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Representation Revelations

John Mc Gowan?, Representation and Revelation: Victorian Realism from Carlyle to Yeats (1986)

Intro

• Main Subject: how “Victorians tried to connect mind with world” 1
  • They believe in a reality that pre-exists language, and they want to “guarantee literature’s ability to represent that reality”
  • realism as dominant mode in Victorian lit, VERY diff from the French realism across the Channel
  • battle for realism is to define realism as YOUR values
• Diff between Victorian and modern thought
  • the ways you “think and talk” will make a “difference” in the world: Victorian
  • reality is “brutal, indifferent, and unthinking,” and no representation or thought can change that: modern (Yeats)
• Victorians “haunted” by Cartesian dualism, the separation of mind and reality, b/c then how can you know the external world?
  • How do they react? “synthesis of eighteenth-century and romantic theories of mind’s position in the world”—and self-consciously so (cf Mill’s essays on Bentham and Coleridge)
    • Wanted to get the best of both worlds, not their excesses
  • However, most of Victorian lit is comedy: posits a union, even if only on level of culture (rather than material world)
• Two Victorian modes: his writers (Rossetti, Carlyle, Ruskin, Dickens, Eliot, Browning, Yeats) use both and defend/discuss both with the readers
  • “Representational theories of knowledge posit the necessity for some intermediary that stands between mind and the world, serving as their point of contact.” 2
    • Representation of two types, based on Locke’s ambiguity in the word “idea” (could also mean sense-data) that makes him refer both to perception and to language as representation: the problem is both of perception and of language, and are “so closely linked for the Victorians” 3
      • So even perception is representation b/c it is an “idea” of the concrete world: “The Mind knows not Things immediately, but only by the intervention of the Ideas it has of them,” says Locke (Human Understanding)... “knows nothing but its own ideas” qtd 4
    • Victorian Lockean knowledge: “knowledge by means of ideas which are causally connected with, but only representative of, objects distinct from the mind” 3
      • But this is problematic: Locke doesn’t solve the problems he creates, ie he says that you know you’re right when your ideas correspond to reality…but how do you know when your ideas are corresponding correctly? he gives no good answer
      • What you need to remember about Locke is for Victorians means that all knowledge “mediate” 4 as the (tenuous) link between the mind and the world, that for the Victorians he espouses “common sense” in which “what we perceive is really there in the world,” at which point they protest, “You need more than just sense-data to understand the world!” that is you need something nonmaterial, nonsensuous
      • they don’t really see that Locke was “uneasy” with his own theories; they think he is content with sensory perception, but really he is troubled by representationalism and would like to retreat into immediacy, and actually tries to argue that never mind, we don’t need mediating ideas b/c perception totally accurate (direct realism, says Douglas Greenlee)—just like the Victorians (and he eventually says God wouldn’t have given us minds that were inaccurate)
      • this is what’s called the “theory of representational knowledge,” assoc with Locke
  • “Revelation…is the basis of a model that asserts that immediate knowledge of the real, either through direct sensory perception or through an intuitive grasp of essential principles, can be attained.” 2
    • “Victorians continually tried to evade the necessity of representation and its indirections in favor of immediate access to the real.” 5 “impatience with the subtleties and difficulties of mediation”
    • sight metaphors 6: the figure for “immediate knowledge”
    • Locke: “Revelation is natural Reason enlarged by a new set of Discoveries communicated by God immediately” 6 no mediation required, direct
      • Why? Mc Gowan?: it gives him a way out of “strict representationalism” 6
  • “Oscillation” between revelation and representation in Victorian works

Getting More Acquainted

• Gap between words and ideas = gaps between world and ideas
• Words: the next level
  • Locke: language a conventional system wherein words always representative (doesn’t think language is natural) (he’s Saussurean, says Mc Gowan?, and the concerns he and Hume address are pretty much same as Derrida: these problems aren’t just modern but also romantic and Victorian 9)
    • “idea” here means “concept” for him
    • words represent ideas
      • ”...Sounds have no natural connection with our Ideas…” “arbitrary:” you need to remember the connex between word and idea, don’t let it slip 8: we “willfully” allow problems of communication b/c sloppy (ex: doesn’t like figurative lang)
    • why? communicate to connex two minds together
  • Creates two-fold representational system, wherein the ideas represent the world, and words represent ideas
    • Both have possibilities of slippage, so requires “double conformity” (of ideas to world; of ideas to words and staying the same between one person and another)
• Romanticism: “a particular set of responses to the problems raised by the dualism Locke’s word introduced into England” 9
  • Locke and Romantics use similar strategies to reconnex mind and world
  • Tho’ romantics don’t like Locke’s materialism, they don’t entirely reject him, says Mc Gowan?
    • cf Coleridge’s commentary on Descartes and Locke
  • Romanticism, ie Wordsworth and Coleridge “afforded the VIctorians certain ways, not found in eightennth-century thought, to understand the relation of mind to world and words to reality”
    • How? In their mission to bring together words and ideas
      • cf Wordsworth’s recommendation to use natural language: plain language nearer to rural language than the city which is so separated from nature and makes your mind torpid
      • cf Coleridge on allegory v symbol: allegory translates one abstraction into another, both being “unsubstantial;” symbol “a translucence of the Special in the Individual or the General in the Especial or of the Universal in the General. Above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative” 11 (it is a part of what it represents) (symbol will give you reality, make it intelligible) (seems to me metaphor v metonymy)
• Of course such attempts he says sometimes fail, esp if you look at what Coleridge produces. However, what he cares about is the desire that comes through in the theory, and how the impossibility of satisfying the desire affects the theory. 11
  • Figuring out new ways of writing will help keep alive the FORCE of the word, which is definitely there tho’ they might not understand exactly how 12
  • Victorian works “ensured” the lasting force of words
  • If you just try to deconstruct their attempts and find them to be failures, you aren’t recognizing how AWARE they were of the problem
• Victorians’ Relation to Romantics
  • for V, “romantic ideal functioned as a living pressure in spite of any shortcomings in romantic practice” 12
    • They took a poet at his word more than we do: they believed the Romantics solved the problem, did get to direct experience and knowledge
      • ex: Coleridge in his preface to Kubla Khan said the images and their expressions came to him at same time (tho’ some critics call Coleridge a monist, Mc Gowan? points out that Coleridge on the contrary accepted the ideas/reality split, and that only when you overcame it…that was his moment, not that there was never a separation 13)
      • ex 2: Worsworth “the appropriate business of poetry….to treat of things not as they are but as they appear; not as they exist in themselves, but as they seem to exist to the senses and to the passions” qtd 13
  • The V tried to “relive” what R did; when they failed it was V-selves’ fault, not R’s fault 13
• Romantics Disagreeing with Empiricists
  • They think they’re diff b/c empiricists say that mind can be accurate if you passively receive sensations
  • Coleridge “Newton was a mere materialist…a lazy Looker-on”
    • materialism reduces life to “impressions, ideas and sensations,” says Coleridge, putting people in “Slavery of the Mind to the Eye” 14
    • world is not just matter perceived by senses; we have nonmaterial truths, and the nonmaterial “infuses” the material 15; knowledge doesn’t equal perception
  • Mind instead is active and creative: the imagination reveals the connex between appearance and reality 15
    • fancy: just means mind rearranging images received from material world, not as good as imagination
    • the mind is REQUIRED in order to understand the material: “reincorporation of matter into spirit” 15 is what Coleridge does to reconcile dualism
  • Mc Gowan? wants to emphasize that the Romantics can’t do away w/representation altogether: they still believe in symbols 16
    • Even tho’ they do try to offer some alternative kind of knowledge that is direct cf Coleridge’s reason v understanding (reason: higher truths, does not need mediation, like an a priori faculty; understanding, sense truths, needs mediation)
      • Such intuition guarantees the certainty of knowledge
      • He also calls it Revelation: “Reason is therefore most eminently the Revelation of an immortal soul” 16 (it’s where you get your interpreting ideas from)
      • Coleridge: def of intuition: “designating the immediateness of any act or object of knowledge” qtd 17 in which says Mc Gowan? “collapse of all material objects into the spiritual truths they represent” (which Coleridge calls “spiritualization of all laws of nature into laws of intuition and intellect”)
      • this is what people mean when they refer to apocalyptic nature of romanticism

Back to the Victorians

• “Victorian writer lived in a world in which the real was not immediately available to him” 17
• B/c of science (nature isn’t human, doesn’t reflect Mind, but mechanistic)
  • Victorians by and large left nature to the scientists 18: as Mill said, God left Nature for man to make more perfect “amended, not imitated, by Man”
  • They’re not as enamored of nature as romantics esp as source of inspiration, imitation
  • Examples
    • Rossetti: tries to but fails to find romantic meaning in nature
    • Ruskin: turns away from transcendent nature to the making of the ideal society
    • “Carlyle is the first Victorian because he is interested in cultural forms and reform, rather than natural inspiration, and because he raises the problem of culture as it will appear throughout the period—in the work of, among others, Ruskin, George Eliot, Browning, and Arnold”
      • Instead of finding transcendence in nature, they’ll want it from culture (examples of culture: Ruskin’s “life,” Arnold’s Culture in Culture and Anarchy, “the best that has been thought;” and Eliot’s “humanist sympathy”) 18
• Culture a problem
  • b/c 1830s and 40s general air of materialism (that Carlyle blasts), where only facts matter not mind
  • b/c Victorian historiography = culture not eternal reality
    • history threatens culture as source of reality 19
• Result: “both sought out mediators to overcome these gaps and resented mediation as a sign of their distance” 19
  • These authors’ mediation: language, between reality and mind; recognition of a gap, of “human isolation from the real” 19
    • So these authors must reconcile their own use of language with language’s danger and its gap, its floating free from signified
      • Often they just try to deny or get around representation, via revelation
      • But often they dramatize the question of whether knowledge comes from mediation or from direct sources
  • In extreme form, “word serves to displace and even replace the thing” artificial instead of reality…words complicate the problem rather than solve it
  • Words “drift” and get you off topic 20, so Victorians want to “ensure its strict responsibility to the referent,” which reflects the “unease” around the novel itself (for it’s a fiction)

Conclusion of Intro

• What happens when Victorians are forced to accepting an “indirection,” the imprecision and mere representation, of language?
  • “a happy fall,” with benefits
  • “Victorians, more than either the empiricists or the romantics, are inclined to forgo revelation altogether in favor of representation—a tendency, I think, attributable to the Victorian interest in cultural solutions.” 20
    • ie inside a community
    • ie cultural mediation for “harmonious communities” are made via cultural mediation between individual and world 21
  • They shun the R’s lack of community, their emphasis on the solitary thinker, but they share R’s belief that the reality is a spiritual or emotional not material: that way the techniques of indirection don’t look like a problem but a necessity 21
• Victorians mix empiricism and romanticism
• “The individual knower must acknowledge the prior existence of that reality and its transcendence of all personal desires or constructs” 21
  • Culture is reality. You must accept it. Cultural reality “molests” private realities. 21 (Ed Said’s term), violently, dramatically
• Why Yeats? He’s the contrast, his example of the end of what he’s describing
• Victorians’ “obsessive need to identify the real indicates their inability to locate it with certainty.” 22 b/c we only have the representatives, not the reality. They’re upset they have to use indirection (mediation), which makes them “defensive”
  • Hence, each of his authors 1) identifies a reality and 2) tries to link mind and language to that reality
  • Artistic expression required b/c the process is so complicated and contradictory 22, yet they mistrust the literary process, making a very strange kind of art, one that doesn’t think its very vehicle is adequate
• Note on method: says he is dependent on post-structuralism for some things (sight/language, presence/absence, genealogy) but doesn’t want deconstruction’s nihilism about text undermining itself
  • b/c Victorians knew about mediation already, dang it
  • b/c mediation not “an unmitigated disaster” 23 and they continue to try to create “an order that, as completely as possible, satisfies desire”
• Note on method: debt to Ricoeur b/c of his anti-formalism cf “The Model of the Text”
• All his examples “trying to place literature at the service of reality” 24
  • Rossetti: after fall of romantics’ trust in nature, struggles to find a new source of reality
  • Carlyle: symbolic language, v influential
  • Ruskin: symbol, but more empirical than Carlyle; begins to find “advantages in mediation” like Dickens, Eliot, Browning
  • Dickens and Eliot: imagination creating worlds via changed perception; we need a “community around imagination”
    • remember Dickens in Bleak House preface, “I have purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things.” and that in Hard Times he tries “proving the necessity of fancy in a world…’chained…to material realities, and inspired…with no faith in anything else’...” qtd 102
    • “The exact truth must be there…And in these times, when the tendency is to be frightfully literal and catalogue-like—to make the thing, in short, a sort of sum in reduction that any miserable creature can do in that way—I have an idea…that the very holding of popular literature through a kind of opular dark age, may depend on such fanciful treatment.”
    • How does this classify Dickens? Mc Gowan? notes that as a result critics have tried to keep him apart from 19th c realism
      • But nowadays people are everywhere, some saying he’s the perfect realist others that he’s got no realism
      • Mc Gowan?: think of how he takes pains to prove scientifically spontaneous combustion
      • Mc Gowan?: David Copperfield will show us the way
    • Copperfield: b/c it was semi-autobiographical (truth) yet still fiction. David as factual narrator, but still its realism is “a point where the images of memory are overwhelmed b the lost object’s return to presence, to immediate perception” 108: a “naive realism” making mediation superfluous
      • Dickens not come into his own yet “still shy” and afraid of his fancy 118
  • Browning: still upset that we have nothing except culture itself (unlike D and E)
  • Yeats: “the last Victorian as well as the first modern” b/c “strives to develop the poetic word as an end in itself, stressing its human content” not its transcendence, but keeps going back to reality
    • “Yeats is able to transform reality’s resistance to desire into the basis of a triumphant art” 201 finding “joy” in frustration
    • Unlike Victorians, “does not blame language or the self for man’s failure to connect with the real” b/c the words are part of the human world, which he learned gradually (young poems made words only a symbol; later joy in words themselves)
    • for Yeats, tragic joy: “Will or energy is greatest in tragedy…it may become a pure, aimless joy though the man, the shade, still mourns his lost object.” 200
      • world is terrible b/c desire conflicts with world, but you still dream of a better one
    • poetry “still has a truth value”

“The Development of George Eliot’s Realism”

• The common George Eliot narrative, given by Catherine Gallagher, J Hillis Miller, and U C Knoepflmacher
  • George Eliot tried realism, said her work was realism, but couldn’t live up to the standard
  • Gallagher: she gives up on representational realism as she loses faith in utilitarianism
  • Hillis Miller: deconstructive readings of her realism
  • Knoepflmacher: turns from real to ideal characters, which would better suit her moral agenda
• Mc Gowan?: they often try to say that realism itself is impossible, given this trajectory; b/c doesn’t recognize that art is transfer of the real into something not-real
  • However, Eliot KNEW art wasn’t reality, and nonetheless still espoused it
• Eliot on Ruskin: “The truth of infinite value that he teaches is realism==the doctrine that truth adn beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination…in place of definite, substantial reality.” Accepting this “would remould our life.”
  • “I undertake to exhibit nothing as it should be; I only try to exhibit some things as they have been or are, seen through such a medium as my own nature gives me.”
  • “The aim of Art, in depicting any natural object, is to produce in the mind analogous emotions to those produced by the object itself…not attained by transcribing, but by translating into the language of Art” (also on Ruskin)
  • On Adam Bede: not an “arbitrary picture”
  • On Romola: “Approximate truth is the only truth attainable, but at least one must strive for that, and not wade off into arbitrary falsehood.”
  • “Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal life.” 136
• George Henry Lewes 1858: “Art is a Representation of Reality—a Representation which, inasmuch as it is not the thing itself, but only represents it, must be limited by the nature of its medium…no departure from the truth is permissible, except such as inevitably lies in the nature of the medium itself.”
• What does Mc Gowan? conclude?
  • Study realism must study representation b/c that’s the medium of truth to reader
  • “True representation has often been identified with resemblance or mimesis.” 133 (ie words aren’t things)
  • However, for Eliot, “Realism is an art that is answerable to the facts,” not identical to them. 134
• What is the realism Eliot refers to?
  • “empirical or social…that transcends the self” 134
  • “never presents a world in which all that is important to know can be perceived by the senses” 135
  • where sympathy reconnex all the levels: sympathy is understanding the passions underneath the surface, a moral stance to go outside of your own ego, and what the reader should have: art EXTENDS your sympathy, says Eliot
• What is Eliot’s career?
  • Simple realism of early work (Bede, Floss), empirical, passively receiving data from outside world, “a world of objects inertly perceived”
  • Moves to complex realism (Middlemarch, Deronda) that “envisions a world and converts readers to that world’s reality” 134, a “visionary realism,” “human interaction with that world as the ‘reality’ to which words must ‘refer’” 135
  • Must move b/c there’s no connex possible between imagination and the world in simple realism (why Maggie dies)
    • So she has kind of “romantic vision,” where mind can influence reality 134
    • “strives to create a context in which words that refer to invisible values and to an invisible (but possible) future can be understood”
      • not just PLAY b/c you have real influence over real world, she assumes
• Intellectual Background
  • Refers to Foucault’s The Order of Things: around 1800 there was a shift from Enlightenment (reality is what you see, appearance and reality the same) to Romantic epistemology (the truth is somewhere underneath the surface)
    • Mc Gowan? compares 18th c classification of living organisms by physical features to the 19th c understanding of all with more or less “life” depending on organizational complexity… meaning is hidden, must be interpreted
• “Realism can be understood as a response to this complexity” (wow!) 135, esp b/c language too comes under this shift, so that words don’t equal things directly
  • See for example their preoccupations with passions hidden underneath the surface of your public form, that then affect the surface behavior
• Mill on the Floss
  • “unresolved difficulties” 135 (I’d say all realists have to face this moment)
  • “one of the few tragedies written by a major Victorian author” b/c most Victorians wanted reconciliation 136, don’t like tragedy (unlike Yeats)
  • Her separation from world is that of her imagination from her world: Maggie likes to fashion the world “in her own thoughts” and thus suffers when the “collisions” occur between her made up world and the real world
    • She won’t accept that the world of books is merely fictional; refuses to accept the real world; the book “is suspicious of books” 37
      • me: this is similar to the social condemnation of ladies reading novels b/c makes them unhappy with their real lot
  • Says that the novel will not “endorse Maggie’s reveries because they have no referent” 137
    • It’s such a problem for me b/c the NARRATOR also has moments of reverie!
    • No referent = doesn’t refer to your relations with other people, mainly…esp as the books lead you to turn your back on your fellow beings
    • Thus, Maggie contra to Victorian ethics indulges in romantic solipsism 138 (solipsism = my own image of the world is the real one)
  • Her experience w/Stephen floating down the river makes her affirm her past, make her actions comply w/the outside world…the past (ie social world) shows you your duty: social world is reality, contrasted w/willful individual imagination
  • Why does Maggie die? Why does this book trouble critics? B/c you have a divide between the “nostalgic referent” (the one Maggie affirms) and the “oppressive referent” (the life of St Oggs): narrator condemns St Ogg’s and Maggie alike
    • He says Copperfield is like this too b/c he has memories he wants to linger on, and then ones to overcome (blacking warehouse)
    • The narrator ultimately won’t let you AND tries to make you believe Maggie’s nostalgic referent: we see she never had an idyllic relationship with Tom as a child (he always withheld) but author tries to insist
      • Why? B/c Eliot doesn’t want to say that you can never get your desires fulfilled (ie mind matches real), wants to leave the possibility over
      • The novel ultimately values the real over the fictional
• My analysis: sufficient for Middlem and Deronda, but he underestimates Mill on the Floss, which is full of visions…too eager to create a progression w/in his thesis, whereas I think her only progression is one of SCOPE
  • For example he takes the narrator at her word when she rejects Aristotle for his overly metaphoric language (“opts for a Lockean plain speaking” 142); “there was a referent in the past that served as the ‘thing’ language denotes, but now that referent is gone, and language floating free of that past, keeps saying ‘something else’” 142
  • he calls what I see as key as “hints of mysticism” 143
    • he calls this “odd conjunction between mysticism and empiricism” is explainable by 1) Victorian religion and 2) that empiricism itself is often based on human constructions (I’d say the former is a rude write-off of Eliot, that the latter is inaccurate b/c then there’d be nothing to explain the stylistic changes during mystical scenes.)
  • thus he concludes that Floss “marks the bankruptcy of a simple realism where words denote an actual world” 144…but I’d say he underestimates the fact that she already has a solution. (that maggie’s fate isn’t a tragedy by the standards of the mystical side of the book)
• Later Eliot
  • “epistemological wholism” where part can only be fully comprehended in its relationship to the whole (ie community) 145
  • Deronda’s Mordecai who sees in visions: “has left her early positivist leanings far behind” b/c you use imagination to understand reality
  • Whereas Floss early Eliot didn’t endorse Maggie’s imagination, later Eliot does via Daniel and Mordecai b/c of the limits of scientific intellection
    • How do you purchase the belief in these visions? B/c refers to a FUTURE reality. You can indeed distinguish between impossible dreams and possible dreams. It’s a middle view b/c it says that there is “degrees of inevitableness” (where some things are more changeable than others)
      • Thus even her “most passionate visions” have to keep link w/reality 157

Random

• Evolution as example of where meaning not visible through senses: “Names are inadequate; only narratives can fully describe an object.” 145
  • Connex this with realism’s character development ie Lydgate in Middlemarch