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“The Higher Inward Life” George
Eliot’s Middlemarch
Georges Letissier
Collection Intercalaires
– Agrégations
d'anglais Presses universitaires
de Paris Nanterre, 2020 Broché. 251 p.
ISBN 978-2840163787. 13 €
Reviewed by Maria Tang Université Rennes 2
George
Eliot features regularly as an author on the syllabus of the prestigious Agrégation
d’anglais examination in France, and Georges Letissier’s monograph on Middlemarch,
written on the occasion of the 2019-2021 programme on which the novel appears,
is published as part of the Intercalaires collection of the Presses
universitaires de Paris Nanterre that is aimed primarily, although by no means
exclusively, at candidates preparing the competitive examination. The challenge
of bringing George Eliot up to date for the twenty-first century has been taken
up by numerous critics over the last several years (K. Chase, Middlemarch in
the Twenty-first Century, 2006; K.M. Newton, Modernizing George Eliot,
2011, and George Eliot for the Twenty-First Century, 2018) and Letissier
adds his voice to the chorus in a contribution which never loses sight of the
pedagogical imperative to provide the student with the requisite tools of
literary analysis and fill in the necessary critical background of over a
hundred years of Eliot criticism, while also opening up the work to
contemporary theoretical preoccupations. It is no small task, but Letissier
does not set out to be exhaustive and offers instead a balanced combination of
close-reading and wider-ranging analyses drawn from a selected range of
critical sources. The monograph is informed throughout by the stated purpose of
foregrounding Eliot’s “engagement with intellectual reflection” [12] in a novel
that registers the friction between the aspired-to “higher inward life” and the
“pilulous smallness” of the material world [14]. A
swift recapitulation of the novel’s genesis and a synopsis of the critical
reception of Middlemarch in the late 19th and 20th centuries,
necessarily selective, in the first chapter, points the student towards such
key critics as Henry James, W.J. Harvey, and David R. Carroll, with their
conflicting appraisals of the novel’s artistic unity or lack thereof. The
ensuing “brief foray into genetic criticism” [28] relies rather heavily on
Jerome Beaty’s well-known study of Eliot’s revisions of chapter 81; however, the
changes highlighted by Letissier, which concern those that Eliot made seemingly
to soften the portrait of Rosamond, serve the author’s overriding concern to
demonstrate Eliot’s commitment to “the higher inward life” even to the point of
having the narcissistic Rosamond “rise to a higher dimension of being” [31]. Chapter
2 explores the novel’s generic plurality with a view to elucidating Eliot’s
particular brand of realism. From its “humble” chronicle-like features that have
only recently been highlighted, right up to the novel’s heralding of “the
epistemological scepticism of post-modernism” [51], the “architectonics” [39] of
Middlemarch’s multiple plotlines are sounded for their mythological
subtexts, the archetypes of genre criticism, and the sensationalist tropes of
melodrama. While the chapter mines some of the classics of Eliot criticism for
its premises, such as Avrom Fleischman’s George Eliot’s Intellectual Life
and David Lodge’s well-known article on “Middlemarch and the Idea of the
Classic Realist Text” (a move which attests to Letissier’s pedagogical concern
to equip the student with the key landmarks in the Eliotian critical canon), his
analysis of the novel’s multiplexity is not limited to rehearsing the standard
lines. A tantalising reflection on a number of “ghost narratives” which “haunt
the novel” – the negated, stifled, and otherwise aborted narrative
ramifications that have the reader “speculating” – is an occasion for a
fruitful rapprochement of Eliot, Derrida, and their mutual influence,
Feuerbach (whom Derrida quotes in his Spectres de Marx, Letissier
reminds us), and the insightful observation that in Middlemarch the
“speculative level is part and parcel of the multiplot” [40]. Alongside
an analysis of the function of the chapter mottoes and a review of Eliot’s own ideas
about ‘Form in Art’, this chapter also provides the Agrégation student with a timely reminder that such pregnant
concepts as “realism” require careful definition before they are used.
Differentiating between the many “different strands of realism… domestic
realism…; social realism; moral realism; realism… relying on a method of
induction” [47], Letissier offers the caveat that “there is no ‘realism’
in the absolute, that ‘realism’ is always context-based, informed by current
cultural representations, epistemological filters, ideological screens and so
on” [47]; and he reminds us that for Eliot the opposite of realism was not
idealism but “falsism” [42]. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Science
in Middlemarch as both theme and method, once again offering a useful
synopsis of a seminal critical text, Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots, in a
concise appraisal of the tension between “natural history” and “natural
science” as opposing paradigms for the novel’s conception. Affirming the
“consubstantial bond between the scientific and the literary imagination” which
produces what he refers to alternately as the “scientific sublime” and as
“Romantic materialism”, “the idea that mystery is lodged within the confines of
the material universe” [53], Letissier concludes the chapter by noting that “Middlemarch’s
world is… post-Darwinian” [55] insofar as the ruthlessly exploitative community
is far from harmonious. Its multiple plots set in motion actions whose effects
are incommensurate and not necessarily meliorative. Letissier’s remark that “the
power of motion… is not the same thing as progress” [56] is a distinction that
could prove useful for future teachers of English in France where “the Idea of
Progress”, until recently a theme on the English cultural syllabus in lycées,
still informs the curriculum. Chapters
3 and 4 perform the delicate balancing act of both providing a summary of the
novel’s multiple interweaving plot lines while imparting astute interpretive
insights gleaned from numerous microtextual close readings. In this way the
author models the systole and diastole movement (to borrow an Eliotian image) between
micro-analysis and the broader thematic considerations which the Agrégation student must also master. “Stealth”
is the unifying motif of chapter 3’s synopses of the first half of the novel (books
1 to 4), alluding to Eliot’s oblique, lateral, or indirect modes of
characterisation and plot development. Instead of giving us the book titles and
unpacking their polysemous meanings as critics often do, Letissier places each
book under the aegis of a key word or concept foregrounded in each (middleness,
liminality, optics and vision, interlacement) and organises the synopsis around
it. This allows him to acknowledge the standard critical interpretations of each
book’s key moments while also teasing out the finer details among the more familiar
narrative threads to offer insightful angles on such well-known tropes as the
pier-glass, the image of entwinement, or the labyrinth (which, it is shown, Eliot
employs as a ‘contronym’). Chapter
4, “Towards moral sympathy”, turns away from the mechanisms of plot established
in the first part of the novel, to probe the intensifying engagement with moral
issues in the latter half. Letissier once again pulls off the feat of focusing
the proliferating events of books 5 to 8 through a number of conceptual prisms
that provide the student with convenient handles on the text, such as the dual
motifs of the echo (the choric and anonymous voice of rumour) and of dialogic introspection
that characterise the aptly named “collective soundscape” [90] of book 5; or the
materiality of objects that are almost invested with a narrative life of their
own, as epitomised in the auction scene in book 6, which blurs the boundary
between the human and the material and affords a critical nod, albeit somewhat
fleetingly, in the direction of the 21st-century “material turn” in literary
criticism. The framing of the Finale as a “parergon” – an inscription
complementary to the main work – occasions a nice “French touch” with the
evocation of Jacques Derrida’s essay “The Parergon” and the idea that what this
Finale exemplifies is less a tying up of loose ends than a “call[ing] into
question [of] the work’s autonomy, its harmonious self-sufficiency” [104]. This
Derridean detour illustrates the specific and insightful contributions to be
made to the English literary critical canon by scholars working in European or
non-Anglo-Saxon critical and philosophical traditions. Chapter
5 turns to a closer examination of narrative structure with a neat summary of the
successive critical perspectives on the ideological implications of Eliot’s
realism. The overview extends from the scholarship of critics such as Barbara
Hardy, whose bid to rehabilitate Eliot’s reputation in the mid-20th century underscored
the overarching unity of the novel, through Colin MacCabe’s view of the novel
as a politically conservative “classic realist text”, to the deconstructionism
of J. Hillis Miller and its emphasis on the rifts and points of rupture that
undermine the representation of a harmonious, organic whole. Between these
critical poles, Letissier situates his own work in the current of more recent
criticism that “has endeavoured to strike a balance between self-deconstructive
aspects and the persistence of a rhetorically consistent novel” [109]. The
chapter’s exploration of the structural function of character is heavily
indebted to the chapters ‘Character and form’ and ‘Possibilities’ of Barbara
Hardy’s seminal 1959 monograph on Eliot, to which Letissier brings a new
freshness, however, in suggesting that the non-actualised narrative
possibilities that “ghost” the novel without ever coming to fruition, bear “the
mark of Darwinism” [116], an observation that is surely informed by our
contemporary environmental concern with the trope of extinction, albeit only
narrative. Discussion of the structural function of the quintessentially
Eliotian tropes and metaphors of labyrinth, web, and water, and of the
prevalence of the visual motif of perception, rehearses the familiar tension
between how such symbolism at once bestows an internal cohesiveness on the text
while also enacting the fractures and limitations of the totalising impulse. The
student will find all the key quotations regarding Eliot’s use of imagery gathered
up here, alongside a timely corrective to postmodernist readings that Letissier
rightly states may have been too prompt to claim Eliot for their own
deconstructionist agenda insofar as they overlook the novelist’s close
familiarity with 19th-century visual culture, itself a sufficient justification
for her reticence to endorse “the possibility of arriving at a common vision” [127]. Chapter
6’s use of the theme of family and inheritance as a device for exploring the
mechanics of the “multi-storied” plots of Middlemarch shows how the text
works to “jam” the ordinary workings of the “family romance” as well as to
question the historical legal underpinnings of primogeniture that have ensured
the circulation of wealth and property in Britain since Roman times. This
chapter is exemplary of Letissier’s wonderfully pedagogical approach. Along the
way the student who may be unfamiliar with Victorian literary culture is given
valuable contextual information on the prevalence of the figures of the double
and of the orphan in Victorian literature, or of the melodramatic clichés based
on chance and contrived coincidence that uncover unsuspected familial
connections, all of which Eliot adapts to her own original ends. Discussion of
the sensationalist “narrative enclaves” [136] embedded within the realist
framework stresses how sensationalism has not only a dramatic role in the novel
but occasions a more metaphysical reflection on the “fumbling and frustrated
endeavours to chart human destiny in a world exposed to the erratic whims of
chance and contingency” [137] as well as the ethical “consequentialist
dimension” [140] which construes deeds as offspring that “live and act apart
from our own will”, in the words of Charles Bray. The
overview of Middlemarch’s dramatis personae in chapter 7 is almost
exhaustive in scope and abundantly illustrated, taking in not only the main and
minor characters, but even wondering whether such nonhuman entities as pets and
houses may not also qualify for inclusion as “synecdochic extensions” of their
owners [152]. Eliot’s already well-documented analogical and contrastive
methods of characterisation occupy a central place in the demonstration, alongside
the mental “dioramas” through which the intense inner life of the characters’
minds is elicited. The emphasis throughout is on the dynamic quality of
character depiction in the Eliotian text, but Letissier also conveys a sense of
the writer’s voracious incorporation of other, more static or mechanistic,
Dickensian modes of character portrayal which act almost as a foil to the
novelist’s own sense of character as “a process and an unfolding”. The prism of
character also affords an opportunity to draw up a taxonomy of the novel’s
social clusters of clergymen and physicians, as well as those figures of the
artist which initiate an “intersemiotic debate” [178] in the novel, a pretext
for Eliot to indulge a number of metatextual reflections on the very process of
characterisation itself. Letissier detects a proto-Modernist quality in her rendering
of character [180], with its emphasis on the fluctuating and indeterminate
contours of the self as exemplified by Will Ladislaw’s wavering, or Rosamond’s
penchant for theatrical “somatic performances” that will entail nothing less
than “[t]he disappearance of a foundational self” so that, as he cogently and
intriguingly puts it, “ontology dissolves into dramaturgy” [182]. The
chapter on gender, “Goose and gander”, highlights the “Bakhtinian
double-voicedness” [186] of Eliot’s treatment of the vexatious “woman question”
in its temporal, social, and biological dimensions. Investigating the “temporal
ellipsis” between the time of the novel’s writing, the 1860s, which witnessed
the increasing demands of the suffragists for women’s rights, and the benighted
condition of women’s educational standards in the 1830s, the time of the
narrated events, Letissier shows how the novel sheds light on the [lack of]
progress made in the condition of women in the intervening years. In a
subsection flagged as overtly “intersectional” [194], however anachronistic that
term might appear by Victorian standards, social class is investigated through
“a female lens” following the example of Herodotus who also “thought it well to
take a woman’s lot for his starting-point” [Middlemarch : 89]. The
social invisibility or marginality of women from the lower and middle classes,
who can only observe from the side-lines the doings of the male characters, is
taken as a paradigm for the issue of social exclusion in general, be it of the
labouring Dagleys or the aspiring middle-classes, embodied by Rosamond,
hankering after social elevation and nurturing fantasies of empowerment.
Plentiful micro-analyses probing the porous interface between conventionally
feminine and masculine traits in characters such as Ladislaw and Farebrother,
as well as other means whereby Eliot explodes essentialist ideas about such
notions as “women’s influence”, underpin the central assertion about the
primacy of “indefiniteness” as the mark of the feminine in Middlemarch.
Letissier offers an unabashedly “gynocentric” reading of the novel that, in
common with the writings of Hélène Cixous, reposes upon Eliot’s rejection of
the “principle of non-contradiction”, seen as a premise of patriarchal
discourse [206]. The
monograph culminates with a magisterial section on the “sonority” of this
“heteroglossic novel” by demonstrating through meticulous explications de
texte the intricate interweaving of the voices of the omnipresent, but not
omnipotent, narrator, the anonymous vox populi or “town’s talk”, and
the intimate “inward colloquy” of individual characters. The narrative voice is
presented as less of a hectoring presence than criticism may have led us to
believe and is positioned rather as a witness that is wary of the pitfalls of
language and often reluctant to commit to a monologic statement of how things
are. The Eliotian narrator is dialogic, double-voiced, entertaining a certain
complicity with the smug Victorian voice of “common sense” while also declaring
his/her nonconformism and being self-reflexively “engrossed in the process of
literary creation” [221]. The varied nuances of the collective voice of
Middlemarch are reviewed, from the regional to the professional, from the hyperbolic
to the epigrammatic, right down to the voices of the nonhuman – the echoes of
the hammer, the roar of the furnace – that make up Caleb Garth’s personal “aural
memory” [225]. Gossip, meanwhile, and the “terrifying… utterly unpredictable” [227]
pressures of “intermental thought”, a concept borrowed from critic Alan Palmer,
form the necessary noisy background against which the inner lives of the
characters stand out. Letissier performs several masterly analyses of these in
which he lays out the workings of free indirect style and charts the shifting
tones and registers of the narrator’s protean voice in what proves to be an
exemplary model of explication de texte for students of the Agrégation who are training for this
kind of exercise in close reading. Pondering in the conclusion upon the contemporary fortunes of Middlemarch, Letissier observes quite rightly that Eliot’s fiction has given rise to far fewer spin-offs and filmic adaptations than Austen, Dickens, or the Brontës, but the proffered explanation – that this profuse and teeming novel offers “no gaps and holes in it… that might be prolonged, completed, or updated” [238] in prequels, coquels or sequels – sits uneasily with previous statements regarding the unresolved narrative strands and “titillating… ellips[e]s” [40], for example, surrounding Ladislaw’s parents, that the monograph has teased out of the novel’s densely woven weft and warp. Appraising recent creative interest in Eliot’s fiction by writers such as Kathy O’Shaughnessy, Rebecca Mead, or Patricia Duncker [Sophie and the Sybil], Letissier, a specialist of neo-Victorian fiction, considers that only the work of the latter can be properly regarded as participating in the “creatively challenging field of the neo-Victorian” [239], the former falling more under the category of memoir, hagiography, or homage. The parallel that is drawn between the novel’s ‘Finale’ and the closing episode of the American HBO series Six Feet Under is spot-on, and so, given Letissier’s interest in contemporary serialisations, it is rather surprising that no mention was made of the popular (at least among recent Agrégation students!) gender-bending web series adaptation of Middlemarch, whose success suggests that Eliot has effectively leap-frogged the neo-Victorian trend to invest the far edgier scene of the online vlog! Letissier’s
prose is a delight to read. He revels in the rich and vibrant diversity of
expression offered by the English language, of which his command and feel are
such that I can only assume that he is merely masquerading as a non-native
speaker! He has a gift for the memorable formula and pithy expression,
deploying alliteration and assonance – Middlemarch is “a noisy novel in
which sounds abound and rumour is rife” [209] – and colourful metaphor that it
is a joy to roll around the mouth. Take, for example, the wonderful description
of Mr Brooke’s “deregulated name-dropping laced with maverick intertextual
parroting” [238]. Letissier’s homage to Eliot’s “mind of a polymath” [47] honours
the “higher inward life” not only by charting the novelist’s engagement with
intellectual reflection but also by escorting the reader herself along an
erudite journey of rediscovery of such flowers of rhetoric as polyptoton,
prosopopoeia, or hapax legomenon, which lard Eliot’s prose and to which Letissier
draws our renewed attention. The
copy is not devoid of a number of typos that could have been eliminated by
closer reading in the proof stage: several spelling errors on the names of
characters, critics, or concepts – for example, Sara Dunkirk instead of Sarah
[20], Gilliam Beer instead of Gillian [57], Mr and Mrs Mamsey
instead of Mawmsey [223], Alan Plamer instead of Palmer [227],
hapax logomena instead of legomena [215] – mar the finely
chiselled prose, and there are a couple of unfortunate confusions between
Dorothea and Rosamond: “Dorothea Lydgate” is mentioned at one point [113] as
well as Mr Farebrother’s failure to bestow his “[subtle observation] on her [Dorothea]”
instead of Rosamond [218]; and the plural of Mr [Messrs] is eschewed in favour
of an unaccountable Mrs when referring to the several physicians, causing
one to wonder initially who “Mrs Gambit, Toller, Minchin, or Sprague”
are [87]. These, however, in no way detract from the fine combination of
theoretically and contextually informed analysis with incisive micro-textual explications
de texte at which the French excel. The monograph brings the 21st-century
student of Middlemarch up to date on the critical canon, while cracking
the door ajar, albeit somewhat fleetingly, onto contemporary avenues of inquiry
offered by ecocritical and new materialist approaches. If its strength resides
in the panoply of close readings which exemplify the skills required of the
work’s primary intended reader, the Agrégation candidate, there is plenty of
nourishment to sustain the more seasoned scholar in their rediscovery of this
quintessentially Victorian novelist.
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