Routledge Revivals: Arguing With The Past (1989)

Essays in Narrative from Woolf to Sidney

Gillian Beer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351267823
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

First published in 1989, this book analyses fiction and long narrative, drawing on a broad range of writing from earlier periods and on recent narrative theory. Gillian Beer looks at the work of writers as diverse as Thomas Carlyle and Philip Sydney, Samuel Richardson, and George Eliot. Three chapters on Virginia Woolf demonstrate how Woolf's reading of past literature, philosophy, and science gave her an intellectual and emotional purchase on problems of feminism and modernism. Beer examines how writers create dialogues with past writing, how readers of the present day engage with the difference of past literature, and how we make contact with the desires and debates of past readers.

1

INTRODUCTORY

Reading will always be informed by current needs, dreads, preoccupations, pleasures. The cultural conditions within which we receive the texts will shape the attention we bring to them. Literary history, like all history, starts now. We shall read as 1989 or, with luck, 1999 readers, but we need not do so hauling without noticing our cultural baggage. The encounter with the otherness of earlier literature can allow us to recognize and challenge our own assumptions, and those of the society in which we live. In order to do so we must take care not to fall into the habit of assuming the evolutionist model of literary development, so often taken for granted. In this, texts are praised for their ‘almost modern awareness’ or for ‘being ahead of their time’. This presentist mode of argument takes now as the source of authority, the only real place.

Engaging with the difference of the past in our present makes us aware of the trajectory of our arrival and of the insouciance of the past – their neglectfulness of our prized positions and our assumptions. To do this, we need to learn the terms of past preoccupations. We may then experience the pressure within words, now slack, of anxieties and desires. To focus such enquiry we can observe how writers interpret the past of their personal and communal culture. We can use this awareness, if we will, to gratify our sense of our own correctness, ‘an almost modern understanding’ – but that leaves out too much text. Rather, the study of past writing and past reading can disturb any autocratic emphasis on the self and the present, as if they were stable entities. It can make us aware too of how far that view continues despite postmodernism.¹

We never read only ‘in our own person’. The writing is there before us; its words, its syntax, its narrative sequences organize our entry into the text and order our roles within it. We may understand ourselves to be free agents as we read, but the range of our freedom is extended by the written work – and limited by it too. The writing characterizes our performance: Jane Austen makes us witty as we read. The effect may not persist. The passionate compunction we discover as we read George Eliot will ebb as we close the book. The readerly wariness that Beckett induces may not much inhibit our attachments. The ungainsayable commitment that Coetzee makes us know is hard to sustain beyond the time of the text. Humanist criticism was mistaken in assuming a straight translation possible from reading-self to socialized self. Reading is a sequestered activity; it is hard work to render its effects communal, and that work demands a series of vigorous displacements, not straight enactment.

Whereas in the theatre we take part in an openly communal experience, the process of reading is nowadays solitary. However, the intermitted reading of long narrative means that it broods within all our other current life-activities. These other activities – and landscapes also – may come to form part of our repertoire of memory when we look back on the text. Particularly is this so when the work has made a profound impression: the plains of Yugoslavia and the bleak clangour of Tottenham Court Road slide past my eyes again when I think of Anna Karenina. Each reader introjects landscapes, rooms, and faces into the text to form an entirely personal residuum of reference, not available to others. But, as readers, we share also a communal ‘I’, which is that unspoken second person of the text. As Georges Poulet puts it, ‘Whenever I read, I mentally pronounce an I, and yet the I which I pronounce is not myself.’² This I/other is a figure scattered among, as much as composed from, the many discursive positions offered by the writing, athwart the positions the reader occupies in current history.

Our encounter with the work is sprung upon the linguistic resources it offers, and our resistance to it as well as our immersion in it cannot refuse its terms. But these terms are not invariant; words on the page do not have fixed limits. They reach us doubly freighted with debate: the arguments, engagements, and estrangements within which they were embedded at the time of the work’s production, the arguments, estrangements, and engagements within which we read now. All the essays in this collection, written over several years (and one long ago), read, in present terms, prose writers engaging with past writing and past reading. The writers respond not only in debate but in affection, riding the rhythms of past prose, as Richardson does with Sidney even as he redisposes the class questions Sidney did not see as questions. The last three essays concern Virginia Woolf, whose internalization of past writing and past persons gets under the guard of the parody she deploys. Her work fictionalizes the modernist claim to a new start, undermines it even as it proposes it.

The concept of the dialogue with the past, developed particularly by Habermas and Gadamer, but there from antiquity, emphasizes the expanding and corrective interaction of present reading with past writing. ‘Understanding begins’, writes Gadamer, ‘when something addresses us. This is the primary hermeneutical condition.’

The hermeneutically trained mind will also include historical consciousness. It will make conscious the prejudices governing our own understanding, so that the text, as another’s meaning, can be isolated and valued on its own….

For so long as our mind is influenced by a prejudice, we do not know, and consider it as a judgment. How then are we to isolate it? It is impossible to make ourselves aware of it while it is constantly operating unnoticed, but only when it is, so to speak, stimulated. The encounter with a text from the past can provide this stimulus. For what leads to understanding must be something that has already asserted itself in its own separate validity.³

The ‘stimulating’ of our prejudices or, to put it more neutrally, of our formative conditions is achieved not by drawing the work into a concept of‘relevance’ but by accepting its initiating distinctness from ourselves, though the writing will be activated for each person only by the process of reading.

Reading the past

Discourse does not take place outside history. However, no historical period consists only of its present. Evidence of this is provided not only by architecture and legal systems but also – with particular intensity – by past writing when read within and read into the present. History is in this sense less linear than constellatory. The parameters of reading periods are unstable and difficult to descry. Whereas we skein out literary production into controllable periods – the Romantics, the Victorian age, modernism – reading periods are quite otherwise organized, trawling a variety of pasts and varying from person to person, though circumscribed by what is available within the community. Reading communities, moreover, differ greatly from one another even within the same place and time. And in much recent discussion of the ‘canon’ and its powers the changing composition of the canon itself has been overlooked: the interlocked accepted works of the late eighteenth century were very different from those of the late nineteenth century, for example, and different again from our own institutionalized grouping of texts.

Reading takes place always in the present. The heat of writing has already been cooled in published work by the mortification of cold print. What Todorov calls the ‘perpetual present’ of narrative enacts the difference between writing and reading.⁴ The distance between time of writing and time of reading varies immensely, of course, and will lead to the need for different forms of explanation. But the space between writing and reading is always and absolutely there. That is the space of enactment and recoil: the argument with the past.

Sometimes writers inscribe it within the text, making the absence the ironic control on which the work is sprung. In this volume I argue that George Eliot does that with the unwritten time of her own adult life, which falls between the setting of her novel Middlemarch and the period of its writing and first reading. Later readings trouble the poise of that ironic relationship by extending temporal distance, so slackening the detailed reference to change, and challenging the normative position ascribed to the first readers.

The present is both an absolute and an endlessly drifting position. In Iser’s account of interaction between text and reader the language he uses renders the text prior to the reader but surpassed by reading; what is written is not shown as having the capacity to re-enter argument: ‘the linguistic signs and structure of the text exhaust their function in triggering developing acts of comprehension.’ The active reader extends the bounds or fills the gaps left by the tutelary writing which ‘offers guidance as to what is to be produced, and therefore cannot itself be the product’.⁵ But reading does more.

Much otherwise invaluable reception theory has emphasized the present of reading without taking account of the historical conditions of the work’s production. This omission obliterates the hermeneutic circle of novel and first readers, the complexity of whose relations is written into the work. The presence of those voices (arguing, repeating, refusing, diversifying the range of the book’s linguistic community), once heard, makes for a fuller, more specific, and often more disturbing resonance to our reading now. Readers are not all cleverer since Henry James, only cleverer at reading Henry James. Past writing can teach us lost reading and experiential skills, and with those skills we can begin to learn the difference of the past.

One merit of the notion of arguing with the past is that it sustains the possibility of the writing persistently re-entering dialogue. As Dominick LaCapra puts it in Rethinking Intellectual History:

The past has its own ‘voices’ that must be respected, especially when they resist or qualify the interpretations we would like to place on them. A text is a network of resistances, and a dialogue is a two-way affair; a good reader is also an attentive and patient listener. Questions are necessary to focus interest in an investigation, but a fact may be pertinent to a frame of reference by contesting or even contradicting it.⁶

Such a position seems to me to be preferable to Harold Bloom’s antithetical imagination, which conceives past and present, writing and reading, as embattled contraries, and survival as being possible only by the evasion or stupefying of what precedes:

‘Influence’ to Nietzsche meant vitalization. But influence, and more precisely poetic influence, has been more a blight than a blessing, from the Enlightenment until this moment. Where it has vitalized, it has operated as misprision, as deliberate, even perverse revisionism.⁷

‘To imagine is to misinterpret’ has proved to be one of those remarks which level more than they liberate.

For example, unless we believe in fixed entities – man and woman – we need to be alert to the processes of gender formation and gender change. We cannot construe this in isolation from other elements within a culture, and, moreover, we shall better discover our own fixing assumptions if we value the unlikeness of the past. The formation of gender, and its condensation in the literature of the time, is not cut loose from economics, or architecture, or class, or, come to that, animal care. No one of these is the single source of authority either: there is no sole source of oppression, though there are dominant forms of it in class, race, and gender power-structures. Self-understanding internalizes the shapes for experience proffered by earlier literature (as I have elsewhere argued concerning Ovid and the language of women’s sensibility).⁸ In the literature of the past we are presented with immensely detailed interconnecting systems: power and pleasure caught into representations so particular as to be irreplaceable. So the informing of the text with our learnt awareness of historical conditions is not a matter simply of providing ‘context’ or ‘background’. Instead it is, more exacdy, in-forming, instantiation.

Yet we can never become past readers: learnt awareness dramatizes what could then be assumed, and so changes it from an inert to an active element in the text. But reading only along the grain of our pressing cultural and personal needs, even what Bloom calls ‘mis-reading’, may too easily become a matter of subjugating the text and evading the awkward questions it poses. The reader claims sovereignty. The text becomes the subject, and subjected. It falls silent or speaks only what the sovereign wishes to hear. This is no way to uncover other experience or to tap into difficult questions. The subjectivist hierarchy, when it is interpreted as empowering the reader absolutely, reduces writing to single signification. Sometimes, it is true, a particular single signification is so gripping, so necessary within a historical moment, that it suffices for that reader, that group. Such hermeneutic retrenchment may have a sound political function, especially if it brings sharply into focus a pattern of debate within the work hitherto little observed, or marks discursive elements unfulfilled at the historical moment of the text’s production. But there will always be more to the text than the single sharply posed question reveals or than the reader’s particular experience necessitates.

The privileging of complexity in literary works, objected to by some interpreters, is a privileging of contestation. Complexity challenges the reader by refusing single resolution, by offering questions we had not thought of, and suggestions not on our terms. It persuades the reader into experience not chosen. The reader cannot foresee the fullness of the written text. Nor can interpretation encompass it.

Ceasing to read

Any reader may choose to cease reading – and this is a power too little addressed in narrative theory. The reader, having ceased to read – flung the book across the room or put it down one morning thinking to pick it up again and then not wished (or wished not) to do so – is left with a problem: the book remains, half read. If the book has bored the reader it may peel flat away from the memory. More often, though, it continues to be read in the mind, brooded over, repudiated. Truncated reading can monumentalize the work, fixing it in the memory. The reader’s only sharp revenge is the refusal to finish reading. The unfinished reading may revenge itself by returning. In such suspended reading the element of debate, of struggle with the text, is intensified.

There are many half-read works in most readers’ minds; but incomplete reading is not a respectable activity. Indeed, rereading is the only thoroughly respectable mode in some circles: ‘I haven’t reread it recently’ may often mean ‘I never got round to reading it’. In studying the books read by past writers we emphasize – and properly so – those that the writer is known to have loved, and perhaps often returned to. However, this seems to me to be only one path to interpretation, and a misleading one if it expunges unsatisfactory experiences or incomplete reading. Hermeneutically, spasmodic reading may be more troubling, unfinished texts more haunting, repudiated reading more provoking, than the thoroughly assimilated book we study. I am not recommending sloppy reading, nor encouraging readers to let the book drop from their hands. I do suggest, though, that we need to take account of truncated or baffled readings as part of the creative process. Intense but unsuccessful reading may be a goad to thought, not its numbing.

In work elsewhere on Darwin’s reading I was able to draw on Darwin’s own exact descriptions of the diverse intensity of reading he gave to different works (‘skimmed’, ‘read thoroughly’, ‘failed in reading’).⁹ It would be r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 INTRODUCTORY
• 2 ORIGINS AND OBLIVION IN VICTORIAN NARRATIVE
• 3 PAMELA AND ARCADIA: READING CLASS, GENRE, GENDER
• 4 RICHARDSON, MILTON, AND THE STATUS OF EVIL
• 5 CARLYLEAN TRANSPORTS
• 6 CIRCULATORY SYSTEMS: MONEY, GOSSIP, AND BLOOD IN MIDDLEMARCH
• 7 BEYOND DETERMINISM: GEORGE ELIOT AND VIRGINIA WOOLF
• 8 THE VICTORIANS IN VIRGINIA WOOLF: 1832–1941
• 9 VIRGINIA WOOLF AND PREHISTORY
• 10 HUME, STEPHEN, AND ELEGY IN TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
• Index