterne suggest). Commenting on eighteenth-century practices of emphasis in his 1825 printer’s manual, Thomas Curson Hansard writes: The labour to a compositor, and also the reader, on such as work as this, will be little short of that required upon a work of which he understands not a single word, and the book, when printed, exhibits a motley appearance of Roman and Italic, capitals and lower-case, till those who are not sufficient judges of typography to know the cause, wonder why the page is so confused and tiresome to the eye. (373)

As a general goal, saving readers (and compositors) from needless labor was not new, but practices of emphasis were not previously perceived to work against this goal.22 The idea of trusting the reader’s “discernment and understanding” in place of marking emphasis implies that something has been re-located from the material page to the reader’s mind, or from the printed page to the sign. This understanding of reading accords with the dynamics of sympathy as Smith explains them: It locates the production of feeling in a reader’s imagination, as a response to the text’s immaterial representations. Typographical effects work against this paradigm of reading and feeling less because they are ineffective, as is sometimes claimed,23 than because They ARE Effective! That is to say, they produce involuntary, fundamentally sensory responses, readerly tropisms, which disrupt the reader’s meaning-making processes. The body and its sense

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capacities have become obstacles to proper reading— distractions—rather than reading’s very medium and mode of address. In this sense, the work of engaging physically with the eighteenth- century text would not have increased for the nineteenth-century reader; rather, it would no longer seem rewarding or integral. The difference in expectations is less a question of what one expects a page to look like than of what one expects from reading: what one expects to gain, and how one understands the relationship between sensing, thinking, and feeling. In addition to erasing typographical emphasis and variation, nineteenthcentury printing practices involved the closer setting of smaller type with thinner margins. Victorian pages featured blocks of uniform text, with cheaper editions printed in very small (6 point) type. Modern typefaces that permitted close setting took over to such an extent that the older faces were literally lost for decades.24 The straighter lines and more regular spacing facilitated by machine-cast type, together with the great prevalence of a limited range of similar modern typefaces, permitted unprecedented uniformity within and across prose texts.25 These printing practices may have helped to pave the road for Victorian realism, which in some ways relies on the notion of the text as a transparent window through which the fictional world can be envisioned. Eighteenth- century realisms, such as the epistolary novel, the fictional autobiography and the “found” manuscript “edited” for publication, use the materiality of the text to reinforce their self-constructions; the text’s material status is part of the fiction. With a few exceptions, the realism of the nineteenth- century novel depends, rather, on the reader’s ability to “forget” the materiality of the text, its status as an artifact. As suggested earlier, the late- eighteenth- century novel of sensibility retained practices of emphasis that had already been dropped from other types of prose. One can imagine a counterfactual history in which prose fiction would have continued to retain these typographical resources. Like imagery and figurative language, typographical emphasis might have functioned to distinguish the novel from non-fictional prose, and to ally it with poetry as affectively intensified text.26 However, that road was not taken; instead, nineteenth- century typographical conventions rendered prose fictions visually akin to all other prose. Thus, in The Newcomes, Thackeray’s fictional biographer can remark: “And, is the case with the

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most orthodox histories, the writer’s own guesses or conjectures are printed in exactly the same type as the most ascertained patent facts” (228).27 Typographical similarity may have helped blur the boundaries between stories or novels and educational reading, tying fiction typographically to knowledge rather than feeling or sensation and distancing it from the disparaged sentimental and gothic novels of the previous generation. As Richard Altick argues, literature was redefi ned during this period; in the wake of Romanticism, it came to be “prized not so much for its capacity to give pleasure as for its extraliterary, or nonaesthetic, values. It was through reading masterpieces of literature that the student could, for instance, enhance his understanding of history” (175– 76). The Victorian “March of Mind” entailed a strong interest in self-improvement, including democratic access to edifying books (Altick 142; 170). Reading in general was associated with learning; thus, novel reading could be justified as educational (sometimes by distancing this novel, which has epistemological merit, from “novels,” that is, mere trash designed to thrill the reader). 28 If the senses were being squeezed out of printed prose, they were being loudly solicited by the splashy new productions of commercial advertising. Print advertising was not new, but was newly pervasive, large, and striking.29 Advertising’s investment in catching at the reader’s senses may have seemed to further contaminate this practice for literary texts; the desire to distance literature from the shameless manipulations of printed salesmanship may have contributed to, or helped maintain, the exclusion of emphatical variations. Whether or not it was so motivated, the nineteenth-century redistribution of typographical styles did function to mark a borderline between the literary and the commercial. In a sense, we can say that typographical resources were ceded to the realm of commerce, which uses them in a different way. Operating within economies of desire that are rooted in the want of/for being, advertisements seek to attach the pleasures of affective intensification to commodities—the form of the object that, as Marx shows, precisely prevents encounters with others and satisfying connections to the material world. This is all the more clear when advertisements position commodities as signifiers of objects of desire that are impossible, as is so often the case. Advertising thus translates the communication of affect into the propagation of want, and the attraction to being affected into the desire for something merely signified by the thing one

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can, in fact, obtain (which, as a signifier, automatically becomes hollow and inadequate). In her provocative discussion of “distressed genres” (eighteenth-century imitations of older “oral” forms like the ballad and the fairy tale, 66– 93), Susan Stewart asserts, “The literary’s nostalgia for oral forms is a nostalgia for the presence of the body and the face-to-face, a dream of unmediated communication that, of course, could never be approximated even in the oral— a dream of an eternalized present, a future-past” (90). Taken as a particularly graceful and intelligent articulation of a widely held poststructuralist position, we should note that this argument fails to account for the fact that in the nineteenth century, print generally moved away from its earlier associations with the senses, the voice, and the body. This movement in itself suggests the existence of an array of different possible relationships between print, bodies, the senses, and the “face-to-face.” Likewise, though ideals of unmediated communication and absolute self-presence are impossible to achieve, it does not follow that all forms of satisfying bodily experience and face-to-face encounters are impossible and must be consigned to the realm of the past, the lost, or the never. Nor does it follow that desire is always inevitably directed toward unattainable ideals. Indeed, the confl icted attempt to embrace both sensibility as an attraction to being affected and the “sympathetic” desire to attain a stable, self-present identity can sometimes be discerned within literary texts, as I will now try to show through a reading of Jane Eyre.

Sympathy and Sensibility in Jane Eyre Presentiments are strange things! and so are sympathies; and so are signs; and the three combined make one mystery to which humanity had not yet found the key. I never laughed at presentiments in my life, because I have had strange ones of my own. Sympathies, I believe, exist (for instance, between far- distant, long-absent, wholly estranged relatives asserting, notwithstanding their alienation, the unity of the source to which each traces his origin) whose workings baffle mortal comprehension. And signs, for aught we know, may be but the sympathies of Nature with man. —Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre 249

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Critical studies of the status of sympathy and sensibility in Victorian literature and culture remain few and far between. Only a few full-length studies exist, with shorter discussions occurring in the context of criticism on Dickens, Gaskell, or George Eliot. Yet as the passage quoted suggests, the problem of an extra-linguistic “sympathetic” mode of communication pervades Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre. At times, the novel explicitly engages a defi nition of sympathy as “fellow feeling”: This aspect of the text can be connected to Victorian debates over charity and social morality, class consciousness, the growing concern over the “vices” of selfishness, egotism, and greed, and the connected search for ethical modes of relation to others. On another level, however, Brontë recovers the contours of an eroticized physiological sensibility that has more in common with Sterne than with Adam Smith. In this sense, Brontë seems to reach back across the Romantic period for older models of feeling, and, in fact, the novel contains numerous allusions to eighteenth-century texts: Helen Burns, for example, reads Samuel Johnson’s novel Rasselas (81). In explicating this connection to the eighteenth-century discourse of feeling, my argument seeks to complement rather than contest other studies of affect in Victorian fiction. Ann Cvetkovich’s exploration of the “politics of affect” in Victorian discourse usefully brings out the doubleedged effects of the representation and communication of feeling for oppressed groups, including women, homosexuals, and the working class. With an eye to historicizing the “uses” of affect for present- day activists, she asks whether and how the narrative strategies of sensation fiction compromise political projects by individualizing social problems. Audrey Jaffe’s Scenes of Sympathy, blurbed as “the first detailed examination of the place of sympathy in Victorian fiction and ideology,” explores the manner in which sympathy, while appearing to erase differences and cross class divides, actually aids in the construction and maintenance of middle- class identity. Rachel Ablow’s Marriage of True Minds offers nuanced analysis of the functions of sympathy in Victorian ideologies of marriage and the marriage plot; her study is exceptional in drawing substantial connections between Victorian and eighteenth- century understandings of sympathy as a paradigm for representation as well as intersubjectivity.30 In this argument, I focus less on the connections between feeling, fiction, and Victorian ideology, and more on a confl ict between two distinct dynamics of feeling (sympathy and sensibility) as it plays out on the levels

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of form and style in Jane Eyre. Clearly, Sterne and Brontë confronted much different sets of historical possibilities for the experience, evaluation, and representation of affect (above and beyond their vivid individual and social differences, including those of class and gender). Where Sterne’s texts permitted us to isolate a scene dominated by sympathy and contrast it to scenes dominated by sensibility, in Brontë’s novel the two dynamics are thoroughly imbricated. Rather than appearing in “pure” form, as an alternative that can be independently presented, sensibility here manifests itself as a subversive counter- current, or strain, of writing— subversive specifically in relation to the subjective, sexual, and epistemological dynamics of sympathy that the novel also inscribes: indeed, embraces. More specifically, a plot driven by Jane’s intense desire for identity, mastery, and the ability to control significance is subtly contested on the level of style by the eccentric murmurs of another story: a narrative sensibility directed at exploding totalities, relinquishing mastery, communicating sensation, and repeating experiences of and as difference. The desire for mastery and self-control is aimed at overcoming the powerlessness associated with sensibility in the Victorian context, especially for women; this desire engages Jane in a systematic program of negating others and otherness. Many critics have drawn attention to the fact that the end of  the novel emphasizes Jane’s success in eliminating all possible threats to her newly attained subject position, and presents us with a picture of a hyperbolically unified and autonomous subjectivity.31 From this point of view, the novel tells the story of the triumph of sympathy: the manner in which the attraction to difference and dissolution associated with sensibility has been repressed, or re- channeled into a desire for identity. But critics also remark various oddities or slippages that complicate this end: Such oddities, I will argue, may be accounted for by the persistence of a wish to repeat the dangerous pleasures of sensibility. While Jane’s autobiography appears to be directed at retrospectively assigning meaning to failed experience, the writing of the autobiography simultaneously allows her to return to the scene and repeat the pleasures that she missed the first time, the disempowering pleasures of sensibility.32 Perhaps perversely, Jane Eyre opens the story of her life with a violent interruption. As she silently tells herself tales to match the illustrations in a picture book, Jane’s cousin attacks her; she strikes out in self-defense, and is taken away to be confi ned in the dreaded red room. Left to herself

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there, stilled and silenced, Jane begins to fear that her kind uncle, who died in this room, might return unbidden to avenge her. Her fantasy, “consolatory in theory . . . [but] terrible if realized” (48), is supported by the appearance of a gleam of light on the wall, provoking “a species of fit” that ends in a scream which summons the (living) others. Jane begs to be released, asserting that she “shall be killed” if left there alone. Her appeals are denied, and a simulation of her death ensues: “unconsciousness closed the scene” (50). This early childhood “death”— a sensuous “death,” a traumatic physical collapse—will later be doubled by a symbolic “death,” the end of the life of Jane Eyre, which takes place as a change of name. Somewhat paradoxically, the fi rst “death” seems to mark Jane’s psychic birth—the beginning of her struggle to identify herself, to become the self whose supreme and fi nal act will be to script its own abandonment by marrying Rochester. At that point, the writing self, authorized by the superior viewpoint of this end, begins to tell the written self ’s story, which is now totalized and fully contained: hence, transmissible according to the logic of paternal inheritance, in which a discrete object is passed from one to another.33 On one level, this doubling of deaths allows Jane to measure the distance between these two moments: to register all the writing self has gained in her journey through life. In the red room, Jane was a disintegrated, uncontained, powerless, and ultimately senseless subject, unable to articulate herself; at the end she will be a picture of composure and control. In the red room, the written Jane, in what the writing Jane calls a state of “dense ignorance,” is unable to answer “the ceaseless inward question— why” she is disliked and abused by the Reeds (47). Her experience is not only painful; it seems meaningless and nonsensical. But here the autobiography slips for the fi rst time into the future perfect tense: A moment will come, the text guarantees us, when this situation will have been understood, will have had meaning: “Now,” the writing Jane interpolates, “at a distance of—I will not say how many years—I see it clearly” (47). Thus, the autobiography sets up a teleological orientation toward the moment of symbolic death: the point at which the written self ’s story will have been granted meaning in retrospect by a future self who can answer all the questions posed by the past. On this reading, the novel follows the logic of Leo Bersani’s “aesthetic of redemption”: Experience itself is damaged and worthless, but is redeemed by an artistic product that transcends it. Art

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distills the meaning of experience and grants it value as a necessary step in the process of symbolizing the “truth,” which lies behind or beneath the phenomenal world.34 According to this reading, which attends to the sympathetic dynamics of the plot, the asymmetry of Jane’s two deaths— one physical and the other symbolic—functions as a metonym of this redemptive structure. In this regard, the novel as a whole seems to trace the passage from sense to sign, or perhaps from intensity to intention. In the red room, Jane comes undone: She loses physical control and forgets what she is doing with her body; she feels she is “a trifle beside [herself ]; or rather out of [herself ]” (44). Thrust upon a stool, she “[attaches herself ] to her seat by [her] hands” (44)— a curious image of non-coordination. She “occasionally [turns] a fascinated eye towards the dimly gleaming mirror” (48)— a common turn of phrase that nevertheless implies an impossible disassociation of one eye from the other and from the movement of the head— and she likens her mind to “a turbid well” (46). In her terror, her voice literally leaves her: She experiences her own cry as something other, as “the rushing of wings” (49). Moreover, she fails to recognize her own image in the mirror, seeing the “strange little figure there” as a “tiny phantom” (46)—a noun that once again evokes death, or really one who has, like the writing self, “died” only to return in or as spirit to the paths it marked with its body; to return, moreover, with intention, specifically with the intention of righting wrongs. Taking the place, in a sense, of the dead uncle who did not return, the coherent, articulate writing self revisits the scene “to punish the perjured and avenge the oppressed” (48), translating the trauma into readable signs. A past that was at once sheer sense and senselessness can now be represented and understood.” Yet upon closer examination, the nature of Jane’s experience in the red room and the style of her retrospective report fail to accord entirely with these sympathetic dynamics, and begin to suggest the presence of some counter-impulse. In the initial scene reported later by the writing self, Jane’s coherence dissolves and she experiences her body as a disorganized assemblage of heterogeneous portions, each of which is increasingly stimulated until Jane loses consciousness. These parts are not integrated or coordinated by a synthetic representational schema; they are simply adjacent, but still in communication, capable of exciting each other. Consciousness and its various regions seem to function merely as parts alongside the rest; in

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this regard, the physical pain in Jane’s head from the blow she had earlier received provokes her mind to think: “ ‘Unjust! Unjust!’ said my reason, forced by the agonizing stimulus into precocious though transitory power; and Resolve, equally wrought up, instigated some strange expedient to achieve escape” (47). In fact, the entire scene is legible in terms of a complex chain reaction of sensory excitations: The light that “gleams” on the wall ignites Jane’s eye, which provokes her imagination to suppose that “the swift- darting beam was a herald of some coming vision from another world”; this mental image further excites her body, inciting her vocal chords to cry out against her will. This sensory sequence cannot be adequately understood as a movement of displacement, for as intensity spreads, the initiating sense is not enervated, but increasingly excited; moreover, the chain is not solely intrasubjective. Jane’s cry excites others: “ ‘What a dreadful noise!’ ” Abbot exclaims upon entering the room, “It went quite through me!” (49). The spread of excitation also seems to infect the language of the text itself, which strains grammatical practice to convey a rush of impulse: “My heart beat thick, my head grew hot; a sound fi lled my ears, which I deemed the rushing of wings; something seemed near me; I was oppressed, suffocated: endurance broke down; I rushed to the door and shook the lock in desperate effort” (49). Stylistically, this sentence performs the passage of an intensificatory movement of excitation from one clause to the next, a movement that is conveyed not only through the denotative value of the words but also through the material rhythms of the syntax and the use of “rhetorical” punctuation; these affective values of the sentence, moreover, communicate excitation to the reader.35 In fact, though Brontë is an extreme case, Victorian novelists routinely exploit the resources afforded by punctuation to achieve “rhetorical,” or performative, effects. John Lennard observes: In the soi-disant realist novels of George Eliot and Henry James . . . each page presents a closely identical appearance, a block of text, without notes or marginalia, formally broken only by paragraph and chapter divisions, but exhibiting within successive sentences an astonishing variety of marks: four stops, two tonal indicators [?,!], three rules [dashes] and the six combinate rule-marks [dash with point], single and triple suspension marks, single and double inverted commas . . . [and] the family of brackets. (7)

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These observations almost suggest that the rich and intricate sentence, or sentence sequence, which characterizes much Victorian prose could be understood as a by-product of the suppression of typographical variation: a re-channeling of prosodic inflections; a way of preserving rhythmic and percussive ties to the senses that exceed the semantics of representation.36 Charlotte Brontë, in par ticu lar, is often cited for excessive punctuation or dense opacity of style, but in this context we can see that the style is functioning as a locus of affective energy that may even run counter to denotation. In other words, if the autobiography records the movement from sense to sign, from intensity to intention, the writing also seems to repeat a different movement: perhaps one that addresses the sign to sense, or repeats intensity with intention. Such a reverse orientation seems to manifest itself even when the writing Jane is most in her symbolic mode, recording the meaning of her experience, providing the coherence that was not present at the time. Looking back, the writing Jane calls upon a foreign language to describe her sense of dislocation: “I was a trifle beside myself; or rather out of myself, as the French would say” (44). On the one hand, the sentence demonstrates the writing Jane’s superior knowledge and worldliness. And yet the French phrase, set beside the English, draws English out of itself— as if the writing is repeating, in its own dimension, the physical process it purports to describe. Moreover, both the difference between the two formulations, and the manner in which this difference brings out the capacity of each sign to differ from itself, translate a sense of disjunction to the reader. In other words, the line sets readers up to repeat the written Jane’s experience of disequilibrium—not through sympathetic identification with Jane as a protagonist, but in their own roles as readers of her writing. A similar movement takes place later in the passage, just at the point where one least expects any such rupture. In the act of positing a moment at which this painful experience will have been comprehended, the writing Jane repeats a certain sensory disjunction between eye and ear: She sees her former self in acoustic terms. “I could not answer the ceaseless inward question—why I thus suffered,” Jane writes; “now, at the distance of—I will not say how many years—I see it clearly. I was a discord in Gateshead Hall . . .” (47). Jane’s vision of discord establishes a distinctive relation between sensory series, in which eye and ear pull each other out of their proper do-

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mains. The lines convey less an understanding of what it means to be a social discord than an emphatic sensory impression of what discord might be: the otherness within a sense that is its outside or singularizing limit, the visible within sound— an incomprehensible agitation. Rendering a relation of complementarity, unity, or synthesis of senses impossible, this disjunction singularizes each sense in relation to the other, highlighting its own powers and specificity through its inability to do what the other can do. At the same time, the relation suggests, perhaps, a kind of attraction— even jealousy—between senses: the passion of the eye for the stimulus which excites the ear, sound; of the ear for that which excites the eye, for vision.37 Such attraction is more clearly expressed by Jane’s frequent desire to see beyond the horizon, her longing “for a power of vision which might overpass that limit, which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen” (140, emphasis mine). In fact, this dynamic competition between eye and ear, voice and vision, is signaled continually in the name “Eyre.” If attempting to deconstruct the sympathetic dynamics of the text, we might read this unresolved tension as an unintended failure or necessary error that reveals the impossibility of achieving a unified identity. But one might also read in it the wish to repeat an experience of discord, an experience of sensory variation and intensity that might have been desirable if it had not been so traumatic. It was traumatic, of course, because Jane is trapped within social structures that render derangement dangerously disempowering. In contrast to Sterne’s narrator, who has the luxury of abandoning a subject position rendered secure by his gender, age, and class, Jane has no subject position to abandon. She has had her agency usurped by others; she is at risk of becoming an object/victim like Maria, or Bertha. But in retrospect, from a position of safety, it is possible that the repetition serves desire, making the text communicate sensory intensity, giving the reader a stimulating experience of discord by clashing the eye against the ear. The plot of the novel suggests that such moments of disjunction and disequilibrium, moments in which the narrator might be said to play with sensibility, are produced textually after they have been completely excluded from the realm of lived experience. Jane’s marriage to Rochester at the end of the novel is figured as a supremely sympathetic relationship, in which two are fully united and feel what the other is feeling; Jane asserts

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that they share one flesh, one heart, and one pair of eyes: “Perfect concord is the result” (476). Their isolated home at Ferndean is entirely free of discord: Even the servants are described as “decent phlegmatic . . . people, to whom one may at any time safely communicate a remarkable piece of news without incurring the danger of having one’s ears pierced by some shrill ejaculation, and subsequently stunned by a torrent of wordy wonderment” (474). One might wonder, then, whether writing the autobiography provides Jane with an opportunity to produce what this end excludes: to repeat the kind of experience that has been suppressed in the interests of achieving mastery. In this sense, the minor particles of sensory intensity that threaten to dis-integrate the narrative and its subject, giving voice to difference, are the very points at which desire is being repeated. If Jane’s experience in the red room forcibly occasions relations of alterity between singular parts of a self that fail to form a synthetic whole, Jane’s retrospective account of this scene repeats these relations in a manner that also compasses another kind of alterity: that between past and present selves. In the context of autobiography, the moment at which the written self is removed from history becomes the moment at which the writing self is inserted into history, firmly located in the aporetic here and now of writing: a moment whose highly problematic nature was thoroughly explored and exploited by Sterne in Tristram Shandy, and has since been further analyzed by numerous theorists, perhaps most effectively by Derrida.38 Nevertheless, real and fictional autobiographies commonly contain a description of the scene of writing, a logical end that folds the existence of the book into the story of the writer’s life.39 Insofar as such scenes reach across the divide of the written self ’s symbolic death to re-establish a relation of identity and continuity between the self who writes and the self whose story is told, they structure a sympathetic, dialectically synthetic relation between past and present selves—indeed, between past and present as such. The identity, even necessity, of the present is confi rmed via its relation to a past that has no autonomy, a past that has been mastered and may now be wrapped up as history, subsumed but preserved as an account of how this present came to be. As a moment in which the past is “comprehended” in and by the present, a scene of writing might be expected to crown the sympathetic dynamics of a plot driven by desire as the want of/

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for being: the desire to synthesize the self. Such a scene, however, is missing from Jane Eyre. Not only is there no scene of writing in Jane’s autobiography, there is no story of how or why Jane became the writer she is now. Though Jane tells herself stories, listens to stories told by others, and reads, she never writes anything other than a few letters—misaddressed and undelivered letters at that (450). While Jane repeatedly refers to herself in the act of writing— as in the line, “now, at the distance of—I will not say how many years—I see [the answer] clearly” (47)— a curious disjunction repeatedly takes place between written and writing selves just at the points which should serve as their hinge or jointure, the points of Jane’s transition from one to the other. Moreover, I wish to argue that the scene of writing is not just absent from the novel in a general way; it is missing from a par ticu lar place, an identifiable location in the text: the scene of Jane’s return to Thornfield, which occurs in response to Rochester’s cry. Many elements suggest that this scene will be the end toward which the plot has been progressing, the end of the story, which will be the beginning of writing. Jane “feels like a messenger pigeon flying home” (447) as she reverses the steps of her previous fl ight from Rochester; this simile obliquely identifies her with the position of the author/“editor,” “Currer Bell,” whose name suggests his/her function as a courier— a conveyor of texts from one to another. “My journey is closed,” Jane states decisively upon arriving at the village inn (448), and we as readers are justified in believing her. In the novel as a whole, scenes of return have consistently drawn a spiral pattern in which Jane leaves defeated and returns victorious; she expects this climactic return to function in a similar way, and we are drawn into this structure of expectation as well. When Jane left Thornfield she was “blind, deaf, distracted with a revengeful fury tracking and scourging [her]” (448). Now she is in complete control: As she approaches the hall, she determines that “[her] first view of it shall be in front . . . where its bold battlements will strike the eye nobly at once” (448). Thus, she positions herself in such a way that “battlements, windows, long front— all from this sheltered station were at my command” (449, emphasis mine). This grand statement falls flat, however; in fact, the narrator is deceiving us. “Were” is an illegitimate interloper, whose place should be occupied by “would be” or “would have been,” for as the writing Jane will

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have already discovered, the Hall has been destroyed by fi re. The written Jane, having posited meaning in anticipation of the outcome, does not see what she expects to see; in the face of what she does see, she is frozen into a death-like state of “stupid regardlessness” (449). Stunned into silence, the written Jane is unable to articulate what lies before her: As readers, we have no idea what she is looking at. She steps out from behind the wall to see “all . . . at [her] command”; then suddenly the point of view shifts to that of “crows sailing overhead,” who see Jane timidly peep out, then stare at the house, then come to a “sudden stop,” and fall into “stupid regardlessness” (449). At this point, the writing self intervenes; having earlier looked back to see herself as a discord, Jane now directly disjoins the reader’s senses. “Hear an illustration, reader” (449), Jane demands, producing a singularizing movement of disjunction between the eye and the ear, which is all the more marked in that she could easily have written the more predictable and less problematic “Here is an illustration, reader.” In fact, the line is easily misread as such: While enjoining the reader’s ear to see, Jane thus sets up a disjunction between the reader’s cognitive expectations and the reader’s visual perception of the words on the page. In the “illustration” that follows, moreover, both disjunctive structures are only exacerbated: A lover fi nds his mistress asleep on a mossy bank; he wishes to catch a glimpse of her fair face without waking her. He steals softly over the grass, careful to make no sound; he pauses—fancying she has stirred: he withdraws: not for worlds would he be seen. All is still: he again advances: he bends above her; a light veil rests on her features: he lifts it, bends lower; now his eyes anticipate the vision of beauty—warm, and blooming, and lovely, in rest. How hurried was their first glance! But how they fi x! How he starts! How he suddenly and vehemently clasps in both arms the form he dared not, a moment since, touch with his fi nger! How he calls aloud a name, and drops his burden, and gazes on it wildly! He thus grasps, and cries, and gazes, because he no longer fears to waken by any sound he can utter—by any movement he can make. He thought his love slept sweetly: he fi nds she is stone dead. (449)

Notably, nothing at all can be heard in this illustration. We are informed that the lover “calls aloud a name,” but the absence of the name, of any uttered sound, serves only to underscore silence. Though it is ad-

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dressed to the ear, the illustration is entirely scopic; contrary to readerly expectations, moreover, the writing self does not describe what Jane sees, or clarify the meaning this scene will have had. In fact, at this point in the text, the historicizing machinery of the novel—the narrative process of manufacturing a history by explaining the present as the product of a determinate past, accounting for the significance of this past in light of the present it has produced, and projecting a future in which this present, too, will have become determinable— seems to break down.40 Jane’s return to this former home, as an appeal to the past, was made with the triple goal of comprehending the meaning of her earlier actions (by viewing Rochester, for whom the Hall seems to serve as a metonym, from her newly acquired perspective), evaluating her present position (how she should understand herself in relation to her own history), and deciding upon a future. Jane expected to arrive at a new understanding of her present situation through seeing herself in relation to the now comprehended selfthat-was, the self that fled Thornfield; instead, both her present and her past become completely unreadable. She had expected the house—“a home of the past, a shrine of memory” (137)—to meet her gaze and to answer the questions she wished to pose; instead, it confronts her as a blank: deaf, blind, and mute. As we will eventually hear, its mouth-like “portal yawned void” (449); its face or “front was . . . but a shell-like wall, very high and very fragile-looking, perforated with paneless windows: no roof, no battlements, no chimneys— all had crashed in. And there was the silence of death about it, the solitude of a lonesome wild” (449–50). Rather than confirming Jane in her newfound identity as one who commands herself, her others, her pen, and her fortune, this encounter with her history at the unreadable point of return erases her position, erodes her newly acquired mastery and robs her of both her voice and her gaze. Instead of defi ning the present in relation to the past, Jane stands “regardless” and “stupefied” while fi rst the crows look at her, and then a future self speaks. The past will return, it seems, from the future which will illustrate or illuminate it, from the point at which this present moment will have been understood. But in the act of figuring her past, the writing self in fact disfigures it, conceals the scene, tells another’s story: She engages, almost literally, in the act of throwing a veil across a void. At the end of this passage, however, the written self, re-positioned—re-posited, “figured” in the sense of “given a face,” although the face she is given is in

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fact a veil—by the writing self, regains her voice: “I looked with timorous joy toward a stately house; I saw a blackened ruin” (449). This curt parallel sentence is far overshadowed by the extravagant fiction the writing self has invented; it comes as something of an anticlimax. The written Jane proceeds to pose questions, once again, to the past: “What story belonged to this disaster? Had life been wrecked as well as property?” (449). The house confronts her mutely, unable to tell its story, but the past, which the present self invokes by posing questions, is given voice by the innkeeper. Rather than directly answering her questions, however, he almost maddens his listener by insisting upon telling Jane her own story: the story of the governess who left (451–52). In this scenario, the past, to which Jane turns to clarify her present position, does not answer her questions by revealing itself but instead tells a story that simply echoes her own. The future tells not her story, which she herself cannot read, but that of another; that is, in the act of figuring her the future disfigures her, eclipses, veils, forgets her. The past, in fact, remains unreadable, undeciphered; determined by the present, it cannot determine it. Moreover, the present will be misread by the future, its errors and failures not recuperated, their truth not recovered; the experience of the past will have not resulted in the knowledge of the future. But if the present will never have been understood, what is the relation between written and writing selves? Paul de Man proposed that written and writing selves do not stand in a chronological relation at all; rather, autobiography expresses the relation between two separate, mutually exclusive sides of the self: the self that experiences, and the self that interprets. Between the self that acts and the self that understands lies a caesura, or a “trope,” a turn. Experience does not lead, in a chronological progression, toward understanding; in fact, it excludes understanding, and vice versa. The relation between the selves is synchronic, not diachronic; it is also a relation of chiasmic exchange, like that between eye and text, or voice and ear. To posit a moment of symbolic death at which the written self will become the writing self is to project a synchronic subjective predicament— an irreducible discrepancy within the act of understanding— onto a time line. On this reading, the “death” that separates written and writing selves is not a state the subject of autobiography moves toward; “death” is (in) the moment, a caesura within the subject.

From Sterne to Charlotte Brontë 105

“To speak of the past . . . becomes nearly inconceivable,” Bersani writes in another context, “once it is no longer a question of describing other customs, other systems of justice, other sets of beliefs, but rather the lost capacity of consciousness to place itself in relation to history” (48). As a moment in which the sympathetic trajectory of the plot deconstructs itself, Jane Eyre’s return to Thornfield Hall can be understood as a frontal encounter with the problem of placing oneself in relation to history. Yet this breakdown of the narrative’s history machine may not be solely an error, an unintended, unconscious, and undesired failure. It is possible that this jamming serves desire, is in fact produced by desire. Drawing on theories of sexuality that contest the Freudian monopoly and render nonsympathetic dynamics legible as such, it is possible to argue that the act of disjoining written and writing selves creatively singularizes both past and present, making it possible to re-frame the question of how consciousness can place itself in relation to history and to time. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze argues that Freud misunderstood repetition, and in doing so missed his chance to accurately describe the death drive and its relation to pleasure. Essentially, Freud believed that repetition happens beneath variations, under disguises. The Id desires to repeat a primary experience; the Ego prevents it from doing so except in masked forms: “Disguised repetition was only the fruit of a secondary compromise between the opposed forces of the Ego and the Id” (17). This formulation is backwards, Deleuze argues: “There is no fi rst term which is repeated. There is . . . nothing repeated which may be isolated or abstracted from the repetition in which it was formed, but in which it is also hidden. There is no bare repetition which may be abstracted or inferred from the disguise itself. The same thing is both disguising and disguised . . . [the disguises] express . . . the differential mechanisms which belong to the essence and origin of that which is repeated” (17). In other words, desire is not attached to what is beneath the disguise, but to the disguise itself, or more accurately, to the process of differentiation involved in “disguising.” As Deleuze puts it, “Eros and Thanatos are distinguished in that Eros must be repeated, can be lived only through repetition, whereas Thanatos (as transcendental principle) is that which gives repetition to Eros, that which submits Eros to repetition” (18). What is desired by Eros, in short, is not repetition of the same but the experience of differing; what is expressed in

106 The Science of the Sensible

the death drive is not the “tendency to return to the state of inanimate matter” (17), but the pure movement of repetition in the understanding that there is no return and nothing to return to, nothing beneath the masks except difference itself, no essence beneath appearances, no “truth liberated from phenomena” (Bersani 26), but only the phenomena themselves: Phenomena that are themselves, moreover, not identities with difference between them but the by-products of a movement of differentiation: singularities. In this analysis, desire—the process of difference and repetition—has no trajectory. It does not move in an arc or a circle: Not only does it not fi nd closure, it does not seek closure. Instead, desire is oriented toward the process of production and transformation, specifically toward the transformations that occur in an encounter with the unassimilable. In contrast to sympathetic dynamics and the literature that enacts and reinforces them, sensibility and its literary manifestations are structured by such a libidinal formation, using the realm of the aesthetic to occasion transformative encounters that differentiate selves and singularize senses. As I have begun to suggest, Jane Eyre is in many respects a novel that stages the problem of the unassimilable, in contexts that range from the sensory to the linguistic to the cultural to the temporal. In each case, the encounter is doubled, or perhaps tripled: While the written Jane is thrown into extreme states of trauma, the writing Jane produces a second set of disjunctive relations that are addressed, ultimately, to the reader. In the “illustration” quoted earlier, Jane deliberately delays her report of what actually happened in order to produce an image that seems intended not to elucidate, but simply to intensify a sensation of excitement and shock. The presence of this intervention in the text holds the reader in a state of suspense that is heightened by the microcosmic recapitulation of a suspended movement within the tale of a lover creeping up on his mistress. Most important, however, the terms of the image pointedly fail to provide an accurate analog of the scene before Jane. Every term is out of joint with what might have been its referent and simultaneously attracts other possible referents; each prismatic detail is loaded with more significance than it can carry coherently. The “lover” seems to correspond to the written self, but he is male. His gender and his act of “[calling] aloud a name” align him imprecisely with Rochester, who has just called Jane’s name telepathically, summoning her back from the dead. The “mistress” seems to symbolize Thornfield Hall; here again, gender makes a difference

From Sterne to Charlotte Brontë 107

because the Hall has functioned as a metonym for Rochester. But the “mistress” also suggests Jane herself, as a bride; Bertha, who has worn a veil and who is now “stone dead,” or, in the innkeeper’s words, “dead as the stones on which her brains and blood were scattered” (453); and also the written Jane, who is here stunned into a deathlike state and must be revived. As it progresses, the image seems to gain its own momentum—it expresses a kind of forgetting of what has occurred, eclipsing rather than illustrating the past present. Overworked, de- simplified, the image articulates too many parts to make a functional whole; the process of producing it has continued beyond the point at which it would have been able to symbolize something in par ticu lar, something other than the process of symbolization itself, the process of aesthetic production.41 It is important to stress that the production of disjunctions within the realm of the aesthetic (reading and writing novels) offers an aesthetic experience of difference that should not be equated with the immediate experience of madness, trauma, or mental illness. Jane’s dynamic repetition, in writing, of her experience in the red room can be situated as a product of desire without implying that Jane wishes to repeat the actual past experience she had as a child, which was traumatic and terrifying. It should be possible to valorize an aesthetic register of experience as pleasurable and creative without implying that madness, trauma, or mental illness are either pleasurable or (necessarily) creative. This difference is analogous to the distinction Bersani draws between a desire for symbolic self-shattering (“énbranlement”) and the desire for biological death (being suicidal). Likewise, one may experience catharsis when watching a tragedy on stage and but certainly not when witnessing a murder on the street. Valorizing the experience of catharsis, or the writing of a tragedy, does not entail advising anyone to go in search of a murder to watch. Yet where the superiority of the aesthetic has traditionally been situated as a question of drawing the essential truth, meaning, or beauty out of senseless and painful experience, which is thereby “redeemed,” here we are confronted with a different understanding. The act of reading and writing makes possible a par ticu lar type of aesthetic repetition that permits an experience of difference in a context that is precisely not trauma or madness, because the subject occupies a protected position. This situation is directly analogous to the conditions Kant posited as necessary for a pleasurable experience of the sublime (i.e., not when we are in the path of the avalanche), though the experience

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provided by Sterne and Brontë, and other writers who invoke the dynamics of sensibility, is almost the opposite of the sense of mastery that, for Kant, defi ned the sublime. In terms of the phenomenology of reading, the narrative drive of the plot here encourages one to rush through the image: As a narrative delay, it simply functions to increase the reader’s desire to fi nd out what has happened. On this level, the paragraph increases tension only in the interest of a pleasurable release, a future moment of resolution where all will have been understood. Yet within this interstice, a very different movement of desire takes place. Rather than remembering, or synthesizing memory into meaning, the narrator here takes memory as merely an occasion for dynamic repetition, in which correspondences based on similarity, analogy, or resemblance are overthrown in a tangle of discrepancy that prevents identification. Within these fractures, moreover, a new kind of relation emerges: Both characters in the illustration become assemblages of singular features, forces, and capacities that can be laterally rather than meta phor ical ly related to those of the characters in the novel at large. The movement of veiling and unveiling a face, for example, is executed by the lover, Jane, Bertha, Rochester, and the narrator—but it would not be accurate to claim that this movement in the illustration either represents or repeats that of the characters in the novel; the relation between novel and illustration is not one of model and copy. Rather, the characters in the novel also repeat this movement, the way a word in French and its imprecise equivalent in English both repeat a third term, which remains beyond the horizon of any language: a term that will always remain virtual, actualized only in its different repetitions, but never circumscribed by them.42 If the relation between the characters in the illustration and the characters in the novel can be read in these terms, so can the relation between past, present, and future selves that is scripted in this scene. Jane’s short story repeats not the past as it was, but a virtual past, the sense of a past that was never present; at the same time, the image is addressed to a reader who will always postdate the writing of the text: a future self. As I have argued, this scene not only reports Jane’s own sensations of disjointure; it encourages readers to actually experience these sensations, in the key of the aesthetic. In this respect, the experience loses its subjective quality, becoming non-subjective or even de-individualizing. This is so not only because such disjointure disrupts identity, but also because the sense communi-

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cated here is not Jane’s, or yours, or mine; it is, in Deleuze’s lexicon, “preindividual”: a singular point through which many lives may pass, and repeatedly embody in passing. But such a point cannot be fi xed historically: As a moment in time, the scene constructs a complex phenomenal intersection between past, present, and future, an intersection we might call “the literary present.” Dislocated historically, quintessentially untimely, this scene not only represents an experience of return: It performs its own dynamic of returning, from a distance of “I will not say how many years.” This temporal collapse— or, more accurately, temporal folding—is reinforced by Jane’s use of the present tense in her illustration, and also by her curious attempt to posit an objective gaze by literally imagining a bird’s eye view. “The crows sailing overhead perhaps watched me while I took this survey,” she writes. “I wonder what they thought. They must have considered I was very careful and timid at fi rst, and that gradually I grew very bold and reckless . . .” (449). Here, Jane seems to displace the distance necessary for an understanding of this event from time onto space. Backhandedly, this displacement suggests that temporal distance has failed to provide the comprehensive perspective on her past self that the crows might have had, though even the crows are ultimately unable to clarify: “ ‘What affectation of diffidence was this at fi rst?’ they might have demanded; ‘what stupid regardlessness now?’ ” (449). Indeed, it is possible to argue that the writing Jane never gleans significance from this moment; its truth does not arrive. Just as the ear discovers its own singular limits when confronted with the visible, the present self here encounters the past as genuinely other, incomprehensible; having reached this limit, the present can actualize its own singular capacities. As I have suggested, this curious passage can be said to take the place of, or to take place as a scene of writing: Jane’s very inability to simply report results in a wholly superfluous proliferation of imagined perspectives and figural displacements, as though this par ticu lar memory enables her to engage in the fundamental processes of aesthetic production. If the past cannot be redeemed or recuperated by the present, it functions instead to make the present alter. What is repeated in the place of meaning, moreover, is the perishing non-truth of the phenomenal, the pure difference of sense as frisson or frayage, not subject to knowledge and not accessible through mimetic repre sentation. Such moments in this narrative weave a looped, not linear or spiralized, relation

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between sign and sense, in a movement which Deleuze describes as that “by which intensity aims at itself in aiming at the other, modifies itself in modifying the other, and returns fi nally onto its own trace” (Logic of Sense 298). If we understand autobiography less as a par ticu lar self ’s written history than as something more like a mode of relation—to self, others, temporality, and writing—we can read Jane Eyre as a double autobiography. In one dimension of the text, Jane struggles toward identity; governed by sympathetic dynamics, this struggle takes place in the plot of the novel, as Jane seeks to become a subject within the phallocentric symbolic order in which she is located historically. In this story, the sign desiccates sense and remembers the meaning an experience will have had, rendering experience coherent and legible in a harmonization that obliterates discordant, a-signifying phenomenal relations. But at the heart of this remembering lies a special kind of forgetting in which the sense of an experience is repeated in the sign, in which its trace is preserved not as significance but as the intensity of differing. Within the interstices of the plotted spaces, in the local structures of the language of the text, Brontë experimentally engages a narrative practice of sensibility: the totalized “I” formed and initialed by Jane Eyre in the fi rst story is re-singularized in the second; the oedipally organized body dissolves into heterogeneous assemblages of foreign parts; the proper name disintegrates into a series of aliases, each a mask for another mask. Countering the sympathetic dynamics that dominate the text—its well-known complicity with imperialism and Victorian domestic ideology43 —this narrative draws lines across social and symbolic categories, while exploring the profoundly creative potential inherent in distances that cannot be bridged. In sum, then, the textual dynamics of sensibility I have traced in the work of Sterne and Brontë gesture toward an affirmative development of “virtue” that would not mean transcending the body or its sexualities, but cultivating the body’s capacity to be open and responsive to what is within and without it, cultivating above all a resistance to violating that which differs from it and can provoke its transformation.44

3.

Sense in the Middle Teleological vs. Cumulative Plotting

It requires but very little experience of life to be aware that the circumstances stated in a novel form a very small part of what must have actually occurred to the persons represented; but it requires more experience to see in what respects the fact that all dull matter is suppressed, falsifies the representation of what is actually described. —James Fitzjames Stephen, “The Relation of Novels to Life,” 1855 (102) The main theoretical difficulty inherent in the teaching of literature is the delimitation of borderlines that circumscribe the literary field by setting it apart from other modes of discourse. . . . The most traditional term to designate these borderlines is “form”; in literature, the concept of form is, before anything else, a defi nitional necessity. No literary metadiscourse would ever be conceivable in its absence. . . . This does not mean, however, that the concept of form is itself susceptible of defi nition. —Paul de Man, “Hypogram and Inscription” (29–30)

A much challenged but still powerful understanding of literary history situates the achievement of the unified teleological plot (often ascribed to Jane Austen) as the culminating moment of the novel’s “rise.” This account is itself the product of a teleological, dialectical understanding of history, in which earlier works constitute necessary but insufficient beginnings or middles in an extended temporal progress toward a goal-state: a fully realized form. Early works contribute certain innovations but also reveal problems that are overcome by later writers, whose work preserves and synthesizes the earlier contributions. This dialectical progression is oriented toward 111

112 Sense in the Middle

the moment at which the ideal or optimal form is fully unfolded, realized, thus bringing closure to the history that has moved toward it. At that point, we can look back and read, in the fullest sense, the whole history: make sense of the contributions and specific insufficiencies of each moment as they culminate in the achieved telos.1 Clearly, this model of history mirrors the unified teleological plot that marks the novel’s arrival, so to speak: its coming-into-being as a genre. Though mirroring effects between a methodology and the object to which it is applied are common and not necessarily a problem, teleological and/or dialectical 2 models of history systematically posit the actual outcome of a historical process (what happened in history) as an outcome that was in some sense inevitable, necessary, or predetermined, or at least a matter of progress (a solution to preceding problems).3 Whether teleological structures are used in novels, in the study of their history, or in attempts to understand life, by placing emphasis on the end they subordinate the middle (the place of process or, more broadly, experience, in all its disorderly connectivity) to the end. Reserving fullness of meaning for the end, and reading the middle only in relation to it, teleological structures work to drain the experience of process (including the process of reading) of immanent, independent, or noninstrumental value. In a recent, self-consciously polemical book, George Levine presents Darwin as a writer who potentially facilitates the project of “valuing the world without faith in ‘transcendental design, teleology, or a divine creator’ ” (Darwin 36); of “confront[ing] without metaphysical equipment the astonishing richness of the world” (44). Levine asserts: No assumption is more dangerous, more devastating to the condition of living, than the view that nothing can matter unless it is somehow sanctioned by what is not of this world— some telos to which it points, some God who created it for some divine reason. This is an invitation to . . . the devaluing of every living thing, of everything. (258–59)

In making this assertion, Levine indirectly echoes Nietzsche: “One has deprived reality of its value, its meaning, its truthfulness, to precisely the extent to which one has mendaciously invented an ideal world” (Ecce Homo 674). In a sense, teleological plot structures microcosmically reinforce this orientation, making all elements depend on the end for their meaning, value, and reason. In theory and criticism, however, it has been more com-

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mon to critique teleology or dialectics on a structural (rather than ethical) basis—in other words, to demonstrate their inevitable failures. For example, Derrida contests Hegel’s assumption that an originary unity comes fi rst and is then negated to produce the beginnings of a dialectical process aimed at a fi nal moment of absolute synthesis. Derrida argues that différance is not secondary; it is “always already” at work, making the idea of a fi nal synthesis— a complete re-capturing and containment of negativity— untenable. In structuralist or poststructuralist linguistics, every signifier points elsewhere; hence, claims to “final meaning” are inevitably unstable and rhetorical. D. A. Miller (Narrative and Its Discontents) and Roland Barthes (S/Z), among other critics, have applied these insights to show that in novels, closure (as the culminating moment or goal of the teleological plot) never works completely. The end can never account for or subsume all the significances of the beginning and middle, or fully choke off what Miller calls “narrativity.” In short, the novel’s claims to closure always deconstruct themselves. However, less attention has been paid to the fact that novels are not always or inevitably constructed on teleological principles in the fi rst place. In teleological accounts of the novel, alternative modes of plotting appear as failed, primitive, or partial versions of a teleological structure (or, in the twentieth century, as pointed negations or deconstructions of that structure4). Clearly, the teleological plot became the road most traveled by the British novel in the nineteenth century, the variant that succeeded in becoming the species or even the genre; it has so successfully instantiated itself as a norm that it has tended to defi ne critical understandings of plot per se.5 Like “transparent” typography, it has succeeded in making everything else look aberrant. However, in this chapter I will try to excavate the characteristics of two alternative structures—variant forms, or roads less traveled, whose capacities and effects differ fundamentally from those of the teleological plot. First, I briefly discuss the rambling digressivity exemplified and defended by John Dunton against detractors such as Jonathan Swift. Second, I offer a more extended analysis of a nonteleological style of plotting exemplified by Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Gaskell’s Mary Barton. To say that a structure is “non-teleological” is to say very little, given that teleology can be departed from in many ways. As I will argue, eighteenthcentury discussions of sentence structure provide a helpful vocabulary for

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making more specific distinctions between two styles of plotting: the teleological (homologous with the periodic sentence) and the “cumulative” (homologous with the cumulative sentence). Borrowing the term “cumulative” has several advantages. Unlike “non-teleological,” it does not invoke a relationship of negation or binary opposition, and it leaves open the possibility of discovering other plots, not just these two. Also, unlike “circular” vs. “linear” or “closed” vs. “open,” the term “cumulative” and the grammatical discourse from which it is drawn give us a certain critical distance from the spatial vocabulary in which the language of form, in general, is so problematically steeped.6 The spatial orientation of form’s vocabulary has constituted a special problem for the novel. Unlike most poems, most novels do not have a physical “shape” that is not purely contingent, even arbitrary.7 Moreover, the misregistration between the (time-based) novel and the (spatial) idea of form is not just a critical problem, a question of inadequate descriptive vocabulary. It is also and more profoundly a historical problem: a question of the pressure that has been exerted on the novel by the strong association of form with space— specifically with closed or discrete shapes, which, in turn, are granted aesthetic and epistemological value. As I will argue more fully later in this chapter, in some cases structures that appear unshapely in light of these equations have a special capacity to represent processes as interesting in themselves. This is especially clear in Robinson Crusoe. Mary Barton, with its famous structural shift, reflects the powerful sway the teleological plot exerted on the Victorian novel, but also suggests that cumulative plotting is better suited to producing positive representations of the day-to-day struggles of the working class— or any activity aimed at maintaining rather than progressing toward a deferred goal.

Boundless Effusions Competing formal values are woven through the multifaceted, overdetermined and remarkably acrimonious “Battle of the Books,” that Restoration mêlée between neoclassical writers and the upstart “moderns,” including John Dunton. Dunton, whose typographical practices I discussed in Chapter 1 (refer to Figure 2), is an exceptionally and quite self-consciously digressive writer. In reading his texts, one senses that writing and living are so closely entwined for Dunton that their temporalities become in-

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separable: As life moves forward, writing moves forward, excluding the retroactivity of reflection and revision that would be needed to synthesize the text or bring its parts into alignment. Instead, the published book inscribes the process by which the writer’s mind, perspective, or situation changes, even to the point of mooting the purpose initially proposed— which, however, remains in place. For example, Dunton begins his Essay, Proving, We Shall Know Our Friends in Heaven (1696) as a detailed lamentation upon the death of his beloved fi rst wife, “Iris.” However, midway through the drafting process, Dunton met and married his second wife. The book shifts toward addressing his new wife, attacking his new motherin-law, and detouring to encompass many other personal, spiritual, political, and literary topics.8 Needless to say, such a work dramatically violates neoclassical values. Yet rather than capitulating to the view that his writing style reflects ignorance, incapacity, or madness, Dunton repeatedly insists that his digressiveness is a choice: a question of “License” rather than “Oversight” (Essay 91). He defends his style by appealing to precedents like Plutarch and Montaigne, but also by situating his writing as an extension of the movements of life. “I have seen two parts of the World, and find there is something in Travelling, that makes a Man’s Thoughts reel, and that leads his Pen to wander as much as his Person does,” he writes (92– 93). Later, he adds, “But if [Montaigne’s] Authority won’t suffice, I must cast the Fault into the great heap of Humane Error; for seeing we digres [sic] in all the ways of our Lives; yea. seeing the Life of Man is nothing else but Digression, I may the better be excused” (94). Sterne will, of course, capitalize on such sentiments, but in Dunton’s version we see a less ambivalent embrace of the idea that digressive writing mirrors the actual movements of minds or bodies, the experience of living (in the present progressive tense). Such writing allies itself with the pains or pleasures of rambling, rather than those of a completed story or unified logical argument in which the end substantiates the beginning. For Aristotle— an important source of the neoclassicists’ rhetorical and grammatical values—the fact that life is rambling and digressive, while art is not, helps constitute art’s superior value: Art supplies the unity and cohesion that life fails to manifest.9 Dunton, on the other hand, defends the value of textual and experiential diversions as one and the same, or coextensive. Readers who share “this Rambling Humour,” he asserts, “will

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certainly be pleased with my Frequent Digressions” (94). The “Rambling Humour” entails, in part, an interest in the novel: what is new and different, not yet said or seen. As he puts it: Constancy is not so absolutely necessary in Authors as in Husbands; and for my own part, when I have my Pen in my Hand, and Subject in my Head, I look upon my self as mounted my Horse to ride a Journey, where altho I design to reach such a Town by Night, yet I will not deny my self the satisfaction of going a Mile or Two out of the way, to gratifie my Senses with some New and Diverting Prospect. (Essay 93)

This trope clearly suggests that the middle or process— the ramble itself—is more interesting and compelling for Dunton, and his ideal readers, than the final destination. Keeping in mind his prolific use of typographical effects, we can say that the text is primarily oriented toward the momentby-moment stimulations of a relaxed journey whose destination does not exert a strong gravitational pull. Swift was not pleased with the Frequent Digressions. In A Tale of a Tub, Swift directly targets Dunton (though he also targets numerous other individuals, types, and trends).10 Therein, the benighted fictional author sets out to tell a story that will function as a religious allegory. The story is constantly interrupted by digressions (pointedly labeled as such), and is  never fully told: The fictional author supposedly lost the end of the manuscript (100). Because this claim is very implausible, we understand that the author has led us on in bad faith, constructing expectations that he does not, in the end, fulfi ll. We are led to perceive that the fictional author has not mastered his subject, nor has he taken the time or had the capacity to carry out the planning and revision that would have been needed to unify the book and complete its argument. In Swift’s version, moreover, these failures signal the monstrous egotism of modern writers and their lack of consideration for readers. In a passage that may directly parody the one I have just quoted from Dunton’s Essay, Swift writes: For in writing it is as in travelling: if a man is in haste to be at home (which I acknowledge to be none of my case, having never so little business as when I am there) . . . I advise him clearly to make the straightest and the commonest road. . . . But then surely we must own such a man to be a

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scurvy companion at best. . . . On the other side, when a traveller and his horse are in heart . . . he takes the road only when it is clean or convenient . . . but upon the fi rst occasion carries [his company] along with him to every delightful scene in view, whether of art, of nature, or of both, and if they chance to refuse out of stupidity or weariness, let them jog on by themselves and be d— d’d. . . . (Tale of a Tub 91– 92)

Where Dunton contrasts textual to sexual constancy, Swift implicitly equates them, or at least equates digressive writing with the abdication of domestic responsibilities, and hence with a moral rather than merely rhetorical failure. The equation of (good) form in writing with social form, courtesy, is also suggested in an earlier passage, where the hapless author compares himself to an indiscriminate host who serves everything at once, rather than exercising judgment as to quality and quantity (89). Swift associates such disorderly, heterogeneous texts with readerly fatigue and frustration, hence with egotistical insensitivity to audience on the part of the writer. Fostered by “the liberty and encouragement of the press,” Swift’s ironized author later writes, “I am grown absolute master of the occasions and opportunities to expose the talents I have acquired” (103). In Swift’s eyes, the end of such writing becomes boundless self-display, a profoundly anti-social form of authorship. The writer’s destination, he implies, should exert a stronger pull, keeping the narrative on the right road and establishing hierarchies of relevance. Notably, too, where Dunton figures the writer’s destination as “such a Town,” implying a departure rather than a return, Swift figures it as “home.” For Swift, “home” is not yet the loaded figure of closure it will become in the nineteenth century, but it does signify a place to which the good writer should want to return, completing the circle of form. The figure of form as circular discursive return is more explicitly elaborated in the writings of eighteenth-century grammarians, whose work centered on the attempt to improve and regularize English by bringing it into greater conformity with formal patterns and principles found in Greek and Latin texts.11 One principle routinely espoused by the grammarians was the need to preserve a clear distinction between prose and poetry.12 Thus, paraphrasing Aristotle in his Philological Inquiries (1781), James Harris claims: “PROSE should not be strictly metrical (for then it would be no longer Prose, but Poetry).” And yet, he continues, “if it had no Rhythm at

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all, such a vague Eff usion would of course fatigue, and the Reader would seek in vain for those returning Pauses, so helpful to his reading, and so grateful to his Ear” (65– 66). On the one hand, then, prose should not mix with poetry; on the other hand, deprived of meter, prose risks appearing formless and exhausting. Determined to draw from classical authorities, Harris is at the same time aware that word ordering is less flexible in English than in Greek or Latin, and that classical prosody was carried out on a different basis (Harris 74–75). This realization did not stop him (or his colleagues) from formulating systems that adapt classical notions of “prosaic feet” and “prosaic numbers” to English prose composition.13 Inscribing the value on form as discrete unit, or shape, Harris contrasts the “descending drops” of “numbered” prose to “vague and vulgar Prose [that flows] indefinitely like a stream” (72– 73).14 On a similar basis, he advises writers to put their carefully ordered “Words and Feet” together into periodic sentences: Among Sentences none so striking, none so pleasing, as THE PERIOD. The reason is, that, while other Sentences are indefinite, and (like a Geometrical Right-line) may be produced indefinitely, THE PERIOD (like a Circular Line) is always circumscribed, returns, and terminates at a given point. In other words, while other Sentences, by the help of common Copulatives, have a sort of boundless effusion; the constituent parts of a PERIOD have a sort of reflex union, in which the Sentence is so far complete, as neither to require, nor even to admit a farther extension. Readers fi nd a plea sure in this graceful Circuit, which leads them so agreeably to an acquisition of knowledge. (Philological Inquiries 102–3)

In Harris’s terms, periodic sentences are characterized by “reflex union”: a moment of coherence created by retroactively combining the last part of the sentence with what has come before. This understanding of periodic sentences remains intact today. The main idea or predicate is withheld, rendering the beginning incomplete, its sense awaiting the suspended information that is supplied at the end.15 The reader holds the initial information in memory; the end unites the beginning with its meaning, completing the “circuit” of sense. David Wisehart (blogging as “The Grammar Guy”) compares the periodic sentence to the structure of a joke: “Both have a set-up, a delay, and a payoff.” To construct such a sentence, the writer must know the end in advance, and the structure rhetorically highlights this

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architectural pre-planning. Periodic sentences rely heavily on hypotactic conjunctions, with their ability to establish specific relations of subordination and, hence, complex hierarchies among elements. Emphasis falls strongly on the end as the privileged location of sense-making, subordinating (in both grammatical and interpretive terms) the beginning and middle to the charged “payoff.” By contrast, the “other Sentences” Harris mentions, now called “cumulative” sentences, begin with the main idea, usually given in an independent clause.16 We can stop reading midway without losing the basic sense: We already got the point, as it were. The cumulative pattern cannot be called non-hierarchical: The main idea is privileged over the supporting details that follow. However, when the main idea is placed at the beginning, it cannot control or subsume the rest of the sentence to the degree that it can, or must, if withheld until the end. With a cumulative sentence, what we have read so far makes sense: What comes next may add pieces to the information we are “accumulating” as we move forward, or present a different perspective, an exception, reformulation, comparison, connection, and so on. Cumulative patterns thus lend themselves to the use of coordinating conjunctions (Harris’s “common Copulatives”), which facilitates a more even distribution of emphasis across the sentence, and across passages of prose written in a cumulative or “running” style.17 The cumulative style is capable of creating an effect of relatively unbroken continuity, or an effect that is more “episodic,” where successive clauses, sentences, or passages function as links in a chain. The temporalizing resources of intermedial punctuation, particularly the soft pause of the comma, are important for cumulative sentences in grouping information, creating rhythm, and providing chances to pause. According to Harris (and Aristotle), the limit provided by the period’s “graceful circuit” facilitates an agreeable “acquisition of knowledge.” Taking this assertion, for the moment, at face value, what assumptions and mechanics make it true? Clearly, a periodic sentence hinges on the initial construction of a structured absence or lack (concretely, the lack of the subject and/or predicate), which is fi lled by the end. The periodic structure deliberately installs a small vacuum in the reader’s understanding, or to be more charitable, creates an interrogative mood that is dissolved by the fi nal clause when it arrives in the guise of an answer. The periodic structure thus provides, to borrow Frank Kermode’s phrase,

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“the sense of an ending,” and it is presumably this part of the process that is “agreeable” to Harris’s reader. The pleasur able sense of resolution or completion depends on the prior cultivation of (unpleasurable) incompleteness, hence suspense, tension, or anticipation that is fi nally relieved when the sentence closes, enabling the backward glance to which we have looked forward, the satisfying moment of “reflex union” in which sense flows backward into beginning and middle.18 The association of the periodic pattern with a closed circle, hence with fi nality and defi niteness, also seems to justify Harris’s depiction of “knowledge” as something one “acquires,” a phrase that fi gures knowledge as a discrete and stable product that has been, moreover, carefully pre-formulated or packaged for the reader by the writer. Cumulative sentences, by contrast, proceed forward without looking back; as Harris’s comparison to “a Geometrical Right-line” suggests, termination is not built into their structure.19 As Morris Croll puts it, “the figure of a circle . . . is not a possible description of the form of a [cumulative sentence], it requires rather the metaphor of a chain, whose links join end to end . . . [Such a sentence] moves straight onward everywhere from the point it has reached” (43–46). Cumulative structures rhetorically highlight process (of thinking, learning, writing, connecting, and so on). Though a cumulative style is sometimes associated with digressiveness (later clauses move away from the main idea initially stated), it is certainly possible to stuff extraneous details into the middle of a periodic sentence; moreover, the cumulative sentence does not promise a “reflex union” it then fails to deliver. It differs in this way from a tale of a tub or a cock-and-bull story that leads us (playfully or not) to expect something it does not yield (closure). In English, moreover, sentence type is unrelated to sentence length: Cumulative sentences are not necessarily longer than periodic ones; in fact, the reverse is often true. The question of length constitutes a disjunction between Aristotle’s discussion and Harris’s. For Aristotle, the period is “compact,” “not too big to be taken in at a glance” (Rhetoric III.9, 182), whereas the free-running sentence goes on and on. The fact that length does not apply to Harris’s analysis of English sentences means that the formal unity and discreteness he claims for the periodic sentence has no spatial component: It depends entirely on the grammatical and rhetorical relationship between beginning and end. The idea that textual unity can be produced without regard to length via the manipulation of structural

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and rhetorical relationships between beginning and end is obviously pertinent to the (very long) novels of the Victorian period. The eighteenth-century grammarians did not make connections between sentence types and larger narrative patterns, or plots, but the homology between the periodic sentence and the type of plot that comes to dominate the nineteenth-century English novel seems obvious in retrospect.20 Both are rooted in Aristotle. Despite Fielding’s early bid to associate the English novel with the epic, by the dawn of the Victorian era it was much more common to link the novel to Aristotle’s discussion of tragedy, and to ratify his emphasis on the unifying power of a single-action teleological plot. By these standards, Tom Jones—held up by Coleridge and Scott as a model of perfect narrative construction— seemed too episodic and digressive; George Henry Lewes called it “very ill-constructed” (qtd. in Stang 122). An 1860 Fraser’s review condemned Defoe’s novels on a similar basis: “there is no necessary connection between beginning, middle, and end. . . . Incident is added to incident, as beads may be strung upon a thread” (qtd. in Stang 116). Clarissa could be praised, by contrast, for its tragic unity of action.21 As suggested previously, the development of this type of plot is commonly identified with the maturation of the novel as a genre. Ian Watt writes: The novel could be considered established only when realistic narrative was orga nized into a plot which, while retaining Defoe’s lifelikeness, also had an intrinsic coherence; when the novelist’s eye was focused on character and personal relationships as essential elements in the total structure, and not merely as subordinate instruments for furthering the verisimilitude of the actions described; and when all these were related to a controlling moral intention. It was Richardson who took these further steps, and it is primarily for this reason that he is usually regarded as the founder of the English novel. (131)

Specifically, Richardson “avoided an episodic plot by basing his novels on a single action, a courtship” (135), but for Watt it is Jane Austen who completes the novel’s rise by perfecting the marriage plot. In light of the foregoing discussion, we might say that Austen reconfigured the story of courtship and marriage to fit a plot structure that mirrors the periodic sentence. This reconfiguration involved placing the marriage at the end

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(in contrast to, for example, Pamela), but also, and more importantly, withholding knowledge from characters and/or readers. The postponed revelation of suspended knowledge helps complete the marriage and the sense, forming, as it were, the “reflex union” of a fi nal predication.22 The resulting “marriage plot”—which names a special closeness of fit between a certain content (courtship and marriage), a certain form (teleological plot), and certain cultural ideals—became a formula that worked almost too well.23 Watt’s argument, like other dialectical accounts of the novel’s “rise,” reflects the assumption that what was good in Defoe, his “lifelikeness,” was preserved in the subsequent development of the genre, incorporated into novels that are superior by virtue of having “intrinsically coherent” plots. In fact, though, it is not clear that the vivid detailing of tasks and processes that constitutes Defoe’s par ticu lar brand of lifelikeness really was retained in the “well-plotted” novels of the nineteenth century; on the contrary, it is one of the things that sets his work apart. In 1892, Edmund Gosse remarked a bit quixotically, “a new Cornish story, called Inconsequent Lives, . . . seemed, when it opened, to be about to give us just the vivid information we want about the Newlyn pilchard-fishery; but the novelist grew timid, and forbore to fi ll in his sketch” (174). Indeed, it is very unusual to fi nd “just the vivid information we want about the Newlyn pilchard-fishery” in a nineteenth-century British novel; this is true despite the value on verisimilitude and the defensive insistence on the novel’s educational capacity. Rather, like the periodic sentence, the teleological plot works to subordinate “supporting detail” to the end, Aristotle’s “chief thing of all.” Over time, as certain ends are repeatedly associated with insight, pleasure, and importance, novels work to naturalize these ends (marriage, for example) as the ultimate loci of meaning and satisfaction. Excluded or subordinated processes are correlatively devalued in terms of their intrinsic psychological interest, aesthetic attractions, and potential to produce pleasure. Without claiming that plot completely dominates or controls all of the other dynamics involved in a novel, I want to argue that different strategies of plotting encourage different responses in readers and lend themselves to different content, or different presentations of similar content.24 Like the cumulative sentence it resembles, cumulative plotting is better suited to emphasizing process and granting value to detail. English liter-

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ary history has inherited from Aristotle the notion that the cumulative pattern is inherently unpleasurable: “unsatisfying just because it goes on indefi nitely” (Rhetoric III.9, lines 30–35). Indeed, cumulative structures do not carry the same dynamics of plea sure claimed for periodic sentences and teleological plots: They do not operate mechanisms of tension and release whose affective power has been assimilated to psychoanalytic models of sexual desire.25 However, I want to argue that cumulative plotting facilitates a different kind of readerly plea sure, one that depends on activating and sustaining interest in the process of reading itself, together with the process one is reading about. Correlatively, cumulative plotting can be associated with types of learning that are not powered by the lure of a final answer, the knowledge one “acquires” at the end. Instead, they require readers to invest interest in the process of following along and finding out: in learning as an ongoing activity, an enjoyment, that is never definitively accomplished. In his chapter on “Interest—Excitement,” psychologist Silvan Tomkins notes that this affect is rarely discussed or even identified; it is often confused with “the function it accompanies,” such as thinking or sexual arousal (338). Darwin, for example, fails to include interest in his list of emotions, though so clearly motivated by it. Psychoanalysis and other branches of psychology have situated interest as a secondary phenomenon, a derivative of the drives, as though one could only be interested in what gave or promised drive satisfaction. We have turned this argument upside down. It is interest or excitement . . . which is primary, and the drives are secondary. (342)

Tomkins associates interest with certain physical reflexes, the “head and eye movements which track a moving stimulus”; he claims that the combination of interest, as motivator, “with these reflexes enables the individual to sustain attention to complex objects” (338). Though interest is not the only affect capable of keeping us attentive, it is an intrinsically rewarding or “positive” affect that can provide “an underlying continuity of motivational support” for many kinds of human endeavors, including thinking and learning, achieving “full acquaintance with any object” (348). Change, movement, and new information activate interest; interest promotes and is sustained by the activity of varying one’s perspective (perceptual and cognitive). Interest is not unlimited in quantity; it is constantly

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being distributed, invested in some things at the expense of others. It can be attenuated by habituation (too little variation, or too much familiarity, so that the object no longer sustains our interest) or the intrusion of stronger negative affects (fear, shame, aggression, distress). In Tomkins’s view, a dramatic attenuation of interest, with its consequences of failure to develop and “lack of commitment to the world,” characterizes psychological disorders (342). Though Tomkins does not explicitly discuss reading, reading certainly involves the activities of perceptual and cognitive “tracking” he associates with interest. His model is rather general, but may still provide a way of talking about motives and pleasures that are not subtended by either lack or desire. If suspense (or a series of suspensions) works as the engine of the teleological plot, we might hypothesize that interest motors the reading of cumulative sentences and narratives, which precisely do not work through suspense (the main idea is not withheld). The book sustains our interest; interest is pleasurable, so we keep turning the pages. We are varying perspectives, achieving full acquaintance with the object, tracking the movement of words and ideas. Plea sure is immanent to this process, distributed throughout the middle rather than concentrated at the end; indeed, the end must stand opposed to the pleasures of interest. When our reading is motivated by interest, we cannot help moving toward the end, because that is the only way to continue, but the end simply halts the pleasure of being interested, at least in that particu lar text. In short, pleasurable reading may at times be based on interest as much as, or instead of, the desirous suspense that makes the middle into a space of anticipation, necessary to the pleasure of the end but not in itself sufficient.26

Maintaining Interest in Robinson Crusoe Writing well before the novel had a name, let alone a set of conventions, Defoe is often positioned (like Sterne) as both central to the history of the English novel and in some ways exceptional, suggesting roads not taken.27 One of the features that marks Robinson Crusoe, in par ticu lar, as exceptional is the remarkable vividness with which Defoe represents Crusoe’s processes of making things and meeting the basic needs of life. As Virginia Woolf put it, readers expecting romantic adventures and profound

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meditations on “the nature of society and the strange ways of men” find instead “nothing but a large earthenware pot” (“Robinson” 21). Clearly, it is not the case that the novel is devoid of adventure, emotion, or profound meditations; rather, these never eclipse the struggle for survival with all its attention to material details, so that in the end Woolf can say “to dig, to bake, to plant, to build: how serious these simple occupations are; hatchets, scissors, logs, axes—how beautiful these simple objects become” (23). On the one hand, the exotic setting renders such basic activities adventures in themselves, quasi-heroic tasks made difficult by limited resources but fi nally achieved through determination and inventiveness. Yet it is not just the setting and not just the sheer amount of space devoted to these descriptions that creates their distinctive effect: Lengthy descriptions and the use of concrete detail are central elements in many novels that do not create anything like the same effect. Rather, Defoe’s ability to represent such tasks so attractively and engagingly depends on his use of cumulative structural patterns on the level of style, plot, and also, in a more oblique sense, content. The plea sure that many readers avowedly take in Crusoe’s accounts can be attributed, at least in part, to the way these patterns avert suspense and create a kind of homology between the process of reading and the processes being described. Despite the narrator’s retrospective point of view, the episodes Crusoe recounts are not subordinated to an overarching periodic plot in which sense-making operations are deferred and occur at the end. Notably, the novel does not end at the moment of rescue, the event that suggests itself (at least to us) as a fitting “fi nal clause.” Rather, the narrative is openended: Crusoe/Defoe can simply re- commence narration in the Farther Adventures, which can easily be read as a continuation of the same novel; indeed, the works are often printed together in that manner. As with other cumulative narratives, one can simply continue by adding more adventures, more links in the chain. Yet pace Ian Watt, who refers at one point to Defoe’s “anthologies,”28 Robinson Crusoe has a high degree of “intrinsic coherence” (131). This coherence is achieved not through teleological plotting—the discrete unity of “shape” in which the end circles back to complete the beginning, enfolding everything in between— but through a distinctive effect of continuity and cohesion that is based in part on style.

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Among English novelists, Defoe provides one of the most striking examples of the “running style,” with its dominant grammatical pattern of long cumulative sentences whose elements are mostly linked by coordinating conjunctions. As noted, this style reinforces the impression of unfolding, ongoing process: continuous movement forward through time and text, without the device of suspense or withholding. It thus creates an impression of immediacy, as though a present progressive temporality is being activated within the past tense narration. Though sentence structure, plot structure, and content are not mutually dependent or mutually determining,29 in Robinson Crusoe the alignment of the three strengthens the effects of the cumulative pattern and renders its dynamics particularly evident. In this respect, the scene in which Crusoe makes pots and then bread is exemplary. The scene is several pages long; to convey its dynamics, I quote it at some length. Unfortunately, in the context of my book the passage is embedded in a periodic structure, since you are waiting for me to make a point. That is not the case in the context of Defoe’s book, where this scene is situated as another linked episode in a narrative that (despite some aberrations) is fundamentally cumulative and sequential. I had long study’d by some Means or other, to make my self some Earthen Vessels. . . . It would make the Reader pity me, or rather laugh at me, to tell how many awkward ways I took to raise this Paste, what odd mishapen ugly things I made, how many of them fell in, and how many fell out, the Clay not being stiff enough to bear its own Weight; how many crack’d by the over violent Heat of the Sun, being set out too hastily; and how many fell in pieces with only removing, as well before as after they were dry’d; and in a word, how after having labour’d hard to fi nd the Clay, to dig it, to temper it, to bring it home and work it; I could not make above two large earthen ugly things, I cannot call them Jarrs, in about two Months Labour. . . . But all this would not answer my End, which was to get an earthen Pot to hold what was Liquid, and bear the Fire, which none of these could do. It happen’d after some time, making a pretty large Fire for cooking my Meat, when I went to put it out after I had done with it, I found a broken Piece of one of my Earthen-ware Vessels in the fi re, burnt as hard as a Stone, and red as a Tile. I was agreeably surpris’d to see it,

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and said to my self, that certainly they might be made to burn whole if they would burn broken. This set me to studying how to order my Fire, so as to make it burn me some Pots. I had no Notion of Kiln, such as the Potters burn in, or of glazing them with Lead, tho’ I had some Lead to do it with; but I plac’d three large Pipkins, and two or three Pots in a Pile one upon another, and plac’d my Fire-wood all round it with a great Heap of Embers under them; I ply’d the Fire with fresh Fuel round the out-side, and upon the top, till I saw the Pots in the inside red hot quite thro’, and observ’d that they did not crack at all; when I saw them clear red, I let them stand in that Heat about 5 or 6 Hours, till I found one of them, tho’d it did not crack, did melt or run, for the Sand which was mixed with the Clay melted by the violence of the Heat, and would have run into Glass if I had gone on; so I slack’d my Fire gradually till the Pots began to abate of the red Colour, and watching them all Night, that I might not let the Fire abate too fast, in the Morning I had three very good, I will not say handsome Pipkins; and two other Earthen Pots, as hard burnt as cou’d be desir’d; and one of them perfectly glazed with the Running of the Sand. (87–89)

This passage is an absolutely focused and systematic account of material making, a process that appears difficult but uncomplicated because it is physical—based entirely on what is manifest to the senses—rather than social, spiritual, aesthetic, or psychological.30 Crusoe’s aim or “end” (“to make myself some Earthen Vessels”) is not withheld: It is clearly stated at the beginning, and functions as the “main idea” of the whole cumulative sequence. Though there is uncertainty involved in this project (about what will work), there are no secrets, blanks, or mysteries. That is to say, when Crusoe achieves his end, the end itself will simply change the tense of the main idea (get pots . . . got pots) rather than altering the significance of the beginning. The sense of the passage is not suspended; it is “complete” at every point, but continues to accumulate together with Crusoe’s own experiences of hypothesis, trial, error, and eventual success. Thus, readers’ interest, like Crusoe’s, is directed at the details of the problemsolving process itself. It is important to note, however, that the presence of a definite aim (“to get an earthen pot”) serves to “curb” the forward movement of the cumulative pattern, giving the scene a degree of discreteness; it

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becomes one link in a chain of “episodes” (though this term eclipses the high degree of cohesion and continuity that characterizes the novel). We are not here confronted with the radically nomadic structure suggested by Harris’s metaphor of a “geometrical Right-line” (a structure one might call “cumulative- continuous,” vs. Defoe’s “cumulative- episodic”). Since the object (in both senses) is given, but not the means, the process (and passage) has a stopping point; also, Crusoe can make discoveries without the risk of heading into the radically new, i.e. ending up inventing something. 31 In the context of the novel, neither the task nor the passage that represents it is situated as a narrative or psychological delay— they do not function to defer desire’s “true” aim, or the sense-making end of the plot. The process of making pots, whose aim is of a piece with the process itself, does not constitute a digression, a detour in the arc of the plot, or an obstacle to the pursuit of a different desire, as it would be if Crusoe were trying to fi nish the pots so that he could get back to reading, or dancing, or falling in love. Crusoe’s overarching aim, to keep alive as comfortably as possible, is directly served by the tasks of making pots, bread, houses, clothes, and so on; moreover, it is not something that can ever be achieved once and for all. The passage thus encourages the reader to remain affectively and cognitively grounded in the forward movement of the passage itself, rather than being oriented toward a meaning-yet-to-come. Because neither task nor passage produces the tension involved in deferral, they are capable of producing a different kind of present plea sure, the pleasure inherent in interest. Other aspects of the style also encourage the reader to stay focused on “tracking,” to use Tomkins’s term, the steps of the process itself. The long (sometimes very long) sentences are paced by commas and semicolons that function to create word groups of varying length, to give readers a chance to absorb chunks of information, and to provide cadence. These shifts in the rate of information flow help maintain the reader’s interest.32 Although our attention is not drawn to the writing— the signifiers as such— neither is it the case that the style becomes “transparent” in the sense of occluding the act or fact of representation. The narrator’s voice makes itself perceptible throughout: His act of representing remains ever-present to the reader. What is achieved in the place of transparency is a precision of concrete description that seems to minimize the space of the unsaid. Most

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of the words that make up the passage are verbs and concrete nouns, words used pragmatically, without obvious multivalence or allusiveness. Crusoe rarely uses figuration, and when he does, his similes are intradiegetic (“hard as a Stone . . . red as a Tile”). Such comparisons do not open up an imaginative distance between the thing and its description. This choice further emphasizes the “linear,” syntagmatic or sequential relationships between the signifiers that are present in the chain, as opposed to evoking, metaphor ical ly, an absent term. In fact, the logic by which Crusoe determines that clay pots “might be made to burn whole if they would burn broken” (88) is itself metonymical: The piece obeys the laws of the concrete whole from which it is taken. If a periodic structure begins by cultivating incompleteness, this passage works in the opposite direction: to avert any perception of gaps. We can make this claim of the passage’s content (for example, Crusoe lists all the different ways his early experiments failed), but also, more rigorously, for its style. In grammatical terms, the sense is complete—but not fi nal— at almost every punctuation mark.33 The style of Crusoe’s journal provides a contrast that may help further specify the mechanics of cumulative patterns. Defoe’s process of experimenting with different modes of representation is particularly evident: It is as if, like Crusoe, he discovers the possibilities and limitations of his improvised devices as he goes along, and includes the record of the failures. Crusoe’s journal can be seen as one such experiment.34 It is initially designed as a memorandum, “a Journal of every Day’s Employment” (51), and thus preserves the daily, repetitive quality of the struggle for survival: The 31st in the Morning I went out into the Island with my Gun. . . . Nov. 3. I went out with my Gun and kill’d two Fowls. . . . Nov. 5. This Day went abroad with my Gun and my Dog. . . . (53)

Just as readers begin to sense that the novel cannot live up to the journal’s demands without exhausting both writer and reader, Crusoe famously runs low on ink (76). On the one hand, Crusoe’s emphasis on the need for ink to write the journal highlights the materiality of writing. A sentence may be indefi nitely extendable in the abstract, but for Crusoe on his island, ink is not; it runs out. As a substance that can’t be taken for granted, ink is as much a part of the story as clay and seeds; writing is presented as a kind of work that requires and consumes time and supplies. From this perspective, the dearth of ink highlights the difference, or tension,

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between teleological forms (with their end foreseen in the beginning) and the contingencies of beginnings and endings in the material world, where things may end because we run out of ink, paper, money, lifetime, and so on. Yet the premise that Crusoe, who makes so many more difficult things, cannot find a way to make ink, is rather fl imsy; it seems clear that the inability falls on the side of the real author, Defoe, who needs an excuse for abandoning the journal as it becomes an unworkable device. Progressively paring down the journal appears to entail a kind of loss, wherein less and less of Crusoe’s experience survives on paper, but it is a necessary sacrifice for keeping the novel itself alive. Seven years’ worth of daily memoranda would presumably stall the novel, lose the reader’s interest, yet the reasons why this is so are not entirely self-evident. Though repeating the same or similar content risks attenuating readers’ interest (we become “habituated”), it is also the case that writing in the paratactic mode of daily memoranda entails a decay of the coordinated continuity that gives the pot-making passage its par ticular momentum. The journal is deeply a-syntactical, not only in its telegraphic style, but also in its paradoxical temporal discontinuity (starts and stops, starts and stops, every day). The shift back to continuous narration highlights the way an adjustment to style, rather than plot or subject matter per se, provides the continuity and coherence, but also variation in pace, needed to sustain readerly interest, making it rewarding to keep following along.35 Defoe’s cumulative style works together with his attention to the quotidian to create a distinctive impression of “straightforwardness,” traditionally associated with truthful rather than artful discourse. In part for this reason, critics from the nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century often dismissed Defoe’s work as primitive or inartistic. Leslie Stephen, for example, remarked: “The merit of De Foe’s narratives bears a direct proportion to the intrinsic merit of a plain statement of the facts” (qtd. in Watt 93). James Fitzjames Stephen makes a similar claim in a more positive light: Robinson Crusoe is “almost as natural and complete as if it were a real history of the real facts” (118). Both remarks highlight a sense of fit between cumulative patterns and a certain understanding of the real, or the matter of fact; what we might hesitantly call the “prosaic.” Yet both Stephens here ignore Defoe’s repeated attempts to draw attention to the

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“poetic” or allegorical dimension of the novel, the process of Crusoe/ Defoe’s spiritual awakening for which the island story has supposedly served as a vehicle. Despite the intense focus on material processes, Crusoe’s experiences come to be associated with spiritual meanings in a system of correspondences between the earthly and the divine (providence). Because these meanings are not withheld for revelation at the end, they do not produce teleological closure; rather, every point along the cumulative chain is connected (or, at times, retrofitted) with another set of connotations. As the narrative progresses, words like “deliverance” become highly multivalent, evoking constellations of abstract spiritual significations that cluster around the physical. That is to say, author and narrator begin to insist that what looks like a markedly straightforward style/story is actually double, shadowed by an important figurative or paradigmatic dimension. One can hardly fault Defoe for yielding to the perception that the vivid details, the pot “perfectly glazed with the Running of the Sand,” do not have value on their own— aesthetic value—without the symbolic meaning added by a story of spiritual progress. The world is not enough; one must have heaven, or at least a point. Yet many readers, past and present, have perceived these allegorical claims as intrusive or implausible,36 perhaps because Defoe here attempts to graft the logic of poetic correspondences (in which, as Gerald Bruns puts it, “every fragment is a luminous detail. . . . in perpetual transport from the everydayness of its material appearance to the sphere of the transcendental where it is really located,” ix–x) onto a narrative whose parts have been so convincingly grounded in embodied material processes as to resist precisely that logic. Indeed, Defoe’s remarkable “lifelikeness,” to borrow Watt’s word, stems from his fortunate failure to convincingly translate Crusoe’s experiences into allegory.37 More recently, however, critics have worked to establish quasi-allegorical relationships between the novel and other sets of abstract forces: capitalist economics and colonial power dynamics. Before, after, and even during his time on the island, in addition to making things, Crusoe makes money (and relentlessly keeps accounts). The novel represents making money, like surviving, as a goal in itself: a process without an object apart from its own furtherance. The ongoing loss and gain (mostly gain) of wealth constitutes a sequence that is not random, but (since no amount of money is

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ever defi nitively enough) does not provide a framework for progress toward an end.38 Crusoe’s interactions with Friday, and the imperialist dynamics of the novel more generally, can be viewed in similar terms. The novel pointedly fails to mask its imperialist power dynamics; indeed, these are represented so overtly as almost to discourage sustained critical analysis.39 They are so obvious because Defoe represents colonial subjection as a process: an ongoing process that is never complete or completely secure, never reaches a state of fi nality that would be capable of subsuming or occulting the processes by which it was achieved. The numerous mutinies represented in the novel and The Farther Adventures, as well as the theatrical techniques Crusoe uses to conquer and manipulate his “subjects,” underscore the fragility and artificiality of power structures and the corresponding need for constant vigilance, struggle, and strategy. Like survival itself, then, money making and colonial mastery are here narrated as cumulative processes. There is a goal (profit; subjection), but because the goal is represented as unstable, requiring ongoing efforts, the process of achieving it (incompletely, over and over) forms an ongoing sequence that does not produce the expectation of a fi nal resolution.40 Relating Robinson Crusoe to the rise of capitalism, Watt argues that in the light of growing economic specialization, Crusoe’s labors gain appeal precisely because they are not alienated (71– 72). Before Friday’s appearance, Crusoe lives alone outside an exchange economy, making any division of labor impossible. Instead of being a contingent, dependent, wholly relational part of the process of making a commodity that he will not consume, he is involved in the whole process; he is the total producer and consumer of what he makes. Readers from Defoe’s time to the present, stranded on the other side of the page, are deprived of the satisfaction Crusoe can obtain by aiming at what is, for us, already given, already made (usually by unknown others). From this perspective, what Watt calls “the substitute experiences provided by the printing press” (71) began to interest readers precisely because they made possible a vicarious or literary version of a kind of experience rapidly disappearing from everyday life: the experience of unalienated labor or, simply, “the human delight in making things” (Sutherland 29). Yet readers’ pleasurable interest in the material processes Crusoe describes, which helps make such processes attractive, also depends on the absence of a periodic plot that would construct the various episodes as incomplete in relation to an end that synthesizes and to

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some extent erases them. In this sense, the historical selection of teleological over cumulative plotting has worked against the representation of processes as interesting in themselves, rather than negatable means to a deferred end. Claims about the value of literature, or the aesthetic more broadly, often begin from the assumption that what we miss in experience is meaning, which art can supply; art can teach us the truths of life. As Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller” so poignantly suggests, the contingent endings of the material world constantly threaten to truncate the meaning-making processes in our own lives; we are attracted to teleological forms because they provide a vicarious experience of closure, which seems to grant a stable meaning to the story of a life. Yet perhaps what we really miss, in both senses, is not the fi nal meaning of experience but experience itself. If one line of thought about aesthetic value relies on notions of transcendence (art’s capacity to re-make the earthly as the spiritual, the historical as the timeless, the cultural as the universal, the par ticu lar as the meaningful), another line has long advocated art’s capacity to show us the world’s surfaces: to translate, not the par ticu lar into meaning, but the missed into experience. This line of thought is reflected, for example, in Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi, who claims, “we’re made so that we love / First, when we see them painted, things we have passed / Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see,” or Viktor Shklovsky’s value on art’s ability “to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony” (6). Woolf claimed that reading Shakespeare, Austen, or Proust “seems to perform a curious couching operation on the senses; one sees more intensely afterward; the world seems . . . given an intenser life” (Room 114). This line of thought forms a context in which cumulative structures might be revalued for their refusal to subordinate processes and particulars to form; that is, to a teleological structure that ultimately vacuums out their value.41 As I have begun to suggest, cumulative narratives have the potential to re-trace processes and material encounters as interesting in themselves—to facilitate interest in the work, as it were. After Defoe, however, the “substitute experiences” provided by the novel are rarely long accounts of making something out of mud.

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Mary Barton and the Working Plot Like Robinson Crusoe, the working class characters in Mary Barton are engaged in a struggle to survive, though Gaskell’s characters are shipwrecked within culture, threatened by forces that are fundamentally social. Like Defoe, Gaskell devotes an unusual amount of narrative attention to the work of everyday living, detailing such domestic tasks as shopping, cooking, sewing, ironing, caring for the bodies of the sick and even the dead.42 Both writers have been praised for their verisimilitude, both have been criticized for their failure (or refusal) to translate material details into metaphors, and both occupy a somewhat marginal or ambivalent position in relation to the canon of English novelists.43 Like Robinson Crusoe, too, Gaskell’s novel constructs an oppositional distance— almost a negative mimesis—between the characters’ world and that of the target audience (middle class readers). As Deidre David puts it, Gaskell attempts “to take the uninformed visitors, as it were, upon expeditions to places they had never seen, and into the lives of people of whom they were essentially ignorant” (5). Throughout the novel, the narrator mediates but also maintains this distance. The reader is positioned as one who “knows” that the working class perspective is flawed and partial (“he spent all he got with confidence [you may also call it improvidence],” [60]), but who must be brought to recognize the fl aws and partiality of his/her own bourgeois perspective. Gaskell’s explicit political project is to foster sympathetic understanding: to make the motives, perspectives, and attitudes of the working class characters legible to middle class readers by presenting the situations that have shaped them. Examining Mary Barton together with its critical reception provides insight into the fate of cumulative plotting in the nineteenth century, and the far-reaching effects of what had become a very strong association between the novel, the teleological plot, and the ideal of progress. If the plea sure attached to the teleological plot helped naturalize the notion that progress toward a deferred goal is the only temporal or narrative structure capable of bestowing value, this association also worked against the fictional representation of other kinds of endeavors, including the ongoing endeavor to survive that characterizes much working class life in and beyond the Victorian era.44

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Like her struggling protagonists, Gaskell never takes a domestic setting for granted, describing interior spaces in detail and emphasizing their materiality. In one such passage, Gaskell writes: On the right of the door, as you entered, was a longish window, with a broad ledge. On each side of this, hung blue-and-white check curtains, which were now drawn, to shut in the friends met to enjoy themselves. Two geraniums, unpruned and leafy, which stood on the sill, formed a further defense from out-door pryers. In the corner between the window and the fi re-side was a cupboard, apparently full of plates and dishes, cups and saucers, and some more nondescript articles, for which one would have fancied their possessors could fi nd no use— such as triangular pieces of glass to save carving knives and forks from dirtying table- cloths. (49)

Were we embroiled in a suspenseful plot, a lengthy description like this one might function as a digression or irritating delay.45 Yet the fi rst half of Mary Barton has a “cumulative- episodic” structure that resembles, at least obliquely, that of Robinson Crusoe. Gaskell, too, often uses a running style, as we see in this passage; as in Defoe, the refusal of suspension on the level of style reinforces the refusal of plot-based suspense (though, as noted previously, these two levels do not determine each other). Because the descriptions neither delay resolution nor build suspense, they receive greater emphasis in themselves. Thus, readers register and retain the vivid details, as is evidenced by the frequency with which Gaskell’s descriptions are quoted and praised as effective by both nineteenth- and twentieth- century critics. Gaskell’s descriptions are often allocated to the novel’s documentary function: her attempts to reveal a suppressed reality that has, for us, become a suppressed history. Yet we should also note that in marked contrast to many Victorian novels, Gaskell’s emphasis on the materiality of domestic environments—things and the manner in which people use them— highlights the friability of the home.46 In this respect, her descriptions of working- class homes complement her “behind the scenes” presentation of the Carson household, which shows that its smooth functioning is not a natural or default state but always a product of others’ labor. For example: “The cook broiled steaks, and the kitchen-maid toasted bread, and boiled eggs” while “in the luxurious library, at the well-spread breakfast table,

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sat the two Mr. Carsons . . . Both were reading . . . while they lazily enjoyed their nicely prepared food” (106– 7). The effect is to contrast the domestic serenity so often idealized in Victorian fiction with the constant work required to produce this serenity. Gaskell shows us that the static image of the happy home, which functions as a figure of closure in so many Victorian novels, simply occults the endless labor required to maintain the appearance of domestic stability.47 Gaskell attempts to valorize such labor, asserting, for example, that Mrs. Carson’s health would have benefited if she had “taken the work of one of her own housemaids for a week; made beds, rubbed tables, shaken carpets, and gone out into the fresh morning air” (254). For Gaskell, too, the work of keeping house requires a set of learned skills; it is not something that simply comes “naturally” to women. Jane’s story of burning potatoes the day after she was married and learning how to cook (164– 65) creates a sharp contrast to a figure like Agnes in David Copperfield, whose femininity is defi ned by her natural (even preternatural) housekeeping abilities. This novel, like much of Gaskell’s fiction, is also unusual in highlighting the ways that love itself takes work. Family bonds are fragile products of an ongoing series of acts and expressions; when damaged, they require effort to repair. The bond of “love and gratitude” between Mary and her father, built up by “many deeds of kindness done to her as a little child” (420), attenuates when it is neglected or dishonored. Jem’s mother, Jane Wilson, irritates characters (and readers) with her constant demands for attention, recognition, and assistance, but unlike her counterparts in the world of Dickens, she is never presented as either comic or villainous. She simply underscores the (disturbing) idea that even family relationships are process-based and hence permanently unstable. For Mary Barton herself, growing up involves learning that social bonds require ongoing maintenance: She is wrong, for example, to wait so long before visiting the Wilsons after the death of the twins (162– 63). Placing emphasis on learning and process, rather than nature or discovery, helps Gaskell defend her working class characters from charges of laziness, ineptitude, or lack of femininity (if, like Jane, you’ve worked in a factory since you were a child, you simply haven’t had a chance to learn to cook). Moreover, domestic work is co-extensive with a social solidarity that extends beyond the nuclear family: sharing of tasks and precious resources; socializing in the context of housework. In Gaskell’s novel, then, the in-

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genuity, resourcefulness, and determination of working class characters, as well as their generosity and loyalty, is revealed in relation to the kinds of domestic activities most nineteenth-century novels exclude. In part, of course, this exclusion reflects the fact that most Victorian heroes and heroines are bourgeois characters who would not be expected to do such work. Yet Gaskell repeatedly draws attention to the blind spots of bourgeois characters and the novels devoted to them, and attempts chiastic reversals of established hierarchies of interest. For example, the drawing-room entanglements and ballroom intrigues that would have been the stuff of plot for Austen are briefly sketched and dismissed as trivial (255); the plight of the Davenports, or of Wilson waiting hungrily in the kitchen, is highlighted instead.48 Despite these praiseworthy attempts, critics have tended to see this novel as politically and formally flawed. On the level of content, Gaskell’s middle class precepts bleed into the novel even when they flatly contradict what her own fiction so vividly demonstrates (in a widely cited example, the narrator serves as bourgeois apologist while John Barton watches his former employer’s wife purchase dainty food for a party, knowing that his son will die for want of nourishment, 59– 61). What she sees and faithfully describes contradicts what she believes; she is unwilling to falsify what she sees (“I have tried to write truthfully,” she states in her preface, 38), yet cannot quite abandon her beliefs. Thus she cannot resist asserting that the interests of the masters and the men are one, that the confl ict is caused by misunderstanding or limited vision, and can be solved by increased sympathy resulting from improved communication. In this sense, the novel leaves us with the awkward implication that if the workers felt loved and understood, they would not mind starving. On the level of plot, the novel exhibits a curiously heterogeneous structure that has been skillfully analyzed from several perspectives. Raymond Williams praises the novel’s early chapters for the “intensity of the effort to record, in its own terms, the feel of everyday life in the working class homes” (87). He sees the later shift in focus from John to Mary Barton as, in essence, a cop-out; Gaskell “recoils” from the violence she chose to dramatize, retreating from politics into the domestic realm (90). Building on this argument, and that of Arnold Kettle—who argues that the love plot was imposed on Gaskell by the pressure of Victorian novelistic conventions— Stephen Gill presents the novel’s structure as awkwardly bipartite: “a

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complex re- creation of events, scenes and problems concerning the real circumstances of the 1840s has given way to a more simple fable which ends in a moral tableau” (21). In his view, Gaskell introduces a more conventional romantic or sensational plot because she is unable to resolve the confl icts central to the early part of the novel; the introduction of the suspenseful love/murder plot enables her to bring about closure in another way. Catherine Gallagher and Hilary Schor, among others, have contested this line of thought. Schor questions these critics’ failure to read the love story as itself political, or to acknowledge the heroine’s success in escaping a conventional plot. Gallagher argues that critical attention to a “split” in the novel has obscured the ways that both halves incorporate and critique a broader range of genres, including melodrama, tragedy, farce, domestic fiction, and religious homily. The novel “is partly about the ways in which narrative conventions mask and distort reality” (Industrial 68). However, Gallagher arrives at something of an impasse when it comes to naming the mode that functions for Gaskell as an alternative: “the ground of her exposition, the narrative mode adopted because she believed that it did reflect working- class reality, is difficult to identify” (70). Elsewhere, she remarks, “the reader cannot initially tell whether the early chapters are part of a melodrama or of some other kind of narrative” (75, emphasis mine). Gallagher ultimately plunks for “working-class domestic tale,” and this choice has some unfortunate consequences: It leads her to claim that the public scenes of adventure in the second half are actually part of a domestic story, and that ultimately John Barton’s tragedy has a domestic origin in the death of his son. Schor points out that this move shortchanges the extent to which Mary as heroine is not confi ned to domestic roles or settings; perhaps it also obscures the extent to which John Barton is motivated by a strong sense of social injustice, not simply his own private loss. In a sense, Gallagher’s reading ends up ratifying Job Legh’s claims that the domestic can and should subordinate the political (“to my mind John Barton would be more in the way of his duty, looking after his daughter, than delegating it up and down the country,” 404). If the alternative narrative mode that Gaskell uses to represent working class reality is “difficult to identify” as a genre, it might be better understood as a structure. As suggested earlier, the fi rst half of the novel comprises linked episodes (the outing to Green Heys Fields, the supper party,

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the visit to Alice, the burning mill, the Davenport tragedy, the twins’ death, Will’s story of the mermaid, preparations for the trip to parliament, and so on). To borrow a term, this part of the novel uses “a device of plot composition” Shklovsky calls “threading,” in which “one finished story motif succeeds another motif and is linked to it by the unity of the protagonist” (68). Shklovsky lists several variants of this device, including the journey, exemplified by the picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes (68– 69). In Gaskell’s case, the episodes are linked through the repeated appearance of several characters (the emphasis falls on community, vs. the single “hero” of Shklovsky’s examples), the process of unveiling different aspects of setting, and multiple threads of sequential action (Mary pursuing her job as seamstress, Margaret slowly losing her eyesight, the economy taking a downturn, Jem’s attempts to court Mary). Individual episodes sometimes generate suspense, but the suspense is resolved by the end of the episode; it is not extended by further complications. The exciting episode of the burning mill, for example, is relatively self-contained; though the scene functions to reveal and develop character, and the event plays a background role in the economic downturn, there is no plot-based carry-over from this scene. Even the melodramatic seduction plot is not painfully suspenseful for anyone except Esther, who fell victim to such a plot in a previous story and hence believes in its power.49 If one approaches the novel with expectations shaped by unified teleological plots, the first half is perplexing. Student readers often report that they cannot tell which characters to focus on, or what the novel is going to be “about.” It seems to be hopping rather than getting off the ground. On the other hand, this is the part of the novel most often praised by twentieth-century critics for its uniquely vivid portrayal of working class life. Importantly, too, Gaskell here succeeds in representing working class lives positively, in the sense of portraying aspects of working class culture that are not wholly predicated on opposition to, or lack of, another lifestyle or set of values. John Lucas argues that for this reason, Gaskell’s account of Manchester is a useful corrective to Engels’s contemporaneous Condition of the Working Class. While Engels was right to emphasize the terrible conditions, Lucas asserts, he failed to recognize that “there are structures of experience which are positive and not merely created out of negativeness and enmity” (56). Gaskell represents positive elements of working class culture—folk knowledge, pubs, songs, communal life—that Engels

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overlooked or didn’t understand, but that “belong to the growth of working class consciousness” as much as does hatred of the bourgeoisie (55). In Lucas’s view, Gaskell also does a better job of making important distinctions along a continuum of working-class living conditions. Alice’s cellar, for example, is more comfortable than the Davenport’s. This distinction allow us to register Alice’s achievement in making a home, but without suggesting that it is right for people to live in cellars or that the Davenports’ situation is their own fault (Lucas 50–51). Without contesting Gallagher’s argument that the whole novel engages a variety of genres, from a structural perspective the divide between the two halves does appear quite sharply. The turning point occurs in Chapters 15 and 16, which launch two major teleological plotlines from dramatically unresolved scenes of confl ict: the fistfight between Jem and Harry, and the failed meeting between masters and men. In the latter plot, suspense is initially generated by the narrator’s decision to withhold the name of the man who drew the marked paper and must now become a murderer (242). Oddly, most critics overlook the fact that the murderer is chosen at random, by lottery, from a large group of angry men.50 Yet this literary fact should lead us to pause before interpreting the murder as a consequence of John Barton’s character development or past experiences. His drawing of the marked paper evokes something much closer to a Greek understanding of tragic fate, wherein accident, character, and inevitability are simply inextricable. The crime itself is designed as a terrorist act, not personal revenge: Barton commits it out of political loyalty to his comrades together with a keen (and correct) sense that they have all been wronged. If we take into account Gaskell’s assertion that she envisioned the life of her hero as “a tragic poem” (Letters 70), we might identify class loyalty as John Barton’s hamartia. This characteristic is presented as a source of strength as well as ruin, insight as well as blindness and moral error. It might easily have been the cause of his death. In fact, the tragic model would suggest that John Barton should come forward and confess the moment he learns of Jem’s imprisonment, then be hanged, becoming a true tragic hero. However, that is not what happens. Presumably, such an outcome simply would not comport with Gaskell’s Christian paradigm of reconciliation and forgiveness, or Victorian readers’ expectations for the novel. By creating a working class martyr, moreover, such an ending would have made the novel a much riskier contribution to British history.

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Still, the mechanism of the lottery enforces a sharp break between the two halves because it prevents us from seeing the events of the second half as a continuous development from the history of personal suffering recounted earlier. In part for this reason, the episodes of the fi rst half are not entirely folded into the teleological plot(s). In the second half of the novel, Gaskell creates suspenseful delays by switching from the courtship plot to the murder plot, allowing the two to interfere with and complicate each other, and constructing dramatic obstacles that hinder resolution (Mary’s journey in the boat, Will’s delayed arrival at Jem’s trial, Mary’s illness). In the process, the love story and the murder mystery largely eclipse the theme of class confl ict, which finally re-emerges to be unpersuasively resolved through, as Gill puts it, a “moral tableau.” Yet exactly because the early episodes are not tied into these plotlines and not subsumed by their resolutions—exactly because the novel does not achieve unity of plot— they retain a degree of independence that strengthens their effectiveness as representations of working-class life.51 As Carolyn Levine has persuasively shown, the production of suspense became, in the Victorian period, a privileged mode of holding a reader’s attention.52 Without making absolute claims, we can suggest that certain kinds of actions or content lend themselves better than others to the withheld fi nal clause that cultivates suspense and permits closure within the circuitry of a periodic plot: courtship over married life; crime over caretaking; inheritance over work; bourgeois success stories over the day-today struggles of the working class. The second terms—the stories that are not shaped by a secret or a fi nal goal— do not lend themselves to a teleological relationship between beginning and end. These stories have been disadvantaged, we might say, by the equation of the novel’s formal integrity with the unified teleological plot. The type of writing with which they are often associated, Zola’s “slice of life,” figures them in static spatial terms. Indeed, the difficulty of fi nding English words for forward movement other than “progress” (which is always defined in terms of an end or goal) illustrates the sway the concept of progress continues to exert over the way we imagine both narrative and living. In Mary Barton, most of the working class characters are not striving to improve their economic status, or climb a social ladder, but simply (and sometimes unsuccessfully) to maintain basic standards of living: physical and psychological health, family and community ties.53 To the extent that

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the lives of working class characters are defi ned by the perpetually renewed, perpetually unfi nished work of sustenance, the alignment of plot with progress toward a stable goal that transcends and subsumes this process makes it difficult for a novelist to tell their stories. The story of surviving has no single climax, no closure, no final point or “reflex union.” It consists in the small-scale and constantly repeated achievements of making enough money, finding enough food, securing transportation, keeping your job, coping with illness, securing shelter, not becoming an alcoholic prostitute like your aunt, not turning to crime, helping your family and friends, offering hospitality to neighbors when a carton of grape sodas comes your way. This story is more often lived than written, and the periodic plot is ill suited to granting it meaning or value. On the contrary, periodic plots obliquely underwrite an essential capitalist assertion: that processes unsatisfying in themselves can be redeemed— or at least justified—by the extrinsic ends in which they result (the paycheck, the promotion, the chance to relax at the end of the day or week). Pleasure is supposed to be waiting at that end, making up for the tedious delay that throws it into relief. This structure works to conceal the idea that it could and should be possible to invest interest in the process itself, that the middle (of the workday, for example) could and should be new and varied enough to support pleasurable interest, independently of an outcome. In this larger scope, what is stake in Gaskell’s novel is not only the survival of individuals, but the viability and visibility of working class cultures. Alice’s stories of her childhood home, for example, evoke the disappearance of a rural lifestyle, a way of life that survives only in memory. The sense that urban working class culture as a whole is threatened, not only by poverty but also by a loosening of intergenerational bonds, is reinforced by mentions of lost folk knowledge: “ ‘To think of two grownup folk like you and Mary, not knowing death could never come easy to a person lying on a pillow with pigeons’ feathers in!’ ” (445). At risk, too, is the political viability of the working class “we,” articulated most forcefully by John Barton: “We donnot want dainties, we want bellyfuls; we donnot want gimcrack coats and waistcoats, we want warm clothes” (238). Such remarks highlight the specificity of working class “want” and its distance from bourgeois desires. Yet the encroachment of bourgeois values on working class culture is evident throughout the novel. For example, to suggest, as Job does, that John Barton is wrong to be “looking after

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every one’s business but his own” (404) is to suggest that he relinquish the public, communal, class-based “we” in favor of the individual “my,” the focus on the private family so crucial to bourgeois morality. In general, Gaskell presents Manchester’s urban working class culture as both populous and marginal, at risk of eroding under the varied pressures of the new economy. Yet beyond the industrial revolution and the Victorian era, working class culture will continue to appear marginal, even vestigial, because bourgeois culture always works to negate it: to thrust it into the past, making it into the pre-history of a story written from the universalizing point of view of the bourgeoisie. British novels often repeat this move in microcosm, representing working class situations only in order to show what protagonists leave behind when they progress. In a loosely analogous manner, though it has been preserved as part of the literary canon, Mary Barton has been tightly tied to its historical context, valued chiefly as a source of historical insight. In contrast to Robinson Crusoe, or the myth it generated, Gaskell’s novel has never been proposed as a universal and timeless classic; it has not become the fodder for figure skating routines, Tom Hanks movies, or reality TV. We might hypothesize that Mary Barton cannot be celebrated in the same way, not because it is somehow “more historically specific,” but because it tries to capture the point of view of a class whose values have never become hegemonic, whose agendas have never been addressed, and whose situation has not “progressed”—in other words, who are still simply, or not so simply, surviving.

4.

Verisimilitudes Curiosity, Wonder, and Negative Capability

The spring of action which, perhaps more than any other, characterized the whole train of my life, was curiosity . . . I could not rest till I had acquainted myself with the solutions that had been invented for the phenomena of the universe. In fi ne, this produced in me an invincible attachment to books of narrative and romance. I panted for the unravelling of an adventure, with an anxiety, perhaps almost equal to that of the man whose future happiness or misery depended on its issue. I read, I devoured compositions of this sort. They took possession of my soul. . . . —William Godwin, Caleb Williams (4) He was the kind of man people looked at twice, deciding whether or not to stare. What are the criteria for gaping? Samson wondered. —Nicole Krauss, Man Walks into a Room (80–81)

Recent literary and historical scholarship on curiosity, and the related affect of wonder, has shaped a history in which wonder undergoes a sea change during the Renaissance, and then yields cultural prominence to curiosity during the Restoration.1 Both terms— oddly ambidextrous in that they can refer to either subjects or objects, and thus imply a special relationship between the two—have been subjected to intellectual, religious, and moral condemnation, often riding seesaw with each other. Throughout the Middle Ages, curiosity was understood as a major sin of intellectuals, a transgressive desire “to know more than God permits” (Benedict 18); the variant “curiositas” remains, today, associated with pornography and other taboo materials. However, enlightenment thought was more favorable to the spirit of inquiry curiosity connotes; Francis 144

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Bacon, for example, defended curiosity by associating it with “the social utility of knowledge” (Benedict 19). He situated curiosity as the opposite of wonder, condemning the latter as the enemy of understanding (Daston and Parks, 317–21). On the other hand, in his 1640 Treatise of the Passions, Bishop Edward Reynolds directly links wonder or “admiration,” the primary passion, to “Curiosity or the desire of Knowledge.” In Reynolds’s account, wonder gives rise to curiosity, which he, like Bacon, situates as “the mother of all knowledge” (qtd. in Johns 401–2). Likewise, Lord Kames, trying in 1762 to explain why people would leave home and endure the discomfort of long- distance travel, concludes that it must be attributed “to curiosity undoubtedly, a principle implanted in human nature for a purpose extremely beneficial, that of acquiring knowledge, and the emotion of wonder, raised by new and strange objects, inflames our curiosity to know more about them” (qtd. in Leask 25). Like all of the passions, curiosity and wonder were believed to occur in different strengths, and to become harmful in excess; wonder or “admiration” that was too intense or prolonged might even result in cataleptic stupor ( Johns 403). As this danger suggests, within the language of the passions, “wonder” referenced a passive state of “unsystematic absorptiveness” (Leask 29), as opposed to curiosity’s active pursuit of knowledge. It is, in fact, wonder’s pleasure in a state of not-knowing that leads scientists, from the seventeenth century forward, to distance their epistemological projects from wonder.2 Where curiosity seeks to uncover or explain, to solve mysteries or answer questions, wonder is provoked and nourished by the strange—by people, things, and events that appear (to a given subject at a given time) new, surprising, marvelous, aberrant, or inexplicable. Active curiosity is “anti-marvelous,” as Daston and Park put it (368): It is oriented toward explaining away the strange, assimilating it to the known. According to phi losophers like Hume and Smith, “the curious seek to avoid the mental pain of uncertainty,” to “restore the imagination to ‘tranquility and composure’ ” (Daston and Park 326–27). By this account, curiosity manifests itself as an unpleasant state of tension or agitation that propels the subject forward toward a solution that will extinguish it, restoring tranquility; as such, it is easily assimilated to (or even identified with) the trajectory of “oedipal” desire as Freud theorized it, together with the teleological plot structures discussed in the previous chapter.3 Wonder’s stationary gaping cannot be assimilated to this same trajectory.

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Rather, it manifests a state of attraction that is rooted in the present, the thrall of the strange, which the wonderer may seek to distend or prolong. Discussing the paired terms “attraction” and “negligence” in Blanchot’s fiction, Foucault writes: “This kind of negligence is in fact the fl ip side of a zealousness— a mute, unjustified, obstinate diligence in surrendering oneself, against all odds, to being attracted by attraction, or more precisely (since attraction has no positivity) to being, in the void, the aimless movement without a moving body of attraction itself ” (29). The wonderer’s absorption in the strange or the new (“being attracted to attraction,” or perhaps to difference) may be pleasurable precisely because it permits a temporary “surrendering” of the self (as long as one can avoid the risk of cataleptic stupor—which we might translate as a more extreme absorption of the self into the Other).4 The fundamental distinction between these two affective states— one active in the Nietzschean sense, seeking to interpret the object; the other passive in the Nietz schean sense, open to being affected— greatly outlives the paradigm of the passions. It can be traced forward through nineteenthand twentieth- century British literature and culture, though not as a simple binary opposition. Both terms (“wonder” and “curiosity”) remain multivalent, blur into each other, and accrue a wide range of contradictory cultural associations; they are, in Darwin’s terms, highly diversified. This complex nexus is signaled by the stunning array of modifiers that attach to the word “curiosity” (for example, idle, ardent, vulgar, vacant, objectless, childlike, polite, avid, impassioned, intellectual, obsessive, mild, prurient, morbid, sexual, blind, sadistic, and professional). Such modifiers signify distinctions in motive, object, and degree of intensity; to some extent, they also re-inscribe within the vocabulary of curiosity the distinction between active and passive that had defi ned the opposition between curiosity and wonder. In nineteenth and twentieth-century texts, it is especially common to fi nd a modified version of the word “curiosity” (i.e. idle, vacant, vulgar, or objectless curiosity) used to denote passive gaping when the object is not beautiful or culturally valued: not, for example, a rainbow or the Mona Lisa but rather a crime scene or “a curiosity.” When used to denote an affective state, the word “wonder” is sometimes associated with unsophisticated gullibility, but often carries positive connotations (childlike innocence, or an appreciative response to beauty).5 One does not often fi nd “wonder” used non-ironically of the less becoming, or sim-

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ply less aesthetic, instantiations of passively absorbed attraction (gaping at a crime scene, for example, or a gigantic chicken made from junk). As with the slippery terms “sympathy,” “sentimentality,” and “sensibility,” etymological vicissitudes do not cancel out the underlying per sistence of a distinction between two affective responses to the strange, one oriented toward a kind of self- surrender (wonder’s stupor) and the other toward mastery (curiosity’s explanations). However, these vicissitudes do invoke a complicated network of differences and relationships based on objects and contexts. As I attempt to show in the fi rst section of this chapter, literary texts have certainly participated in the construction of this network. With respect to the history of the novel, it is easy to see a close relationship between active curiosity and the suspenseful teleological plot, as illustrated by Caleb Williams in the passage quoted at the beginning of the chapter.6 It is less easy to see any relationship between wonder and the novel. Phillip Fisher, for example, argues that it is almost impossible for narrative (unlike lyric poetry) to induce wonder.7 Mary Baine Campbell, in her study of the relation between wonder and science in early modern Europe, notes that “speechlessness and a kind of paralysis are major symptoms of the state of wonder, as brevity and isolation often are, or were, of its rhetorical presentation” (4). These qualities clearly do not invite novelization, though Campbell argues that the pleasure associated with wonder worked to align it with fiction as opposed to “serious” scientific discourse (67). At one point, Samuel Johnson associates wonder with the narrative form we now call the romance, as opposed to the one we now call the novel. Distinguishing “works of fiction . . . such as exhibit life in its true state” from the older “heroic romance,” Johnson observes that the former must “keep up curiosity without the help of wonder” (149, Rambler 4, March 31, 1750). In the romance, Johnson suggests, “incredibilities” such as giants, knights, deserts, shipwrecks, and dryads provoke wonder, which (as in the accounts of Reynolds and Kames) gives rise to the curiosity that motivates continued reading. The new fiction that eschews the exotic and supernatural in the interests of verisimilitude cannot provoke wonder, or at least not in the same way. It must thus devise other ways to arouse and sustain curiosity. In accordance with most past and present discourse on the topic, Johnson seems to assume that “life in its true state” does not inspire wonder (though it might arouse curiosity). The realistic novel aligns itself, instead, with active curiosity as the desire to know, and emphasizes the capacity of

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literary representation to function as a technique of knowledge. In the nineteenth century, this foregrounding of active curiosity shapes the manner in which British realist novels typically present the material world. Though Victorian novels are famously stuffed with things, they almost inevitably subsume these particulars to character or action, or to larger thematic and epistemological economies of meaning and knowledge. Particulars are presented to be interpreted (by the actively curious) as, for example, metonyms, metaphors, symbols, or clues.8 Moreover, the repudiation of the romance and its modern progeny (horror, fantasy, the gothic, and so on— genres situated as Others to the novel in its respected literary forms) in effect peels the marvelous away from the real, aligning realism with the knowable and constructing the ordinary as a space that excludes wonder; a space, as Keats put it, where we “Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, / Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine— / Unweave a rainbow . . .” (Lamia lines 231–37). At times, however, Victorian realist novels gesture toward a different project: the project of situating the phenomenal experience of the ordinary world as attractive in itself, capable of provoking the passively absorbed state of wonder described previously. Novelists who take this less traveled path (if only for a few pages) dynamically repeat the question of what might make it possible to perceive, or represent, the ordinary world in the key of wonder. Though their answers vary somewhat, the texts I will analyze suggest that this mode of perception depends on a state of consciousness that is at odds with active curiosity; it excludes the desire to know. It is characterized by open receptiveness rooted in what is presented to the senses, and can thus be aligned with Keats’s notion of “negative capability.” Though nineteenth-century novels rarely either model or provoke anything like negative capability, exceptions occur with some regularity in scenes that represent a character’s recovery from a faint or fever. These scenes, which I explore in the second section of this chapter, associate perceptual openness with moments at which the subject is depleted or decentered. Among Victorian novelists, Hardy stands out for his more sustained interest in the conditions under which it becomes possible to perceive the material world as itself, rather than as a series of signifiers that ultimately points back to the subject, and in techniques that might permit a novel to convey this “disinterested” mode of perception. As I will argue

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in the last section of this chapter, The Mayor of Casterbridge invites us to consider the virtual potential of a literary ideal that foregrounds passive wonder over active curiosity; that is, attraction, absorption, and perceptual experience rather than explanation, mastery, and epistemological gain. Pushed toward its extreme, this ideal would replace the writer’s act of translating the par ticu lar into the symbolic— and the reader’s corresponding act of translating the symbolic into meaning—with another form of literary experience, close to what Bersani calls “a displaced repetition of the par ticu lar” (14).

Gaping and Grasping in Frankenstein Despite their exigent reliance on provoking curiosity in readers, many nineteenth-century novels and stories present active curiosity as an ethically insufficient motivation for any kind of action. As Caleb Williams and Frankenstein particularly illustrate, assuaging one’s own “mental pain” can be a selfish and shortsighted motive made dangerous by the fact that curiosity’s ends, always by defi nition located in the unknown, are unpredictable and uncontrollable. Thus, protagonists must often be provided with noble rationales that justify what might otherwise seem to be intrusive prying, and vicariously legitimate the reader’s curiosity. At times, fictions accomplish this task by pointedly differentiating protagonists (and, by extension, readers) from other kinds of lookers. For example, in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Six Napoleons,” Watson describes the house in which a murder has occurred: No. 131 was one of a row, all fl at-chested, respectable, and most unromantic dwellings. As we drove up, we found the railings in front of the house lined by a curious crowd. Holmes whistled. “By George! It’s attempted murder at the least. Nothing less will hold the London message-boy. There’s a deed of violence indicated in that fellow’s round shoulders and outstretched neck. What’s this, Watson? The top steps swilled down and the other ones dry. Footsteps enough, anyhow! Well, well, there’s Lestrade at the front window, and we shall soon know all about it.” (585)

This passage contrasts two kinds of looking: that of the crowd gathered to gaze at the crime scene, and that of Holmes himself, the great detective,

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who “reads” both the house and the crowd. Holmes was invited, summoned by the police. Knowing that Holmes has “a taste for all that is out of the common,” Inspector Lestrade has succeeded in provoking Holmes’s interest in the case by describing the “undoubtedly queer” events, which Holmes agrees are “ ‘very novel . . . singular, not to say grotesque’ ” (583– 84). Though not explicitly characterized as such, it appears that Holmes is actively curious. His curiosity has a trajectory aimed at explaining the strange events. He will piece together clues and reason out the possibilities, “[trace] the various windings of this complex case” (591) and design a trap in which to catch the criminal: always a legitimating motive. Holmes’s act of looking is thus accompanied by an expectation of closure—specifically, the moment at which he will be able to reconstruct for Watson and Lestrade the whole “sequence of events . . . in the inverse order to the way in which they presented themselves to me” (594). His examination of the house is oriented toward this future moment when the past, which appears in the present enigmatic, will have been deciphered and explained, becoming fully narratable.9 One does not want to discount out of hand, or out of class bias, the possibility that the curiosity of the “curious crowd” is identical to that of Holmes, or would be if given the same chance: that these persons are also motivated by the desire to solve the mystery and catch the criminal. Yet in this and other similar scenes, the crowd is more emphatically characterized by the wish to stand there looking, and to keep standing there looking, than by the desire to fi nd an explanation. In other words, the crowd’s presence appears to be motivated simply by the pleasure it generates in the present, and in the prospect of prolonging or sustaining the present pleasure of gazing. Thus, the sight “holds” even the London message-boy, who is apparently the very embodiment of having seen it all. In other stories, such crowds are described as “loafi ng” or “idling,” connoting an investment in lingering rather than moving along through space or time.10 The fact that the crowd remains stationary (while Holmes moves into the house and then crosses and re-crosses the city) further suggests a mode of attention that differs from the active, essentially teleological investigation that progresses, through space and time, toward comprehension. If the crowd’s curiosity differs from the detective’s in the sense of lacking a deferred goal (reaching a solution), their gaze signals a less rational, or less rationalized attraction to the rupture of the ordinary that has here taken

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place. In short, the crowd’s curiosity is passive; it is an affective experience that seems to fit eighteenth- century descriptions of “wonder.” As suggested above, passing references to wondering crowds function, at least in part, to establish the moral and intellectual superiority of the protagonist’s own position. Here, to the extent that the reader is led to identify with the detective, or his sidekick, and not the crowd, the gesture may reassure the reader that s/he also occupies this superior position and not that of the vulgar gapers. The crowd’s wonder is presented as “vulgar” in two senses, from both of which the reader—whose position clearly mirrors the gaper’s in certain respects—must be rescued. First, it takes place in the plural: It is associated not with an individual but with the many, the faceless crowd, the vulgar masses, who must, second, be vulgar (uneducated, unacculturated, insensitive) to take pleasure in gaping at a crime scene. The image of the crowd inscribes loss of self or loss of individuality; in this sense, it doubles the loss of self that is already implied by wonder’s absorption in the object. Indeed, the plea sure of wonder may involve both this transient loss of self and the communal aspect of the crowd’s experience.11 Clearly, however, we cannot admire or wish to be part of a crowd that stares at a crime scene. Here we encounter a complex network of ethical distinctions between modes of curiosity: distinctions that rely on objects, contexts, desires, and motives. Even Plato puzzled over what is sometimes called “morbid curiosity”: the distressing wish to see something gruesome, the sadistic “appetite for sights of degradation, pain, mutilation” (Sontag, Regarding 96). In these cases, the fascination might be explained by what Bersani theorizes as a perversion of the death drive: not the pleasurable loss of self that ensues from masochistic joissance— or, in softer terms, from absorption, attraction, becoming-other—but “rageful aggressiveness, and . . . the longing for a merely biological death” (Bersani 45). In some cases, staring may indicate not a passive openness to being affected but an ego superlatively closed off, enjoying its own impermeability. Or it may operate to confirm the self ’s superiority by negating the other’s wholeness, normality, or safety (i.e., I am whole because she is lacking; or, it only happens to others: if to others, then not to me; or, he is strange: if he is strange, I am normal).12 Yet just as desire is not always directed at the ever-deferred achievement of a stable identity, an interest in difference is not always reducible to an interest in the norm. Dominant critical methodologies have been so

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focused on bringing out investments in identity, mastery, and normativity that they may have eclipsed the existence of other impulses. Without denying the reality of “morbid curiosity,” we can see it as just one version of an affective response that carries other ethical and experiential potentials, and that may also be found in (or even provoked by) novels. Indeed, the list of things that have the power to attract curious crowds, or prompt passively curious gaping, greatly exceeds the awful; it includes, for example, construction sites, escaped balloons, strange machines, the Marfa lights, giant chickens welded together out of scrap metal (“Tigerton Man Constructs Steel Chicken Behemoth”) and many other phenomena that have as a common denominator the fact of being “out of the ordinary” without falling into the realms of art, beauty, or the sublime.13 As the Steel Chicken Behemoth suggests, those objects we call “curiosities” are especially likely to provoke wonder—perhaps in part because they derail other possible responses, especially active curiosity’s impulse to explain. Curiosities foreground their own process of production, and are often perpetually in progress.14 Eighteenth-century critics, including Samuel Johnson (212, 231), bemoaned the extravagantly counter-utilitarian expenditure of labor, time, and resources associated with such objects. The manner in which they make labor visible has sometimes prompted today’s critics to situate eighteenth- century curiosities as signifiers of “the elite power to command labor for no practical use” (Benedict 11). However, Deleuze and Guattari’s work allows us to regard them, instead, as particularly pure and vivid instances of desiring-production. As such, in contrast to the work of art as it is usually understood, curiosities are not based on the displacements and substitutions that produce readable symbols and figures. As Bersani writes in a different context, such objects “act symbolically without symbolizing anything external to them” (17, emphasis original). To the extent that they thwart interpretation, or even recognition, they may also exert a de-personalizing effect on viewers, providing the plea sure of transient self- surrender and revealing desire as desiringproduction, a force of disaggregation and re- aggregation that has little to do with the subject. Mary Shelley’s famous monster might seem to fall into this category— to be a curiosity, or a wonder—yet pleasurable attraction is not a response that Frankenstein’s creature ever succeeds in evoking, at least not within

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the novel itself. Frankenstein is, of course, a great novella of curiosity; indeed, the text might be said to perform a series of moral tests on curiosity’s different modes, relations, and social encodings.15 Early in the novel, upon fi rst taking Victor aboard his ship, Walton writes: “When my guest was a little recovered, I had great trouble to keep off the men, who wished to ask him a thousand questions; but I would not allow him to be tormented by their idle curiosity” (14). Victor says, “I have, doubtless, excited your curiosity . . . but you are too considerate to make inquiries.” Walton replies, “Certainly; it would indeed be very impertinent and inhuman in me to trouble you with any inquisitiveness of mine” (15). Here, the modifier “idle” seems to indicate a mode of curiosity whose aims are not serious or pressing enough to justify “tormenting” the object—in this case, the exhausted Victor. Walton, who in the end turns back, is able to exercise a restraint that distinguishes his civilized response to Victor from the crowd’s “idle curiosity”: He resists the temptation to ask questions, and prevents others from doing so. He thus obeys dictates of courtesy that require the curious to turn away, literally or metaphor ical ly, from the object that incited curiosity, especially when that object is another human being. In an extra-textual dimension, this longstanding code of politeness manifests itself in the basic social axiom that it is rude to stare. What prompts a stare is often an anomaly or disruption, something unusual: In its various forms, difference snags one’s gaze.16 The fact that children must be emphatically trained not to point or stare may indicate that there is something primary about this impulse to look at the strange.17 If so, wonder belongs to the “natural” as Ross Chambers defines it: “that ‘other’ against which the cultural is defined and which is consequently an essential component of its identity . . . . [The natural] must be at one and the same time acknowledged . . . and prevented from going too far or taking over” (Chambers 88, emphasis original). Codes of politeness struggle to counter “natural curiosity” with a demand to assimilate: to treat the strange as if it were not. To stare is, in Walton’s terms, “impertinent and inhuman”; it carries the social risks of making the other feel uncomfortable, “objectified”; or, in the case of disastrous disruptions, trivializing someone else’s tragedy by treating it as an entertaining spectacle.18 From this perspective, adults who stare or gape signal a failure of the civilizing machinery: the “natural” incompletely repressed or restrained.19

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For the properly acculturated subject, then, the impulse to look, or to ask, becomes a prequel to the ethical movement of willed refusal: turning away, as modeled by Walton. This response is ultimately rooted in sympathetic dynamics: imagining oneself in the other’s place, vicariously experiencing their pain, and thus seeking to mitigate or at least not exacerbate their pain. It is noteworthy, however, that Walton’s ability to restrain his curiosity is later rewarded by having his curiosity satisfied: Victor tells him the story.20 Indeed, though novels often model gestures of polite restraint, these gestures turn out to be tokens in that they do not actually truncate the story. The missed material is almost inevitably recuperated for both character and reader, as though the gesture simply establishes the listener’s worthiness.21 As a genre, the novel thus manages to distance itself from the social taint of “idle curiosity” without having to pay the price for turning away. Victor and Walton describe their own curiosity not as “idle,” but as “ardent.” Walton says, “I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before visited, and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man” (7). Victor remarks, “I will not lead you on, unguarded and ardent as I then was, to your destruction and infallible misery. Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge . . .” (31). He had desired to infuse life into an inanimate body “with an ardour that far exceeded moderation” (34). Ultimately, though, Shelley blurs the distinction between “idle” and “ardent” curiosity. Though Walton and Victor seek to cross into the radical unknown, and the sailors seek simply to know what someone else can tell them, both modes of curiosity are rooted in a subjective state of mental agitation that seeks its own satisfaction at almost any price. Both are tainted by self- centered desires and drives that have little to do with social good, and render even the most civilized characters quite capable of “tormenting” others. Moreover, like lust but unlike love, “ardent” curiosity does not outlast the pursuit of its object. As such, it is an especially terrible reason for creating a new life. Whether “idle” or “ardent,” these active modes of curiosity can be contrasted to a scene of passive gazing recounted later in the novel, by the monster. In a striking reversal of freak show relations, the monster watches the de Lacey family from the safe, invisible, relatively disengaged position of one who gazes through a peephole. In this scene, Shelley associates his

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passively curious gazing with something more like “admiration” (Reynold’s term for wonder) than vulgar objectification. The monster is not condemned as a voyeur, and his act of looking does not diminish the family’s human complexity. At fi rst, he experiences pleasure in this situation, accompanied by a wish to prolong it: “I . . . was delighted to fi nd, that the setting of the sun did not put an end to the pleasure I experienced in watching my human neighbors” (73). The monster’s wish to continue or prolong the pleasurable experience of watching clearly traces a different temporal trajectory from the teleological arc that locates pleasure at the end of desire’s quest, in the release of tension or the extinction of uncertainty. In fact, it is not clear that wonder has a temporal “trajectory.” Seeking to maintain itself, wonder makes no move: Rather than striving toward or away from the object, gaping suggests (even physiologically) openness to being affected by it, and, conversely, at least the temporary absence of active desire to appropriate the object.22 In this context, then, wonder might be situated as a mode of apprehending otherness that sidesteps the damaging dynamics of mastery and imperialism that Shelley associates with active curiosity.23 As the monster’s story illustrates, however, wonder is highly unstable. The monster’s pleasure in watching through the peephole does not remain passive. First, it gives rise to a form of imitation as he learns language vicariously. In a sense, he is allowing himself to be modified, reconfigured in relation to those others whom he watches. For the monster, however, learning language quickly gives rise to active curiosity, the desire to understand and ultimately to take part in what he sees: “My thoughts now became more active, and I longed to discover the motives and feelings of these lovely creatures; I was inquisitive to know why Felix appeared so miserable, and Agatha so sad. I thought (foolish wretch!) that it might be in my power to restore happiness to these deserving people” (77). As is the case with other acts of boundary crossing in this novel, it will be a disaster. In the abstract, as a sight out of the ordinary, the monster himself might seem to constitute, for others, a perfect wonder: a great opportunity for gaping. Yet if passive, absorbed attraction constitutes one response to a strange sight, courteous willed disregard another, egotistical self-confi rmation a third, and active desire to explain a fourth, characters who come faceto-face with the monster model a fi fth response, one perfectly captured in

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the colloquial phrase, “I can’t look.” Walton, for example, says, “I shut my eyes involuntarily . . . I dared not again raise my looks upon his face” (152–53). This self-protective response may arise from a sense that the object poses too strong a threat to the subject’s integrity—the threat of being indelibly affected or perhaps transfi xed (no longer being able to turn away), something we might think of as the Medusa effect.24 “No mortal could support the horror of that countenance” (35), Victor claims; “its unearthly ugliness rendered it almost too horrible for human eyes” (65). His words signal the frightening possibility of a self-surrender that goes too far or takes over, like the cataleptic stupor thought to result from too much wonder. In this story, no one tries Perseus’s mirror tactic, but the idea that reflection disempowers the Medusa’s gaze suggests that, face-to-face, what the too-horrible countenance threatens to paralyze is one’s capacity for reflection (or critical thinking).25 For the characters, then, the monster’s face marks the outer limits of what can be looked at, while also becoming something that can’t be “seen past.” The monster’s dreadful appearance trumps his eloquent speech, and overwhelms the enlightened principles of the idealized de Lacey family. Even these admirable persons are unable simultaneously to see the monster and to “see” him as human, fellow, friend. The ability of the domestic realm to incorporate difference, to render familiar or re-make the strange (illustrated by the de Laceys’ adoption of Safie, the Frankensteins’ adoption of Elizabeth and Justine, and even the tolerance with which Victor is received) ends at the monster’s face, and gives rise to other movements: repulsion, expulsion, denial, violent negation. The monster’s inability to provoke wonder may suggest that this affective response, like the experience of the sublime, depends on an underlying assurance of physical and psychological safety: a sense that the object will not be permanently overpowering. But the reader, who literally cannot see the monster, is not subject to quite the same threat. We really can’t look; we are separated from the monster by the gaps between past and present, fiction and life, the textual and the visible. The device of the letters underscores these distances in space and time, as well as the distance between reading and seeing. Walton claims that his letters are oriented toward providing the reader with pleasure: “This manuscript will doubtless afford you the greatest plea sure,” he says, “but to me, who know him, and who hear it from his own lips, with

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what interest and sympathy shall I read it in some future day!” (17). The difference between his own “interest and sympathy” (for Victor) and Margaret’s hypothesized “plea sure” seems to be an effect of distance, a distance that helps to constitute the realm of the aesthetic. Like Margaret, readers can react without being seen, and without the possibility of directly intervening in the situation. Moreover, figurative blindness, like De Lacey’s literal blindness, permits the reader to direct “interest and sympathy” toward the monster, not the shockingly irresponsible Victor. In this sense, the novel constructs its outside as a space for the qualities of justice and mercy that fail within the world of the story, but this space is bounded by the page: that is to say, predicated on the fact that we cannot see the monster. Ironically, though, the rich proliferation of Frankenstein movies, illustrations, and Halloween costumes marks a strong drive to see or even be the monster, thoroughly contradicting the monster’s own attempt to prevent reproductions, indeed to thwart active curiosity (“I shall collect my funeral pile, and consume to ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and unhallowed wretch, who would create such another as I have been” [155]). On the one hand, the violence and error the novel consistently attributes to boundary crossing is evident, in a faded and metaphorical way, when one dons a monster mask and claims to be Frankenstein. Also, though the monster’s fictional status provides a certain exemption, the act of imitating another’s peculiar movements, appearance, or speech is often a form of cruelty. On the other hand, if wonder embodies a basic attraction to difference, the attractive differences are located on the side of the self as much as the other. “Being attracted to attraction,” in Foucault’s phrase, entails being attracted to differing—to the self ’s capacity for differentiation, becomingother. In this sense, the impulse to imitate may sometimes be an impulse to experiment with the forces that make up one’s own body, evoking what Michel de Certeau calls “the joyful and silent experience of childhood: . . . to be other and to move toward the other” (de Certeau qtd. in Greenblatt 2). In “Tinturn Abbey,” Wordsworth recollects his childhood encounters with nature, “their glad animal movements all gone by.” “I cannot paint what I then was,” he writes, implying that this primary, participatory relation to nature exceeds representation, falling into the realm of experience or the particularities of the body. It was per for mance rather than reflection or

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transcendence. In a similar vein, the impulse to experiment with other ways of moving or speaking may bespeak an attraction, not to the being or identity of the other (a wish to be that person, or negate her, or appropriate her) and not to the sympathetic process of imagining oneself in the other’s place, but to the otherness that lurks in the self: the plea sure of the body in morphing, finding new sensations, capacities, conjunctions (what is it like to move that way?).

Recovering Consciousness in the Victorian Novel Like Mary Shelley’s suggestion that the drive to master the unknown is better resisted or at least moderated, the provocative partial idea Keats accidentally bequeathed to the future advocates hesitation, the ability to linger within a potentially fraught state of not-knowing: “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Insofar as wonder involves the derailment or suspension of the desire to know, it can be linked to “negative capability,” a notion that continues to pose a Romantic challenge to the still hegemonic Enlightenment principle that what is important in any given encounter is knowledge or understanding. In one sense, negative capability means respecting the space of the open question: suspending or subverting the desire to erase the tension it produces, instead allowing “the sense of Beauty [to overcome] every other consideration, or rather [obliterate] all consideration.” Keats thus associates negative capability with purer forms of perception missed, evidently, by Coleridge, who “would let go by a fi ne isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge” (Letter to George and Thomas Keats, December 21, 1817; 889– 90). Together with Hazlitt and many eighteenth- century critics, Keats associated this special openness and receptivity particularly with Shakespeare, whose work reflects, as Nicholas Roe puts it, “an imaginative hospitality of global generosity” (234). That is to say, negative capability inscribes not only the ability to resist the urge to pin things down—to name, know, defi ne, identify, erase irritating uncertainty—but also the peculiar evacuation or displacement of the ego that allows the poet to harbor aliens, to be inhabited by others, “the Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are . . . poetical” without incorporating them into “my identical nature.” The

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poet, Keats famously claims, “has no Identity—he is continually in for— and fi lling some other body”; “not myself goes home to myself ” (Letter to Richard Wood house, October 27, 1818; 895). Like sensibility, then, negative capability invokes a difficult type of passivity that is not merely a default state (the absence of activity), but rather an ability to will oneself to refrain: to wait, look, listen.26 This ideal applies as much to the reception of literature as to its production. As Leon Waldoff argues, “Keats ordinarily makes no distinction between the uses of imagination in the response to art and in the creation of it. . . . [T]he reader of a poem is assumed to share, and in large measure repeat or recreate, the experience of the poet” (4). As a form of experience, this ideal state of receptivity precedes and exceeds poems; it is clearly applicable to moments at which one resists the impulse to actively intervene (for example, in another person’s driving or fashion choices), or resists the impulse to ascertain the identity of that odd lump under the couch (or, for Virginia Woolf, that mark on the wall). The logic of negative capability suggests that resisting the impulse to fi nd out what the thing is, to know and name it, might yield a purer perception, “a fi ne isolated verisimilitude” rather than, for example, cat toy, lost sock, or half- eaten burrito. In other words, exercising negative capability means trying not to allow curiosity, or desire, to interfere with a perception of the thing’s phenomenal particularity. The lump under the couch might not be for Keats beautiful, but his assertion that for the negatively capable, “the Sense of Beauty” overcomes or obliterates consideration implies that one should allow the impression to eclipse interpretation, rather than the other way around. Keats links this mode of reception, which is also a mode of representation, to “truth”: truths of beauty accessed through imagination and perception, rather than the rational truths of philosophy.27 Both Carol Christ and George Leonard note that controversy over the aesthetics of the par ticu lar has characterized the history of poetry and the visual arts more than that of the novel, because critics and readers take for granted the importance of the par ticu lar to the novel’s project of verisimilitude. Christ argues that “the development of the Victorian novel can in part be seen as a movement toward even greater sensitivity to the particularity of experience than the eighteenth century novel suggests”; however, speaking in terms of its much longer history, poetry “has traditionally been more primarily concerned with the universal than has the novel”

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(Finer Optic 77– 78). Thus, the involvement of nineteenth- century literature in the par ticu lar constitutes a more radical break with tradition for poetry than it does for prose fiction. Yet though novels are strewn with words that signify particulars, the particulars thus invoked almost inevitably signify something else. Their role is to contribute to larger narrative structures: to construct theme, to support the repre sentation of social dynamics or psychological states, to function as components in plot developments, or as material for inductive reasoning (clues).28 Perhaps the argument made by nineteenth-century realist novels as a class, so to speak, is that the object world exists to be read: to be subordinated to sense-making operations that, fueled by curious inquiry, burn up the par ticu lar, translate it into meaning. Though the meaning need not be posited as “universal” (it may be simply individual), there is a sense in which the novel’s usual investment in the objective par ticu lar is no less transitory than poetry’s traditional subordination of the par ticu lar to the universal. In both cases, the phenomenal world and our sensory experience of it are not imbued with value in themselves; value is located elsewhere. As argued in Chapter 3 with reference to teleological plots, like a belief in heaven, or a transcendent ideal, this move works to degrade what is earthly and sensuous; in so doing, it deprives us of satisfying experience by directing attention away from the body’s real or imagined encounters with the world it faces, which then come to constitute the missed and the missing. Yet in Victorian novels, the representation of illness— specifically, faints and fevers— seems to have provided a special opportunity for novelists to explore the relationships between consciousness and the material world. These scenes consistently reflect an interestingly dynamic, conductive relationship between subject and object, consciousness and context; they also inscribe, if only briefly, a passive mode of perception akin to negative capability. In comparing these scenes across a range of novels, one fi nds a par ticu lar narrative sequence that is not inevitable, but occurs frequently enough to be called a pattern.29 First, the character collapses (swoons or succumbs to fever). This collapse is followed by an interval of being “out of oneself ”: in syncope, or delirious hallucinations. Upon awakening, some characters experience a transient state of special awareness, characterized by a passive, pleasurable receptiveness to the phenomenal world. In the fourth stage, the character achieves a full recovery: Active

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consciousness is restored, together with a desire for knowledge. This return of or to the self is often doubled by some other return—the rather improbable recovery of another lost person or place. The fi rst phase, the moment of collapse, often takes place in the wake of an episode of high excitement. The character’s collapse is usually attributed to a combination of medical factors and intolerable circumstantial, emotional, or psychological pressure. For example, Mary Barton collapses in the courtroom after heroically ensuring that her beloved Jem will be saved from an unjust murder conviction. Having exerted great effort to remain conscious and coherent during the trial, she collapses the moment Will Smith’s arrival assures Jem’s acquittal (394). The narrator tells us that the “stupor” into which she falls “was partly disease, and partly exhaustion after the previous excitement” (415). Likewise, Caroline’s illness in Shirley is attributed partly to cholera, partly to heartbreak; Richard Swiveller’s fever in Old Curiosity Shop is brought on by “the spiritual excitement of the last fortnight working upon a system affected in no slight degree by the spirituous excitement of some years” (475). In Great Expectations, Pip says, “the late stress upon me [of caring for the dying Magwich in prison] had enabled me to put off illness, but not to put it away; I knew that it was coming on me now, and I knew very little else, and was even careless as to that” (495). Esther’s illness in Bleak House is unusual in being explained entirely by the hand-to-hand transmission of a contagious disease. Taken as a set, the scenes of collapse point to a dynamic interaction between the character’s will, the character’s physical resources, the power of situation, and also the needs of the narrative as such. The character’s collapse allows the narrative to escape the high drama of scenes like the trial in Mary Barton or the conviction of Magwich without itself collapsing or going feeble. In a sense, the narrative’s inability to continue indefi nitely at such a high pitch of excitement is metonymically transferred onto a character whose recovery can then be traced, achieving by proxy the recovery of story. More directly, though, such scenes point to a tension between the physical and psychological resources of the character and the threat posed to these resources by the pressures of context. When characters sense that their resources are about to be overwhelmed, they may try desperately to hold on, to last it out—like Pip, or Mary in the trial scene— or they may wish for oblivion as a way of escaping the situation. Earlier in

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Mary Barton, watching a burning mill in which two men are trapped, Mary “longed to faint, and be insensible, to escape from the oppressing misery of her sensations” (90). Her wish is fulfi lled two pages later, when she does faint and is nearly crushed by the crowd. Willed or unwilled, the scenes of collapse suggest an almost thermodynamic transfer of energy between consciousness and context, or situation. As one gains, the other loses. When the demands of context consume too much energy, consciousness depletes, losing its ability to master the situation and finally its ability to maintain itself; the situation, as it were, overcomes the subject. As Pip puts it, “when in the morning I tried to sit up in my bed and think of it, I found I could not do so” (495). In his discussion of biological mimicry and legendary psychaesthenia, Roger Caillois provides a suggestive analysis of something he calls “the instinct of giving up.” He writes: “Alongside the instinct of self-preservation that somehow attracts beings toward life, there proves to be a very widespread instinct d’abandon attracting them toward a kind of diminished existence; in its most extreme state, this would lack any degree of consciousness or feeling at all” (102). Caillois associates this instinct with another force: “the lure of space” (99): “Under its influence life seems to lose ground, to blur the line between organism and environment as it withdraws” (102–3), undermining “one’s sense of personality (as an awareness of the distinction between organism and environment and of the connection between the mind and a specific point in space)” (100). To some extent, his paradigm can be applied to the loss and recovery of consciousness as represented in Victorian novels, especially given that the novels themselves sometimes associate fevered consciousness with images of being assimilated into the material world. In the case of the swoon, it is not easy to say what happens while the subject is, as we say, “out.”30 As Villette’s Lucy Snowe puts it, “Where my soul went during that swoon I cannot tell. Whatever she saw, or wherever she traveled in her trance on that strange night, she kept her own secret; never whispering a word to Memory, and baffl ing Imagination by an indissoluble silence. She may have gone upward, and come in sight of her eternal home, hoping for leave to rest now, and deeming that her painful union with matter was at last dissolved” (157). Where Brontë figures the swoon as a radical divorce of soul from body, Dickens repeatedly presents fevered consciousness as a too intimate “union with matter.” Remember-

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ing her fever, Esther writes, “Dare I hint at that worse time when, strung together somewhere in great black space, there was a flaming necklace, or ring, or starry circle of some kind, of which I was one of the beads! And when my only prayer was to be taken off from the rest, and when it was such inexplicable agony and misery to be a part of the dreadful thing?” (544). Likewise, Pip remembers “that I confounded impossible existences with my own identity; that I was a brick in the house wall, and yet entreating to be released from the giddy place where the builders had set me; that I was a steel beam of a vast engine, clashing and whirling over a gulf, and yet that I implored in my own person to have the engine stopped, and my part in it hammered off ” (496).31 If the swooned consciousness departs from the world, leaving the body inanimate, merely part of matter, the fevered consciousness has the misfortune of feeling itself a thing, painfully becoming materiel. Where the swoon mimics death, moreover, delirium mimics madness. Writing of schizophrenia, Caillois claims, “For dispossessed minds such as these, space seems to constitute a will to devour. . . . then, it ultimately takes their place. The body and mind thereupon become dissociated; the subject crosses the boundary of his own skin and stands outside of his senses. He tries to see himself, from some point in space . . . and he dreams up spaces that ‘spasmodically possess’ him” (100). The fever passages in Dickens clearly capture an impression of being overtaken by space, turning into the outside. In this disordered mode of perception, consciousness is no longer situated as the center or origin of its spatial representations; dislocated, dispossessed of its usual privileged vantage, it “is simply one point among many” (Caillois 99), a bead or beam or brick. Recovery, then, will depend on re-establishing the proper distinction and relationship between consciousness and its surroundings. In several instances, however, full recovery is preceded by a third, interim phase in which the character is conscious, but lacks the energy to be active, and is instead passively fascinated by whatever is there to perceive. Mary Barton’s recovery from her post-trial delirium provides one of the clearest examples: She opened her eyes. Her mind was in the tender state of a newborn infant’s. She was pleased with the gay but not dazzling colours of the paper; soothed by the subdued light; and quite sufficiently amused by

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looking at all the objects in the room,—the drawing of the ships, the festoons of the curtain, the bright flowers on the painted backs of the chairs—to care for any stronger excitement. She wondered at the ball of glass, containing various coloured sands from the Isle of Wight, or some such place, which hung suspended from the middle of the little valence over the window. But she did not care to exert herself to ask any questions. (416)

This passage conveys a type of perception that is neither objective nor tightly linked to the character’s normal consciousness of self and situation. The state of mind is associated with a pleasurable perception of objects as themselves, and with a suspension of desire, especially the desire to know (“she did not care to ask any questions”). Here is Richard Swiveller’s recovery from his fever in The Old Curiosity Shop: He awoke. . . . Happening . . . to raise his hand, he was astonished to fi nd how heavy it seemed, and yet how thin and light it really was. Still he felt indifferent and happy; and having no curiosity to pursue the subject, remained in the same waking slumber until his attention was attracted by a cough. . . . Still, he lacked energy to follow up this train of thought, and unconsciously fell, in a luxury of repose, to staring at some green stripes upon the bed-furniture, and associating them strangely with patches of fresh turf, while the yellow ground between made gravel-walks, and so helped out a long perspective of trim gardens. (476)

Once again, the pleasurable state of “just looking” at the proximate is opposed to the presence of (active) curiosity. However, for Swiveller (who likes to speak in verse) this state is accompanied by a very mild form of aesthetic play, making the superficial or metonymical connections that Coleridge associated with “fancy.” In The Gay Science, Nietzsche echoes the notion that convalescence provides a special kind of perceptual openness and sensitivity: “from such abysses, from such severe sickness, also from the sickness of severe suspicion, one returns newborn, having shed one’s skin, more ticklish and malicious, with a more delicate taste for joy” (37). Dispensing with the “big county-fair boom boom” and “theatrical scream of passion,” convalescents need “another kind of art— a mocking, light, fleeting, divinely untroubled, divinely artificial art.”32 This will be the real art, the art for

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artists, “for artists only.” It will be an art of appearances, capable of stopping “courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin” (37–38). Achieving this aesthetic requires disengaging the will to knowledge, which is almost impossible, especially for the young and the well. In the passages cited, the characters are presented as depleted, almost infantile. Certain ingredients have been subtracted from adult subjectivity, especially memory, curiosity, desire, and egotism. Esther describes “the blissful rest, when in my weakness I was too calm to have any care for myself ” (544). This de-centering of the ego might almost allow us to translate Swiveller’s happy “indifference” as “disinterest”: He is experiencing a mode of consciousness that is not governed by subjective investments, not oriented toward an end. In this phase, the object world is enough; in fact, it is strikingly full. Clearly, it is the depletion of active desire, including the desire to make sense of things, that permits the characters to take pleasure in such basic perceptions; to fi nd mundane things attractive, and to reparticularize the world. Esther writes, “I found every breath of air, and every scent, and every flower and leaf and blade of grass, and every passing cloud, and everything in nature, more beautiful and wonderful to me than I had ever found it yet. This was my first gain from my illness. How little I had lost, when the wide world was so full of delight for me” (558). In this phase, it is possible to be absorbed by the object world without being absorbed into the object world. It is as though a thermodynamic equilibrium has been achieved, in which neither consciousness nor environment has the upper hand. Consciousness is back, but has not yet resumed its usual employment as center of the universe, with the consequent hierarchical subordination of all other points in space. For that very reason, convalescent consciousness is fragile, at risk of being overwhelmed by “stronger excitement.” Of Dombey Senior, who is hovering between life and death, Dickens writes: “It was dimly pleasant to him now, to lie there, with the window open, looking out at the summer sky and the trees: and, in the evening, at the sunset. To watch the shadows of the clouds and leaves, and seem to feel a sympathy with shadows” (861). The last phrase suggests that there is a fi ne line between being “quite sufficiently amused” and being sucked into the shadows. In this state, the subject does not have enough energy to power up the usual ego defenses and screening mechanisms. Of course, once they are powered up— once the character has fully recovered— mundane objects will no longer be sufficiently amusing.

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Indeed, the aberrant status of these passages—that is, the fact that characters model a capacity for wonder, or negative capability, only when ill— suggests that the pleasure afforded by sheer phenomenal experience is eclipsed or excluded by the interests and pursuits of a fully energized consciousness. The return of the self entails a kind of closing off: as the self recovers the world recedes, as though restoring consciousness means draining the ordinary world of its “lure.” Once again, Esther is an exception: She claims to hold on to this special mode of perception even after she has recovered. Yet this “gain” is specifically presented as compensation for a permanent loss, her disfigurement. She does not get her whole self back, but is left with a little more world. In Nietzsche’s account, delight in the world of appearances is spoiled by “this bad taste, this will to truth, to ‘truth at any price,’ this youthful madness in the love of truth” (38). Fittingly, the characters’ full recovery is often marked by posing a question, signaling a reactivation of the desire to know. “Where am I?” says Lucy; “Is it Joe?” says Pip; “Will you have the goodness to inform me where I shall fi nd my voice, . . . and what has become of my flesh?” says Swiveller. In each case, the answers reveal that consciousness has not returned to its point of departure. With surprising frequency, however, the character does not awake to fi nd the new; rather, the return of or to full self-consciousness is doubled by the simultaneous recovery of another lost person, or place. In Great Expectations, Pip awakens to find that he is being nursed by his old friend Joe; long lost mothers return to Caroline (in Shirley) and Esther (in Bleak House); the lost daughter returns to Dombey. In Villette, this trope is famously hyperbolic: Lucy awakens to fi nd herself in a copy of her childhood home, under the care of her former godmother. It might be tempting to argue that the notion of getting the same self back after such dramatic vacations seems so tenuous as to require narrative reinforcement, an empirical guarantee or external point of reference by which the self can, as Esther puts it, “[attach] to life again.” Yet this explanation does not match the texts. Though sometimes instrumental to the character’s recovery, the returning people and places do not function as comfortingly familiar presences, or stable points around which affirmative acts of mutual recognition can occur. For Esther and Shirley, the mother was not previously known as such; the unmasking ushers in change. In Lucy’s case, the people she recognizes do not recognize her. For Pip and

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Dombey, the return is affectively complicated, steeped in guilt and remorse. For both Pip and Lucy, recognizing the familiar face or place is initially disorienting, profoundly so for Lucy, who thinks she’s gone mad. Finally, the returns strike both characters and readers as being at least faintly improbable (more than faintly, in the case of Villette). As I have argued, these novels associate loss of consciousness and early convalescence with the defeat or suspension of impulses to master the environment. In the fourth stage, these impulses return. Perhaps they return with a vengeance. The pairings noted in the preceding paragraph almost invert the earlier relationship, in which the environment overwhelms consciousness. Here, in a sense, consciousness overwhelms the environment. When we call the scenes improbable, we mean that they do not seem to obey the rules of reality. Perhaps such scenes defi antly demonstrate the power of the novelist to break those rules, to “overcode” or reinterpret the uniform continuities of a natural world that does not, in fact, revolve around individual consciousness (or even consciousness per se). In a sense, the novelists overcompensate the characters for having been decentered, thrust into the inanimate, by depicting a world that revolves around the character in ways that are almost frightening: precisely, “uncanny.” More broadly, if representing the loss of consciousness summons up specters of radical displacement and loss of distinction, perhaps these specters must be laid to rest by reaffi rming the power of consciousness, specifically artistic or novelistic consciousness, to represent a world primarily ordered by human desires and personal relationships. In doing so, of course, novelists construct another kind of outside world: a compelling environment that exerts its own lure, as the mimicries of Don Quixote so decisively illustrate. In some ways, then, novel reading itself offers opportunities to indulge the “impulse d’abandon,” to allow one’s consciousness to be absorbed and even reconfigured by the space fiction opens.

Looking and Loitering in The Mayor of Casterbridge To pursue further this possibility, we turn to Thomas Hardy, whose work stands out for its investment in recuperating missed moments of phenomenal pleasure within the register of the literary, and in modeling modes of receptivity that are congruent with wonder or negative capability. The Mayor of Casterbridge, in par ticu lar, presents a sustained exploration of the

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conditions under which the ordinary world, and its representations, might become, in themselves, a source of attraction. Near the end of that novel, the narrator tells us that the self- exiled Henchard kept an eager ear upon the conversations of those who passed along the road—not from a general curiosity by any means—but in the hope that among those travelers between Casterbridge and London some would, sooner or later, speak of the former place. The distance, however, was too great to lend much probability to his desire; and the highest result of his attention to wayside words was that he did indeed hear the name “Casterbridge” uttered one day. (317–18)

In this passage, as throughout the novel, Hardy implicitly contrasts different possible relationships between perception, desire, pleasure, and (ultimately) narration. Here, a configuration in which desire exerts sway over what Henchard hears, constructing hierarchies of relevance that screen his perceptions, is parenthetically contrasted to an alternate mode: “general curiosity.” The phrase implies a certain current of interest or motivation; it is not apathy, nor is it “dogged and cynical indifference” (1). Yet the modifier, “general,” implies the absence of a specific object: an indiscriminate interest, open to whatever may come along. In this respect, “general curiosity” might resemble Elizabeth-Jane’s “desire— sober and repressed . . . to see, to hear, and to understand” (24). Yet “general curiosity” does not carry the black-edged weight that freights the word “desire” in Hardy’s novels, and is not necessarily associated with understanding. Rather, as I will argue, numerous passages in The Mayor of Casterbridge correlate “general curiosity” with a non-appropriative approach to the phenomenal world that is divorced from knowledge as well as desire, and linked instead to pleasure. Many critics have noted that Hardy’s novels are centrally concerned with ethical, aesthetic, affective, and ideological distinctions between various modes of looking. Amid the variety of critical arguments and approaches, one finds consensus that alongside grim binary oppositions, Hardy often holds out some third possibility, an alternative mode that is not utopian but can mitigate the destructive effects of oppressive social forces and careless chance. For example, John Goode writes, “to look and be looked at are separate forms of subjective containment. There is a third term which is neither the fiction of a lost community nor the myth of

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universal individualism, but the returned question of the obscure life” (94). For Gillian Beer, this third term resembles Darwin’s “ ‘normative felicity’ . . . a deep association of life and pleasurability” that is best accessed through states of “alert passivity” (238). For J. Hillis Miller, Hardy ultimately endorses “the will to remain quietly watching on the sidelines” (6). Elaine Showalter situates the third term as a combination of masculine “rebellion against life” with feminine “capacity for suffering,” yielding “skills of observation, attention, sensitivity, and compassion” (114). I hope to advance this general line of thinking by re-examining both the psychological conditions that allow characters to be “generally curious,” and the narrative configurations that allow Hardy to, as it were, repeat these conditions on the level of structure, making it possible for readers to experience this mode of attention as part of the reading process. Certain moments in The Mayor of Casterbridge work to provoke as well as represent general curiosity as a mode of attention that is subtended by the abeyance or defeat of desires aimed at par ticu lar objects or objectives (including the desire to know). These moments involve suspending or subverting more familiar narrative entanglements, especially the operations of the teleological plot as it works to produce desire, suspense, active curiosity, and the expectation that we will be able to subordinate details and episodes to larger processes of constructing meaning or arriving at a fi nal goal. In these instances, Hardy seems to probe the possibility that a novel might convey a perspective from which the world outside the self could be registered as such: that is, as something apart from subjective desires, especially the subject’s ruthless desire for itself, a pattern of desire that, as Bersani puts it, “works to reduce the world to a reflection of the desiring subject” (8). In the passage quoted at the beginning of the chapter, to finally hear the desired word is the “highest result” of Henchard’s focused attention. On the one hand, the phrase implies that this single occurrence is a paltry return on his investment; on the other hand, it implies that had his listening not been so narrowly determined by his own interest, he might have heard much more. In an earlier novel, Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy presents a similar contrast in a rather different light. In a comically hyperbolic scene, the clumsy rustic Cain Ball returns from a holiday trip to Bath, eager to tell Gabriel Oak and the other rustics what he has seen. Oak, however, is exclusively interested in one thing he has seen: Bathsheba in the company of

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Troy. Cain Ball’s coughing and sneezing keeps disrupting his account; he also lacks the principle of selection under which Oak is operating, the desire to know something in par ticu lar that would impose a hierarchy of relevance on the details of the trip. When his cough at last abates, Cain gives a detailed description of Bathsheba and the soldier. In response to Oak’s next question, “What did you see besides?” (199), Cain lists all the wonders of Bath: “great glass windows to the shops, and great clouds in the sky, full of rain, and old wooden trees in the country round,” moldy batty-cakes, hot water that “springs up out of the earth,” “large houses . . . grand churches,” the “holy gold rings” on the parson’s fingers, their “moustaches and long beards,” the singing at High Church and preaching at High Chapel. He did not see Bathsheba again. “Why didn’t you say so afore then?” exclaims the disappointed Oak (201). For Oak in the grip of active, desirous curiosity, the particulars of Bath are automatically uninteresting: They appear, like the cough, as mere impediments to the communication of relevant information. In this scene, moreover, the reader’s perspective and desires are strongly aligned with Oak’s. With him, we have been led to expect and desire a fi nal clause, a missing piece of information, which Cain (inadvertently) seemed to promise and then fails to provide, leaving us discontented with half-knowledge. As impediments that seem to delay the answer Oak meant to elicit, moreover, the details may function to intensify suspense, anxious desire to know about Bathsheba, and subsequent frustration. The scene is so prolonged, however, that it almost overtops the production of suspense and threatens to derail the forward momentum of the narrative altogether. One listener, Joseph Poorgrass, begins “to think apprehensively of the serious consequences that would follow Cainy Ball’s strangulation in his cough, and the history of his Bath adventures dying with him,” underscoring the sense of peril to the life of the narrative (198).33 In this context, then, Cain’s narration appears inept, displaying a failure to properly subordinate irrelevant details to the central question (What is Bathsheba doing with Troy?). In fact, he does not hierarchize his material at all: Each detail is linked, cumulatively, with “and.” It is clear that Cain has been equally interested in them all. Yet though Cain is presented as naive and misguided about the things he describes, consider the status of his story had it not become entangled with the desires of Oak. Cain’s descriptions are not inherently uninteresting. Taken out of context, they are

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rather poetic (“great glass windows to the shops, and great clouds in the sky, full of rain”). Indeed, for the other rustics, Cain’s account does not function as an irritating delay. “ ’Tis for our good to gain knowledge of strange cities,” says Poorgrass; Moon adds: “ ’tis a curious place to say the least, . . . and it must be a curious people that live therein” (200). Not sharing Oak’s urgent desire for news of Bathsheba, the workers express a relaxed interest in hearing about what is new and strange. The trip itself has been motivated by an apparently indiscriminate desire to see new things: by “general curiosity.” Apart from the merit of the content, though, for the rustics the story is part of another pattern, one defi ned by hiatus: It provides a break from working. When Cain approaches, Poorgrass pauses in his reaping; the narrator tells us that he “had a way of resting a while from his labour on such hot days for reasons preternaturally small; of which Cain Ball’s advent . . . was one of the first magnitude” (198). Although it is in Oak’s interest, and by extension the reader’s, for Cain to get to the point and stop talking, it is in everyone else’s interest for Cain to prolong his story, to maintain the diversion.34 From this angle, Cain’s story can be seen as a competing narrative practice governed by a different set of values: a variant form. It is a cumulativeepisodic narrative based on interest that produces a pleasurable pause, but it gets tangled up in a goal-oriented (periodic or teleological) narrative that is operating the machinery of desire. Notably, though, while Oak ignores Cain’s details, Hardy does not erase them. He also allows Cain’s story to continue far past the point where there is nothing more for Oak to gain. The second half of the story is never recuperated by desire: There is no “pay-off ” to the wait. In this scene, though, because we are waiting, the pointlessness of Cain’s account carries negative value. The structural dynamics of the scene make it almost impossible for a reader to sympathize with the rustics, or to share their interest in dallying over details rather than Oak’s restless desire to find out about Bathsheba. In The Mayor of Casterbridge, however, we fi nd a loosely comparable scene that reverses this polarity of value. Elizabeth- Jane and Lucetta are watching the marketplace from the elevated vantage point of Lucetta’s windows. The description begins with a par ticu lar visual subject and object: “Elizabeth could see the crown of her stepfather’s hat among the rest beneath, and was not aware that Lucetta watched the same object with yet intenser interest” (150). But the writing quickly moves away from all three,

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to take in the farmers’ “leggings, switches, and sample bags,” clothes, boots, hands, and faces, their cheque books and money, and “three tall apple trees” for sale (151). The description then rejoins Elizabeth-Jane, who wonders aloud “if the same trees come every week?” (151). Lucetta, “absorbed in watching for Henchard,” has not seen them: “What trees?” she responds (151). Like Henchard’s “eager ear,” and Gabriel’s impatient listening, Lucetta’s object-oriented desire narrows down what she perceives as interesting. In fact, it narrows down what she perceives. In this case, however, the details of the marketplace that Lucetta is missing come to the foreground for the reader. In other words, the narrator here does something that closely resembles Cain Ball’s cumulative recounting of phenomenal details. Yet here the description “encodes,” and, at least in some cases, actually receives, a different response.35 David Lodge, for example, remarks: “the plot has little to recommend it . . . yet we scarcely register these things as flaws because they are overlaid by, or are actually the occasion of stunning visual effects” (252–53). Hardy’s novels are “made tolerable and indeed pleasurable because of the sublimity of the effects created” (254). In a second such example, after telling us that the contents of the shop windows reflected the agricultural business of the town, the narrator proceeds to list all 26 specific items: “scythes, reap-hooks, sheep-shears, billhooks, spades, mattocks, and hoes . . . bee-hives, butter firkins, churns, milking stools and pails, hay-rakes, field-flagons, and seed-lips . . . cartropes and plough-harness, . . . carts, wheel-barrows, and mill-gear . . . horseembrocations . . . hedging-gloves, thatcher’s knee- caps, ploughmen’s leggings, villagers’ pattens and clogs” (28). It is as though the narrative has surrendered itself to the attractive power of the world’s contents, following the pointless path of a mildly curious eye. As Goode notes, “This list is clearly longer than its obvious function . . . the list itself seems to take over . . . Such lists are not synecdochic . . . they do not indicate a whole world by indicative detail. They hold the text up, clutter it” (81). This last sentence can’t be quite right, though, because if it were, the list would have the same effect as Cain’s storytelling, and it does not. Here, the narrator’s dallying with things creates, in the place of frustrated suspense, what Gillian Beer calls “the full sense of life elated in us by the range of sense perceptions which throng [Hardy’s] writing . . . the moment-by-moment plenitude of experience” (248).

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Importantly, though Hardy is clearly the better prose stylist, these descriptive passages are no more relevant to the novel’s plot, theme, or character development than are Cain’s impressions of Bath. It is as if the world floods in, exceeding the novel’s economy of meaning without becoming mere obstacle or waste. Beer attributes this effect to “the double sense of apprehension” in play in Hardy’s novels, a “situation created in the reader by the contradiction of plot and writing” (238). Apprehension in the sense of fear, prompted by the downspiraling plot, “awakens thought and sensation” (238), prompting greater sensory “apprehension” of the world. In a sense, this analysis puts readers in the position of the rustics, wanting Cain Ball to prolong his story because it delays the arrival of a disagreeable future. While I fi nd Beer’s analysis compelling, I want to suggest that rooting the effect of Hardy’s descriptions in wonder rather than fear allows us to understand this effect, and the narrative dynamics through which it is achieved, from a different angle. Because wonder does not depend on dread (a “negative affect” that would, at least in Silvan Tomkins’s model, compete with rather than facilitate pleasurable interest), its openness to the world is not the secondary effect of a primary aversion, a prior sense of tragic inevitability. In Hardy’s novels, I want to assert, phenomenal pleasure exceeds the tragic economies of ambition or desire that govern the plot, and remains after they have crashed. He presents wonder (or “general curiosity”) as an alternative to these economies, rather than their epiphenomenon. There is a sense in which this mode of attention is primary and perpetually proximate. Yet access to it requires a degree of disengagement from the pressure of desire, or telos in general; unfortunately, such disengagement, when possible at all, will inevitably be transient. Hardy repeatedly implies that such disengagement is more likely to occur when external forces negate one’s desires than by dint of choice or will. Thus, as Christopher Lane notes in a different context, Hardy sometimes presents “failure not only as a more likely outcome for his characters, but, perversely, as a more attractive option” (122). In The Mayor of Casterbridge, the characters least able to perform this disengagement are the most likely to miss things: Lucetta (“what trees?”) and especially Henchard. Characterized by his “amazing energy” (111), “sledgehammer directness” (197), and “momentum” (188), Henchard often plans things in a manner that resembles teleological plotting. He envisions outcomes, then devises a sequence of actions in order to achieve

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them. Examples include the (realized) second courtship of Susan (72), the (unrealized) plan to forestall a creditor by announcing his engagement to Lucetta (207–8), and the (failed) plot to ruin Farfrae. Henchard’s failures are sometimes attributed to poor pacing: “If Henchard had only waited long enough he might at least have avoided loss though he had not made a profit. But the momentum of his character knew no patience” (188). On the other hand, when Henchard does wait—when he tries, specifically, to manipulate delays in order to build desire in another—he waits too long. His deliberate delays in visiting Lucetta, for example, merely “wearied her,” and she gives up on him (154). Throughout the novel, states of suspense are often presented as unproductive, their tension less released than broken in trivial ways. Elizabeth Jane, hiding in the barn, waiting for Farfrae to leave, sees “a winnowing machine . . . beside her, and to relieve her suspense she gently moved the handle; whereupon a cloud of wheathusks flew out into her face” (91). Here, suspense is comically trumped by something like idle curiosity, one’s hand being attracted to a handle. As this moment begins to suggest, if subjective desires, priorities and expectations have the power to fi lter out the world, Hardy also implies that objects can exert their own attractions, their power to compel perception. In a move that obliquely echoes Caillois’s “lure of space,” or the sway of environment in representations of fever and fainting, Hardy frequently presents looking as unwilled or unmotivated, not completely under the subject’s control. For example, when Lucetta and Farfrae find themselves together in her home, with its windows overlooking the marketplace, the narrator tells us: “By natural deviation, their eyes sought the busy scene without” (156). The syntax makes the act of looking selfless, as though the eyes are attracted without the rest of the subject seeming to want or will anything. Subtracting agency from the perceiver makes perception into a multilateral relationship of attraction between senses and the sensible, granting power to the object world. Another inscription of what we might call the programmatic dimension of human sensory response takes place in the novel’s opening scene. Drunken Henchard offers to auction off his wife: “ ‘I am open to an offer for this gem o’ creation . . . All I want is a buyer’ ” (8). The next paragraph reads: At that moment a swallow, one among the last of the season, which had by chance found its way through an opening into the upper part of the

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tent, flew to and fro in quick curves above their heads, causing all eyes to follow it absently. In watching the bird till it made its escape the assembled company neglected to respond to the workman’s offer, and the subject dropped. (8)

The distraction effectively derails the action-in-progress, so that Henchard has to start it up again “a quarter of an hour later”: “ ‘Here—I am waiting to know about this offer of mine. The woman is no good to me. Who’ll have her?’ ” (8). Henchard was waiting, but no one was waiting with him; no one else is particularly eager for this sequence to continue. Presented as purely incidental, the bird draws the crowd’s attention simply because it is slightly unusual and it is moving around. The phrase, “causing all eyes to follow it absently” implies a kind of automatic attraction of the eye, granting primacy and power to the object (the power to “cause” looking). The gaze is ascribed to “the crowd”; specifically, to “all eyes,” as if individual selves are not involved. In this sense, the relation between sparrow and crowd inverts Althusserian “hailing”: No one is addressed, but everyone looks. We are confronted not with the claims of the social on the subject, but with the claims of the object on the human nervous system. In that the sparrow threatens to de-rail the plot in progress, moreover, we might see it (or the paragraph that, writing about the sparrow, so pointedly obtrudes) as a synecdoche of involuntary deflection or swerve; the way the “other of the contingent world” (Goode 81) perforates human attention. In this sense, the force exerted by objects themselves poses a kind of challenge to the fi ltering effect of subjective desires and expectations. This interest in the dynamic interactivity of seeing is again highlighted when the narrator describes a new agricultural machine on display in the marketplace. The machine’s function, whatever that may be, is completely eclipsed by its fascinating appearance. It becomes a curiosity: “Its arrival created about as much sensation in the corn market as a flying machine would create at Charing Cross. The farmers crowded round it, women drew near it, children crept under and into it . . . They examined it curiously . . . ‘This is a curious machine,’ ” Lucietta says (165– 66). The narrator describes the machine in a manner that cannot possibly be mistaken for objective documentary: “The machine was painted in bright hues of green, yellow, and red, and it resembled as a whole a compound of hornet, grasshopper,

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and shrimp, magnified enormously. Or it might have been likened to an upright musical instrument with the front gone. That was how it struck Lucetta. ‘Why, it is a sort of agricultural piano,’ she said” (165). Through this outrageous embranglement of the animal, musical, and mechanical, the description captures less what the machine looks like than what it is like to look at it.36 In other words, the visual relation between characters and machine is less represented than repeated in the relation between reader and text. This effect is further complicated by the last sentence, which accomplishes a provocative splice between what seemed (for three paragraphs previous) to be the unsituated perspective of the narrator and what is now abruptly identified as the specific perspective of an embodied character (“that was how it struck Lucetta”). The act of seeing comes fi rst (“the machine was painted in bright hues”); a specific looker comes later, making it impossible to say exactly when the narrator’s perception becomes Lucetta’s. The effect is to limit the perspective from which the object is being described, making it human in scope (not transcendent, objective, or Godlike), and yet a-personal (not fi rmly grounded in one individual’s psychology; as though anyone might take it up). Seeing, we might say, is here de-individualized, or even (to the extent that the description confuses or pries away identification) de-individualizing.37 The image is obviously “mediated,” but the slippage from narrator to character makes it seem not to be mediated by the personality or desires of one par ticu lar unified individual. The act of seeing comes across as a kind of collaboration that includes the object, transpiring within a complex but shared space that is neither objective nor fully subjected, but more like a field of forces.38 The instances discussed so far help to identify several possible fates of narrated phenomenal details in Hardy’s fiction. First, they may become significant to the development of character, plot, or themes, and thus to some extent “transparent,” in that we read other meanings in or through them. For example, Farfrae “allow[s] his eyes to travel over the intricate wood-carvings of the chimney piece, representing garlanded lyres, shields, and quivers, on either side of a draped ox- skull, and fl anked by heads of Apollo and Diana in low relief ” (75). The carvings clearly have a place within the novel’s larger economy of meaning, signifying love and death; the ox-skull belongs to a series of Henchard metonymies. We see in the

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carvings the hand of the designing author, who uses the chimney-piece as material in fashioning a larger structure of meaning. Yet not all of Hardy’s details function in this way. Barthes has argued that it is impossible for a narrated detail not to signify: Non- symbolic details that have no apparent function “finally say nothing but this: we are the real; it is the category of ‘the real’ (and not its contingent contents) which is then signified; in other words, the very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent alone, becomes the very signifier of realism: the reality effect is produced” (234). The categorical tone of Barthes’s argument perhaps eclipses the fact that there is more than one reality effect, or reality affect. Depending on dynamics of plot, style, and framing, non-symbolic details may evoke very different attitudes toward, or modes of perceiving “the real.” But to make a stronger claim, where for Barthes the relationship is either between signifier and signified or signifier and referent, Hardy’s details sometimes work to repeat or re-inscribe phenomenal experience.39 At such moments, the text diverges from the denotative or representational logic of realism, moving toward what Deleuze calls “a superior empiricism.” In these instances, emphasis can fall on the aesthetic or phenomenal pleasure of material particulars because they have not been posited as either obstacles to or instruments of meaning.40 Instead, they become opportunities to experiment with another way of approaching the world. Without claiming that Hardy’s descriptions have the same effect on every reader, I do want to argue that the text structures these descriptions in a way that makes possible a certain kind of pleasure: the pleasure of “general curiosity” that undergirds the narrator’s remarking upon all the kinds of flowers in the gardens, all the different things that intrude onto the pavement, the vans, horses, shop contents, “yeomen, farmers, dairymen, and townsfolk,” and so on (58– 60). We might see these passages, then, as reversing the redemptive aesthetic Bersani critiques. Rather than serving a “patching function” (painful experience redeemed by meaning or knowledge gained), the novel allows us access to the phenomenal pleasure we are always missing (precisely by virtue of desire’s rushing us through middles in order to reach some end). The descriptions become “a certain type of repetition of the phenomenal itself, a repetition that, far from substituting truth for appearances, continuously re-presents appearances in order to test modes of interpretation freed from the constraints of anxious desire”

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(Bersani 15). To use the novel’s own idiom, these passages can be said to manifest the lesson Elizabeth-Jane is said to have learned: the “secret . . . of making limited opportunities endurable . . . [through] the cunning enlargement, by a species of microscopic treatment, of those minute forms of satisfaction that offer themselves to everybody not in positive pain” (331). As other critics have noted, Elizabeth-Jane is characterized by her perceptiveness and her position as unseen or disregarded observer. For much of the novel, desire’s tunnel vision renders her invisible to other characters: “the pain she experienced from the almost absolute obliviousness to her existence that was shown by [Henchard and Farfrae] became at times half dissipated by her sense of its humorousness” (176). Painful experience, combined with her own awareness of her status as perennial outsider, prompts her to set her desires (and also the desires of others) at a certain distance: “She had learnt the lesson of renunciation, and was as familiar with the wreck of each day’s wishes as with the diurnal setting of the sun. . . . Continually it had happened that what she had desired had not been granted her, and that what had been granted her she had not desired” (177). We cannot say that she does not feel desire, but its forward drive has been disengaged because she has lost all hope of attaining the object. Desire is, as it were, out of gear, “idling” in the automotive sense. Her state of suspended desire is represented during the awkward tea with Lucetta, Henchard, and Farfrae. At this point in the plot, Lucetta has deferred Henchard’s proposal of marriage; she is in love with Farfrae. Elizabeth-Jane is in love with Farfrae, too, but has given up hope; Farfrae himself (oblivious to Lucetta’s history with Henchard) is in love with Lucetta. Henchard suspects without being certain that Farfrae is his rival. For Henchard, the external world is overcoded by his own jealous desire: Lucetta’s “windows gleamed as if they did not want him; her curtains seemed to hang slily, as if they screened an ousting presence” (178). Simultaneously, he fails to “discern” the little clues that, for Elizabeth-Jane, make it “plain as the town-pump that [Farfrae] and Lucetta were incipient lovers” (180). The passage that follows is rhetorically complex: They [Henchard and Farfrae] sat side by side at the darkening table, like some Tuscan painting of the two disciples supping at Emmaus. Lucetta, forming the third and haloed figure, was opposite them; Elizabeth-Jane,

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being out of the game, and out of the group, could observe all from afar, like the evangelist who had to write it down: that there were long spaces of taciturnity, when all exterior circumstance was subdued to the touch of spoons and china, the click of a heel on the pavement under the window, the passing of a wheelbarrow or cart, the whistling of the carter, the gush of water into householders’ buckets at the town-pump opposite; the exchange of greetings among their neighbours, and the rattle of the yokes by which they carried off their evening supply. (179)

In a familiar association of distance with knowledge, Elizabeth- Jane’s disengaged position permits her to discern accurately the relations between the characters (“plain as the town-pump”). More strikingly, though, it permits her to discern the town-pump itself: “the gush of water into householders’ buckets at the town-pump opposite,” together with a list of other very specific, vividly captured sounds that have no symbolic function. In other words, these sounds do not point back to the desires of the characters and do not seem to be screened though desire. Conversely, they are what desire screens out. The odd clause, “all exterior circumstance was subdued to the touch of spoons and china, the click of a heel,” reverses the usual assumption that these accidentals are themselves “exterior,” as if the characters and their affairs had become a mere backdrop to the sounds things make. For Elizabeth-Jane, the suspension of desire, the fact of “being out of the game,” seems to make possible this unselected re- emergence of the phenomenal world: the world that is, precisely, with- out (outside of, apart from) desire. Accordingly, the sensory representation floats away from the perceiver, seeming (like the description of the machine discussed above) not fi rmly anchored in a single individual consciousness. The poetic tone of the passage, moreover, invites the reader to participate in its pleasures, the sheer sensory fullness of a world that is not wanting. Perhaps there is no such thing as the subject without desire. Yet the very fact of mortality makes it perfectly clear that there is a world without the subject’s desire. The disturbing and melancholy way that death severs the bonds between subject and objects, making the object world appear apart from the subject’s desire, is suggested after Susan’s death: “Well, poor soul, she’s helpless to hinder that or anything now . . . And all her shining keys will be took from her, and her cupboards opened; and little things a’ didn’t wish seen, anybody will see” (118–19). The link between

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death, or a posthumous state, and the distance from desire that opens perception is also signaled by the narrator’s rather self-consciously off hand reference to “some Tuscan painting,” which takes us into a complicated Biblical allusion.41 The allusion highlights, first, the men’s state of ignorance or failed recognition, which is dissolved in the Bible, but not in the novel, by the breaking of bread (ironically inscribed here when Henchard and Farfrae grab the same slice and tear it in two, 179). At the same time, the irreverent comparison of Lucetta to the risen Christ (“the third and haloed figure”) ironizes the biblical story, bringing it “down” to the level of sexual jealousies. More saliently, the grandest of scenes is here so overlaid with acute phenomenal details that, ultimately, the risen Christ is eclipsed by the gush of water into a bucket. By itself, the reference to the painting would position Elizabeth-Jane as a viewer: one who occupies the same present moment as the image. However, the slide to text (“like the evangelist who had to write it down”) positions her as a writer— specifically, as “the evangelist,” presumably Luke, who wrote from a historical distance of approximately 80 years. For the evangelist, “from afar” is a question of time rather than space: a temporal distance comparable to the one Hardy’s narrator rather insistently maintains from the scenes and characters in the novel (“now in great part pulled down,” 251). As one who lives after, the evangelist is, like the risen Christ, a figure of the posthumous, inviting comparison to a provocative passage from Hardy’s Life: I have attempted many modes of fi nding [the value of life, and its interest]. For my part, if there is any way of getting a melancholy satisfaction out of life it lies in dying, so to speak, before one is out of the flesh; by which I mean putting on the manners of ghosts, wandering in their haunts, and taking their views of surrounding things. To think of life as passing away is a sadness; to think of it as past is at least tolerable. Hence even when I enter into a room to pay a simple morning call I have unconsciously the habit of regarding the scene as if I were a specter not solid enough to influence my environment, only fit to behold and say, as another specter said: “Peace be unto you.” (218)42

In a sense, Elizabeth-Jane is in just this ghostly position, experiencing both its perceptual advantages and its affective drawbacks. Strikingly, Hardy does not seem to want to know the end of his life, per se, or to

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glimpse his life totalized, its meaning and significance rendered stable and legible. Rather, he imagines subtracting from existence its progressive tense, the sense of what is pending, while remaining embodied; it would be a kind of post-teleological temporality. Dying thus seems to figure, for Hardy, not the ideal condition for understanding the meaning of a life, but rather the ideal condition under which the world might be perceived. In a sense, it would be the ultimate form of loitering.43 One of the distinctive features of Hardy’s fiction is the intermittent presence of someone variously named loiterer, lounger, idler, stranger, wanderer, or “any casual observer”: “What was really peculiar, however, in this couple’s progress, and would have attracted the attention of any casual observer otherwise disposed to overlook them, was the perfect silence they preserved” (1). These names figure, in the strong sense, the depersonalized, moderately disengaged perspective of someone. The perspective is human in scope, but not mediated by a par ticu lar subjectivity. The position is defi ned, almost exclusively, by a little bit of passing interest: general curiosity.44 In Hardy’s novels, any casual observer is fortunate in his/her (“too impersonally human” to be gendered, 94) access to the sensory fullness of the phenomenal world, an access often blocked to the characters enmeshed in the plot. For example, the narrator says of Henchard: “If he could have summoned music to his aid his existence might even now have been borne” (293). Two paragraphs later, it is not Henchard but “the wanderer in this direction” who is able to hear singular symphonies from these waters, as from a lampless orchestra, all playing in their sundry tones from near and far parts of the moor. At a hole in a rotten weir they executed a recitative; where a tributary brook fell over a stone breastwork they trilled cheerily; under an arch they performed a metallic cymballing; and at Durnover Hole they hissed. The spot at which their instrumentation rose loudest was a place called Ten Hatches, whence during high springs there proceeded a very fugue of sounds. (293)

Ultimately, of course, it is the reader who is given a chance to imagine a kind of listening that would summon up these sundry tones from the words printed on the page, a readerly pleasure that might indeed function as “the occasional episode” of happiness “in a general drama of pain” (332). In one sense, the experience is specifically textual, situated in reading. Yet “any casual observer” may also model for the reader an attitude of openness that

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makes it possible to “notice such things”45 in life as well as reading; to be “curious” in the obsolete sense, “careful, attentive” (OED). Though Hardy does not limit this capacity to those recovering from illness, the novel does suggest that this passive openness is inevitably transient; it is an interlusory mode of perception, not a position one might permanently occupy. First, “a superficial and temporary thing is the interest of anybody in affairs which do not directly touch them” (306). Second, if one should become more than temporarily or superficially interested, one risks losing the privilege of disengagement and toppling over into all the excitement, misery, and violence of intense involved desires (like Frankenstein’s monster). Finally, the degree of disengagement that defi nes the loiterer’s perception is purely relational. All the observers, wanderers, loungers and readers have their own desires, concerns, and destinations, their own stories in progress, from which they are just being briefly diverted. Still, when the narrative is focalized through the perspective of the idler, what is simulated for the reader is a mode of perception that might be deemed “disinterested” in the limited sense of not having a motive or goal that is not immanent to the experience itself. Although Elizabeth Jane gets a relatively happy ending, this outcome does not give her any faith in teleological models of narrative, or desire: “Her experience had been of a kind to teach her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful honor of a brief transit through a sorry world hardly called for effusiveness, even when the path was suddenly irradiated at some halfway point by daybeams rich as hers” (332). Clearly, the novel stakes happiness not on the ends of desire’s trajectories, but on their hiccups— on the possibility that art or chance, distraction or failure may occasion moments of general curiosity that allow us to perceive such daybeams. One of the many legacies of poststructuralist theory is the notion that it is simply impossible for a cigar to be just a cigar—ever, under any circumstances that we, as signifying animals, can represent (to ourselves, or for others). The dependence of human consciousness on signs seems to exclude what we might call “quiddity,” the mute, solid presence of the thing as such, its status as thing and not signifier. The sense of loss that accompanies this exclusion is often attributed to nostalgia for a more certain world in which it was possible finally to say what the thing is. However, it can also arise from a sense that experience is impoverished when we do not credit an external check to human discourse: when things are what

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we call them. If poststructuralist paradigms can challenge longstanding assumptions about the validity of human knowledge, they can also diminish the power of things (or animals) to confront us with their otherness, their existential independence, and thereby to challenge the perspective from which we have represented them: to demonstrate its limits.46 Though structuralist and poststructuralist standpoints are often opposed to “humanism,” understood as a worldview that places human values and principles at the center of systems, there is a sense in which poststructuralist understandings of representation greatly disseminate the human by rendering the perceptible world wholly and inescapably signifi cant. Resistance to poststructuralism is often attributed to its negation of “truth” as a stable one-to-one correspondence between a representation and a reality conceptualized as external and prior to representation. Yet just as an interest in difference is not always reducible to an interest in the norm, an interest in the limits of knowledge is not always reducible to a desire for conquest or mastery. It may take the opposite form of an attraction to encountering, in the realm of the secular, something that is not simply assimilable.

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Conclusion Woolf ’s Fin

Now the Eye Now, the eye is a curious thing, information ponders along its nerves until years later it’s suddenly year later and while you’re shaking your head the many faces continue forming the man you married. The pieces came in telegrams. I lay eyes on you to touch you with gentler fi ngers. Visual images are an entirely different process. She was shocked by how much more there was to his face each evening. Years later they were sitting in the kitchen, he turned a certain way and she saw it once completely. —Cole Swenson, It’s Alive She Says (47)

Thus far, I have tried to map several developments in the history of the British novel, tracing divergent practices of printing, communicating affect, plotting, and representing the par ticular. In each case, I have indicated the cultural selection of certain techniques or ideals over other variations, which became roads less traveled—in most cases, roads less traveled into the nineteenth century. In its most respected form, the nineteenth-century British novel favored transparent typography, sympathy’s affective dynamics, teleological plotting, and active curiosity’s subordination of the par ticu lar. By contrast, typographical emphasis, sensibility’s affective dynamics, cumulative plotting, and passive wonder’s pleasurable perception of the par ticu lar were less often embraced. As I have argued, two linked distinctions underlie these choices. The fi rst lies between oedipal and 185

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non-oedipal patterns of desire or sexuality; the second involves the relationship between experience (process, feeling, sensation) and knowledge (understood as outcome, end, or product). In nineteenth-century British novels, practices that reproduce oedipal desire and subordinate experience to knowledge (situating it as a means to an end) were more widely propagated and endorsed than practices that are based on non- oedipal patterns of desire, or that foreground experience as an end in itself. By the same token, the former set of practices have been more widely analyzed and critiqued than the latter, whose existence in Victorian novels, especially, has not been widely registered. If the latter practices constitute roads less traveled by the novel out of the eighteenth century, by the time we reach the twentieth century, these roads are so overgrown as to appear new (hence the impulse to situate Sterne, for example, as proto-Modernist or proto-Postmodernist, rather than the other way around). Extensive analysis of the fate of these “misfit forms” in the twentieth century is beyond the scope of this book. However, in closing I would like to return to the problem of style, and the broader ethical stakes of this project, by reading two modern novels that are intensely invested in the connections between literary style and the “unseizeable” singularity of a mortal individual: Woolf ’s Jacob’s Room and The Waves.1 In a diary entry of 1925, Woolf wrote: “I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant ‘novel.’ A new ----- by Virginia Woolf. But what? Elegy?” (A Writer’s Diary 78).2 Amidst Woolf ’s works, Jacob’s Room is perhaps most obviously like an elegy: It memorializes the life of a young man who is killed in World War I. As other critics have observed, Jacob Flanders’s name signals his fate from the very beginning; he has, in a sense, already been killed on the fields of Flanders in the coming war; moreover, the (rather ghostly) Jacob is himself haunted by the figure of Woolf ’s much-loved brother Thoby, who died of typhoid fever at the age of 26 (Ruddick 186). An elegy testifies to the value of vanished or vanishing things, and on one level the book commemorates an entire generation of young men who died in the war and the worlds that died with them. Yet the narrator insistently circles around one par ticu lar individual, Jacob, repeatedly posing the question of what vanishes—what has been lost—when he does not return. At the same time, the novel is strongly invested in exposing and

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critiquing the “patriarchal machinery” that produced Jacob— or his “room,” his space in a structure that “[sinks] the private brother, whom many of us have reason to respect, and [inflates] in his stead a monstrous male, loud of voice, hard of fist, childishly intent upon scoring the floor of the earth with chalk marks, within whose mystic boundaries human beings are penned, rigidly, separately, artificially” (Three Guineas 105). In this sense, the novel explores two inseparable aspects of transience: Everything is on the verge of vanishing; everything is subject to transformation, even to revolutionary change. These affectively opposed faces of transience cause the novel to oscillate between the “ecstasy and hubbub of the soul” (113) and “sadness and disappointment that what might have been should never be” (151); between life as “unseizable force” (156) and death as its end or ultimate seizure. Both faces are regarded and conveyed through the prism of style: Woolf ’s own styles and stylistic techniques, but also her attempts to capture what can only be imperfectly captured: that is, Jacob’s Style, which becomes a metonym for the general problem of representing singularity. One technique that returns throughout Woolf ’s fiction, becoming a recognizable feature of the style we call Woolf ’s, but that is particularly marked in this novel, is the use of lists: Banjoes strummed, the parade smelt of tar which stuck to the heels; goats suddenly cantered their carriages through crowds. It was observed how well the Corporation had laid out the flower-beds. Sometimes a straw hat was blown away. Tulips burnt in the sun. Numbers of sponge- bag trousers were stretched in rows. Purple bonnets fringed soft, pink, querulous faces on pillows in bath chairs. Triangular hoardings were wheeled along by men in white coats. Captain George Boase had caught a monster shark. One side of the triangular hording said so in red, blue, and yellow letters; each line ended with three differently colored notes of exclamation. (18)

Though the lists are sometimes taken to connote a fragmented reality, a world no longer capable of being taken as a unified whole,3 Woolf ’s lists have a kinetic quality that works against the perception of fragmentation and presents something more like a stream or streaming. In their dynamism and heterogeneity, they oppose the social machinery that strives to construct uncrossable boundaries and fi xed developmental sequences. Yet

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despite their extensive inclusiveness, the lists never present themselves as comprehensive. Just as transience entails both mortality and the possibility of change, Woolf ’s lists connote both the capacity of style to connect and the limits on this capacity: the powerlessness of style to encompass all the nouns in the world, which constantly shift, change, vanish. The urgent momentum of the lists conveys this motion: everything “racing, flying, escaping” (132), sweeping a cloud across the landscape that the painter Charles Steele is attempting to hold still (9). Because the world is not frozen, the writer must constantly choose: “The observer is choked with observations. . . . But . . . one has to choose” (68– 69). This activity is given par ticu lar poignancy by the novel’s historical setting, which we are never quite allowed to forget: Subtle reminders of the war are strewn throughout the text. This setting vividly highlights our perception that all of these singularities, and the world they comprise, are poised on the verge of destruction. And yet there is something liberating, even ecstatic, about the dynamic excess of reality glimpsed in this way: something charged with revolutionary potential, as we see most clearly in Woolf ’s images of the city. The city itself is rhetorically set into motion through a flow of shifting images: “one behind another, round or pointed, piercing the sky or massing themselves, like sailing ships, like granite cliffs, spires and offices, wharves and factories crowd the bank . . .” (67). It becomes an outside space that is not entirely under the control of social machinery; a space often presented in contrast to the series of closed, private rooms Jacob inhabits. Such images show us that geograph ical space can also function as a connective principle, especially the least cultivated areas, the waste spaces of the social: They have no houses. The streets belong to them; the shops; the churches; theirs the innumerable desks; the stretched office lights; the vans are theirs, and the railway slung high above the street. If you look closer you will see that three elderly men at a little distance from each other run spiders along the pavement as if the street were their parlor, and here, against the wall, a woman stares at nothing, boot-laces extended, which she does not ask you to buy. The posters are theirs too; and the news on them. A town destroyed, a race won. A homeless people, circling beneath the sky whose blue or white is held off by a ceiling cloth of steel fi lings and horse dung shredded to dust. (66)

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Woolf ’s construction of the nomadic population that occupies not rooms but the open-ended streets functions as a counter-weight to the social construction of Jacob as an individual subject. To treat the street as a parlor in which to run spiders is a strategy Deleuze and Guattari call deterritorialization, the rhizomatic conquest of state space. Woolf ’s vision of the revolutionary energy inherent in such social flows, while far from utopian, is celebratory, attractive, alive. Her writing style produces a point of view through which we see the city as a constant flux, a situation whose instability and unpredictability the social machinery works to avert and deny. “Ah, but where are you going if instead of brushing past the old man with the white beard, the silver medal, and the cheap violin, you let him go on with his story . . .” (95): Every moment is underdetermined, humming with choice and chances. Anywhere, at any time, the traffic laws can fail: Any series can collide with any other. Every moment carries secretly folded within it a horde of virtual accidents, some of which are at every moment actualized: “indeed, Piccadilly and Holborn, and the empty sittingroom and the sitting-room with fi fty people in it are liable at any moment to blow music into the air” (112). We live amidst a fi eld of potential eruptions: “Why, from the very windows, even in the dusk, you see a swelling run through the street, an aspiration, as with arms outstretched, eyes desiring, mouths agape. And then we peaceably subside. For if the exaltation lasted we should be blown like foam into the air. The stars would shine through us. We should go down the gale in salt drops—as sometimes happens” (120). Clearly, the salt drops suggest tears as much as ecstatic transformation, or rather they become the same thing: Revolution is loss, and vice versa. If some virtual accidents are actualized, others are not; they remain, for the individual at least, roads not taken. For example, the note on history that “falls out of a book twenty years later, and one can’t remember a word of it,” though it might have been “one of those scribbles upon which the work of a lifetime is based” (150) confronts us with the ghost of a virtual self who happened not to be actualized: what Woolf elsewhere calls “shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves” (Waves 289).4 Such an encounter disrupts our comfortable narratives of our own evolutionary continuity, our sense of our own inevitability: By “choosing” this path—this shifting set of relations and connections—we have foregone another, many others.

190 Conclusion

Yet everyone must inevitably choose, and throughout the novel the narrator keeps choosing Jacob (though, as she tells us, she might just as easily have followed someone else home from the opera, 69). She shows us the choices that Jacob, in par ticu lar, fails to make: his unseized opportunities to diverge from the path laid out for him by the patriarchal machinery. During his trip to Greece, for example, he sees that the Parthenon is wholly incompatible with the British idea of “Greek spirit”: It is entirely foreign, profoundly other, “really astonishing in its silent composure” (148). He grasps, for a moment, the myth as myth: “ ‘the Greek Spirit’; the Greek this, that and the other . . . we have been brought up in an illusion” (138). Unfortunately, his insight is eclipsed by the appearance of Sandra Wentworth Williams, “the English type which is so Greek” (142). Earlier, after the “beastly” luncheon with the Plumers, he scans “the street for lilac or bicycle— anything to restore his sense of freedom” (35). Yet as the narrator informs us, “the extent to which he was disturbed proves that he was already agog” (35–36). Ultimately, he fails to shape his own room, his own “form in the world” (36); he allows himself to be constructed by the institutions that exist for that purpose. Over the course of these repeated failures, it becomes increasingly difficult to sustain faith in Jacob, or to see the basis for the narrator’s own faithfulness, her constant efforts to find Jacob—to recognize him. He seems an unremarkable young man—fairly insensitive, intellectually limited, hardly capable of great things. Yet Jacob’s very ordinariness—the fact that he is not special in his singularity— generalizes and radicalizes the question of what is lost when Jacob, when anyone, no longer returns. If Woolf ’s novel does not encourage us to identify or sympathize with Jacob, or to see him as special, neither does it permit us to see him as dispensable or even replaceable. This stands in marked contrast to Jacob’s fate as a soldier: a signifier in a sign system that is particularly able and willing to replace him with a different body that can occupy the same position. The extent to which a reader registers Jacob’s death as a loss signifies the extent to which the novel succeeds in conveying a way of looking through the symbolic or the representational at a world in which the value of a singularity simply cannot be mea sured. As a technique of style, Woolf uses repetition to evoke differences that elude representation: to posit singularity and its loss as what signs inevitably miss. For example, Jacob looks out of his window on page 116: “Pick-

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ford’s van swung down the street.” After Jacob has died, his friend Bonamy looks out this same window: “Pickford’s van swung down the street” (176). On one hand, the repetition tells us that things don’t change; Pickford’s van is indifferent to Jacob’s death: The social machinery goes right on running without him. On the other hand, something has changed: It is a different statement the second time, a different world that Bonamy sees, and it is different because Jacob doesn’t see it. The resonance between the two occurrences of the same statement conveys affective intensity, conducts experientially the loss that has taken place. Its registration relies on the outside-of-text that is the reader, the reader’s own memory, and ability to apprehend. A more complex series of repetitions is traced across the course of the narrative by moths and moth images. At fi rst, Jacob collects them. “The pale clouded yellows had pelted over the moor. . . . The fritillaries flaunted along the hedgerows . . .” (24): Now they are dead, in his box, scientifically identified and cata logued. In a gesture of transposition, the narrator then positions Jacob himself as a moth: “There he stood pale, come out of the depths of darkness, in the hot room, blinking at the light” (24). Later, the narrator likens herself to a moth in a passage describing her endeavor in this novel: But though all this may very well be true— so Jacob thought and spoke— so he crossed his legs—fi lled his pipe . . . there remains over something which can never be conveyed to a second person save by Jacob himself. Moreover, part of this is not Jacob but Richard Bonamy— the room; the market carts; the hour; the very moment of history. Then consider the effect of sex—how between man and woman it hangs wavy, tremulous, so that here’s a valley, there’s a peak, when in truth, perhaps, all’s as fl at as my hand. . . . But something is always impelling one to hum vibrating, like the hawk moth, at the mouth of the cavern of mystery, endowing Jacob Flanders with all sorts of qualities he had not at all. . . . Yet over him we hang vibrating. (73, emphasis added)

As the images pile up and resonate with one another, moths come to indicate a powerful, dangerous, and irrational attraction. The moths themselves are attracted, fatally, to the lantern Jacob uses to catch them; Jacob is attracted, fatally, to the “light of civilization”—“male society, cloistered rooms, and the works of the classics” (82), and the narrator is attracted to

192 Conclusion

him. This series does not exhaust the virtual singularity its elements repeat; in fact, the image of the moth is transformed and repeated throughout the body of Woolf ’s writing.5 Something “remains over,” remains powerful; insofar as it is not conveyed, or quite conveyable, this something returns, or the writer returns to it, driven by the force of attraction that her image itself invokes. At another point, the narrator uses the image of a net— a butterfly net, perhaps—to describe the activity of novelists: “It is thus that we live, they say, driven by an unseizable force. They say that the novelists never catch it; that is goes hurtling through their nets and leaves them torn to ribbons” (156). To catch Jacob (or life) in the net of representation, via the signifier, is to miss it: the way to capture (a) life is to show it escaping, a feat of style. By invoking roads not taken, variations not selected, virtual lives he will not lead, and the world as he no longer sees it, the narrator imbues Jacob with a certain magnitude. Part of what is lost when Jacob dies is, of course, this virtual potential; all of the singularities that will remain by him unactualized. Clearly, this is part of what makes anyone’s death, everyone’s death, enormous. Yet there is a real loss as well: the loss of the actual person. Something “remains over . . . which can never be conveyed . . . save by Jacob himself ”—even though much of what is Jacob is not in Jacob as an essence, but in his relations to other things, Bonamy, and the room and the moment in history. The narrator can represent these relations, yet something cannot be conveyed or recovered. The narrator can only assert that this is true, because what remains over is purely presentational, a matter of style. The problems of style and singularity, in relation to both individuals and writing, return to be re-worked in The Waves.6 To state a truism, The Waves violates the codes of its genre. If plot, characters, setting, action, dialogue, description—the “elements of fiction”— defi ne the novel as a genre, then The Waves is not a novel, and some critics have analyzed it in these terms: as an “anti-novel” (like Tristram Shandy), play, poem, verbal painting, or even music.7 As critics generally agree, rhythm or serial repetition takes the place of plot as a primary organizing principle. As Edward Bishop puts it, “the waves infuse their rhythm into all aspects of the text, from concepts of character to modes of discourse, to levels of fi gurative language . . . and the emotional rise and fall of the characters” (Virginia 103). Yet the word “characters” fits only imprecisely. Responding in

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her diary to a review of the novel, Woolf wrote: “Odd, that they (The Times) should praise my characters when I meant to have none” (A Writer’s Diary 170). It is difficult to know what to call the six named not-characters; they are often called “voices,” though this is a somewhat problematic term for a written text, particularly because the writing style is so uniform. In this novel, prose style functions as what Deleuze and Guattari call a “plane of consistency”: a homogenous field of force or pure connectivity. In their brief discussion of The Waves, Deleuze and Guattari assert: each of these characters, with his or her name, its individuality, designates a multiplicity (for example, Bernard and the school of fi sh). Each is simultaneously in this multiplicity and at its edge, and crosses over into the others. . . . Each advances like a wave, but on the plane of consistency they are a single abstract Wave whose vibration propagates following a line of fl ight or deterritorialization traversing the entire plane. . . . (Thousand 252)

To elaborate, in one series, wave rhythms produce the paragraphs of which the novel is composed: Bernard said. . . . Said Rhoda. . . . Each concrete wave/paragraph is distinctive, singular, yet each is shaped by the others with whom it is in communication, like changing frequencies (sound waves) perpetually defined and redefi ned in relation to each other. Over the course of the novel, we see each “speaker” (I find this term least imprecise) use the figures and phrases of the others—which it may adapt, revise, answer, or refuse (to name only a few possibilities). Thus, like Tristram Shandy, The Waves shows us style-in-formation. As Bernard puts it: “I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me” (134); elsewhere, “I am not part of the street—no, I observe the street. . . . I am a . . . blower of bubbles through one thing and another. And striking off these observations spontaneously I elaborate myself; differentiate myself ” (115). Such re-makings are not limited to the contacts between the speakers; they include, for example, literary encounters. Bernard “changed and changed; was Hamlet, was Shelley, was the hero . . . of a novel by Dostoevsky; was for a whole term, incredibly, Napoleon; but was Byron chiefly” (Waves 249). Even observation is a form of participation, a relation; likewise, the rhythms of the novel involve while holding off a reader, working against sympathetic identification or even partiality. As Bishop puts it, “we are distanced because we are not meant to identify

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with a character but with an experience, an emotion” (Virginia 110). The emotion might almost be called “love,” if, like Bernard, we situate “love” as an imprecise but convenient word for a less specific, less subjective quality of feeling: “We have come together at a par ticu lar time, to this par ticular spot. We are drawn into this communion by some deep, some common emotion. Shall we call it, conveniently, ‘love’?” (263). As a form, waves are dramatically non-teleological; they press toward endless iteration. In some ways at odds with the waves, the italicized passages that describe the movement of the sun, dividing the novel into segments, introduce formal principles of interval and succession. The wave form that repeats itself unceasingly becomes the bearer of a succession of developments, each of which it refracts and elaborates until the sun shifts, the clock moves, the scene is altered. The sun’s movements presage developments that take place at the level of the body, of language and social position. First, for example, the group of speakers is divided in two along the line of biological sex. Louis has a father in Brisbane and Rhoda no father at all; these two are now placed on the outside edges, marginalized by class, not like Bernard and Neville, “who inherit armchairs” (96). As margins, moreover, Louis and Rhoda (who become lovers) come to designate two extremes, states of arrest that bracket off a more fluid middle. Louis is stalled by identity. Early in the novel he hears, again and again, the unfree return of the same: “something stamping . . . a great beast’s foot is chained. It stamps, and stamps, and stamps” (9). Later, he has “signed [his] name . . . already twenty times. I, and again I, and again I. Clear, fi rm, unequivocal, there it stands, my name. Clear-cut and unequivocal am I too” (167). Louis’s “unequivocal I” limits his potential to becomeother: He cannot stop becoming himself, over and over. At the opposite extreme, we find Rhoda: “I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I said, and fell” (64). Rhoda cannot connect the elements in her series; she cannot make herself cohere as a dynamic unity, a Style. Instead, she experiences radical discontinuity: “I cannot make one moment merge in the next. To me they are all violent, all separate . . .” (130). Communication fails her; she is “not composed enough” (107). Difference for Rhoda lacks gradation; it becomes not a force but a gap, into which she ultimately leaps. Bernard, on the other hand, is a great stylist, a great avatar of Style as principle of dynamic unity and coherence: “I must open the little trap-

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door and let out these linked phrases in which I run together whatever happens so that instead of incoherence there is perceived a wandering thread, lightly joining one thing to another,” he said (49). Yet even for Bernard, being-affected is not always an unmitigated pleasure: “Something now leaves me; something goes from me to meet that fi gure who is coming, and assures me that I know him before I see who it is. How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. How useful an office one’s friends perform when they recall us. Yet how painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have oneself adulterated, mixed up, become part of another. As he approaches I become not myself but Neville mixed with somebody—with whom?—with Bernard?” . . . said Bernard. (83)

Such passages acknowledge the tensions inherent in Style, the painful aspects of its dependence on others, the way the affects of being-in-relation include not just the pleasures of recognition and connection but also, for example, resentment, envy, shame. Contributing to the novel’s par ticu lar consistency, each monologue is spoken in the same verb tense—the pure present, producing time itself as a uniform field: “My body instantly of its own accord puts forth a frill under his gaze. My body lives a life of its own. Now the black window glass is green again. We are out of the tunnel. He reads his paper” (quoting Susan, 63). As a counterpoint to the use of the present tense within the monologues, the attribution to a speaker is always given in the past tense (“said”). The repetition of “said” makes the novel as a whole seem to take place as memory—but a curiously impersonal kind of memory that belongs to no one in par ticu lar, and becomes almost synonymous with experience itself. In other words, the double tense creates an image of time folded: a present folded into a past or vice versa. In a sense, this is the temporality of fiction, in general, which we indicate by using the “literary present tense.” Literary events are never finally over; they are always happening (again). Literature is exempt in this way from the temporal law of history, with its relentless unilinear transformation of the present into the past. Jane Eyre meets Rochester not at one specific unrecoverable point in history, but on page 144. This peculiar temporality is part of what gives literature its special relationship to the dimension of the presentational. History can be represented, but literature is always presenting itself, anew—to us.

196 Conclusion

The multiplicity the speakers make together might be imagined as an open constellation that faces, in the most literal way, a reader, to whom it appeals. Long before a reader is directly addressed as the “you” with whom Bernard dines— and to whom he discloses as fully as possible his singular Style—the reader’s being-there is elicited by the text, invoked as the one to whom the speakers “said.” This novel needs a reader like no other, for the characters do not hear one another. If the waves are to be “heard all through,” as Woolf had hoped (Writer’s Diary 141)—if the waves are heard at all—it is only because we “hear” them. As Garrett Stewart has pointed out, one of the more concrete ways in which we “hear” the waves is the frequent phonic play that takes place in the prose—for example, the phrase “moth-wing quiver.” Stewart argues that such phrasing creates a disjunction between “two senses of the reading body. It divides between eye and ear, between script and a tacit voicing fractionally out of phrase with it, overlapping the boundaries between written words” (421). Drawing on Lacan, Stewart sees this effect of “stylistic d/rift” as a kind of phonic oscillation or “aphanisis” that “zeros out” the subject in a disturbing manner: “Woolf ’s writing . . . incurs the body through a disturbance in the process of reception, an evocalization, as it were, of the reader’s own physical presence” (459). Yet such “sound defects” (421) and the sensory disjunctions they produce might just as easily be interpreted, like the relations between eye and ear in Jane Eyre, as minor movements of provocation that function to intensify the text and give a reader’s senses chances to singularize themselves. From this point of view, the novel weaves in threads of affect, traces its style with “little language” Bernard thinks he seeks: What is the phrase for the moon? And the phrase for love? By what name are we to call death? I do not know. I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and fi nd their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright wool . . . I need a howl; a cry. . . . Nothing neat. Nothing that comes down with all its feet on the floor. None of those resonances and lovely echoes that break and chime from nerve to nerve in our breasts making wild music, false phrases. I have done with phrases. (295)

As Bishop points out, the penultimate sentence in Bernard’s speech does precisely what he says he will no longer do, creating resonances and

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lovely echoes that chime from nerve to nerve (Virginia 112). Woolf has given him the little language lovers use: He fi nds it on the surface of the phrasing he renounces. Affect is not spoken in another language; it runs like ripples through one’s own, stylistic lines of fl ight traced through signification. Like Brontë, like children, like lovers, Woolf and Bernard “invent a minor use for the major language within which they express themselves completely: They minorize language . . . [They] make language itself cry . . . stutter, mumble, or whisper” (Deleuze, “He Stuttered” 25). It is this conductive minor key in language that permits and promotes recognition—what the child seeks from the mother and the lover from another—because it is style; it is a locus of singularity. As such, it communicates, at the same time, appeal; affect, attraction, alterity. As an image of precisely this process, Woolf ’s fi n makes its fi rst appearance in a diary entry of 1926: I wished to add some remarks to this, on the mystical side of this solicitude; how it is not oneself but something in the universe that one’s left with. It is this that is frightening and exciting in the midst of my profound gloom, depression, boredom, whatever it is. One sees a fi n passing far out. What image can I reach to convey what I mean? Really there is none, I think. The interesting thing is that in all my feeling and thinking I have never come up against this before. Life is, soberly and accurately, the oddest affair; has in it the essence of reality. I used to feel this as a child— couldn’t step across a puddle once, I remember, for thinking how strange—what am I? etc. But by writing I don’t reach anything. All I mean to make is a note of a curious state of mind. I hazard the guess that it may be the impulse behind another book. At present my mind is totally blank and virgin of books. I want to watch and see how the idea at fi rst occurs. I want to trace my own process. (A Writer’s Diary 100)

Bishop argues that The Waves “was Woolf ’s sustained meditation upon that image [“a fi n passing far out”], her attempt to coax the implications of it into words” (Virginia 107). In the published version of the novel, the image appears in Bernard’s words: Leaning over this parapet I see far out a waste of water. A fi n turns. This bare visual impression is unattached to any line of reason, it springs up as one might see the fi n of a porpoise on the horizon. Visual impressions

198 Conclusion often communicate thus briefly statements that we shall in time to come uncover and coax into words. I note under F., therefore, ‘Fin in a waste of waters.’ I, who am perpetually making notes in the margin of my mind for some fi nal statement, make this mark, waiting for some winter’s evening. (189)

But Woolf is ahead of Bernard: She knows, by now— as he will know in the end—that “some fi nal statement” will not arrive. At fi rst, one might want to say that this fin—which haunts one—is an image of the not-me: of, precisely (and the image is nothing if not perfectly precise and distinct) the way nature refuses to reflect me, to reflect mind, or even to be illuminated by mind. In this sense, the image opposes a Romantic view of the relation between nature and mind: Romantic ideology founders upon the fi n’s absolute alterity.8 Yet perhaps it would be a mistake to stop there, with the fin as an image of human, natural, or ontological alienation, for the image—if chilling—is very attractive. One might at fi rst understand its attraction as the negative form of reflection— the reflection of the negative—which Stewart, following Lacan, following Roger Caillois, describes as the effect of oscelli or anamorphosis. But to see it as such—to see the image as a reflection of the beánce in the ego— simply inverts Romanticism, and Woolf ’s writing takes us further, showing us that the image is not paralytic but highly provocative.9 Like sound defects, and like Jane Eyre’s experience in the red room, Woolf ’s image of the fi n promotes a sensory frisson associated with the erotic—but it also appeals to one intellectually, as though somehow it is “up to us to capture it, to receive it.”10 To capture or receive it may not be to uncover its meaning; indeed, when Bernard seeks a simile, the image returns to image itself (seeing the fi n is like seeing the fi n). This circular comparison explicates the manner in which the fin frustrates an attempt to state its significance, and in the process derails “any line of reason.” Yet in the face of reason’s failure, the fi n promotes an extreme productivity, as is illustrated by Woolf ’s numerous manuscript revisions and dynamic repetitions of the image. Marianne Moore traces this revision process: After its appearance in the diary, the fi n enters the fi rst draft of the novel as “a tent shaped shadow” produced by or as the figure of a narrator; next it becomes a triangular “hooded figure,” then the triangle of a “woman’s fan” (Moore 123–25). Edward Bishop adds to this chronicle; in the fi rst

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draft, Rhoda has the vision of the fin: “This is my reality . . . passing, like a dark fi n . . .” (qtd. in Virginia 108). Then it is given to Bernard: “We sank into one of those stupors that are more fertile than talk, when some fi n rises, here & there . . . & it sinks back, leaving a little ripple of curiosity.” In the second draft, it returns as a marginal note to a passage describing “these moments of escape,” “these elevated prospects,” “these glimpses,” “these visions of fi ns.” Next, the fi n sinks beneath the surface in a speech of Bernard’s: “I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion. Now there is nothing. No fi n breaks the waste of this immea surable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no varied words.” In the fi nal draft, it briefly disappears altogether. But in making her fi nal corrections Woolf returned it to the text in a new context, as an entry in Bernard’s notebook. (Virginia 109–10). Clearly, the fi rst appearance of the image in Woolf ’s diary does not ground the meaning of its repetitions. We can connect the image of the tent-shaped shadow, for example, to that of the fin, but we would not want to say that tent “stands for” the fi n, and the fi n does not get us any closer to what the tent “stands for.” Nor would we want to say that the image of the fi n itself grounds the meaning of the novel as a whole. The fi n is a kind of origin; it seems in some sense to have inspired the novel, and to pulse through it. But it does not carry the explanatory power origins are traditionally granted (for example, in philosophy, history, or psychoanalysis). When Woolf fi nished the novel, she felt she had “netted that fi n in the waste of water which appeared to me over the marshes out of my window at Rodmell” (A Writer’s Diary 165)— and yet this process of netting has been more like repeating than deciphering, more like transmitting than mastering, more like apprehending than comprehending. Like Brontë’s “hear an illustration, reader,” the image of the fin becomes, both in itself and through its repetitions, a symbol of its own production; that is, of the singular encounters that prompt aesthetic production, the “process” Woolf thought to “trace” when the image fi rst appeared. In earlier chapters, I have associated “sensibility” with a general susceptibility to attraction, the open movement of desire as dynamic repetition, which is oriented not just toward the human but toward the phenomenal in general, including (as Yorick puts it) “deserts and cypress trees” (Sentimental Journey 51). Ultimately, the fi n is a singularity so charged with alterity and attraction that its appearance is always an event; it is a singularity

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that despite repetitions never becomes familiar, and always functions as a provocation, an encounter with limits that cannot be transcended, but only re-described. The fi n does not signify or explain; its power is one of incitement.11 It figures performatively the production of attraction, and the way in which attraction is, in turn, productive. Bernard says he will translate the image “in time to come”—but it is a wait that eventually stops seeking closure, as he stops waiting for something. Bernard gives up on the final statement, the ultimate synthesis; he drops his phrase book and allows the charwoman to sweep it away, but this is not necessarily a failure. As Bishop puts it, Bernard’s final cry, “Against you I will fl ing myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!” (Waves 297), is neither surrender nor affirmation; it is “a cry of recognition that captures the limits of knowing” (Virginia 114). Yet before this cry brings the book, if not the wait, to an end, Bernard dynamically repeats the others’ stories. He repeats them to “you” in narrative form in his fi nal dinner conversation, but he also repeats them physically, with his body: Yes, ever since old Mrs. Constable lifted her sponge and pouring warm water over me covered me with flesh I have been sensitive, percipient. Here on my brow is the blow I got when Percival fell. Here on the nape of my neck is the kiss Jinny gave Louis. My eyes fi ll with Susan’s tears. I see far away, quivering like a gold thread, the pillar Rhoda saw, and feel the rush of the wind of her fl ight when she leapt. (289)

Bernard’s body becomes a surface of sensory inscription; like stone in John Sallis’s analysis, his body has become “capable of . . . memorializing into an indefi nite future one who is dead and gone” (Sallis 26). But unlike stone, a body is fragile, mortal, momentary. Not even great writing—not even Shakespeare—will last as long as a stone. Bernard’s memorials—his body, his words, his testimony— are not monuments; they are only memory. Critics sometimes read a failure here, or even a kind of nihilism.12 But it is also possible to argue that this end registers an affectively complicated ethic of transience. As Lingis points out, the poignancy of singularity is located in its mortality, which cannot be abolished and should not be denied. Yet as Jacob’s Room shows us, transience is also the condition of possibility for change. Respecting transience opposes Bersani’s “culture of redemption”: the notion that everything of value can or should be distilled from the vanishing particularities of experience, and preserved as

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permanent truths. Transience makes one careful with things, makes one care for them; at the same time, the other face of transience means resisting the will to fi xity, refusing to tread too heavily on the future, making permanent marks on the earth that others will inherit, building rooms that are hard to dismantle, restricting the possibilities.13 “We have destroyed something by our presence . . . a world perhaps” (232), says Bernard. Such an ethic resonates with Nietzsche’s positive forgetting, the power to forget that makes room for the new; but in Woolf this power is either attenuated or enhanced by a handspan of memory that maintains the importance of witnessing, of recognizing or receiving the singular. Both Jacob’s Room and The Waves suggest that memory makes possible a special kind of recognition that might indeed be called elegy. Part of the work of mourning is the attempt to apprehend what does not return when one dies, what is left behind, what is repeated in other series, and what “cannot be imparted”: This then is the world that Percival sees no longer. . . . Now then is my chance to fi nd out what is of great importance, and I must be careful, and tell no lies. . . . Something of you remains . . . But for how long? . . . . A child playing— a summer evening— a door will open and shut, will keep opening and shutting, through which I see sights that make me weep. For they cannot be imparted. . . . Yet something is added to my interpretation. . . . For one moment I thought to grasp it. . . . After a long lifetime, loosely, in a moment of revelation, I may lay hands on it, but now the idea breaks in my hand. (153–57; spoken by Bernard)

With respect to the task of apprehending singularity, literary works have an advantage over life in their longevity, and their superior ability to return or to remain “conductive.” A text presents itself again with each reading. It presents itself, not its author; a person’s Style is “never still,” always unfolding, and thus it cannot outrun mortality. Though “the very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare” (To the Lighthouse 52), even a failed and forgotten novel gathering dust in an archive retains its potential to present itself again for a much longer time than does a human being. From this angle, not just Tristram Shandy and not just Woolf ’s “elegies,” but literature as such, almost by defi nition, potentially functions as anti-obituary. This means, in part, that literature forms an archive of styles that is for most people much larger than life: larger historically, geograph ically, culturally, intellectually, affectively. As Mark Edmundson

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argues in a different context, without literature we are stuck encountering only the world in which we live and the people in it. Literature gives us chances to apprehend other styles and singularities; it greatly expands the experimental realm of recognitions, contacts, and also, importantly, alterities; it gives us repeatedly the experience of, as Lingis puts it, divining an other. In short, literature is capable of attuning us to the acts of recognizing, valuing, and perhaps cultivating singularity, via the dimension of style. Learning to recognize Style is inherently a process, a never-ending endeavor. It is impossible to “do justice,” once and for all, to a living other—or to the fragile yet dynamic traces others leave behind to be confronted and interpreted, confronted and interpreted, respectfully and repeatedly. Thus, reading for Style entails valuing that which cannot be contained by meansend models, and resisting the reduction of knowing and learning to the facile exchange values of capitalism. Despite the dominance of transparent typography, sympathetic models of feeling, teleological plots, and the subordination of particularity to end-oriented desires, the actual history of the British novel can be re-read in this way, re- singularized, which entails reading not against the grain but the grain itself.

Notes

Introduction: The Novel, Education, and Experience 1. Likewise, in How Novels Think, Nancy Armstrong notes that “what we now call ‘the novel’ won its title in a field of argumentation as it figured out how to adjust to, incorporate, and abject competing ways of thinking,” particularly about the modern subject whose production and reproduction novels made possible (10). In The Economy of Character, Deidre Lynch asserts, “when we reconstruct the history of what we have done to and along with [literary characters], it is possible to glimpse something besides earlier versions of what we presently are. We can catch sight, in addition, of alternatives that might once have been” (265). 2. Here I echo Michael Warner, who argues that the dominance of a highly valued practice of critical reading “blocks from view the existence of other cultures of textualism” (16), making it difficult to recognize “rival, uncritical frameworks of reading . . . [as] just that: rival frameworks” (33). 3. See, for example, the feminist critiques of teleological plotting by Susan Winnett and Theresa DeLaurentis; also see generally the work of Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous, whose writing works on the level of style as well as content to elude and deconstruct these patterns. 4. On the distinction between suspense and curiosity, see Knobloch et al. 5. When I first began working on this project in 1998, it was very uncommon to use the work of Deleuze or Guattari in English studies; using Deleuze required defense and detailed explanations. Today, Deleuze is much more widely read, and in light of the nuanced use of his work by Victorianists such as William Cohen, extensive explanations no longer seem necessary. On Deleuze’s concept of the virtual, see Difference and Repetition, especially 71–105, Nietzsche and Philosophy, especially 47– 72, and Foucault, especially 1–22. Derrida articulates a loosely similar view of history in Specters of Marx: The virtual outcomes are the specters that “remain,” in the double sense of the words, “before” us. Also see Elizabeth Grosz’s The Nick of Time, and Viktor Shklovsky’s suggestive image of submerged literary lineages (189– 90).

203

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Notes to pages 8–14

6. See Kenneth Graham’s discussion of Victorian arguments over the novel’s educational value (1–11 and 72– 90), and Andrew Miller’s study of the relationship between reading and ideals of moral improvement in nineteenth- century Britain. Also see Stephen Arata, who situates Stevenson and Morris as exceptions to this rule— specifically as writers who opposed the emerging Victorian equation of reading and work. The history of the relationship between the sensible and the intelligible is different for poetry. On that history, see particularly Carol Christ, George Leonard, and Gabrielle Starr. 7. King focuses on the pleasures and theological value of Victorian descriptions of the natural world, which critics overlook in reading the descriptions as delays in relation to plot; Freedgood works to correct an over- emphasis on the metaphorical readings of things in Victorian novels by bringing out their metonymical connections to historical realities; Garcha investigates why Victorian readers enjoyed Thackeray’s Pendennis, concluding that the “plotless” segments of the novel afforded middle- class readers relief from the achievement- oriented temporality of their work. 8. Working from very different philosophical standpoints, Mark Roche and Derek Attridge critique this trend and its effects on the study of literature. In The Singularity of Literature, Attridge argues against “the treating of a text . . . as a means to a predetermined end” (7), an “instrumentalism,” which, as he notes, is visible not just in the endeavors of literary critics but in “more areas and activities than ever before” (6), including “outcomes-based” mea sures of educational effectiveness. 9. See, for examples and references, Patricia Cohen, Lisa Zunshine, and Vladamir Alexandrov. 10. See Marjorie Levinson’s review article for an overview of recent work in this direction. 11. As Sharon Marcus and Timothy Best put it, “those of us who cut our intellectual teeth on deconstruction, ideology critique, and the hermeneutics of suspicion have often found these demystifying protocols superfluous in an era when images of torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere were immediately circulated on the internet” (1–2). On the increasingly apparent limitations of critique for both scholarship and pedagogy, also see Sedgwick (Touching Feeling 123–51), Ellen Rooney, Rita Felski, and Bruno Latour. For prescient analysis of the cultural consequences of pervasive irony, see David Foster Wallace (54– 69). 12. As Geoff rey Galt Harpham puts it, “What are the humanities about if not the cultivation of an informed conscience, a habit of reflection in which the flow of thoughtless action and means- end calculation is interrupted by an examination of historical contexts and ethical considerations, by an imaginative awareness of the character and consequences of action, by a deep investment in the human condition and its possibilities?” (81). 13. On Deleuze’s understanding of simulacra, see The Logic of Sense, 253– 79.

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14. In a beautifully written book, Karmen Mackendrick argues that “we explore surfaces because they are, precisely, limits; because limit is implicit in desire; because surface itself is seductive, impelling us to touch, to enfold, to open” (24). Ultimately, she argues, the body and language function as provocative limits or boundaries for each other. Mackendrick is likewise interested in understandings of desire and attraction that take surface seriously (including the work of Deleuze and Guattari). 15. This body of work includes Jean- Luc Nancy’s Being Singular Plural and The Inoperative Community; Maurice Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community; and several works by Alphonso Lingis. Also see Bill Readings’s provocative application of these ideas to academic communities, including the classroom (150– 63, 180– 93). 16. Geoff rey Hartman notes that the word “style” is “short for vertere stilum,” turning the stylus; thus, as Hartman pithily puts it, “Style is what cannot stand still” (41). In her study of the rise of print, Elizabeth Eisenstein notes, “it seems likely that the very concept of a ‘style’ underwent transformation when the work of hand and ‘stylus’ was replaced by more standardized impressions made by pieces of type” (83). I return to this question in Chapter 1. 17. On the use of style to form or mark subcultures, see Dick Hebdige. Also see Deleuze’s analysis of the ways Proust’s characters’ utterances carry “layers, families, allegiances, and borrowings which are very different from each other, which testify to the links of the speaker, to his frequentations and secret worlds. . . . words themselves are world-fragments” (Proust and Signs 111–12). For Deleuze’s own discussions of style, see Proust and Signs, especially 103; Logic of Sense 260– 61; “He Stuttered” 27–28; and A Thousand Plateaus, 97. 18. Pater’s essay “The Child in the House” might be read through this lens as bringing out the ways that contingent encounters may play important roles in the formation of one’s style: “How insignificant, at the moment, seem the influences of the sensible things which are tossed and fall and lie about us, so, or so . . . little shapes, voices, accidents—the angle at which the sun in the morning fell on the pillow—become parts of the great chain wherewith we are bound” (20). 19. For an overview of debates among language phi losophers over this defi nition of style, see Richard Ohmann. 20. English Professor Donald Foster has developed a computer- aided system for analyzing style that has been used to assist the FBI in identifying the author of anonymous missives. Foster states, “a writer’s use of language is as distinctive, as inimitable, as unique, as one’s DNA” (qtd. in Beeler). 21. This line of argument could easily be extended to other arts and media: Dancers and actors, for example, cultivate the ability to perform different styles. On that topic, see Robert Barton’s Style for Actors. 22. In a nuanced investigation of singularity in George Eliot’s fiction, Catherine Gallagher argues that “individuated fictional characters . . . can never

206 Notes to pages 22–31 efficiently refer to types that, in turn, orga nize individuals in the world.” Rather, “the essentially referable thing about the specifics is just the very general fact that they are specific.” This paradoxical assertion “nevertheless does yield some insight into the nature of novels by indicating why the extravagance of characters, their wastefulness as referential vehicles, is precisely what makes them seem real” (65– 66). 23. Clearly, the privilege I am claiming for the novel is far from absolute. The poetics of Gerard Manley Hopkins, for example, can be understood to explicate, in another idiom (“selving,” “inscape,” “instress”), the value on singularity, its recognition, and its connection to the aesthetic (for Hopkins, also to the divine). 24. “But look—,” says Woolf ’s Neville; “he fl icks his hand to the back of his neck—for such gestures one falls hopelessly in love for a lifetime” (The Waves 199). On this understanding of attraction, also see the readings of Proust by Deleuze (Proust and Signs) and Bersani (Culture of Redemption 7–28). 25. In his study of “recognition scenes,” Terence Cave argues that the frequent need for characters to show numerous proofs of identity— i.e., the difficulty of establishing who someone “really is”—highlights the instability of identity. This is true in part because a singularity can be repeated across individuals (vs. only by one individual); thus, the cough, the “Ha!,” or the way of moving function only imperfectly or heuristically as indicators of the identity of a subject. 26. As Mayoux puts it, Sterne’s “writing . . . is a sort of conversation, not so much between the characters as between the author and the reader in yet another present, the time of their imaginary meeting. . . . The determination to maintain in a future present his living dialogue with the reader is everywhere” (579). For a different analysis of the question of representing particularity in Tristram Shandy, see Lynch, Economy of Character, 23–56. 27. For a helpful consideration of the relationship between style and parody, see Chatman. 28. A second work that seems to exemplify this mode of reading and responding is Walter Slatoff ’s The Look of Distance. In both cases, the exceptionally close, appreciative relationship between the critic and the literary works discussed yields fi nely textured readings oriented toward the recognition, illumination, and also reinscription of styles. 29. “I doubt that any theme is in itself good or bad. It gives a chance to one’s peculiar qualities—that’s all” (A Writer’s Diary 100).

1. Typing Feeling: Sympathy, Sensibility, and Sentimentality 1. On this relationship, see, for example, N. Katherine Hayles, “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep.” Though studies of the history of printing have been written

Notes to pages 31–33

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from within the trade for centuries, academic interest in this topic is relatively new. See especially the 2006 special issue of PMLA, The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature (ed. Leah Price) and The Book History Reader (ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery). 2. Janet Todd, for example, associates the novel of sensibility with “a typographically excited mode” (Sensibility 85). A lack of terms for describing typography poses problems even for those who take it seriously. As type designer Ethan Hoefler remarks in the documentary fi lm Helvetica, “There is no way to describe the qualitative parts of type faces without resorting to things that are fully outside it.” For example, “[this type face] should have that orange plastic, typewriter, Roman holiday espresso feeling.” 3. Studies that relate typography to history, literary history, or literary interpretation remain few in number, but include the work of Jerome McGann and D. F. Mackenzie, who have long advocated for the importance of attending to the material text; Glyn White, Joanna Drucker, and Craig Dworkin on twentieth- century literature; and J. Paul Hunter (especially “From Typology to Type”) and Janine Barcas on eighteenth- century texts. Also see J. A. Downie’s call for greater attention to printers in histories of the novel; E. A. Levenston (though unfortunately Levenston’s analyses of pre-nineteenth century texts are not consistently reliable), and the recent collections Mar(k)ing the Text (ed. Bray, Handley, and Henry), The Iconic Page (ed. Bornstein and Tinkle), and Illuminating Letters (ed. Gutjahr and Benton). 4. Robert Markley, for example, situates the sentimental novel as a powerful ideological tool of the rising bourgeoisie. Some feminist critics have argued that the genre reinforces patriarchal power distributions: See Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings 17 and Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, 37–39. 5. Festa explores the double effects of sentimentality in the context of imperialism, arguing that as a rhetorical structure, sentimentality functioned both to create empathy for unknown others and to draw rigid distinctions and construct stable hierarchies between the feeling subject and the felt- for object. Ellis synthesizes intellectual, cultural, and literary history to excavate the multi- dimensional relationships between the sentimental novel and a series of political issues, particularly debates over slavery. His study suggests that far from being either apolitical or blindly ideological, sentimental novels played active and dynamic roles in a fraught political sphere before becoming, themselves, central objects in debates over the ethics of the novel. 6. In her poem “Sensibility” (1782), Hannah More writes: “Sweet SENSIBILITY! Thou secret pow’r / . . . Thy subtle essence still eludes the chains / Of defi nition, and defeats her pains. / . . . To those who know thee not no words can paint, / And those who know thee, know all words are faint.”

208

Notes to pages 34–35

7. Ellis and Festa map this terrain differently. Ellis remarks, “though sensibility and sentimental may not be separated, that is not because they share a single unitary meaning, but rather, they amalgamate and mix freely a large number of varied discourses” (7– 8). He defi nes the sentimental novel as a point of intersection for this field of meanings, the place in which “sensibility comes together” (8), and suggests that this convergence helped make the novel, as a genre, into the dialogic space Bakhtin describes. While I fi nd Ellis’s approach fruitful and illuminating, I believe it may be useful to work in the opposite direction: that is, to distinguish between the patterns (or amalgamates) that repeat themselves under various names within, between, and beyond novels. This approach may help us recognize what was at stake in the debates that ultimately led to the (incomplete) suppression of two dynamics, making the novel into a less ideally dialogic space than Bakhtin’s model perhaps suggests. Festa’s defi nitions of sympathy and sentimentality almost invert the relations I establish here. The fluidity of the terms makes such discrepancies almost inevitable; also, Festa’s comparative study includes French usages, which, as she shows, bear a complicated relationship to En glish terms and ideas. 8. For a particularly clear and interesting example, see the satire “Pernicious Effects of the Art of Printing” by “Antitype.” 9. For example: It was common seventeenth-century practice to vary type for effect and emphasis, with proper names and important passages in italics and occasionally in variously sized capitals and in gothic script; in addition, nouns and other parts of speech were frequently capitalized. Spelling often differs from modern spelling and is inconsistent within the works and across works, and punctuation occasionally obscures meaning for a modern reader. Since this is a collection for the general reader I have regularized spelling and modernized punctuation, but only where this seems necessary. I have in addition avoided capitalization, italics and typographical extravagancies. ( Janet Todd, Note on the Text, Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works, 25). For arguments pertaining to the practice and philosophy of textual editing, see generally the work of Jerome McGann, especially The Textual Condition; the collection Scholarly Editing (ed. Greetham), and several of the essays in Mar(k)ing the Text (ed. Bray, Handley, and Henry). 10. Greg uses the term “accidental” in the philosophical sense, not to mean chance or error. More recently, book history scholars have used a distinction between the book as “material object” and the text as “sequence of words” (Price 10). As Bill Brown puts it, though the experience of a par ticu lar novel may differ across its various “mediations” (book, serial, Kindle), “the novel in some sense remains the same” (25). On the other hand, Janine Barchas and Anne

Notes to pages 35–36

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Henry stress the extent to which we miss semantic nuances of canonical eighteenth-century novels by reading them in modernized editions. 11. The Stanhope and other metal presses came into use in 1804 (similar presses had been designed much earlier, but were not widely adopted). Metal presses reduced the amount of labor required to print a form and made “stereotyping” (casting the form) commercially viable. The steam press was introduced in England in 1811, the letter-founding machine in 1822, and electrotype in 1830. The rotary press was introduced in 1848 and improved by web feeders in 1868. Though only a fraction of printers could afford them, these inventions exponentially increased the press’s overall speed and output. The handpress could produce about 300 sheets per hour, the steam press 1100, the rotary press 8000, and the web-fed rotary press 20,000. However, automatic justification of lines and mechanical distribution of type did not become possible until about 1897. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, type was set by hand; nineteenth- century printing technologies did not, in themselves, impede the use of italics or varied fonts. For more detail, see Steinberg, especially 136–45. The revival of “fi ne printing” by William Morris and others at the end of the nineteenth century, which failed at least in part because of expense and impracticality, may have distorted both past and present understandings of the difference between “fi ne printing” and what could always be done with a page in the ordinary course of typesetting. As A. J. A. Symmons put it, “Morris set the trade printer a standard which he could never hope to reach, and widened rather than diminished the gap between the ideal book and the book of every day” (qtd. in Steinberg 157). Also see Handover, 154– 68. 12. The repeatedly expressed desire on the part of eighteenth- century printers for “uniform type” meant, specifically, cast metal letters whose blocks were of the same size, which would facilitate setting the type in straight lines and prevent the correction of one wrong letter from interfering with the justification of a whole page. They were not expressing a desire for the “uniform text” of the Victorian era, with its massive erasure of typographical variation. Witness John Smith’s 1755 plea: “it ought to be made a law, That each of the different Bodies of Letter should always be cast to the S A M E Height, Depth, and Line; by Letter-Founders of the same place, at least” (27). 13. Clifford Siskin likewise argues that our tendency “not to engage writing as a productive, material practice” can be traced to the eighteenth-century “reorga nization of work into mental versus physical labor”: As writing came to be increasingly associated with knowledge, it was “idealized as a cipherlike medium for the power of mind” (24). This is also the moment, he notes, when the writer as Author began to be foregrounded over the writing; attention paid to writing and the issues it raises was “systematically psychologized” (15). 14. See Johns, Jody Greene, The Trouble with Ownership, and The Construction of Authorship (ed. Woodmansee and Jaszi).

210

Notes to pages 36–46

15. For a list of writers who appropriated Moxon, see Appendix VII in the edition edited by Herbert Davis and Harry Carter (442–44). 16. In 1797, Henry Lemoine lists among the qualities of a good compositor: liberal education; genius and taste; knowledge of English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew; and “a mind capable of being improved in such knowledge as contributes to exercise the Art with address and judgment” (69). 17. As a printer, Moxon’s special interest was geography; he also printed works on astronomy, math, navigation, new inventions, trades such as bricklaying, and religious doctrine. For a list of works printed by Moxon, see Appendix I of Mechanick Exercises (ed. Davis and Carter). 18. For a few especially interesting case studies of eighteenth- century reading practices, see the essays by Naomi Tadmor and John Brewer in The Practice and Representation of Reading in England. Also see H. J. Jackson’s study of marginalia in the Romantic era. 19. Women were quite active in the printing industry, possibly aided by the fact that printing took place in houses (literally): see Johns 78. 20. There is some evidence that less skilled readers were thought to require heavier textual marking. Pope reduced his use of italics in the more expensive folio editions of his Works, but kept the italics in the cheap trade editions. David Foxton speculates, “perhaps he felt that the vulgar needed help in reading his work correctly” (qtd. in Bray 108). One might hypothesize that typographical emphasis dwindled as the reading skills of the literate public improved. However, this hypothesis presumes that the cognitive “internalization” of emphasis is a superior, more sophisticated model of reading, and thus begs the question of the differences between the models. 21. One should note, however, that some authors did mark the copy for emphasis; also, some superintended the printing process closely or asked a trusted person to do so in their stead. Generally speaking, authors gradually and unevenly gained control over their texts as individual authorship gained clearer legal and social defi nition following the copyright act of 1709. See Greene, The Trouble; Woodmansee and Jaszi; and Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing. 22. Though most historians date the shift in understanding nerves to the 1740s, images of the nerves as vibrating fibers appear earlier (for example, in George Cheyne’s 1724 Essay of Health and Long Life). Conversely, a medical treatise based fi rmly in the humoral paradigm appeared in En gland as late as 1758 (Mullan 234). 23. For more detailed coverage, see Vila, Johns (393– 96), and Porter, Flesh. 24. See Johns’s analysis of Robert Boyle’s journals, 380–408. 25. For further discussion of Cheyne, see G. J. Barker-Benfield, 6–22. 26. For example, a woman’s breast and uterus were widely thought to stand in relationships of sympathy with each other; this concept persisted well into the nineteenth century. The OED provides an example drawn from A. Meadows,

Notes to pages 46–53

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Man Midwifery, 1871: When attempting to induce labor, if a pregnant woman has another child, “the child should be put to the breast . . . as this . . . through the sympathy between the breast and the uterus, is sure to excite uterine action.” 27. On eighteenth- century theories of the nerves, see Barker- Benfield (1–36) and G. S. Rousseau (229–31). James Rodgers and Valerie Grosvenor Myer also provide helpful discussions of eighteenth-century physiology. 28. Like Moxon’s, Smith’s book was widely plagiarized and included in “compilations”—for example, the books by Luckholme and Caleb Stower. 29. In the eighteenth century, punctuation was as tied to the body, and almost as unruly, as practices of emphasis. Punctuation was widely understood as a system of pauses: Differences between the marks were based on time, not grammar. According to Baker, for example, a comma “directs us to rest while we may count two”; a semicolon “directs us to stop while we may tell three,” and a full stop “while we may tell ten, if the sentence be long; but if the Sentence be short, the Pause need not be so long” (44–45). Bishop Robert Lowth defi nes the pauses relationally, as in music, rather than prescribing specific counts (119–20). In the nineteenth century, punctuation was gradually redefi ned as a structural element internal to the grammatical rules of language, a system that does not depend on the reader’s physiological responses or enactments. On the history of punctuation, see M. B. Parkes, Anne Henry, Paul Bruthiaux, Kathryn Sutherland, and John Lennard. This pool of scholarship is rather small, which Leânard attributes to structuralism’s unfortunate failure to take punctuation into consideration. 30. Stephen Greenblatt makes much the same argument about the risks of empathy in cross- cultural encounters: “Empathy . . . may be a feeling of oneself into an object, but that object may have to be drained of its own substance before it will serve as an appropriate vessel” (Renaissance Self-Fashioning 227). 31. See David Marshall’s reading of Diderot in The Surprising Effects of Sympathy (105–34). As Marshall argues, understandings of sympathy were closely involved with theatrical relations (spectacle and spectator). For an alternative perspective on the relations between sympathy and theatricality, see Rae Greiner, who also makes a compelling case for seeing a very close relationship between the nineteenth- century realist novel and Smith’s theory of sympathy. 32. The question of the plea sure of pain or taking plea sure in another’s pain posed an ethical problem addressed by Locke, Burke, Smith, and Hume, among others. See Law, 150– 64; Marshall, Surprising, 12–49; and Wandless, “Narrative Pain.” Van Sant highlights parallels between scenes of suffering in novels and scientific investigations that relied on provoking and observing pain (EighteenthCentury 60–82). For an alternate point of view, see Binhammer, who shows connections in certain eighteenth-century instances between the pleasures of pain and female homoeroticism.

212

Notes to pages 55–59

33. American history offers no direct parallel to either the embrace of “effeminate” sentimentality in England, or the reaction against it in the 1790s and 1800s. Thus, the histories of sentimental fiction in England and America are not isomorphic, despite cross-Atlantic influences. See Michelle Burnham for consideration of early trans-Atlantic influences on sentimental literature. For further discussion of the meaning and value of “effeminacy” in eighteenthcentury British culture, see Barker-Benfield (104–53). 34. Feminist responses to this conjugation have ranged from condemning the sexism in sentimental texts (or the harmful effects of leading women to overvalue feeling) to condemning the sexism in the critical reception of such texts. The former approach is exemplified by Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women and more recently by Mary Ann Doane. The latter is exemplified by Jane Tompkin’s work on American sentimental fiction; also see Julia Sterne and Suzanne Clark. Clark argues that “the coherence of ‘the sentimental’ ” has been largely produced by “opprobrium . . . the ‘serious’ constitutes itself again and again—not as a continuity but in a series of repetitions— against a feminized ‘other’ discourse which functions like woman herself to make the binary defi nition possible” (19). Deidre Lynch offers a different way of critiquing the gendered oppositions between high/low, classic/popu lar, or realism/romance, suggesting that such terms may “index” not a stable opposition between two “categories of writing,” but rather “the varying uses to which readers can put a single text” (“At Home” 188). That is to say, the terms describe contexts that, rather than being mutually exclusive, are always permeable to each other. 35. See Janice Radway’s analysis of the “ideal romance” (Reading 119–56). 36. As traced by Warhol; see particularly her account of her own response to Wag the Dog, xv–xviii. 37. As Warhol puts it, “the ideals of sentimental culture—the affi rmation of community, the per sistence of hopefulness and of willingness, the belief that everyone matters, the sense that life has a purpose that can be traced to the links of affection between and among persons— are good ideals. If manipulators of public sentiment . . . deploy the narrative techniques of the sentimental tradition in the ser vice of nationalism, capitalism, and commercialism, that does not drain the techniques themselves . . . of value” (55–56). 38. As Garrett Stewart puts it, “genres . . . are built upon zones of expectation . . . Detective fiction, for instance, seeks to enlist interest on the side of hermeneutics; historical romance on the side of nostalgia, psychological realism on the side of the autonomous subject; pornography on the side of objectified desire” (344). Also see Radway, Feeling (esp. 127– 68). 39. On this repudiation, see, in addition to Warhol, McGann (Poetics 1– 9), and Suzanne Clark (1–41). 40. See Warhol’s discussion of the way culture structures “patterns of affect,” 56–57; 122.

Notes to pages 59–61

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41. This 1752 book, which Hume called “of all my writings . . . incomparably the best” (qtd. in Hendel, vii), is often overshadowed by the earlier, massive Treatise of Human Nature (1739), which contains a significantly different theory of sympathy as “fellow-feeling.” In the Treatise, Hume argues that it is only possible to sympathize with persons close to us (especially those who “belong” to us as family). Hume was troubled by the implication that we cannot sympathize with those we don’t know: Deleuze comments on this problem in his book on Hume, Empiricism and Subjectivity (esp. 37–59). Catherine Gallagher discusses Hume’s 1739 theory of sympathy in Nobody’s Story (167– 74), pointing out that it works against a recognition of otherness (like Smith’s theory, in my earlier analysis) and creates an appropriative relationship tantamount to selfi shness (your feelings become mine). She argues compellingly that this theory positions fictional characters as “uniquely suitable objects of compassion” (168): Because they belong to nobody, they could be said to belong to everybody. Here, I engage instead with the arguments set forth in 1752. 42. Smith explicitly pushed away from this idea in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. For further discussion of the distinctions between Hume’s understanding of sympathy and Smith’s, see the articles by Samuel Fleischacker and Evan Gottleib. Gottleib connects the work of these Scottish phi losophers to problems of national identity. He reads Humphry Clinker as a novel that experiments with both models of sympathy; Smollett fi nally endorses Smith’s model as offering a more effective mechanism for harmonious social relations (and a united Britain). 43. In addition to typography, pages printed on wooden hand- presses carried traces of the body that disappear as the press was automated in the nineteenth century. The appearance of eighteenth- century pages depended on the pressman’s par ticu lar bodily movements; the pages thus carried visible traces of another body’s labor ( Johns 92). In this sense, the “trace of the hand”— of a body’s involvement in the process of production— and the quanta of “aura” this trace carries do not vanish in the transition from manuscript to print, but rather in the later transition from hand-press to automation. On the embodiedness of medieval books in contrast to modern “idealist incorporeal aesthetics” that “erase signs of material making,” see Michael Camille (42–44). 44. Swift mocks Dunton in A Tale of a Tub: “That worthy citizen and bookseller, Mr. John Dunton, hath made a faithful and a painful collection [of last speeches from the condemned] which he shortly designs to publish in twelve volumes in folio, illustrated with copperplates. A work highly useful and curious, and altogether worthy of such a hand” (27). Dunton receives brief sardonic mention in the The Dunciad Variorum (II. 135– 6, and note). For further information on Dunton’s life and more probing interpretations of his work and its historical significance, see particularly J. Paul Hunter, “The Insistent I”; Jody Greene, “Ego”; and Robert Adams Day.

214 Notes to pages 61–63 45. Greene writes that print “has the capacity to produce change, and it is in this sense that I want to think about the press as a prosthesis, or . . . a ‘technology of emotion.’ I’m thinking here of the now mostly obsolete sense of emotion as mobility, as a migration or movement outwards. Print in these texts [autobiographical writings by middle class tradespersons who lacked a classical education] is thought to enable a kind of discursive mobility, a movement from one social, civil, or psychic place to another— or perhaps, in the lexicon of Dunton, a kind of ontological ‘rambling.’ ” (“Ego” 128). The trope of rambling also occurs more widely in eighteenth-century texts—for example, in the work of Ned Ward. 46. A Voyage was reprinted, with minor emendations, in 1762, as The Life, Travels, and Adventures of Christopher Wagstaff, Gentleman, Grandfather to Tristram Shandy. Dunton is not acknowledged as the author, though the anonymous editor states that s/he is presenting Sterne’s source. See Stedmond, “Another Possible” (17n9), and Hunter, “Insistent” (27–28). Day mentions that Wilber Cross’s biography of Sterne contains a reference to “a letter (untraced to date) in which Sterne speaks of being indebted to Dunton for many ideas and devices” (138n24). Day remarks that “a close comparison of [A Voyage and Tristram Shandy] will convince the reader that the Voyage is either a most important though unacknowledged source for Tristram or a case of anticipation truly phenomenal” (132). Stedmon proposes a third explanation, that Dunton and Sterne shared sources, including Cervantes and Rabelais (17). However, Dunton’s work seems more likely as a model for Sterne’s typography, including his use of dashes; the resemblances are obvious enough to cast suspicion on the critical hesitation to recognize them. This is not to claim that Sterne simply plagiarized Dunton. Unlike Tristram Shandy, A Voyage cannot be retrospectively recognized as “an artistic success,” to borrow Hunter’s phrase. We might say that Sterne dynamically repeats Dunton’s “ideas and devices,” realizing their potential more fully and pursuing further the road less traveled that Dunton’s work suggests, as I try to show in the next chapter. 47. On the typography of Pope’s Dunciad Variorum, with comparison to Tristram Shandy, see Hunter, “From Typology to Type.” Swift’s use of asterisks in Tale of a Tub often seems designed to highlight the idea that print effects could be substituted for an author’s lack of knowledge or reasoning power. I discuss the opposition between Dunton and Swift in Chapter 3. 48. “The elementary concepts of repre sentation are the categories defi ned as the conditions of possible experience. These, however, are too general or too large for the real. The net is so loose that the largest fi sh pass through” (Difference and Repetition 68). Brian Massumi explains Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the words “affect/affection”: Neither word denotes a personal feeling (sentiment in Deleuze and Guattari). L’affect (Spinoza’s affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a preper-

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sonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act. L’affection (Spinoza’s affectio) is each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting, body (with body taken in its broadest possible sense to include “mental” or ideal bodies). (Translator’s note, A Thousand Plateaus xvi) Also see Deleuze and Guattari, “Postulates of Linguistics” (A Thousand Plateaus 75–110). This is the root of their concept of a “minor” language, further developed in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. 49. In using this term, I do not mean to invoke the theories of performativity issuing from the work of Austin, Butler, Lyotard, and Irigaray, among others. The textual performativity I will discuss is fundamentally sense-based, addressed to the body, rather than linguistic, psychological, or ideological. For a useful overview of twentieth- century theories of performativity, see Warhol (4– 6). As Van Sant notes, in the eighteenth century, “no aesthetic theory was developed to explain a form of reading that produces the specialized effects of sensibility narratives.” Though the word “rhetorical” was sometimes used (then and now), it is imprecise. “Rhetorical” is specifically associated with persuasion; it applies “when a writer moves the passions in order to move an audience to act in the world or to assess something in it.” In novels of sensibility, however, the goal is often to “move the reader’s passions simply in order to create an intensified inner state” (119). In such instances, I propose, the text is “performative.” 50. As one reader pointed out to me, the blank space might imply a temporal pause rather than a gesture. Yet whether the text scripts something like a shrug or something like a hesitation, I believe that my basic point about its performativity, the way it conducts an experience, remains intact. On “flexion,” see Deleuze’s discussion of Klossowski’s fiction (Logic of Sense 286). For a provocative phenomenological study of the relatively neglected topics of gesture and kinesthesia, see Carrie Noland. 51. As an analogy: when an orchestra plays a score, we don’t imagine that they are imitating the score; we imagine that they are playing the score in an original manner. Likewise, their per for mance doesn’t copy an earlier per formance of the score, though all per for mances of the score can be imagined as a series, a kind of repetition, though each per for mance will vary, and in varying, will differentiate the score: each per for mance will show or “actualize” what the score is capable of becoming in combination with this par ticu lar set of bodies and instruments. 52. Ann Jessie Van Sant discusses Sterne’s “miniaturization of experience”: the presentation of otherwise minor events or moments which, in giving rise to a series of “microsensations,” achieve “near- epic force” not because they draw

216 Notes to pages 67–75 significance from an “external reference” as analogy or emblem, but because they cause extensive “reverberations in the ner vous and circulatory systems of participants and readers” (100–1). I return to this point in Chapter 2.

2. The Science of the Sensible: From Sterne to Charlotte Brontë 1. The word “impression” also carries philosophical connotations, resonating with distinctions between impressions and ideas found in Locke and Hume (see Festa, 22–30). In The Double Principle, Jonathan Lamb argues in favor of Hume’s influence on Sterne, which he thinks has been eclipsed by the greater critical focus on Sterne’s relationship to Locke. Though Lamb takes up some of the passages I discuss here, he does not consider Sterne’s typography, and reads the passages in the context of very different overarching claims. Using Addison’s notion of the double principle, Lamb reconciles Sterne’s comedy (or wit) with his sentimentalism, proposing that the oscillations between tragic and comic produce an effect of the sublime. On the general tenets of sentimental morality, and their roots in the writings of the seventeenth-century Latitudinarian divines, see Crane. 2. Protesting the dash, and “the dashite Sterne” in 1839, John Best Davidson writes, “I am at a loss to know how the effects of this dash would be indicated in recital” (Section 65). As a mark that was not part of the system of pauses and was impossible to voice, the dash is literally contra- diction. It evokes while disrupting fundamental oppositions between voice and eye, blank and marked, disclosed and withheld, speakable and unspeakable, connection and separation. It becomes a typographical gesture that, like a body’s gestures, lends itself to expressive polyvalence, especially in the eighteenth century when its length could vary. On the history of dashes and ellipses, see Henry. 3. See de Voogd, “Tristram”; Moss, “Sterne’s Punctuation”; and Alexis Tadié (118) for evidence of the ways in which Sterne worked with his publishers to control the typography of his novels. 4. For other examples of effect-producing page breaks, see Portela (295–303). 5. However, also see Deidre Lynch’s nuanced exploration of the changing meanings of “identification” in connection with shifting practices of characterization and the “affective revolution” (10) of the late eighteenth century (Economy of Character, especially 116–33). 6. Writing in 1782, Vicesimus Knox argued that the new “sentimental manner” in English fiction has given an amiable name to vice, and has obliquely excused the extravagance of the passions, by representing them as the effect of lovely sensibility. . . . The languishing and affectedly sentimental compositions formed on the pattern of Sterne, or other less original Novelists, not only tend to give the mind a degree of weakness, which renders it unable to resist the slightest

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impulse of libidinous passion, but also indirectly insinuate, that the attempt is unnatural. (70) See Howes for an overview of the ambivalent response to Sterne from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. 7. Hagstrum outlines three general positions taken by critics: 1. In Sterne’s work, sexuality is actually at odds with virtue, and carnality is evoked only to be renounced (256); 2. “though the physical may properly be present in love, it must be transcended by the truly sentimental and moral” (257); 3. Sterne is “actually satirizing the sentimental movement for divorcing itself . . . from the fructifying forces of human physicality” (257). Hagstrum takes up a modified version of the third position, claiming that within the context of the eighteenth- century “cult of feeling,” Sterne “revived an older . . . conception of Eros, the one expressed by Bacon [in which] Cupid is the cause of all union, including that of sentimental fraternity” (259). My own position approximates this assertion, though Hagstrum’s reading centers on the tension between tropes of impotence and virility; I will try to show that the erotics of sensibility transcend this opposition. 8. Recent work in the history of sexuality cautions against the assumption that heterosexual genital intercourse was always a norm or baseline of sexual activity. Both Henry Abelove and Tim Hitchcock argue that the late eighteenth century was a moment of transition toward the greater frequency and centrality of genital heterosexual intercourse. 9. In her reading of A Sentimental Journey, Sedgwick argues that the novel conforms to a narrative model in which “the spectacle of the ruin of a woman” is used to help “male rivals unite, refreshed in mutual support and defi nition” (Between Men 76). At times, though, Sedgwick feminizes objects that are not clearly feminized in the text itself. This move enables rhetorically effective but ultimately dubious claims, as when Sterne’s rundown carriage becomes, in Sedgwick’s text, “the ruined carcase of a woman” (76). At other times, Sterne’s ambiguous sexualization of objects is rendered, by Sedgwick, as an unambiguously heterosexual gendering of objects (see particularly her analysis of Yorick’s “affair with the moon,” 75). Sedgwick herself shares new reservations about “paranoid” reading in Touching Feeling (9–13; 123–51). 10. Brissenden, for example, writes: “The significance of Uncle Toby as a symbol not only of goodness, but also of impotence, is not always recognized. . . . Nor is it usually recognized just how much Toby’s goodness depends on his impotence” (211). John Smyth connects the trope of impotence in Sterne to Nietz sche’s feminization of truth and Derrida’s reading of this Nietzschean formation in terms of castration (“ ‘Woman’ is someone who plays with castration without believing in it,” Derrida in Smyth, 93). Yet relying on the fundamentally erroneous image of the castrated woman underplays the radical departure from oedipal paradigms inscribed in Sterne’s texts.

218 Notes to pages 79–87 11. As the nineteenth- century critic Justin Brenan put it, Sterne’s dashes produce “that sudden transitive singularity of which he was not a little vain” (50). The manner in which dashes physically connect words resonate with Van Sant’s assertion that “sensibility . . . translates all sensory experience into a form of touch, which in scientific terms is a form of contact and mobility” (92). 12. Here I disagree with Lamb, who argues that “after the tumble on the bed, Yorick’s metaphor shatters into its literal elements. All figurative buoyancy is lost as cash becomes just cash, hands hands . . . and women paid for giving plea sure to men, prostitutes” (81). Here and elsewhere, Lamb’s use of the literal/ figurative binary perhaps eclipses the text’s repeated insistence on being read superficially, in terms of surface contacts, communication, and mobility. 13. On this understanding of sexuality, see, in addition to Deleuze and Guattari, Alphonso Lingis (especially Libido and Deathbound Subjectivity), Elizabeth Grosz (especially Volatile Bodies and Space, Time and Perversion), and the collection Sexy Bodies (ed. Grosz and Probyn). Van Sant pertinently notes that historically speaking, “the erotic suggestiveness of the material existence defined by sensibility was [not] fully available to women” (“Paraleipomenon” 89– 90). 14. Here I agree with Andrew Gibson, who argues that Sterne’s “tendency to fracture and dissipate the power and authority of narrative [involves] a refusal to subjugate the reader” (Reading 66) and “generates a morality of respect for the mystery and unknowability of other people” (63). Gibson also investigates the performative relation Tristram Shandy establishes with the reader, asserting that the narrative draws the reader “into [Tristram’s] uncertainty, . . . tentativeness and aptitude for conjecture” (67), and thus promotes the moral stance it represents. 15. Even the famous flourish that illustrates Trim’s gesture with his stick in Tristram Shandy fi nds an ancestor, precedent, or source in William Baker’s Rules. A woodcut flourish similar to Sterne’s appears on last page of Baker’s preface (xi), where it is paired with a hilariously suggestive woodcut of a seated man holding a very large quill pen, and again on the last page of the book (see Figure 1 earlier in this book). 16. On the challenges of editing and translating Tristram Shandy, see Portela; on the effect of such devices in the early editions, see Roger Moss, “Sterne’s,” and Fanning, Holtz, and both essays by de Voogd. 17. As Barchas shows, Sarah Fielding used hundreds of dashes of varying length in the fi rst edition of David Simple. Her brother Henry removed most of her dashes for the second printing (not to be restored until 1998); he may have wanted to distance her work from Richardson’s (153– 72). On Richardson’s typography and punctuation, see Henry, Bray, and Stephen Price. 18. See Todd, Ellis, Festa, and Barker-Benfield (351– 95). 19. On this transition, also see Candace Ward, “Inordinate Desire,” and Elizabeth Dolan.

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20. Interestingly, earlier objections to the overuse of italics, capitals, and other modes of emphasis target the convention of capitalizing noun substantives and italicizing proper names, because these habits take power away from the use of capitals and italics for emphasis (see Brightland’s Grammar, 153; John Smith, 13–14). 21. Likewise, a recent writer’s handbook states: “Italics can be useful, especially in informal writing, but use them sparingly. It is usually better to create emphasis with sentence structure and word choice” (Lunsford and Connors 542). The handbook discourages exclamation points because they “suggest that you are exaggerating the importance of what you are saying” (491). 22. Moxon states that “a good compositor is ambitious as well to make the meaning of his Author intelligent to the Reader, as to make his Work shew graceful to the Eye, and pleasant in reading” (Mechanick Exercises 211). Likewise, while John Smith railed against the labor caused to compositors by authorial changes at the proof stage, neither he, nor any of the other pre-nineteenthcentury printers I have read, complains about the work involved in setting typographical variations. It does not seem to have been perceived as a dispensable part of the process. 23. The 2009 MLA Handbook, for example, states: “Italics for emphasis . . . is a device that rapidly becomes ineffective” (Gibaldi 79). 24. See Hanover on the rediscovery of Casalon among disused stock in 1844 (145–46), and Steinberg on the recovery of the “Fell types” at Oxford University Press in 1877 (153–54). Also see Sarah Kelen’s discussion of London printer Thomas Dunham Whitaker’s decision to use black letter for his 1813 edition of Piers Plowman. Kelen argues that the choice not to modernize the typeface worked to associate Catholicism with the historical past. 25. Peter Shillingsburg’s essay “The Faces of Victorian Fiction” illustrates the difficulty of fi nding anything to say about the material appearance of Victorian pages. Victorian print conventions seem so ordinary and unremarkable: They make everything else look like a deviation, rather than seeming to carry historical specificity. In a brief discussion of nineteenth- century printing, Adrian Johns suggests an ideological link between uniform text and uniform, or docile, response for working class readers. He argues that the cheap periodicals made available by groups such as the Society for the Diff usion of Useful Knowledge, containing “nothing to excite the passions,” were intended to supplant more dangerous books and knowledges. Their format was designed to resist “reader’s creative appropriations,” though these always remain possible and vary according to social setting (630–32). 26. The typographical practices for poetry, including layout and punctuation, were never as uniform or strictly codified. See Parkes, 97–114. 27. On the fact/fiction distinction in the eighteenth century, as it entwined with the question of print’s trustworthiness and also the history of the novel, see Davis, Factual, especially 138–53.

220 Notes to pages 91–94 28. On the tensions between fiction and didacticism, story and principle, novel and social productivity see Gallagher’s discussion of Edgeworth’s career in Nobody’s Story (257–327). 29. Hansard laments that in his time (1825), “it may perhaps be said with truth that a much greater improvement has taken place in the printing of hand-bills than of books” (355). On the typography and printing of advertisements in the nineteenth century, see Handover (140–45); on nineteenth- century advertising’s impact on the novel, see Sara Thornton; on its relationship to spectacle and “commodity culture,” see Thomas Richards. 30. Also see the readings of sympathy in Jane Eyre by Amit S. Rai and Lara Freeburg Kees, which appeared after the article on which this section is based had gone to press. Rai and Kees both foreground the manner in which sympathy is complicit with damaging racial and imperialist dynamics in the novel, though both also suggest its ethical or egalitarian potential. Athena Vrettos’s Somatic Fictions includes discussion of the role of sympathy in Victorian medical discourse, and fictional representations of the body. Rae Greiner offers an insightful analysis of the relationship between Adam Smith’s theory of sympathy and Victorian understandings of realism; Melissa Schaub also invokes Smith in her reading of the connection between sympathy and Foucaultian discipline in Mary Barton. Elliot Gilbert, James Eli Adams, Hina Nazar, and Margaret Case Croskery offer readings of sympathy in Great Expectations, Adam Bede, Middlemarch, and Cranford, respectively; only Croskery suggests connections to eighteenth- century fiction. Andrew King and Tamara Wagner offer suggestive arguments about the connections between Victorian sensation fiction and the eighteenth-century novel of sensibility; as both note, critics have tended to overlook this connection. On sentimental scenes in Victorian fiction, see Fred Kaplan. 31. Discussing the functions of totalization and de-totalization in relation to the construction of self and other, Susan Derwin argues that Jane’s “strong narrative investment in the act or fact of dying” (99), and “the aggressiveness with which Jane as a narrator attempts to dispense with the characters in her story” (107), are functions of the “symbolic violence—if not the violence of the symbolic— that underwrites the achievement of self hood” (98). Jane constructs “an imaginary identity by expropriating her others” (108), destroying Bertha, getting rid of St. John, maiming Rochester, and then allowing him to exist only in relation to her own identity. In a slightly different vein, Carol Bock attributes the fact that Jane alone seems to survive her story intact to her intense need to “stay in full command of the storytelling that constitutes her actualized self ” (107): her wish to prevent her own version of events from being contested, and to ensure that hers will be the only voice we hear. Framing the same general argument in terms of vision rather than voice, Peter Bellis argues that Jane’s narrative authority derives from the position of the unseen observer,

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fi nally defi nitively attained by blinding all other gazes. In a more historicist mode, Helen Von Schmidt argues that Jane’s romantically “unlimited assertion of self, the Byronic insistence on self- defi nition alone” (91), precludes relations to others. As Carolyn Williams puts it, “in this novel, the process of Jane’s self- defi nition is precisely the plot, and it develops antithetically, by comparison, contradiction, and negation, in opposition or re sistance at the edge of the other” (66). 32. The tension between these co-present, but contradictory patterns of desire may produce the truly peculiar charge that this novel still carries for its readers, a unique forcefulness that has not been entirely accounted for by the classic oppositions used in discussing the novel (romance and realism, patriarchy and feminist revolt, or Romantic passion and Victorian self-restraint). For a reading of the novel that does take up these oppositions but places them, interestingly, in the context of both evangelical childhood and the popularity of Victorian annuals (whose unabashed appeals to romantic and exotic yearnings inspired the young Charlotte Brontë), see Heather Glen (65–143). 33. For divergent analyses of this general pattern in fictional (auto)biography, see Genette (Narrative), Moretti (The Way of the World), Brooks (Reading for the Plot, especially 115–42), de Man (“Autobiography as Defacement”), and Lukács (especially 77–83). 34. See The Culture of Redemption, especially 7–28. 35. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, punctuation marks that could be seen as “rhetorical”—related to rhythm or emphasis rather than syntactical grouping—were often suppressed as incorrect or superfluous. See Bruthaiux, Levenston (63– 77), and Kathryn Sutherland’s study of changes made by printers to Austen’s punctuation in the second edition of Mansfield Park. Though scholars often speak of a single historical transition from “rhetorical” to “syntactical” punctuation, Parkes shows that this is very imprecise; the history of controversy over different understandings of punctuation stretches further back and involves more than two models. The development of punctuation significantly postdates both the writing of prose and the advent of the printing press; the set of marks underwent significant changes and did not seem stable to eighteenth- century printers (see John Smith 87). Parkes argues that the spread of print helped standardize punctuation because the marks were cut together with the letters in a font. 36. This assertion is best supported by pointing to Garrett Stewart’s work on the phonetic intensities of English literature. See Novel Violence and Reading Voices, especially 192–231. 37. On the notion of intrasubjective jealousy, see Lingis, Libido (75– 78). 38. See particularly Glas and Aporias. 39. On the last page of David Copperfield, for example, Dickens’s narrator writes, “And now, as I close my task, subduing my desire to linger yet, these

222

Notes to pages 100–12

faces fade away. . . . I turn my head, and see [my wife], in all [her] beautiful serenity, beside me. My lamp burns low, and I have written far into the night, but the dear presence, without which I were nothing, bears me company” (870). 40. In the following discussion, I am drawing on de Man’s essays “Shelley Disfigured” and “Autobiography as Defacement,” and Žižek’s analysis of psychoanalytic transference in relation to the problem of narrative temporality (Sublime 55–84). 41. This analysis is inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of Henri Michaux’s description of “a schizophrenic table” (Anti-Oedipus 6– 7). 42. On this understanding of the relations between languages, see Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator.” 43. As I hope is clear, my reading is not meant to oppose or invalidate the influential critiques of this novel by Gayatri Spivak (“Three Women’s Texts”) and Nancy Armstrong (Desire and Domestic Fiction), but rather to suggest that those modes of reading do not exhaust the text and should not eclipse the co-presence of contradictory impulses. 44. In this sense, their work points toward later philosophical engagements with the ethics of sensibility. Andrew Gibson explicates Levinas’s late understanding of sensibility as a fundamentally corporeal and ethical modality of “susceptibility,” “involvement,” “exposure”; a receptive “aptitude” that is not a state or structure: “Sensibility is always moved” (“Sense” 248). Gibson argues that twentieth- century theory and criticism have tended to subordinate sensibility to “cognition and critique,” and to defi ne affect as “an active violence, a movement outwards towards an object, rather than susceptibility or openness to the event” (Postmodernism 164). As “the power to be affected,” Gibson argues, sensibility becomes “the problematic other of criticism as will to power, a will that is actually that of criticism itself, but that it insistently descries in the literary work” (Postmodernism 164).

3. Sense in the Middle: Teleological vs. Cumulative Plotting 1. Ian Watt’s pioneering study, The Rise of the Novel, is one example of this approach; Marshall Brown (Preromanticism) and Michael McKeon (Origins of the Novel and Domesticity) offer more self-consciously teleological, systematically dialectical accounts of the relationship between eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury literature. For critical analysis of Watt’s argument, see J. A. Downie, Homer Obed Brown (“Why”), and two special issues of Eighteenth-Century Fiction, “Rethinking the Rise of the Novel” (2000) and “Rethinking the Rise of the Novel II” (2008). Clifford Siskin critiques both “rise” and “novel,” a term he replaces with “novelism,” one feature of which is the developmental narrative, another its nationalism, and a third the “habitual subordination of writing

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to the novel” (172). Also see Deidre Lynch’s critique of this traditional manner of understanding literary history in Economy of Character, 123–29 and 250– 65. 2. At the risk of oversimplifying, I use the word “teleological” to refer to goal- oriented processes, where a preordained or pre-defi ned end seems to, or does in fact, direct and control the middle (or process) that leads to this end. To the extent that the struggle toward the goal unfolds as a series of stages or moments, each of which presents a useful contribution to be preserved and a problem to be solved by the next stage, it can be called “dialectical.” This (loosely Hegelian) understanding of dialectics requires teleology (without the presumption of a goal, or an ideal form, there is no basis for calling something a problem and something else a solution), but not all teleological structures, processes, or explanations are dialectical. (One might, for example, set out to make a cake, and proceed straightforwardly through a series of steps that are determined by this end and bring it about, without necessarily innovating or encountering problems to be solved.) 3. McKeon anticipates objections to his methodology: “To my understanding, the objection to teleology in argument is that it implicitly posits at the outset a result that is purported to emerge only as the result of inquiry” (Domesticity xxv). Yet this statement does not capture the problems inhering in the value judgments implicit to a teleological argument that assumes an end— specifically, a preordained form— toward which earlier works are reaching. McKeon’s assertion that “diachronically different phenomena— a before and an after— stand in some comparative and meaningful relationship to each other and that historical study invites speculation on what that relationship might be” (xxv) does not dictate that we read that relationship in terms of problems (before) and solutions (after). Rather, it is possible to situate different forms as alternatives, divergent paths whose reasons for being taken, or not, at par ticu lar points in history may be traced without the presumption that history was always aiming at the present set of actual outcomes, or the idealist presumption every form has an internal telos that it is determined progressively to unfold. 4. On questions of teleology, coherence, form, and formlessness in modern and postmodern art and literature, see Sianne Ngai, Ugly, especially 289– 97. Much of the material presented in this chapter was initially generated in the course of collaborative research with Michal Peled Ginsburg. I am thoroughly indebted to her ideas, questions, and suggestions, but should be held solely responsible for remaining weaknesses. 5. For example, in a recent book, Jesse Molesworth defi nes “plotting, the process of fi nding teleological significance within the merely accidental” (10). The entry on “plot” in The Harper Handbook to Literature concludes, “a plot has a shape that . . . is teleological: it has a purpose in moving as it does, and its purpose is to illuminate the beginning by the end, and vice versa” (Frye, Baker, and Perkins 352–53). For other examples, see Hayden White (9), Paul Ricoeur

224 Notes to pages 113–15 (167), and Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (especially 11–23). Defi nitions of “story” are often broader: Frank Kermode, for example, defi nes story as “events sequentially related [with] . . . an irreducible minimum of ‘connexity’ ” (79–80). In How Novels Work, John Mullan distinguishes between story (“what happens”), narrative (“the way that this story is told”) and plot (“hidden design”). He associates plot with teleological relations that operate via the withholding and revealing of secrets and connections (169– 72). In a well-known formulation, E. M. Forster aligns “story” with chronology (“a narrative of events arranged in their time- sequence”) and “plot” with causality (“the time- sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it”). A plot “with a mystery in it” is a “form capable of high development. It suspends the time- sequence; it moves as far away from story as its limitations will allow.” Forster belittles the “and then— and then” of story: It appeals only to curiosity (the subject of my next chapter), which Forster characterizes as “one of the lowest of the human faculties” (86). For a helpful discussion of the relations between story, plot, form, and time as presented in Shelley’s A Defense of Poetry, see Gallagher, “Formalism and Time.” 6. Susan Sontag notes: “One of the difficulties [for a formalist literary criticism] is that our idea of form is spatial (the Greek metaphors for form are all derived from notions of space). This is why we have a more ready vocabulary of forms for the spatial than the temporal arts” (12). On the problems of defi ning “form” and “formalism” for literary studies, also see Marjorie Levinson, “What Is New Formalism”; W. J. T. Mitchell, “Commitment,” and John Carlos Rowe. 7. As Robert Louis Stevenson put it, “Now the fact of the existence of the modern English novel is not to be denied; materially, with its three volumes, leaded type, and gilded lettering, it is easily distinguishable from other forms of literature; but to talk at all fruitfully of any branch of art, it is needful to build our defi nitions on some more fundamental ground than binding” (140). Catherine Gallagher argues that narratological understandings of form (whether as structure or as style) are biased toward visual repre sentations (charts, diagrams, formulas) or isolated moments. They thus occlude “temporal sequence—length,” a defi ning feature of the novel (“Formalism and Time” 305– 06). For critical engagement with “form” as defi ned by Hegel, see Žižek, Tarrying (130–40); on Kant’s understanding of form, see Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime. 8. See Greene, “Ego,” on the multivalence of “rambling” in Dunton’s work, particularly in the context of class (and other forms of ) mobility. As Hunter observes, after the death of Iris, Dunton “seems to have virtually come to live in his autobiographical prose” (“Insistent” 28–29). In some cases, especially The Art of Living Incognito (1700), his accumulating day-by- day accounts uncannily anticipate today’s bloggers (Swift’s worst fears realized, or rather cyberized). Yet Dunton himself writes rather fl ippantly, “ ’Tis the indiligent Reader who looses

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my Subject, and not I; there will always be found some Words or other in a Corner, to make good my Title Page. tho they lie very close” (Essay 92). 9. See, for example, his remarks on the unity of the hero and on the possible and the probable (Poetics Ch. 8, 234–35). For a recent analysis of plot and probability in the eighteenth- century novel that takes a loosely Artistotelian approach to the question of the relation between art and life, see Molesworth. 10. Swift harbored some personal animosity toward Dunton, having mistaken Dunton’s “Athenian Society” for a genuine society of respected scholars (it consisted of Dunton and two rather undistinguished associates). Dunton published Swift’s “Ode on the Athenian Society,” much to Swift’s delight, but later horror when he found out that he had been gulled. Stedmond establishes echoes between passages in Swift’s Tale and passages from Dunton’s Voyage Round the World (likely a source for Tristram Shandy, as noted in Chapter 1). Whether or not Swift was satirizing Dunton directly, Stedmond argues, Dunton’s book “provides an example par excellence of the very Grub Street formlessness which Swift himself claimed to be, in part, satirizing in the Tale” (“Another” 17). On Dunton’s relationships to Swift and other writers, also see Parks, Day, and Hunter (“The Insistent I” and Before Novels). 11. As Sterling Andrus Leonard puts it in his helpful study of this neglected corpus, “the prevailing view of language in the eighteenth century was that English could and must be subjected to a process of classical regularizing” (14). Most of the grammarians espoused the theory of “universal grammar,” and believed that Greek and Latin approximated more closely a pure state of language. James Harris defi nes universal grammar as “that Grammar, which without regarding the several Idioms of par ticu lar Languages, only respects those principles, that are essential to them all” (Hermes x). Language was regarded as an entity, perhaps divinely given, that in its pure state had the power to mirror natural reality and/or human reason. Locke’s understanding of language as a product of convention (or, in Hume’s version, social “compact”) was known, but not widely accepted. For further discussion see, in addition to Leonard, Bakalar and Law. 12. For example, in a lecture published in English in 1741, “A Discourse to Shew that there can be no Poems in Prose,” L’Abbe Fraquier stresses the need for prose writers to steer clear of meter, rhyme, and poetic diction. There is no reason for “passing the Plow over the dividing Land-marks, and giving to Prose what hath always belonged to Poetry; and thus making, of two distinct heritages, one and the same common field” (87). On the prose/poetry distinction, see James Sutherland, George Philip Krapp, Kittay and Godzich, and Ginsburg and Nandrea, “The Prose of the World.” 13. See Harris, Philological 65– 93; also John Seally, The Lady’s Encyclopedia (1788), Vol. 2, 134–50; and John Mason, An Essay on the Power and Harmony of Prosaic Numbers (1749).

226

Notes to pages 118–19

14. The word “vague” is Aristotle’s, but Harris’s “vulgar” evokes eighteenth- century class politics. The gradual spread of prose, especially its adoption in law and politics, was sometimes praised as a positive democratic development, especially in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. But the systems proposed by the grammarians probably worked toward reinstituting class-based hierarchies of style. For further discussion, see Leonard, 169–80. 15. To clarify, the periodic sentence was not new to En glish in the eighteenth century. The Ciceronean period was introduced during the Re naissance. Its popularity faded in the seventeenth century, when writers like Burton and Bacon advocated a “loose and free” sentence that is fundamentally cumulative in structure. However, the “loose” sentence lost out to the so- called “plain style” advocated by the Royal Society in 1667. After about 1760, the novelists of sensibility moved away from plain style, using ellipses, figuration and other rhetorical devices that supported their project of provoking feeling, while the grammarians advocated a return to Latinate sentence structure. Historians have sometimes aligned the preference for one sentence style over the other with the dominant values of an age. Croll, for example, asserts that the cumulative (“trailing”) sentence of the Baroque era was suited to “portray, not a thought, but a mind thinking” (29). Likewise, Ian Gordon argues that “the Ciceronian period with . . . its end foreseen in its beginning, implies settled convictions”; conversely, cumulative patterns were better suited to “the exploratory, doubting, and increasingly skeptical mind of seventeenth- century England” (109). Richard Lanham provocatively suggests that the two sentence types “point to two basic ways the mind relates itself to time and hence to human experience” (54). 16. Aristotle used the term “lexis eiromene,” translated as “strung together” or “free-running,” to reference the sentence type (and corresponding style) now called, interchangeably, “cumulative,” “loose,” or “running.” See Rhetoric III.8– 9; also Lanham, 53–54. Aristotle sometimes used the Greek equivalent of “periodos” (etymologically, “a way around,” “a circuit”) to mean the unit of the sentence; at other times, to designate a specific style. Likewise, in eighteenthcentury English texts, the word “period” may mean “sentence,” or a type of sentence (the periodic), or a longer passage that works on the same principles of suspension or withholding. It is not clear that Aristotle’s distinction is perfectly isomorphic with Harris’s or that of later English grammar handbooks. Problems of translation from Greek, the multivalence of the terms, and grammatical differences between Greek and English complicate this question. 17. It is important to note that the distinction between periodic and cumulative sentences, or subordinating and coordinating conjunctions, does not parallel the opposition between parataxis (the rhetorical mode in which items appear side by side without conjunctions or connections, sometimes used— as by Frederic Jameson— as a metaphor for postmodern experience) and hypotaxis

Notes to pages 119–21

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(whose hierarchical principles of subordination are generally taken to be a more sophisticated mode of intellectual and textual orga nization). In grammatical terms, the latter opposition, which has also been used in narrative theory, leaves out a third possibility: the use of coordinating conjunctions to form coherent cumulative sentences and prose styles. 18. In Aristotle’s version, “the hearer always feels that he is grasping something and has reached some defi nite conclusion; whereas it is unsatisfactory to see nothing in front of you and get nowhere” (III.9, p 182). As noted above, critics such as D.A. Miller and Roland Barthes have shown that novels do not actually succeed in closing off narrativity. The analogy to periodic sentence structures may help clarify the mechanics of withholding that function to create a perception of closure; that is, to mask the story’s inevitable incompleteness by rhetorically highlighting certain gaps or elisions and not others. 19. For Aristotle, a cumulative sentence “comes to a stop only because there is no more to say of that subject” (Rhetoric III.9, 182). Harris, for whom it is perhaps no longer plausible to suggest that any subject is exhaustible, rather argues that a cumulative sentence may be “produced indefinitely.” 20. In twentieth- century narrative theory, one often encounters brief references to syntax or sentences as models or analogies for narrative structure. In S/Z, Barthes provides a more extended version of this comparison, using the periodic sentence as an analogy for the “hermaneutic” code, the “Voice of Truth” in the text: “The proposition of truth is a ‘well-made’ sentence; it contains a subject (theme of the enigma), a statement of the question (formulation of the enigma), its question mark (proposal of the enigma), various subordinate and interpolated clauses and catalyses (delays in the answer), all of which precede the ultimate predicate (disclosure)” (84; also see 209). Another of Barthes’s five codes is the “proairetic,” the “Voice of the Empiric,” which is associated with sequences of actions (203–4). Building on this distinction, Peter Brooks associates the proairetic code with the “picaresque tale, or the novel of pure adventure: narratives that give precedence to the happening.” Plot, Brooks argues, “might best be thought of as an ‘overcoding’ of the proairetic by the hermaneutic, the latter structuring the discrete elements of the former into larger interpretive wholes” (18). My interest lies in re- evaluating novels that give primacy to the “proairetic,” whose analogy is the English cumulative sentence. 21. The increased emphasis on the importance of this plot structure is visible in both Victorian critical discourse and the careers of individual novelists. For example, Dickens’s early works (Pickwick Papers; Nicholas Nickleby) resemble the picaresque; their structure is fundamentally cumulative. The Old Curiosity Shop appears as a transitional work, with its abandoned frame narrator and aimless road narrative ultimately encased within a plot that turns on fi nal revelations. This is followed a few years later by the famously careful advance plotting of Dombey and Son, with its quasi-tragic tropes and characters. The Victorian

228 Notes to pages 121–24 innovation of multiple subplots was sometimes criticized by reviewers as detracting from a novel’s unity, but only if they did not appear closely connected or were inadequately subordinated. As Trollope put it, “There may be subsidiary plots, which shall all tend to the elucidation of the main story” (qtd. in Graham 117). 22. This structure is especially clear in Pride and Prejudice: The reader learns that Elizabeth and Darcy are mistaken in their judgments before they themselves do; the reader anticipates the suspended clause, and waits for the characters to arrive at it. Persuasion departs from this pattern, as I argue in “Difference and Repetition in Austen’s Persuasion.” 23. For discussion of these ideals, see Ablow; also Patrick Parrinder, Nation and Novel, 180–212. Victorian critics themselves sometimes protested against the marriage plot’s stranglehold on the English novel, appealing to French and German examples of novels that foreground other topics. Edmund Gosse, for example, claims that novelists “were set down to farm the one hundred acres of an estate called Life, and because one corner of it— . . . the kitchen-garden of Love— offered peculiar attractions, and was very easy to cultivate, they have neglected the other ninety- seven acres” (172). 24. On the relations between analysis of plot and analysis of other features, such as description, character, or length, see Amy King, James Phelan, Reading Characters, Reading Plots, and Catherine Gallagher, “Formalism and Time.” 25. See especially Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot; for a feminist perspective on Brooks’s model, see Winnett. 26. Here I differ from Ross Chambers’s interpretation of a comparable narrative structure. Discussing Nerval’s October Nights, Chambers argues that the narrator uses a strategy he calls “temporizing” to maintain the reader’s attention: “in lieu of what the audience expects or wants (in this case an ending- oriented story leading to the closure of, as Nerval puts it, either a wedding or a death), a substitute satisfaction is provided, but of such a patently inadequate kind that it generates a whole series of such substitutes” (67). Chambers assimilates this type of reading to “the temporality . . . of desire, structured by lack, as Lacan has it, into an endless metonymic chain of substitute ‘satisfactions’ ” (67). Yet it seems equally possible to hypothesize that in some cases at least, desire is not oriented toward ending, but toward continuing; closure itself is the substitute satisfaction, a kind of consolation prize for the fact that the book can’t go on and on. From this perspective, serial fiction— or simply serial reading—might not be a question of wanting to repeat the arc of disruption/tension/release, but rather of wanting to maintain or renew the absorbing plea sure of interest. For a useful survey of different ways the term “interesting” has been used as an aesthetic judgment, see Ngai, Our Aesthetic, 110– 73; for investigation of the eighteenth- century meanings of the word “interest” in the context of a reading of Clarissa, see Batsaki.

Notes to pages 124–29

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27. Nancy Armstrong, for example, asserts, “inasmuch as his masculine form of heroism could not be reproduced by other authors, we cannot say Crusoe inaugurated the tradition of the novel as we know it. By way of contrast, Richardson’s story of relentless sexual pursuit and the triumph of female virtue proved infi nitely reproducible” (Desire and Domestic Fiction 29). 28. In discussing Moll Flanders, Watt argues that despite the effectiveness of individual episodes, they are ill connected and fail to function as parts of a coherent structure or overarching design; Moll Flanders “is not so much a great novel as Defoe’s richest anthology” (130). 29. Twentieth-century detective novels, for example, usually follow the “set-up / delay / pay- off ” structure of the periodic pattern, but are often written in a running or “clipped” style (such as that of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammet). 30. Crusoe’s attempts to read God’s will in his successes and failures might seem to complicate this assertion. Watt attributes the unique pairing of material and spiritual to Defoe’s Puritan worldview, which later disappears from novels as the genre defi nes itself as secular: “Defoe’s attitude . . . exhibits a confusion of religious and material values to which the Puritan gospel of the dignity of labor was particularly liable . . . the highest spiritual values had been attached to the per for mance of the daily task” (74). I return to this doubling below. 31. One should also note that the passage is premised on the notion that Crusoe did not know that clay must be “fi red” before he saw the pieces burn, which seems rather unlikely. Throughout the novel, such sleights of hand permit Defoe to graft the fantasy of being the fi rst man— one who has no pre- existing knowledge, who must invent everything from the ground up, for the fi rst time— onto the project of recreating the known modes of a specific culture. The combination suggests ethnocentrically that the fi rst man would, naturally, invent British culture (make a pot rather than using a gourd, for example). 32. Tomkins postulates that change in the rate of information flow is essential to activating and maintaining interest (341–44 and 487–88). In his note on the text of the Norton edition, Michael Shinagel observes that most of the punctuation was probably inserted by the compositors because Defoe “rarely put any breaks in his notoriously long sentences” (223). The punctuation varies quite a bit even among the six editions published in 1719, though I do not believe the variations imperil the assertions I am making here. The fact that the punctuation does not follow grammatical rules probably encourages even today’s readers to process the marks as pauses, contributing to the effect of hearing the narrator’s voice that is so strong in this novel. 33. To clarify, completeness is not the same as comprehensiveness. No account could be truly comprehensive in the sense of including every detail. Completeness in the grammatical sense means that the construction does not

230

Notes to pages 129–32

lack the subject, verb, or object required by its structure. In a broader sense, completeness may be said to obtain when nothing seems to be missing, unanswered, unaccounted for, and so on. Nothing more is required for sense or functionality. Completeness in this sense does not imply fi nality: Something else might be added, another word, part, or detail. As Deleuze suggests, we can understand completeness as a mathematical total (always provisional, but not for that reason illusory) rather than a metaphysical whole. By contrast, because metaphysical wholeness is impossible, when we posit a metaphysical whole something will always be missing from it (the whole itself ). For this reason, Deleuze and Guattari describe multiplicity as “n–1,” where what we subtract is the concept of oneness or the “whole” (A Thousand Plateaus 17; 21). 34. The journal’s vexed relationship to the rest of the narrative has been widely remarked. Its contents do not contribute to the plot because Crusoe repeats the same information from his retrospective point of view; he departs from and returns to his journal in ways that are sometimes illogical, and the narrator’s retrospective point of view continually bleeds into the entries. For fuller discussion, see McKeon (Origins 316–17) and Marshall, “Autobiographical Acts.” 35. Of course, not all readers always experience pleasurable interest or fi nd the novel rewarding, for many reasons, some of which might be accounted for using other aspects of Tomkins’s model (i.e., successful competition from negative affects or alternative stimuli), others of which may be historical (i.e., the rise to dominance of the teleological plot structure, which conditions readers’ expectations). 36. Michael McKeon, for example, asserts that, ultimately, Defoe has “explicitly sanctioned our re sistance to allegorical translation” (Origins 319); Jefferey Hopes argues that it is “the impossibility of actually reading Robinson Crusoe as an allegory, that makes the imaginary story so powerful” (321–22). For the critical debate over the novel’s religious themes, also see G. A. Starr, Hunter (Reluctant), and John Richetti. 37. Levine discusses the manner in which allegorical interpretations of the fi lm The March of the Penguins function to cancel out “the reality of the penguins themselves,” so that they can no longer be “admired, attended to, respected, seen for what they are” (Darwin Loves You 257). 38. See David Marshall’s nuanced analysis of Crusoe’s varied forms of accounting in relation to problems of autobiography and the peculiarities of sequencing in the novel. For other approaches to the novel’s economic themes, see Richetti (21– 62), Maximillian Novak, and Wolfram Schmidgen, who reads the novel in the context of eighteenth- century mercantilism and the circulation of goods. It is worth noting that in contrast to Crusoe’s cumulative fi nancial plotting, in some nineteenth- century novels, the marriage plot seems to provide a morally palatable point for the acquisition or accumulation of money, a kind of

Notes to pages 132–34

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alibi for the profit motive (money enables the character to marry and establish a family home). 39. Brett McInelly makes this observation in his analysis of the novel as “allegory or figure of colonialism” (3). Despite its status as “the prototypical colonial novel. . . . the colonial elements of Robinson Crusoe have not been as thoroughly treated as we might expect” (1). McInelly notes that some of the most complex and insightful analyses of the colonial dynamics in the novel are themselves literary, such as Derek Walcott’s Pantomime and J. M. Coetzee’s novel Foe. 40. Critics often see Crusoe’s projects as connected moments in a single upward progression: a quest for mastery over the self, then over the island and its animals, then over other people. Richetti traces the trajectory from self- mastery to mastery over others; Novak and McInelly also develop paradigms involving expanding circles of mastery or possession. McKeon reads the relationship between the parts of the novel as “the progressive literalization of relationships that at fi rst were only figurative” (Origins 333). However, these schemas imply a progression that is not entirely born out by the novel, particularly if we consider its sequel. The fi rst few pages of The Farther Adventures make it clear that Crusoe has never succeeded in mastering himself; he cannot stop himself from thinking, dreaming, and talking about the island. It may be more accurate to say that all of Crusoe’s projects are represented as unfi nished, ongoing processes that sometimes complement and sometimes interfere with each other. 41. Or, potentially, to critical paradigms that vacuum out their plea sure; as Cynthia Wall puts it, “we need to reinvest Defoean things— and early modern things generally—with some plea sure that reaches beyond use-value or profit” (109). On the question of sensitivity to the pleasures of things apart from commodity fetishism, also see Lesjak (4–5) and Freedgood. 42. Here I disagree with Lesjak, who argues that the novel occludes work. In making that argument, she seems to exclude household labor from the category of work (despite claims to the contrary offered in her introduction), as well as Mary’s paid labor as seamstress, which is repeatedly represented. Lesjak also asserts that Gaskell separates the realms of home/pub and work/politics, positing the home as an independent realm. In my view, the novel does just the opposite: It insistently connects the two spheres and demonstrates that work and politics directly affect the home. To offer a few examples, both the home and the pub become sites of political dissent; Mary brings her paid work home; Margaret’s singing is both domestic and public/commercial. On the broader question of representing work, see Amanda Claybaugh’s analysis of work in Anne Brontë, and Elaine Scarry’s inimitable Resisting Representation. 43. “Modern criticism of Mary Barton is likely to start from the same point as [contemporary reviews]: an appreciation of Mrs Gaskell’s truth to life” (Gill 16); “Mrs. Gaskell does not have the intense imagination which could see in the fact of a disease an emblem of essential truths about society” (Gill 13).

232

Notes to pages 134–36

44. Umberto Eco noted in 1962 that “the structure with a ‘plot’ in the most Aristotelian sense of the term, is still the most widespread, even at the highest levels” and also on television, including live television—the news, sports. Eco argues that “the public” wants to think of real life as plot-like, and that plot as lifelike, despite the fact that it obviously isn’t. He notes that live TV could, if it chose, “suddenly open up the currently held notion of verisimilitude” by, for example, showing at the end of a football game not the delirious celebrations of the winning team but a pigeon pecking around a trash can (Open Work 105–22). One can always hope. 45. Amy King draws attention to description as a formal feature that has been eclipsed by plot in recent theories of the novel. King associates description with stillness (“Natural History” 460, 463, 465), perhaps re-inscribing a problematic opposition between narration (or plot) and description. In reading descriptions, one clearly moves forward through the text in the same way (though perhaps not at the same speed) as one does when reading other passages. Prying the idea of plot away from the teleological plot may be helpful here: Descriptions that follow a cumulative pattern are not motionless and not automatically antithetical to plotting, per se; rather, they move according to a logic that is additive rather than teleological, and establish a less anticipatory relationship between presentation and temporality. 46. Susan Fraiman points out that the foregrounding of domestic processes is often associated with the trope of survival (as in Robinson Crusoe and Mary Barton). As a counterpoint to the familiar dysphoric association of women with confi ning forms of domesticity, she analyzes the “blow- by-blow accounts” of “domestic endeavors [that] have become urgent and precious in the wake of dislocation,” for characters who are “outsiders to polite society” (343). Where my argument here emphasizes structure, Fraiman places greater emphasis on the psychological, social, and political contexts in which “shelter writing” takes place (in contemporary as well as older texts). Elaine Freedgood asserts in passing that Mary Barton “regresses generically to a protonovelistic form, the Robinson Crusoe-like starting- over-in-the-new-world story” (78). As I have been arguing, situating this form as a divergent path rather than a “proto” or primitive stage in the novel’s development helps us register its independent values. 47. As Michal Ginsburg has argued, when the family home is positioned as a goal that controls the movement of plot, family and home are necessarily idealized, placed beyond narrative, beyond the reach of change or decay. This idealization fits well with the Victorian understanding of the proper home as a closed and private space where one can fi nd the peace, harmony, and stability lacking in the world outside the home (a world which is thus redefi ned in negative terms, as the opposite of the home). See “House and Home” and “Narratives of Survival.”

Notes to pages 137–44

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48. One should note that Gaskell associates the bourgeois Carsons with qualities frequently assigned to the aristocracy (lazy, frivolous, decadent), perhaps to exempt her middle class reader’s own values and lifestyle from direct critique. 49. Gallagher persuasively argues that the plot involving Esther, Mary, Harry Carson, and Sally Leadbitter, which plays on the genres of farce, sentimental romance, and melodrama, is designed to demonstrate that these genres are the wrong lenses through which to view or represent working- class reality (68– 78). 50. Critics have also tended to elide the fact that the crime itself was Gaskell’s choice. Williams is exceptional in asking why Gaskell chose this event, which was historically unusual and thus seems out of keeping with the repre sentational principles she elsewhere follows (89– 90). 51. In Cranford, Gaskell makes a more sustained and consistent use of cumulative patterns. The later novel provides an excellent example of narrative sustained by interest rather than suspense. Yet Cranford deals not with the working class but rather with a par ticu lar segment of the middle class. See Ginsburg, “Narratives of Survival”; Croskery; and Schor, Scheherezade, 83–119. 52. Overall, Levine presents this development in a positive light, associating it with scientific forms of critical inquiry. Suspenseful narratives, she argues, model and promote the process of forming and testing hypotheses, a type of investigation that is designed to prevent one from simply assuming that the world conforms to one’s expectations. However, Levine perhaps overstates the analogy between the suspense generated by a novel’s plot, whose end will inevitably seem fitting because it has been designed by the writer, and the genuinely uncertain “suspense of judgment” that undergirds the process of scientific hypothesis testing. 53. Lesjak argues that Mary’s choice of Jem over Harry Carson “effectively maintains working- class and middle- class identities as separate from one another. . . . bypassing the whole question of cross- class desire” (41). However, we can also see this choice as affi rming her identification with the working class community: She decides that she does not want the social climb, the wealth and carriage, after all. Likewise, though Jem does achieve a degree of social mobility, his progress is peripheral to the action of the novel, is more lateral (emigration to Canada) than vertical, and is an effect less of ambition than of exclusion from his workplace community (his co-workers shun him, believing him guilty of the murder).

4. Verisimilitudes: Curiosity, Wonder, and Negative Capability 1. Stephen Greenblatt’s study of wonder traces a historical trajectory “from medieval wonder as a sign of dispossession to Renaissance wonder as an agent of appropriation: The early discourse of the New World is, among other things, a

234

Notes to pages 144–46

record of the colonizing of the marvelous” (24–25). In my fi nal chapter, I return to the marvelous as a sign of the eyewitness’s surprising recognition of the other in himself, himself in the other” (25). Also see Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park’s remarkably comprehensive history, studies of wonder and curiosity in the context of eighteenth- century science and travel writing by Mary Baine Campbell and Nigel Leask, Marjorie Swan’s study of collecting, and Barbara Benedict’s broad- based “cultural history” of curiosity. Though Benedict includes brief remarks on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary texts, scholarship on curiosity in post- eighteenth- century British literature and culture occurs mostly in the context of par ticu lar readings: See Hilary Schor’s reading of The Golden Bowl, Sarah Winter’s analysis of curiosity and didacticism in The Old Curiosity Shop, and Ann Gaylin’s study of eavesdropping. Sarah Kareem’s forthcoming book on wonder and eighteenth-century fiction promises to be a valuable contribution to this fi eld. I regret that I did not have access to it when drafting this chapter. 2. As Mary Baine Cambell writes, “Wonder comes under attack in a number of major seventeenth- century attempts to purify the codification and transmission of knowledge, as well as repre sentation of the scene in which knowledge is acquired” (67); by contrast, “antagonism to ‘science’ and preference for the weird or ‘inexplicable’ is centrally located among the disenfranchised” (71). On this point, also see, in addition to Daston and Parks, Leask, especially 4–32. 3. Though Renaissance typologies of the passions typically list curiosity alongside desire, more recent theories of affect (including psychoanalysis) tend to subordinate curiosity to desire, or to situate it as one of desire’s many hyponyms. This may account for the fact that curiosity has been little studied in its own right. Carl Goldberg asserts, “Curiosity as a clinical entity has been a neglected subject in the psychoanalytic literature. Freud never addressed the issue of curiosity systematically. His interest was in trying to account for children’s sexual questioning” (185). On Freud’s perhaps inadequate understanding of curiosity in children, also see Rachel Bowlby. Barbara Benedict suggestively asserts that curiosity precedes the sexual: “Rather than sexual discovery motivating the plea sure of curiosity, as Freudian thought suggests, it is the historical phenomenon of curiosity that sexualizes discovery” (8). 4. If so, this experience might be seen as a version of the “experience of énbranlement or self- shattering” (37) that Leo Bersani situates as the aim of desire: “a kind of masochistically enjoyed disturbance of psychic equilibrium” that “aims at being maintained, replicated, and even increased” (36). We should also note that the loss of self associated with wonder resists or even inverts the affi rmation of intellectual mastery that belongs to the sublime as Kant theorized it. For Kant, the key moment in the experience of the sublime is the mind’s self- confi rming ability to cognitively master and transcend what

Notes to pages 146–50 235 seems to exceed or overwhelm sense- based comprehension. Ultimately, for Kant, we “ judge as sublime, not so much the object, as our own state of mind in the estimation of it”; specifically, the way this “makes intuitively evident the superiority of the rational determination of our cognitive faculties to the greatest faculty of our sensibility” (Critique of Judgment, Second Book, XXVI– XXVII, 435–36). 5. For example, Phillip Fisher analyzes wonder as a special, respectable form of aesthetic experience prompted by phenomena like rainbows, mathematical formulations, and art. Fisher lists positively valued criteria for states of wonder: “the sudden, the unexpected, the all-at- once of the visual, a fi rst-time experience, a rare or singular event, a progression from mystification to explanation, a feeling of the freshness of the world, the bodily states of the smile and the swaying” (26–27). On the other hand, in their epilogue, Daston and Park argue that in our own time, “wonder and wonders defi ne the professional intellectual by contrast: seriousness of purpose, thorough training, habits of caution and exactitude are all opposed to a wonder- seeking sensibility. . . . Whether vulgar or edifying, an odor of the popu lar now clings to wonders” (367). 6. As Molesworth puts it, “curiosity is indeed the sine qua non of plot” (115), though as pointed out previously, Moleworth equates “plot” with the teleological or periodic plot. Many seventeenth- century writers, including Locke and Robert Boyle, praised the power of books to stimulate and satisfy curiosity: Locke advised parents and tutors to incite children’s plea sure in reading by selecting materials that foster the child’s curiosity ( Johns 382; 406– 7). However, the reading of “romances” was a dubious proposition; Boyle believed that his early reading of romances had “prejudic’d him by unsettling his Thoughts” (qtd. in Johns 380), just as Burton had warned in Anatomy of Melancholy. 7. Fisher argues that wonder requires a “sudden experience of the whole”: This is achieved in lyric poetry, but “memory and expectation are so fundamental to the narrative arts . . . that wonder is ruled out, or is replaced, we might say, by mere surprise, as in a twist of plot. . . . In language it is the work of familiar syntactic structures and the work of grammar that builds in a strong component of expectation at every moment” (21–22). 8. On this point, see Freedman. Though it may initially seem counterintuitive, it is in fact quite difficult to fi nd a thing in Victorian fiction that resists being “read” in these ways, which reflects the longstanding value on aesthetic unity as well as the reader’s drive to interpret: to take fictional things as signifiers. Despite our habitual association of critical interpretation with difficulty and work, taking things literally is, perhaps, the most challenging of all possible modes of reading. I explore this point more fully later in this chapter. 9. See Peter Brooks’s reading of Doyle’s story “The Musgrove Ritual” (Reading for the Plot 23–29) for a nuanced analysis of the temporal dynamics of plot and narration in detective fiction.

236

Notes to pages 150–52

10. For example, in “The Adventure of the Empty House,” Watson describes “a group of loafers upon the pavements, all staring up at a par ticu lar window” (485). In the same passage, the “tall, thin man with coloured glasses, whom [Watson] strongly suspects of being a plainclothes detective” and who is “pointing out some theory of his own” that Watson fi nds “absurd” strongly suggests Poe’s detective, Dupin. If so, the story alludes to another locked-room mystery, Poe’s “Murder in the Rue Morgue.” Therein, Poe’s narrator remarks, “The house was readily found; for there were still many persons gazing up at the closed shutters, with an objectless curiosity, from the opposite side of the way” (13, emphasis added). For a reading of curiosity in the Poe story, see my “Objectless Curiosity” (from which parts of this section are adapted). Without engaging Lacan’s intricate reading of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” in any depth, it may be worth pointing out that the gaze of the crowd is not inscribed in the tripartite structure of glances Lacan identifies. It is possible that the crowd’s gaze resists inscription within the Lacanian paradigm of desire, and is better explained by theories that revise or oppose this paradigm (such as the work of Bersani or Deleuze and Guattari). 11. If so, the wonder of a gaping crowd would partake of the “subjective universality” that is the ultimate basis of aesthetic plea sure for Kant. Kant would undoubtedly fi nd this application perverse; however, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht associates the plea sure of being part of a spectating crowd at sporting events with Kant’s subjective universality; he also provocatively aligns this plea sure with the Dionysian side of Nietz sche’s Apollonian/Dionysian duality (204–23). 12. Susan Stewart, for example, writes: “While the freak show may seem, at fi rst glance, to be a display of the grotesque, the distance it invokes makes it instead an inverse display of perfection. Through the freaks we derive an image of the normal” (On Longing 132–33). 13. Kant belittled curiosity, “ ‘a taste for all that is rare, little though its inherent worth otherwise might be’ ”; for him “this ‘spirit of minutiae’ came close to being ‘the opposite of the sublime’ ” (see Daston and Park’s discussion, 362). In Kant’s aesthetic philosophy, the role played by the formation of “normal ideas” in our perception of the beautiful pointedly excludes what ever is aberrant or “curious” from the beautiful and from the realm of aesthetic judgments (see Critique of Judgment, First Book, XVII, 429–31). Also see Alex Wetmore for an analysis of the multifaceted relations between interesting machines, theories of feeling, and theories of moral and aesthetic value in the eighteenth century. 14. For the past twenty years, a man named Pete Kelley has been building a castle on a piece of farmland in northern Wisconsin. In a newspaper interview, Kelley explains that as a young man, he was “itching to build something.” After discarding ideas for a boat and an airplane he settled on the castle, which, he acknowledges, “will always be a work in progress.” Kelley spends all of his free time and money building the castle; as his father puts it, “It’s a fascination of

Notes to pages 152–54

237

some kind” (Loiselle). Clearly, the point of the castle is its building. An even better example is Dr. Evermore’s Forevertron, a massive 300- ton assemblage of scrap metal that resembles nothing (located in Sumpter, Wisconsin). For a more extended discussion of the curiosity as object, see my essay “DesiringProduction and the Novel.” 15. Benedict notes that Shelley “deliberately rehearses a discourse about curiosity that dates back more than 150 years” (241). The fact that the novel is often read today as a parable about the dangers of genetic engineering indicates that this discourse remains very much in play. 16. In the 1899 edition of The Emotions and the Will, Alexander Bain makes this claim of wonder: Wonder is prompted by “some startling deviation from use and wont in the world without” (83). He notes that the stimulus may be something that “rises far above common experience” or something that “falls beneath what is ordinary” (85–86). 17. Steven Greenblatt asserts that “wonder is absolutely exigent, a primary or radical passion” (17). Likewise, Lawrence Weschler explores what he calls “the impulse, the orientation toward wonder” (99). Lord Kames also situates curiosity as a “natural propensity,” though he draws a distinction between legitimate curiosity that is “indulged in order to acquire knowledge” and the shameful preference for “any thing merely because it is new” (qtd. in Leask, 27–28). 18. On the relationship between spectacle, suffering, and objectification in literature or fi lm, see Laura Mulvey, Susan Stewart (On Longing), Susan Sontag (Regarding), Slatoff, and Martin Harries; in per for mance studies, see Jane Goodall and Baz Kershaw. Elaine Scarry’s reconsideration of the ethics of looking in the context of aesthetic experience and the response to beauty pushes away from the earlier tendency to associate looking with harm (or spectatorship with power and spectacle with vulnerability). That is also true of some recent work on the “freak show”: See Christopher Smit and Erin O’Connor. 19. On the other side of the coin, a lack of natural curiosity characterizes the egotistical and the unsociable. For example, in Margaret Drabble’s novel A Natural Curiosity, Liz is led to realize that she has never asked Ivan any questions about himself, and feels guilty about her “shameful indifference and incuriosity” (75– 77). Likewise, writing from the perspective of the analyst, Carl Goldberg’s concern is with patients who lack curiosity; specifically, curiosity about other people. 20. Walton justifies his own desire to hear Victor’s story in moral terms, supplementing curiosity with altruism (“I felt the greatest eagerness to hear the promised narrative, partly from curiosity, and partly from a strong desire to ameliorate his fate, if it were in my power,” (17). Yet he does not so justify his impulse to record and transmit it, giving only strangeness as a reason: “So strange an accident has happened to us, that I cannot forbear recording it” (12); “a scene has just passed of such uncommon interest, that although it is highly

238

Notes to pages 154–59

probable that these papers may never reach you, yet I cannot forbear recording it” (148). 21. For example, in Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, Emily triumphs over her intense curiosity and burns St. Aubert’s papers without reading them, but we later fi nd out what the papers say (see Benedict’s discussion, 235). In a very uncommon move, at the end of Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady, our vapid hero Eustace chooses not to read the letter that would reveal to him the details of his wife’s suicide; however, the letter is directly presented in the text for readers to peruse. An exception that proves the rule is the monster’s refusal to satisfy what he calls Walton’s “senseless curiosity” by telling exactly how he was made (146). This information cannot be provided because its existence is imaginary, necessitating the ruse that it is being withheld. 22. Indeed, this scene evokes the states of absorption Michael Fried fi nds depicted in numerous eighteenth- century French paintings. Fried notes the “uncanny” power of these pictures to suggest duration (49–50); they become images “not of time wasted but of time fi lled” (51). Ross Chambers identifies certain patterns of digression with a lateral narrative movement that represents temporal distension or dilation: “To be dilatory is to defer the future, or to express a desire to defer the future, by living the actual movement of time from present to future as if it were an infi nite expansion of the present, a dilation sideways, as it were, instead of a direct and inexorable march toward a future that the nature of the present leads one to fi nd unattractive” (16). In the texts Chambers analyzes, the dreaded future is, specifically, the advent of modernity. In the case of wonder, the unattractive future would seem to be, conversely, the return of the “same” or the norm. On questions of literary absorption, digression, or drift, also see Katherine Saunders Nash, McGann’s reading of Powys (The Scholar’s Art 175–89), and Stephen Arata. 23. “If no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquility of his domestic affections,” says an older- but-wiser Victor, “Greece had not been enslaved; Caesar would have spared his country; America would have been discovered more gradually; and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed” (33). 24. See Jean-Pierre Vernant (111–38) and James Elkins (86–124). 25. Discussing Carlyle’s response to popu lar Victorian “freak shows,” Erin O’Connor asserts that “For Carlyle and other critics, the problem with monsters was that they solicited a distinctly uncultivated, uncritical gaze. . . . People didn’t think about what they saw in monsters; they were merely arrested by the monsters themselves. . . . The freak show was an overpowering sensory experience, a scene of sheer physical apprehension: curiosities overwhelmed curious crowds; wonders inspired wonder; marvels were marveled at” (159). 26. The connection to sensibility is not fortuitous: Roe shows that Keats built on eighteenth- century discourses of sensibility (230–47). By contrast,

Notes to pages 159–71

239

Wordsworth’s poetics align more closely with Smith’s understanding of sympathy. 27. A splendid example of a negatively capable poem is Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “The Woodspurge,” which conveys the tension of a terribly difficult refusal to translate the par ticu lar into a general truth, or to translate painful experience into a meaning that would transcend it and bring it closure. 28. For consideration of different techniques of description (and roles played by described things and spaces) in eighteenth- century novels, see Cynthia Wall’s The Prose of Things. 29. Critics such as Helena Michie, Bruce Haley, Athena Vrettos, GianPaulo Biasin, and Miriam Bailin have drawn attention to the semiotic significance of illness (and health) in Victorian literature. To the best of my knowledge, though, the par ticu lar narrative patterns that characterize Victorian representations of faints and fevers have not previously been traced. 30. Catherine Clément writes: Syncope: an absence of the self. A “cerebral eclipse,” so similar to death that it is also called “apparent death”; it resembles its model so closely that there is a risk of never recovering from it. When she comes to, her fi rst words will be, “Where am I?” And because she has come to, “come back,” no one thinks to ask where she has been. The real question would be, rather, “Where was I?” But no, when one returns from syncope it is the real world that suddenly looks strange. (Syncope 1) 31. For a related reading of Esther’s dream, see J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens, 208– 9. 32. Likewise, Baudelaire: But convalescence is like a return to childhood. The convalescent, like the child, enjoys to the highest degree the faculty of taking a lively interest in things, even the most trivial in appearance. Let us hark back, if we can, by a retrospective effort of our imaginations, to our youngest, our morning impressions, and we shall recognize that they were remarkably akin to the vividly coloured impressions that we received later on after a physical illness, provided that illness left our spiritual faculties pure and unimpaired. (“Painter” 397– 98) 33. In this sense the passage approaches what Ross Chambers calls “a state of textual inertia . . . from which there could be no return” (152). My analysis of this scene, and overall perspective on Hardy’s novels, are much indebted to Jules Law. 34. The rare and desirable quality of breaks from work is highlighted when Poorgrass notes that “a bad leg allowed him to read the Pilgrim’s Progress” (196); Coggan’s father “put his arm out of joint to have time to go courting” (197), and

240 Notes to pages 171–76 Cain was able to go to Bath because a minor injury has prevented his working. See Chambers for a related discussion of “the small pleasures of fugue” that become, in the context of novel-reading, “a narrative equivalent of ‘time out,’ providing a break from the goal- orientedness of story” (114). 35. I borrow the term “encodes” from Garrett Stewart. Stewart argues that a novel “might encode . . . its own reading,” actively participating in a “cultural milieu . . . upon which it makes its mark by the protocols not just of attitude or behavior . . . but of literary reaction itself, which the novel constructs, perpetuates, or reinforces” (Dear Reader 11–12). For a more empirical study of the reception of Hardy’s fiction, see T. R. Wright. For Hardy’s own ideas about reading, see his essay “The Profitable Reading of Fiction.” 36. As such, the description seems to reflect Hardy’s assessment of Turner’s goals as a painter. In a diary entry, Hardy wrote: What [Turner] paints chiefly is light as modified by objects. He first recognizes the impossibility of really reproducing on canvas all that is in a landscape; then gives for that which cannot be reproduced a something else which shall have upon the spectator an approximative effect to that of the real. He said, in his maddest and greatest days: “What pictorial drug can I dose man with, which shall affect his eyes somewhat in the manner of this reality which I cannot carry to him?” (Life 226) 37. I am drawing loosely on Deleuze’s discussions of “individuation”: see Difference and Repetition 246–52 and 276– 77, and Logic of Sense 109–117. Deleuze and Guattari list Hardy, together with D. H. Lawrence, Malcolm Lowry, Henry Miller, Alan Ginsburg, and Jack Keroac, under the heading “strange AngloAmerican literature”: “Through the impasses and the triangles a schizophrenic flow moves, irresistibly” (Anti-Oedipus 132–33). Also see Deleuze’s brief remarks about “individuation without a subject” in Hardy’s novels (Deleuze and Parnet 39–40), and William Cohen’s Deleuzian reading of The Return of the Native. 38. A similar granting of vision to objects takes place as Elizabeth-Jane watches over her dying mother: Objects “stared at her so helplessly, as if waiting for the touch of some wand that should release them from terrestrial constraint” (117). Also see the initial description of Casterbridge (26). The argument I am making here would not apply to all of Hardy’s fiction, particularly not to Tess. While certain scenes in Mayor, such as the skimmity ride, may foreshadow Tess’s greater investment in the link between violence and visibility, in this novel spectatorship is more often granted an innervating effect. Cricket games at the ruin are abandoned because the structure shuts out “every appreciative passer’s vision” (70), and Henchard’s entertainment fails “as there were no spectators” (103). On the effects of looking in Tess, see Stewart, “Driven”; Silverman, Freeman, and Nunokawa. On the general question of perspective in Hardy’s fiction, see particularly Ea gleton and Lodge.

Notes to pages 177–81

241

39. See Elaine Freedgood’s excellent discussion of Barthes (9–10), and persuasive case for reading things in Victorian novels less metaphor ical ly and more historically. While I fi nd Freedgood’s argument compelling, my interest here is in represented things that resist both types of interpretation. Also see Catherine Gallagher’s reading of singularity and embodiment in George Eliot’s fiction: “George Eliot is the greatest English realist because she not only makes us curious about the quotidian, not only convinces us that knowing its particularity is our ultimate ethical duty, but also, and supremely, makes us want it” (73). 40. The phrase “aesthetic or phenomenal” is a bit of a hedge, but as Jerome McGann points out, “aesthetic” originally meant “in the senses, of the body” (Scholar’s 9); it is a term that, before Kant, highlighted the sensuous, material aspect of the art object, not its Ideal or conceptual aspects. 41. The allusion is to Luke 24. After the crucifi xion, Jesus joins two disciples walking along the road to Emmaus, but they do not recognize him. The three enter an inn and sit at a table; the disciples recognize Jesus when he blesses and breaks the bread. If Hardy had a par ticu lar painting in mind, I do not fi nd that it has been identified. A number of paintings of the scene exist, including two by Caravaggio, but the one that features a “haloed” Christ, and matches the configuration of persons here described, is Velazquez’s The Supper at Emmaus (c. 1620). 42. Said by the risen Christ in John 20:19. For other readings of this passage, see Hillis Miller (Thomas 55–57), and Levinson (“Object-loss” 564). Despite Hardy’s stated dislike of Nietz sche, one is reminded of the following aphorism: Sub specie aeterni. ----A: “You are moving away faster and faster from the living; soon they will strike your name from the rolls.” ----B: “That is the only way to participate in the privilege of the dead.” ----A: “What privilege?” ----B: “To die no more.” (The Gay Science 218). 43. The Mayor of Casterbridge shows us two bridges “haunted” by loungers: “all the failures of the town; those who had failed in business, in love, in sobriety, in crime” (220). The loungers on the brick bridge, “those of lowest character . . . [who] did not mind the glare of the public eye. . . . survey the passers-by” (220–21). The “shabby-genteel men” on the stone bridge suffer too much from shame to feel generally curious, and only pretend to look at “some strange fish” (221). “Failure” might be seen as another simulacrum of posthumousness: a mode of being, as it were, shunted off to the side, coughed out of one’s plotting. 44. David Lodge identifies this perspective with that of the camera, but perhaps it has an affective specificity that the analogy with the camera fails to capture. In this novel, unlike Tess, the voyeur istic quality Lodge attributes to this gaze is largely absent.

242 Notes to pages 182–92 45. I quote here from Hardy’s poem “Afterwards,” which also links rich phenomenal experience to death: “he was a man who used to notice such things” (Complete Poetical Works, Vol. II, 308– 9). See Levinson’s suggestive discussion of subject/object relations in Hardy’s poetry. 46. The recent upsurge of critical interest in things (and animals) seems to respond, if only implicitly, to this sense of loss. See, for example, the collection Things, edited by Bill Brown.

Conclusion: Woolf’s Fin 1. On the whole, Woolf admired Sterne’s work, in part because, in contrast to her modernist colleagues, “interested as [Sterne] was in the way in which he saw things, the things themselves also interested him acutely” (“The ‘Sentimental Journey’ ” 84; also see “Sterne”). On Woolf ’s relationship to Sterne, see Roger Moss (“Jacob’s Room and the Eighteenth Century”), Josephine Schaefer, and Miriam Wallace (“Thinking Back”). On Woolf ’s relationship to eighteenth- century philosophy, especially Hume, see Gillian Beer (“Hume”). My readings of Woolf ’s novels are much indebted to Professor Christine Froula. 2. In How Novels Think, Nancy Armstrong writes, “I cannot quite believe that any novel can reach in and modify the ideological core of the genre and still remain a novel” (10). Woolf ’s rejection of the term signals a broader gulf between her work and the type of “thinking” Armstrong identifies as peculiarly novelistic. Where Armstrong sees late Victorian romances, especially Dracula and She, as playing out a residual “logic of sensibility at the cost of the modern individual,” imagining “some form of collectivity that obliterated individualism” (23) and cannot but be negative (vampiric, bestial), I will argue that Woolf succeeds in conveying a positive rhizomatic vision of collectivity, especially in The Waves. 3. See, for example, Auerbach (525–53) and Kazan, but also DuPlessis, who notes that lists “need not be arranged in a par ticu lar order”; Woolf uses them, she argues, to combat teleological narrative structures (197). 4. Woolf ’s interest in roads not taken, virtual literary history, is evident throughout her critical writing. She wonders what might have been actualized if Austen had traveled, or if Brontë had lived longer: “How different those legends might have been had her life reached the ordinary human span . . .” (“ ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’ ” 155); what might have been written had Sterne not “thought it necessary to reply” to a public “which had cried out . . . that the writer was a cynic who deserved to be unfrocked” (“ ‘The Sentimental Journey’ ” 85). 5. The image returns, for example, in “Death of the Moth” and also The Waves, which was to be called “The Moths” until, apparently, Woolf remembered that moths only fly at night (A Writer’s Diary 143). See Harvena Richter,

Notes to pages 192–98

243

who traces the “re-pearance” of moths in Woolf ’s writing and discusses many personal associations the image may have had for her. 6. Shortly after The Waves appeared, Woolf wrote in her diary: “Oh yes, between 50 and 60 I think I shall write out some very singular books, if I live. I mean I think I am about to embody at last the exact shapes my brain holds. What a long toil to reach this beginning— if The Waves is my fi rst work in my own style!” (A Writer’s Diary 172). 7. Bishop notes: “The relentless intensity of the book . . . makes it something that should be read in short concentrated bursts, like poetry, rather than in the relaxed, collusive mode one can adopt even with novels like To the Lighthouse” (Virginia Woolf 98– 99). For comparisons to musical structures, see Levin and Clements; to visual art, see Jack Stewart. This novel has become something of a test case for a wide variety of critical approaches. As Miriam Wallace puts it, “critics seem generally agreed that The Waves is a novel centrally about the creation and dissolution of self hood. However, the understanding of what ‘self hood’ means, its relation to literary style, and po litical implications for feminism are much less universally accepted” (132). For readings that foreground Woolf ’s gender politics, see Heilbrun, Sypher, Wallace, Utell and Kemp. For new historicist readings, see Hussey’s collection. Miko provides a deconstructive reading of the novel, arguing that Woolf values immediacy, permanence, closure, truth, oneness, “a unity beneath phenomenal diversity” (63), but fi nds she cannot achieve these things because “true meaning and value, it would seem, are a function of being inside: the self, the moment, the world,” but that is impossible within the perpetual “outside” of writing (84). Porritt provides an interesting corrective to this reading, arguing that Woolf moves beyond the deconstruction or “poetic disarticulation” of the self to explore the potential this opens up for new “relations of ‘we’ ” (335). In an argument that reflects recent critical interest in ethics, Monson draws on Levinas and Kristeva in reading Bernard’s “ethical awareness of the Other” (193). Also see Jessica Berman, who combines Levinas’s understanding of the ethical relation to the other with Deleuze’s figure of the fold in reading several of Woolf ’s novels (though she does not discuss The Waves). 8. In a reading of To the Lighthouse, Gillian Beer compellingly argues that Woolf refuses to use symbols, as the Romantics did, to resolve the tensions between “inner and outer, past and present . . . subject and object” (48–49). Instead, Woolf engages in a kind of dialogue with Hume, with whom she shares an interest in the unstable, fluctuating relations between those terms. Yet in her attempt to re-value the ordinary and the transient, Beer argues, Woolf also refuses Hume’s melancholy suggestion that absence obliterates: For Woolf, things and “people survive when you are not there, when they are not there . . . but they survive here in a kind of writing which eschews permanence” (55). For

244

Notes to pages 198–201

the counter-argument, which associates Woolf with the English Romantic poets, see Ellen Tremper, John Moses, and Charles Schug. 9. Noting the bilingual punning of “fi n” with “le fin,” Patrick McGee reads the fi n as a signifier for the Lacanian Other, with a feminist twist: The fi n becomes the “anti-phallus.” I agree with his argument that Woolf attempts to “think of a sexuality beyond the phallus”— a sexuality that is not binary but plural— and to imagine a discourse, society, and education “founded not on the principle of reason but on difference and process” (245). But by figuring the fi n in Lacanian terms, McGee does not himself get beyond the phallus; ultimately, he argues that the fi n, as signifier of the Other, is empty and hollow (“Woolf cadaverizes it, reduces it to the shell of meaning,” 243). The argument illustrates the difficulty of using psychoanalysis to move beyond critique; it can thus become a paradigm that truncates Woolf ’s novels, which do move beyond critique. 10. Derrida writes, “The ‘big bang’ would have, let us say at the origin of the universe, produced a noise which we can regard as not yet having reached us. It is still to come and it will be up to us to capture it, to receive it” (qtd. in Lukacher 5). 11. Thus, critics writing on The Waves almost inevitably feel impelled to re-read (differentiate and repeat) this image. 12. See, for example, Gabrielle McIntire, who reads Bernard’s closing speech as the collapse of heteroglossia into a monologism associated with fascism. 13. On the question of the ethics of transience or eff acement in relation to justice, see Heidegger, “The Anaximander Fragment.” On the question of resisting means-end models in the classroom, see Bill Readings.

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Index

Ablow, Rachel, 93, 228n23 aesthetic experience, 10, 57–58, 70–71, 95–96, 106–9, 132–33, 146–47, 157, 164–65, 177, 199, 215n49, 235n5, 236n11, 241n40 affect: advertising and, 91; communication of, 3–4, 42–44, 46, 50–67, 73–78, 84–90, 92, 195; experience and, 8, 177, 191; and Nietzsche, 145; and plot, 12; and sentence style, 97–98, 128, 196–97; theories of, 63, 123–24, 173, 214n48, 216n5, 222n44, 230n35, 243n3; in Victorian fiction, 93–94. See also curiosity; interest; pleasure; sensibility; sentimentality; sympathy; Tomkins, Silvan Althusser, Louis, 21, 175 Altick, Richard, 91 Aristotle, 115, 117–23, 226n14, 226n16, 227nn18–19 Armstrong, Nancy, 203n1, 222n43, 229n27, 242n2 assessment, 9–10 attraction, 17–18, 21, 25–26, 75, 84, 99, 145–47, 157–58, 174–75, 198–200, 206n24 Attridge, Derek, 14–16, 21–22, 204n8 Austen, Jane, 1, 55, 111, 121, 133, 137, 221n35, 228n22 Baker, William, 37–39, 42, 47 Barthes, Roland, 113, 177, 227nn18,20 Beer, Gillian, 169, 172–73, 243n8

Bersani, Leo, 95–96, 105–7, 149, 151, 152, 169, 177, 200, 234n4 Bishop, Edward, 192–94, 196–98, 200, 243n7 Blair, Hugh, 33, 48, 88–89 Blanchot, Maurice, 146, 205n15 book history, 34–49, 68–69, 86–92, 206–7n1, 208–9nn9–13. See also compositor; emphasis; Hansard, Thomas Curson; Moxon, Joseph; punctuation; Smith, John; typography Brontë, Charlotte, 197, 199; Jane Eyre, 92–110; Shirley, 161, 166; Villette, 162, 166 Brooks, Peter, 26, 223–24n5, 227n20, 235n9 Caillois, Roger, 162–63, 174, 198 capitalism, 131–32, 142, 202 Chambers, Ross, 153, 228n26, 238n22, 239nn33–34 Cixous, Hélène, 84–85, 203n3 closure, 6–8, 30, 75–83, 106, 111–13, 117, 120, 131, 133, 138, 141–42, 150, 200, 227n18 cognitive approaches to literature, 10–12 Collins, Wilkie, 25–26, 238n21 colonialism, 110, 131–32, 155, 207n5, 220n30, 231n39 compositor, 33, 36–37, 43–44, 47–48, 61, 89, 210n16, 219n22 crowds, 149–52, 153, 175, 236nn10–11, 238n25. See also mob, contagious feeling and

269

270 Index cumulative structures: and Defoe, 124–31; and Gaskell, 134–43; and interest, 123–24; sentences and plotting, 2, 5, 113–14, 119–23, 170–72, 226nn15–17,19–21, 230n38, 232n45; and working-class life, 141–43 curiosities, 152, 175–76 curiosity, 2, 5–6, 45, 144–49, 198–99; and Frankenstein, 152–57; in Hardy, 168–70, 174; and negative capability, 159, 164; and reading, 235n6; scholarship of, 233–34nn1–3; and Sherlock Holmes, 149–51, 236n10; and the sublime, 236n13; and suspense, 203n4 Cvetkovich, Ann, 63, 93 Danielewski, Mark, 68–69 Darwin, Charles, 2–3, 112, 123, 146, 169 Defoe, Daniel, 121–35, 229nn28,30–32,36,38–39,40 Deleuze, Gilles: Difference and Repetition, 4, 6, 70–71, 105, 109, 177; fetishism, 56–57; Logic of Sense, 110, 204n13, 215n50, 240n37; minor language, 16, 197; Proust and Signs, 205n17; singularity and the virtual, 14, 24, 203n5; subrepresentative domain, 17, 63; whole versus complete, 229n33 Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari, 3, 6, 7, 15–16, 70, 84, 152, 189, 193, 214n48 Derrida, Jacques, 11, 100, 113, 203n5, 217n10, 244n10 Dickens, Charles, 22, 29, 136, 162–65, 221n39, 227n21 digression, 115–16, 128, 135, 238n22 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 149–51 Dunton, John, 4, 34, 61–62, 87, 113–17, 213n44, 214n45,46, 224n8, 225n10 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 34 elegy, 186, 201 emphasis, 2–4, 34–48, 60–62, 88–90, 135 fainting and fever, in Victorian novels, 160–67 formalism, 11–12, 224nn6–7

Foucault, Michel, 44–45, 146, 157 Frankenstein. See Shelley, Mary Freud, Sigmund, 35, 56–57, 85, 105, 145–46, 234n3 Gallagher, Catharine, 138–40, 205n22, 213n41, 233n49, 241n39 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 114, 134–43, 161–64, 231nn42–43 genre fiction, and sentimentality, 57–58 Gibson, Andrew, 218n14, 222n44 Ginsburg, Michal Peled, 223n4, 232n47 Goode, John, 168–69, 172, 175; grammarians, eighteenth-century, 117–20, 225nn11–13, 226nn14–16 Greene, Jody, 61, 209n14, 210n21, 213n44, 214n45, 224n8 Guattari, Felix. See Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari Hansard, Thomas Curson, 3, 89, 220n29 Hardy, Thomas, 148; Far from the Madding Crowd, 169–71; The Mayor of Casterbridge, 6, 167–69, 171–82; The Woodlanders, 20–21, 24–25 Harris, James, 117–20, 128 Hume, David, 3–4, 34, 59–63, 72–73, 76, 87, 145, 213n41 Hunter, J. Paul, 207n3, 213n44, 214nn46–47, 224n8, 225n10 illness, in novels, 160–67 imperialism. See colonialism interest, 5, 30, 123–24, 127–28, 130, 132–33, 142 Jaffe, Audrey, 93 Johns, Adrian, 34–35, 45, 47, 219n25 Johnson, Samuel, 6, 59, 93, 147, 152 Kant, Immanuel, 107–8, 234n4, 236nn11,13 Keats, John, 148, 158–59 Lacan, Jacques, 87, 196, 198, 228n26, 236n10, 244n9; symbolic order, 110 Law and the Lady. See Collins, Wilkie Levine, Carolyn, 141, 233n52

Index Levine, George, 112, 230n37 Lingis, Alphonso, 18–19, 54, 200, 202, 221n37 Lucas, John, 139–40 Lynch, Deidre, 203n1, 206n26, 212n34, 216n5 Mackenzie, Henry, 63–66, 75, 87 madness, 44–45, 107, 115, 163–64 de Man, Paul, 11, 104, 111, 222n40 March of Mind, 91 Marshall, David, 211nn31–32, 230nn34,38 Marx, Karl, 91–92 Miller, D. A., 30, 113 mob, contagious feeling and, 60, 87–88. See also crowds Moretti, Franco, 2, 221n33 Moxon, Joseph, 33, 36–37, 43–48, 61, 68, 210n14, 219n22 negative capability. See Keats, John nerves, 34, 44–46, 59, 72, 79 nervous, 3, 42–43, 46, 87, 175 new historicism, 10–12 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 18, 29–30, 75, 85, 112, 146, 164, 166, 201, 236n11, 241n42 obituary, 26–28, 201 performative, 23, 29, 63, 68–69, 89, 97, 200, 215n49, 218n14 periodic sentences, 5, 114, 118–23; and plots, 125, 129, 132, 141–42, 171, 226nn15–17, 235n6 Pinch, Adela, 59–60, 88 pleasure: versus desire, 105, 168; of novel reading, 9, 91; of the phenomenological, 165–68, 173, 177, 179, 231n41; of process, 5, 115, 122–25, 128, 177, 179, 182; of sensibility, 59–60, 72, 77–78, 88, 94, 158; of sentimentality, 56–57; of suffering, 53; of teleology, 118, 134, 142; of wonder, 145, 147, 150–52, 155–57 postcolonial theory. See colonialism poststructuralism and structuralism, 15–16, 28, 92, 113, 182–83

271

printing, history of. See book history progress, 1, 3, 76, 101–4, 111–14, 131–32, 134, 141–43, 150, 152, 182, 223n3, 231n40, 233n53 psychoanalysis. See Freud, Sigmund; Lacan, Jacques punctuation, 36, 48, 66, 73, 75, 79, 97–98, 119, 129, 211n29, 218n17, 221n35, 229n32 reading, experience, practice or phenomenology of, 8–10, 13, 27, 33–34, 62, 75, 108 Readings, Bill, 205n15 Robinson Crusoe. See Defoe, Daniel Saussure, Ferdinand, 15–16 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 63, 217n9 sensibility, 4, 7, 31–34, 59–110, 159, 199 sentimentality, 4, 33–34, 55–59, 86–88 Shelley, Mary, 149–58 singularity, 13–30, 59, 106, 186–202 Smith, Adam, 4, 33–34, 47, 50–52, 61, 93 Smith, John, 33, 37, 47–48, 209n12, 219n22 Sontag, Susan, 151, 224n6, 237n18 Sterne, Laurence, 4, 30, 34, 68–69, 70, 115, 186; the marbled page, 23–24; A Sentimental Journey, 52–54, 67, 76–87; Tristram Shandy, 27–28, 72–76, 100 Stewart, Garrett, 196, 198, 212n38, 221n36, 240n35 Stewart, Susan, 92, 210n21, 236n12, 237n18 style: as singularity, 13–30, 186–202; in Jane Eyre, 94, 98; in Robinson Crusoe,128–30 sympathy, 4, 32–34, 44–54, 58, 70, 85–89, 93–94, 96, 99, 110, 134, 154, 158, 193 Swift, Jonathan, 61, 113, 116–17, 213nn44,47 teleology, 17, 30, 112–114, 223nn2–5 things, representation of, 21, 131–32, 135, 148, 152, 162–65, 172–73, 177, 179, 182–83

272 Index transcendence, 13, 52, 112, 131, 133, 157–58, 160, 176 typography, 2, 31–48, 61–67, 79, 88–92, 113, 207nn2–3, 213n43, 214nn46–47 Tomkins, Silvan, 123–24, 128, 173, 229n32, 230n35 Warhol, Robyn, 55–58

Watt, Ian, 121–22, 125, 131–32, 222n1, 229n28 wonder, 2, 6, 144–83 work, representations of, 111–14, 124–43, 169–71 Woolf, Virginia, 27, 30, 124–25, 133, 159; Jacob’s Room, 186–92; The Waves, 192–202