The Poetics of Poesis

The Making of Nineteenth-Century English Fiction

Felicia Bonaparte

• Éditeur: University of Virginia Press
• Année: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780813937335
• Sujet: Literature
• Sous-sujet: Literary Criticism Theory

Examining novels written in nineteenth-century England and throughout most of the West, as well as philosophical essays on the conception of fictional form, Felicia Bonaparte sees the novel in this period not as the continuation of eighteenth-century "realism, " as has commonly been assumed, but as a genre unto itself. Determined to address the crises in religion and philosophy that had shattered the foundations by which the past had been sustained, novelists of the nineteenth century felt they had no real alternative but to make the world anew.

Finding in the new ideas of the early German Romantics a theory precisely designed for the remaking of the world, these novelists accepted Friedrich Schlegel's challenge to create a form that would render such a remaking possible. They spoke of their theory as poesis, etymologically "a making, " to distinguish it from the mimesis associated with "realism." Its purpose, however, was not only to embody, as George Eliot put it in Middlemarch, "the idealistic in the real, " giving as faithful an account of the real as observation can yield, but also to embody in that conception of the real a discussion of ideas that are its "symbolic signification, " as Edward Bulwer-Lytton described it in one of his essays. It was to carry this double meaning that the nineteenth-century novelist created, Bonaparte concludes, the language of mythical symbolism that came to be the norm for this form, and she argues that it is in this doubled language that nineteenth-century fiction must be read.

Part I

“Chaos Is Come Again”

Chapter 1

The Crisis in Religion

The crises nineteenth-century novelists took as the origins of the predicament they were setting out to address, vast and complex as they knew them, were in essence only three: the crisis of faith, on which much has been written but on which much remains to be said, as well as two others that have not usually been perceived as crises, one, as it was seen in this century, the crisis of empiricism, the other, really a part of the second, the crisis of reason as empiricism defined it. And while it was generally understood that each had many kinds of consequences, it was their epistemological impact on which the era focused most, for together these crises had managed to undermine literally every ground on which life and thought had rested. Matthew Arnold summed it up when he wrote in “The Study of Poetry” (1880), “There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve.”

Religious faith, as long as it lasted, was the most secure foundation for the building of all things, if only because truths anchored in it were held to be secured by a deity who was, by definition, right. Had no other crisis occurred, this alone would have been enough to dismantle every structure by which the past had been sustained. It is essential therefore to realize that, in a foundational sense, this crisis was already in place from the very first years of the century. Disagreements on this subject are not, each from its own perspective, necessarily mistaken in placing the crisis early or late, for there are many considerations to be taken into account in the making of this estimate. Bernard M. H. Reardon, Callum H. Brown, Owen Chadwick, Josef L. Altholz, and Cornelio Fabro, to name but a few, focus on very different things—different groups in the population, different geographic areas, different kinds and degrees of doubt, different religious denominations, different criteria for the crisis—and come up with different conclusions that, while mutually exclusive, are in some sense all correct.

Not only was the religious crisis fully in place at the start of the century, it was profound, it was pervasive, and included not intellectuals and the avant-garde alone, as has been suggested by some, but all layers of society. The Tinker, for instance, in Bulwer’s “My Novel”; or, Varieties in English Life by Pisistratus Caxton (1853) literally carries a bag of books that he sells from village to village—not city to city, not town to town, but small village to small village and therefore to every point in the land and to people who are rarely considered to be reading such literature—books that are, as they are described, “bombs and shells against religion” (vol. 4, chap. 5). As John Morley remarks in “Byron,” the “seven centuries that flowed between the spiritual mind of Europe when Saint Bernard was its spokesman, and the spiritual mind of which Byron was the interpreter, had gradually dissolved” those “certitudes” of which religion was the keeper.

The loss of a deity in itself had, quite apart from its consequences, so profound and so distressing an effect on the nineteenth century that even an atheist like Hardy is, in The Dynasts (1904–8), led to lament through the Spirit of the Pities, “Something within me aches to pray / To some Great Heart, to take away / This evil day, this evil day” (pt. 2, sec. 5). This loss is often in Hardy’s fiction the origin of a thousand ills, as it always is in this century, for it is not this loss alone that is the center of the crisis, but, as Friedrich Nietzsche recognized, the million others that spring from it. To follow even one single thread of a large and complex tapestry and only in the sketchiest outline will perhaps suggest a few of the turns the argument takes and a few of the countless symbols—a full “language” in itself, as Lance St. John Butler rightly calls it—created by the nineteenth century for the discussion of this crisis. The name Julian makes a good starting point.

Today we tend to notice names in the nineteenth-century novel mostly when, like Mr. M’Choakumchild’s, the deadly schoolmaster of Hard Times (1854), they call attention to themselves. But names in nineteenth-century fiction are no less pivotal thematically than in medieval allegory. Readers of fiction in this century were both fascinated by names and aware of their significance, as may be gauged by the popularity of Charlotte Yonge’s The History of Christian Names (1863)—“Christian names” being, of course, the term at the time for “given names—“a standard volume published to answer the demand for such information, reprinted many times in the century and vastly expanded at one point. The book was on many library shelves, public libraries as a matter of course but many private ones as well, including, among the many we know of, the libraries of Ruskin and Hardy.

Not uncommonly, a name found to be popular in fiction is equally popular in fact, not because the novel reflects its general use mimetically but because both fact and fiction are responding to a reality that for some reason favors that name. Indeed, the rise or fall of ideas, movements, conditions, and concerns can often be traced in the rise or fall of a name both in fiction and fact. Thus, the rise of the feminist movement can be tracked in the increasingly frequent use of the name Diana. The hunter goddess of the Romans (in many functions not unlike Artemis but different enough in personality that, in an unusual preference, the Roman is chosen over the Greek), a creature celibate, single, powerful, competent to care for herself, and fearsome to those who dared to cross her, seemed the perfect embodiment of what was becoming the new woman. Rarely used in the first half century—Diana Rivers in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) is little more than a minor character—it sometimes becomes in the second half even the name of a title heroine, as in George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways (1885) and Mary Augusta Arnold Ward’s The Testing of Diana Mallory (1908). Writers often call attention to the meanings of names they use and to the fact that names have meanings now and then in a comical way, almost in the manner of Sterne. In Knight-Errant (1887), Edna Lyall explains that the tenor of the novel gave himself the name Sardoni because, while dining in Sardinia and in a sardonic mood, he found himself feasting on sardines (chap. 15).

Although any means may serve to create meaning for a name in fiction, names become symbolic generally in one or another of five ways. A few are made up to serve a point in the themes of the works they appear in, Mr. M’Choakumchild in Hard Times being one of the most obvious. Abstractions, a slightly larger category, account for such figures as Helen Burns, whose name is part of the extensive imagery of fire and ice Brontë develops in Jane Eyre. In many more cases, names are allusive. Ginevra Fanshaw in Brontë’s Villette (1853), flighty, flirtatious, and self-willed, is named for the Guinevere, wife of Arthur, whose adultery brings down Camelot. The name David Copperfield (1850)—and in a novel in which his antithesis is named Uriah—is typical of the many names that are imported from a work, the Bible being very popular for novelists like Dickens especially, that helps identify the character and his place in the theme of the book. A very large number of names derive their significance etymologically, and the great sophistication we must assume in this century’s readers with regard to the roots of names is illustrated by Wilkie Collins in his novel The Law and the Lady (1875) when we find Miserrimus Dexter, born with no lower extremities, called as a witness at a trial. Taking the witness stand, he offers the court a disquisition on names, explaining that many have a meaning discovered through their etymologies. His own first name, he adds at last, “means, in Latin, ‘most unhappy.’ It was given to me by my father, in allusion to the deformity which you all see” (chap. 20). Collins, however, characteristic of the nineteenth-century novelist, places us squarely on the road but leaves us to our own devices to reach the ultimate destination, which is ironically implied in the Latin etymology not of his first name but of his last. The novel is partly a murder mystery and Dexter turns out to be the murderer, proving he is not dexter, “right,” but actually “left,” in Latin sinister.

Julian, meant to recall the emperor who repudiated Christianity, coming thus to be “The Apostate,” quickly became, thanks in part to the prominent place assigned to him by Edward Gibbon in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89), a symbol of the crisis of faith. Charles Algernon Swinburne translates Julian’s final words supposedly, “Vicisti, Galilaee,” in his “Hymn to Proserpine” (1866)—“Thou hast conquered, O Pale Galilean—” and uses them in the poem’s epigraph. The name is popular early and late, fully developed by 1818 in Shelley’s “Julian and Maddalo” as well as, in the identical year, Susan Ferrier’s novel Marriage, in which it appears in its feminine form, and dominant still in Tiny Alice written a hundred and fifty years later (1964), a work in which Edward Albee explores the relationship between presentation and representation in a fully secular age and in which Julian, the central character, undergoes his own crisis of faith.

No one, however, uses this name as extensively as Hardy. In Jude the Obscure (1895), we come upon Sue reading Gibbon on this emperor and, having finished, reaching as well for the very volume of Swinburne in which is found his “Hymn to Proserpine.” It is one of the novel’s ironies that at precisely the same moment Jude is reading the New Testament (pt. 2, chap. 3). This, a common scene in Hardy and in a great many other works, is in essence a battle of texts, which is a battle of ideas, and it is clear that in Hardy’s opinion, Jude is reading the wrong gospel. The identical point is made in The Hand of Ethelberta: A Comedy in Chapters (1876) in which Julian, however, becomes the surname of a brother and sister whose first names develop the argument further. The name of the sister here is Faith, not an overly popular name but always significant when used, as in Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” (1835). “My Faith is gone,” cries Brown in despair when he discovers that his wife has left to attend a “Black Mass” in the forest. In a manner that is common in the nineteenth-century novel, Hardy brings the names together to produce not only a point but a sentence, an assertion, the first name taking the place of the noun and the second of the verb. The sister tells us that it is faith that is apostate, which is to say gone. The brother, whose first name is Christopher—a reference to the anointed one, which in Christianity is Jesus, as Charlotte Yonge reminds her readers—specifies, when combined with his last, that the faith that is gone is Christianity. And as if this were not enough—for Hardy does, with subjects like these, like to hammer his points home—Faith and Julian are shown to be bloodless characters who belong to the dead, not the living. The “blood in his face,” writes Hardy of Christopher, which was “never very much,” seems to disappear altogether when sunlight cuts across his features and gives them the very “hues of death” (chap. 39).

The crisis of faith had much to do with the passion for history that developed in this century. Scott had proved himself prophetic when he had, in The Antiquary (1816), created characters obsessed, and in many ways metafictionally, with the recovery of the past. The past, writes Nicolas Berdyaev in The Meaning of History, had become in the nineteenth century a compulsive preoccupation, always the mark for him of an age undergoing a “spiritual dismemberment” (chap. 1). In a like manner, in Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented (1891), Hardy speaks of the modern mind as suffering from a “chronic melancholy” (chap. 18), a melancholy that is here shown, through its etymology, to have been produced by time, which is to say by that moment in history. In its own mind, the age, indeed, felt itself aggressively modern, often describing itself in that word and explicitly attributing modern thought with its secular bent inevitably to this very crisis. That figure which Scott was one of the first and greatest perhaps of all to create, the character who finds himself impaled on a moment of transition, depicts this very isolation Victorians felt in historical time. Every novel of Scott’s has one, Earnscliff in The Black Dwarf (1816), for instance, or Edgar in The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), both more enlightened than their neighbors but trapped in a world they cannot escape. In Henry Esmond, Esquire (1852), William Makepeace Thackeray, obviously offering his own preferences, places this split in the man himself. His heart is with the world that was (the Stuarts, Catholicism, feudalism) but his intelligence tells him the new (William of Orange, democracy) is by far the better alternative. This was later to become a favorite type for Anton Chekhov, whose Lyubov in The Cherry Orchard (1904) can neither restore the land to its glory nor subdivide it into tract housing and is therefore condemned to lose it. In many ways an American Chekhov, Tennessee Williams does something similar in A Streetcar Named Desire (1948) in creating Blanche Dubois who belongs to the genteel past of an estate whose name, “Belle Reve,” ties her to the “beautiful dream” of what certainly never was but is thought to have been in retrospect, so much so that she becomes a ghost of that past in the present day. Like Hardy’s Julians, she is pale and always associated with white, which is instantly made evident by her clothing and her name. On the other side we have the raw but energetic future represented by Stanley Kowalski who is associated with red, beginning with the bloody package of raw meat he brings home to his wife at the opening of the play, in one sense the eternal caveman bringing his kill home to his woman, but in another his reincarnation in the emerging Darwinian man.

Specific texts associated with perspectives of the past are often the means of establishing dissociation in a novel between the present and the past. Vanity Fair (1847) makes use of one in its very opening chapter when Thackeray shows Amelia and Becky receiving Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary as their graduation gift from Miss Jemima Pinkerton as they leave her academy. This plot, it should be added here, of two young women who enter the world and make their way on different paths is common in nineteenth-century fiction and it follows a common pattern. One is a conventional woman who treads on the conventional road. Hers are the old ways but they prove, because of the crises, no longer tenable, so that, while she herself appears moral, proper, and respectable, her choices lead to unhappy consequences or, at the least, ineffectual ones, and sometimes even she herself is not entirely what she seems. The other young woman is daring, bold, original, and adventurous. She takes the unconventional road and is frequently successful, but, in the blazing of new trails, she often has to break old rules, so that she is often improper, sometimes immoral, and even criminal. Visions of the past and future, they are scathing testimonies to how the century saw itself placed in the progress of history. This is precisely what happens here. Amelia, as she is handed the Dictionary, clutches it lovingly to her bosom. Becky flings it out the window as the coach takes her away. The work of the prototypical man of the century before, this dictionary is the embodiment of the verities of the past. It is the relic of an age, Thackeray seems to be implying, that still held definition possible, an age that still knew what things meant. It is to that world Amelia belongs. Becky, however, belongs to the new. For her no past can be a guide. Miss Pinkerton, who is shocked by her action, exclaims in amazement, “Well, I never!,” a stock remark of surprise in her time, especially in those melodramas Thackeray was so fond of attending, but precisely the right phrase for this moment in history, for in truth she “never” has. Becky’s action is unprecedented, as is the era and the character.

Of the many competing notions of what history actually was and how it was to be interpreted—F. D. Maurice offers a summary in his essay “English History” (1866) delivered to the “Working Men’s College,” another suggestion of the eager audience for ideas in this period—by far the dominant point of view was, in a very loose sense, the Hegelian. Hegel himself, as Kirk Willis demonstrates, was very well received in England, but his general ideas were already familiar to everyone decades before his admiring students collected his lectures to publish them posthumously, by word of mouth in part no doubt but also, in the case of history, because the specific views he expressed had been anticipated by others, by two others in particular, Friedrich Schelling in his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) and, even earlier, by Herder in a good number of his works. Hegel imagines a world-spirit that fulfills itself in time, giving to individual ages their peculiar characteristics in ideas that become in each age the final origin of its empirical conditions. As Hegel’s best advocate and interpreter, R. G. Collingwood, sums it up, all history is the “history of thought.”

This Hegelian view of history has pervasive implications to the very form of fiction. For if a historical approach requires an analysis of the ideas of an age, then any novel is historical that is concerned with those ideas, even when it is set in the years in which it is actually written. While many novels for different reasons still take the past as the time of their action, and some that period of sixty years earlier that Scott especially singled out, by far the largest number of works that think of themselves as historical fiction are set in an almost immediate present. Present history was to Ruskin the only kind meaningful to art. “What do you at present,” he asks in Lectures on Architecture and Painting (1853), writing here about graphic art, “mean by historical painting? Now-a-days it means the endeavouring, by the power of imagination, to portray some historical event of past days. But in the Middle Ages, it meant representing the acts of their own days; and that is the only historical painting worth a straw” (Lecture 4: “Pre-Raphaelitism”). Bulwer, Eliot, and Kingsley, just three among many that could be named, considered The Parisians (1873), Deronda (1876), and Yeast; or, The Thoughts, Sayings, and Doings of Launcelot Smith, Gentleman (1849, 1851) genuine historical works although all three are set very near to the time of their composition. Little wonder that in “Hallam” (1828), Thomas Babbington Macaulay, much neglected as a critic but another of the many who contribute to the huge body of literary criticism written in the nineteenth century, laments that his era is producing few if any really good histories but an extraordinary number of “good historical romances.”

Such a subject, it is obvious, cannot be conveyed mimetically. In their most reductive details, characters and events might be so, but to represent an age through its dominant point of view, and to consider the progress of time of which that age is a stepping-stone, the action must be made to figure, for they cannot be depicted, questions, ideas, and arguments, history itself in some way. This is precisely what we find done, and done in the most ingenious ways. In Marius the Epicurean (1885), for instance, set in the earliest years of Christianity, Walter Pater alludes continually to figures and movements throughout history (Jonathan Swift, Théophile Gautier, the “German enthusiasts at the beginning of our century”), making it known that his real subject is not a period in ancient Rome but the full history of the West. In Rienzi...