Novel Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction

Novel Violence

gar r e t t st e wart

novel violence a na r r at ogr a ph y of v ic t or i a n f ic t ion

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS • CHICAGO AND LONDON

Garrett Stewart is the James O. Freedman Professor of Letters at the University of Iowa. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2009 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2009 Printed in the United States of America 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09

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isbn-13: 978-0-226-77458-9 (cloth) isbn-10: 0-226-77458-9 (cloth) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stewart, Garrett. Novel violence : a narratography of Victorian fiction / Garrett Stewart. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-226-77458-9 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-226-77458-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Violence in literature. I. Title. pr461.s79 2009 823′.809—dc22 2008043134

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—PermaMaterials, ansi z39.48—1992.

Contents

b ack l o g \ prol o g u e Fiction in Its Prose . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

i n t roduc t ion Narrative Intension . . . . . . . . . . . 13 1 . . . . t h e om i t t e d per s on pl o t Little Dorrit’s Fault . . . . . . . . . . 31 2 . . at t e n t ion su r f e i t dis or der An “Interregnum” on Poescript vs. Plot . . . 61 3 . . . . . . . . . . . mind fr ames Anne Brontë’s Exchange Economy . . . . . 90 4 . . . . . . . . of t i m e a s a r i v e r The Mill of Desire . . . . . . . . . . 127 5 . . . . . . . . . de at h per f orce Tess’s Destined End . . . . . . . . . . .174

e p i l o g u e / di a l o g u e Novel Criticism as Media Study . . . . . 220

no t e s . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239 i n de x . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263

For those memorable graduate students over the years who kept up with the reading by keeping pace with the prose

Backlog \ Prologue f ic t ion i n i t s p ro s e

This is a radically historicist study. It is also one of several books of literary scholarship over the last quarter century in which this exact claim no doubt appears in the opening sentences. I haven’t gone back to check. They no doubt meant it, too, those other books. But not in the way this one does. The historicist effort here—radical indeed in the recent culturalist climate of novel criticism—is to read Victorian fiction as the Victorians read it. And not as they could have done, by testing for discursive or sociological contexts at every turn. But as they actually did read it: taking the context for granted as theirs and thus processing the novel’s prose not mainly for its public assumptions but, more to the point, for the novelty of its language and incident—and of its language as incident, including its shock effects. Victorian audiences read for the conjuring work of that language, phrase by phrase, sometimes syllable by syllable. On the way toward larger patterns of suggestion, they savored the cadences of syntax and the surprises of diction, the recitational vestiges of writing’s phonetic patterns, the beat and lift of the sentences as well as their dying falls. Th is, plus the wobble and lunge of prose’s more distressed intensities. The Victorians let the reading itself do its cultural work upon them, or try its best to, rather than sedulously decoding its prose for unspoken associations with either a pervasive ideology or the cognitive inroads of other communication and recording technologies besides print—to name but two recent ways of “opening out” the text to the doxa or technicity of its age. Victorian readers let the text “open in.” In the grip of fictional engagement, and with the sound of its words in their inner ears, such readers, as we now say, internalized. How do I know? Because somewhere we all know this—by analogy with our own mediated pleasure and attention, and in occasional approximation of theirs as well. For more than half a century, until the advent of motion pictures at least, the novel was the Victorian public’s chief mass (1)

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backlog \ prologue

medium. The Victorians set aside leisure time for it—for immersion in it, as verbal texture as well as plot. And theirs was a reading, even if silently, that was inevitably shadowed by a residual memory of recital and its intonations, turning every library or park bench or train carriage into a displaced family hearth. The page was always being intoned for them. This was the case even when, in solitary encounter, the transmissive force was activated entirely by their own silent enunciaton. Novel reading was layered through and through, start to finish, by cultural assumptions, certainly—but thick, first, with inscriptive effects produced as phonetic language. Always in the richest of these novels, and whatever the overriding (or hidden) agendas, prose came before proselytizing, rhetoric before interpellation, affect before ideological reflex, the ingratiations of script before the force of conscription. Like the rest of us, the Victorians had to read their way into culture, which is how, in part, it could seem discursively bred in them. And in the evolution of genre as cultural form, it was the dominance of the novel as mass-print medium in Victorian England that went unquestioned (even when its effects were debated) as the chief vehicle of such social acculturation. Prose fiction worked upon its public in untold ways, but first of all as verbal storytelling. For the most part in recent criticism, however, prose as epithet is almost empty fi ller in the categorical designation “prose fiction.” That’s because fiction has come to seem mostly a slice of past life, historically enmeshed rather than imaginatively activated: a slice of history—and sometimes a rather clinical cross-section at that. “We have had impressed upon us the necessity for reading . . . in terms of . . . historical context, and that kind of reading has been carried on so successfully that some of us have been tempted to feel that it is the only kind of reading possible.” A querulous excerpt from a guest editor’s column in a recent journal, hoping to pave the way for something less routine? Not quite, given the inertial momentum of current trends. Instead, halfway back in the last century, this is Cleanth Brooks in his late-1940s manifesto for a Newer Criticism. Whether or not the continuing vogue of cultural studies or the more recent surge of materialist inquiry—into the physical circuit of the text object in commercial exchange—constitutes in itself a definitive backlash against the stratified extratextual descriptions of the newer historicism, it can’t hurt to be reminded of what none of these adjacent methods does in approaching that Victorian discursive field, let alone cultural form, made manifest in the objects known as novels. And there are other longstanding tendencies and acquiescences worth calling to mind, if not necessarily to any combative account. In more

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theoretical approaches to fiction, it certainly wouldn’t be accurate to say, paraphrasing Brooks, that we’ve had impressed upon us the necessity for narratological readings of novelistic form, and that kind of reading has been carried on so successfully that some of us have been tempted to feel that it is the only kind of reading possible. But it is too often the case that narrative theory generally conceived, in all its variety and nuance, is reduced to equivalence with the supratextual rigors of narratology and its often diagrammatic terrain. It can easily seem like the only theoretical reading possible of narrative structure in any medium must start with the same avoidance of surface texture that characterizes the abstractions of narratology, whether the grain of narration to be dispensed with is scriptive or optical, novelistic or fi lmic. At the same time, serious genre criticism, increasingly historicized, has been confined of late mostly to rise-of-the novel studies in the long eighteenth century. The pioneers of fiction negotiated its form. The Victorians, it would seem from a widespread silence in the commentary, just went about publishing as fast as they could, recirculating through given formats the new lexicons of an industrial and imperial era. What gets lost in this approach through discourse rather than genre, lost to Victorian studies in particular, is the light that might otherwise be shed by some of the most searching achievements in contemporary novel theory. In the waiting chapters, instead, a three-way convergence is attempted: genre theory coming up against the limits of narratology from within a novel’s own sentence-by-sentence prose. Th is requires, for one thing, a look at the varying accounts of ironic reversal in genre theory from Georg Lukács to Michael McKeon in relation to exactly those ironic disjunctions of linguistic form that were the staple of New Criticism as much as of deconstruction. Genre crossed with medium around the uniquely phrased turns of narrative irony begins in this way to mark out the intersection—between writing and plotting—that will preoccupy us from here out. Fiction in prose is one thing: a genre label. Fiction in its prose is another: a call to generative reading, following out the linked routes by which narrative meaning is produced under formal, which is to say formative, constraint. Not knowing even that much about this book’s hopes when opening it, the reader now deserves, given the multiple convergence it strives for, some further words of orientation. Though you’ve taken this volume from one shelf, let me set it briefly—so as to place it conceptually—on another in my own library, where it holds down a predetermined slot. For any writer, I suppose, glancing ahead to what might come next can take the

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backlog \ prologue

initial form of an inventory. This was where I, at least, found myself when rolling up my sleeves for a return to Victorian narrative after a decade’s hiatus in my book-length writing about the novel. Had my previous commentary on fiction and its prose—as accumulated so far—been in some further sense adding up? Would more of it be, if not less, just more? Or was the way clear to making a return visit count as something beyond the sum of previous parts? With intervening publications on visual culture off to the other side of the shelf for the moment, at least one thing seemed probable. The intermission these studies had required in any sustained writing about fiction and language should have offered a useful distance on—not just from—four earlier volumes of literary criticism leaning together in the other direction. The only way to know for sure, of course, was to take at least a quick look back. Th is combination of backlog and prologue is the result. Through the late 1990s, my literary criticism had spanned work on the delegation of Dickensian verbal energy to his own characters, on the rhetorical challenge of the death scene in British fiction, on silent voicing in prose as well as poetry, and on the conscription of the novel reader, by rhetorical address and narrative exemplum alike, in Victorian fiction particularly. As suspected, an overview of all this offered at first blush a rather motley sight. This wasn’t exactly disheartening, but neither did it help chart a fresh course. In returning to the Victorian fray, if not the fold, and eager to engage both with the state of nineteenth-century novel criticism in its current predilections and with narrative theory in its latest developments, it dawned on me that a more explicit review of earlier procedures might in itself, fueled by new novels in evidence, offer a fresh direction. To collect myself for a new volume, that is, I could perhaps best begin, in more than the idiomatic sense, by regrouping. Maybe the previous books did fit more flushly with each other than they were consciously designed to do. When the first study closed with a character in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend inviting her intimates to “Come up and be dead,” the wrench of the oxymoron does call up in its own right—as manifested in scores of novels from Dickens through Conrad to Woolf and beyond—the verbal equivocation of actual death moments and the figural crisis induced by their narrative approach to the void. Then, too, in a “death sentence” or otherwise, textual activation entails the subvocal charge of narrative prose—especially in that post-Romantic density of phonetic language cultivated in certain of the major Victorian novelists and further intensified in their modernist successors. And how can this at least latent aural

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enunciation avoid taking a crucial part in that conditioning of readerly investment, and often its vocative personification (the “endearing” of the literate public), in which Dickens led the way among the Victorians? So with hindsight being a fairly reliable guide across one’s own chosen turf, and faced with the choice between a new departure and a renewed commitment to a linguistically ingrained method, I’ve chosen both. The effort takes shape in a broader focus than before on the novel violence (both senses) of Victorian narrative, in light of which certain previous issues get immediately reconstellated. Even the “dear reader” trope—when the act of consumption it apostrophizes is refigured by plot as a suspiciously vicarious desire or an aggressive co-optation—offers the socializing contrast to a recurrent melodramatic violence at the base of narrative fascination. And be this as it may, how are the assaults of Victorian plotting moderated in either sense—whether in presiding control or in implied mitigation—by the phrasal measures of fictional prose and their own dramatic violations of linguistic norms? Such has been the new line of inquiry both prompted and addressed by an abiding level of textual attention. The findings are open before you. For as long as you keep them there, I want to draw their implications out into the open as well. But let me stress first their correlation—or mismatch—with a longer institutional history in English studies. Decades ago, I began work on Victorian fiction wondering why it wasn’t being written about with the deserved verbal attention zealously reserved instead for the poetic achievements of the same century, Wordsworth to Tennyson to Hopkins. And no matter how sophisticated the so-called poetics of prose became under a subsequent series of structuralist and poststructuralist dispensations after the waning of New Criticism, including the manifold rigors of narrative theory, metagrammatical, dialogic, psychoanalytic, and otherwise, the wonder remained. My continuing question in response: what would it really look like to take prose that other way, take it up on its own verbal terms? And narrative prose in particular. In an effort this time out to formulate the means toward an answer in a single term, I’m now calling the approach “narratography.” The term would put the tightly gauged registration of such prose effects into clearer distinction from other options for the reading (or let’s say study) of prose fiction. Chief among them is the announced goal of structuralist narratology. In its aspiration to a transmedial theory of narrative operation, formal narratology serves—or strives at least—to dial out all the specific channels of narrative, all the timbre and static of closely tuned transmissions, for a more abstracted access to narrative’s punctual

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backlog \ prologue

structures. This is obviously not where questions about the prose of fiction, as prose, will find answers. In dialogue with such theory, though keeping in touch as well with narrative wording per se, I will be able to lift that protective shield of quotation marks from around so-called narratography only by grounding it not in debate but in demonstration: as a verbally negotiated way in to the working out of plot—and its working, in the process, upon us. Narratology (the science of narrative structure) is something performed on rather than inherent to narrative. Narratography, likewise, is an analytic procedure, not a textual ingredient—but in this case a locally summoned practice of reading rather than its social or cognitive science. Lexigraphic rather than categorical in focus, syntactic rather than metagrammatical, asking less what makes a narrative than what makes it tick over syntactic time, narratography is the reading of prose fiction for its words, word for word if called upon—called upon, that is, from within the rush, throng, and drag of phrasing. This approach makes common cause with the graphic apprehension of cinema not because it attends to the visual layout of the page, but rather because it is alert to prose fiction’s basis, like that of fi lmic motion, in the generative differentials of imprint, here letters, there photographic modules.  In prose fiction, the press of alphabetic rudiments may at any turn do double duty, not just forming words but refashioning from within their cumulative perception en route. As regularly looked past by narratology, such is the density of prose action in its encountered traction. In the event of a reading, that is, the structuring of prose fiction, including its superstructural grid, is at base worded. Whatever the process of composition, in the act of reading it is always language that comes fi rst. So what does this experienced primacy look like, sound like, in action? Given an unusual economy of effect, we can calibrate the narrative drive of prose across a single (syntactically embedded) word of narrative peripety in two different examples early and late in Victorian writing. Narratographic apprehension appears here at its narrowest compass—and at its most medium-specific. Much is at play for a structural narratology of the multiplot novel in the first example from Dickens’s midcentury Dombey and Son (1846–48). But it is up to narratography to engage the sudden slippage, the give and final snap, of prose’s own tensile energy (Empson’s “play, in the engineering sense”). In the colliding plot lines of the novel’s namesake corporate figurehead and his resentful nemesis Carker, a locomotive runs down and dismembers the villain in his attempted escape from Dombey. At exactly the point of lethal impact, what the linguistics

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of Roman Jakobson identifies as the “poetic” function—not just in the deviant but (by his own early description, so we’ll see) in the “violent” projection of pattern onto sequence—is manifest in an unusually reduced case. For Dickensian phrasing executes a direct displacement of vertical or paradigmatic alternatives (inherent to word-formation itself) onto the horizontal combinations of syntax (in its internal differentials). Dickens’s paratactic clauses lurch forward as follows when Carker, borne in upon by the train’s personified ocular drive, “uttered a shriek—looked round— saw the red eyes, bleared and dim in the daylight, close upon him—was beaten down, caught up and whirled away. . . .” (emphasis added). The plot-long conniver is annihilated across a single phonetic difference. Here the fatally breached antithesis of Barthes’ s “S/Z” paradigm seems writ small in precisely its still active alternation between “unvoiced” and “voiced” consonants. For the headlights of the approaching locomotive, in one and the same monosyllable—indeed one and the same (but different) sibilant—are no sooner “close upon” him than they “close upon” him. The narrative crisis is not just verbally localized, then, as it would always have to be. Rather, it is driven so far into the structuring of prose motion that its effect, as narrative force itself, can only be graphed conceptually at the sublexical (as well as subvocal) level, even in silent reading. Narratography doesn’t audit the roar of the engine of destruction; it traces the microgrammar of death’s plotted arrival. Almost four decades later, in 1886, a protagonist is expunged in a single self-transformative grammar negotiated in part by the inordinate fluidity of a comma splice: “Yes, I had gone to bed Henry Jekyll, I had awakened Edward Hyde.”  Swiveled around the syntactic (and semantic) alternatives of the predicate “awakened” in the unstable paradigm of its deployment, the relation of self to its alter ego is either passive and intransitive (awakened as the other) or else, in an ontologically broken parallelism, willfully transitive (roused the other in myself). It is of course, and impossibly, both. Where narratology would certainly note a definitive turning point in the plot, narratography comes to grips as well with a phrasing every bit as grammatically deviant and divisive as it is narratively violent. To operate upon recognition at this level, language is always, as they say, marked. But what is it a mark of? To answer: of narrative momentum—this may seem a tautology, but it’s a start. The larger methodological question has to do with how stories can be found to make such marks in the scantest phrasing as well as the broadest temporal phases of their form. It must be stressed that an interest in this suspends no com-

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backlog \ prologue

mitment to novel theory or narrative theory, either one. It is not linguistic by contrast. It is linguistic by rights, inherently. It doesn’t relax into formalism, however that might happen. It tracks the formative. And one can at times extrapolate from it a theory of narrative generation, though not necessarily an ology. Narratography’s procedures thus retain a concern with narrational vectors in words or images (one medium at a time) more than with the underlying formats of storyness itself (in verbal and visual manifestations alike—because interchangeably). This is where the theoretical ramifications of narratography meet those of novel theory, broadly charted. Genres, as evolving types of prose fiction (romance, picaresque, epistolary novel, mock-epic, family chronicle, Bildungsroman, confession, etc.) begin by delimiting the plot options that also push against their received formats. Hence the pressure points where inherited mode and structural form, genre and plotting, exert their narrative leverage on the language of desire and social inhibition in Victorian narrative, on the very lexicon and syntax of human impulse—and its violent overthrows. As pilot venture, narratography is therefore intended to fall well within the wide scope of novel theory, even as its graphic or inscriptive bent operates without the leveling rigor of its more-established counterpart in a narratology striving to transcend genre as well as medium. With its orientation top-down rather than bottomup, narratology would seek to abstract the conditioning fact of the narratable. It studies the structure of stories apart from their content or surface presentation, apart from psychology as well as from medium: the latter treated (for convenience at least) as more or less transparent in order to secure an unobstructed view of the narrational armatures beneath; the former reduced to structural functions rather than emotional foci, actants rather than fragile or rent subjects. Systemic and generalizing, narratology is, in essence, the science of narrativity per se. Narratography, as its suffi x suggests, when directed at a verbal text (at a Victorian novel, for example) moves beyond the taxonomies of stylistics or the broad machinations of rhetoric to engage, in a more transactive sense, narrative writing itself; narrative writing itself out, phrase by phrase. It is therefore better prepared than its counterpart to hit the ground running with each new paragraph. It doesn’t for a minute set aside conventional story, character, or theme for linguistic nuance. Rather, it sees them built up from just such minutiae—again, at precisely the verbally marked intersection of genre and narrative momentum. For narratology, linguistic signals and inferences of this sort would be an incidental feature of mediation quite apart from a concern for definitive

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story forces. At a different scale of response, narratography comes upon the story told by mediation itself. Having attempted a book-length demonstration of the latter method when trained on the fi lmic and digital grain of current narrative cinema, and turning now to its verbal application, I find it time to give the approach its most basic and uncontentious definition. In response to verbal or visual texts, narratography is the apprehension of mediated narrative increments as traced out in prose or image by the analytic act of reading. Where the specialized vocabularies of narratology often aim at the hard science of overarching story forms apart from a given medium, the text-driven work of narratography offers instead a micropoetics of one narrative medium at a time. And so the reader may make space to imagine here, etched in interpenetrating circles, a Venn diagram—or one each for any given medium. In a fi lmic response to screen storytelling, it is the cinematographic that overlaps into the narratival. When we are reading the grammatical disposition of words in fiction, it is rather the linguistic that overlaps into plot. In each case specifically, concerned with either visual or verbal style, narratography would, according to set theory, occupy the shaded area— marked out always by the shadings and gradations of narrative advance itself—defined by the intersection of stylistics and narratology. In literary cases, the zone of overlap and reciprocal consequence would, of course, be narrow in some writers, wider by far in others, varying with the phrasal and figural density of their prose. Uncontentious, I do assume, when put this way: a fact that deserves reiteration at the start. And so, in turn, a caveat and a ready concession. This book is neither a polemic nor a retrenchment. In the study of Victorian fiction, for instance, it eagerly concedes the extratextual advances of new historicism and their potential textual impact—as well as, at the opposite pole of novel study, the rigorously dehistoricized insights of narratology. Without doubt, novels speak their cultural moment and are spoken by it. As amply shown by so-called discourse analysis, historical currents are one among the forces to which the prose of fiction is porous. At the same time, however, any major Victorian novel processes at least two discourses at once, outer and inner, the language of the tribe and its own transliteration thereof, sociolect and narrative idiolect alike. One discourse is that of its day; the other of its staying power as writing. As in the sibilant slippage of that last sentence itself, words intersect and dovetail with each other as well as with their cultural moment. We read Victorian novelists not only because the Victorians did. If that were the case, their power would indeed, in today’s colloquial sense, be history.

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backlog \ prologue

Premised otherwise, narratography’s question, as the Victorian precursor Wordsworth might have put it, concerns the “secret hiding-places” of that power, where half-sequestered but strongly sequential energies remain preserved in their charge even for readers of a later century. This is a charge that knows its own kind of violence, muted or otherwise. Narratography records the shocks of both. While readers are transfi xed by the elations and defeats of represented Victorian experience, by vocations realized and social fantasies dashed, by the raptures and ravages of sex and death and everything in between, narratography looks to the articulation of these moments by internal tensions and resolutions in the pace of prose. Within the circuit of fictional rhetoric, this in the inner lining of a discourse that is also at the same time historically conditioned and culturally programmed. On narrative’s outward face, in the treatment of self and its motives: an often unconscious choice among social vocabularies for identity and desire. On its inner lining: the remobilization of such terms by the grammar and diction of storytelling, where narratographic reading catches hold. To whatever extent possible, such reading is further keyed not only to historicist frameworks but to those of narratology as well. In respect to both widespread alternatives, then, the investigations broached here are less corrective than complementary. In the case of narratology, one doesn’t deny the gains of its claims in noting that they leave unsaid the very manner of narrative saying, the unfolding pace and shifting weight of the told. Even when proceeding by individual accounts of a given short story, fi lm, or novel—as laboratory samples of plottedness and its endoskeletal structure—the method’s theoretical ambitions lie far afield from interpretation and well apart from the specific textures of verbal or visual imaging. Yet the present venture in narratography is under no obligation to contest or revise the assumptions, let alone discoveries, of its seasoned counterpart. It wants simply to test against such axioms an alternate mode of approach, one equally but quite differently committed to narrative theory—and, in the case of this book, to novel theory in particular (primarily the line of descent in the dialectics of genre from Lukács to McKeon). And one in which the prose of fiction is understood as a determining rather than a bracketed (and hence inevitably discounted) medium of its plotting. Less anatomy than diagnosis, the method of these pages is drawn to the pulse and tone of the individual story told, the nerve centers of its emotional relays. There is no incompatibility in this divergence from narratological concerns. It is a question of plot’s conditions of possibility on the one hand, its contours of effect on the other. Indeed, this book’s level of attention can be seen as

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bridging the gap, or attempting to, not only between genre and the immediate generation of plot but, across a gulf equally wide, between plot and prose. Plot and its prose. Narratography, that is, logs the potentiation of plot in the increments and recurrences of phrase. For under the coming narratographic lens, prose is where the action is. Insisting on this is, once again, less an argument with than for. The fact that honing in on such verbal activity can also, at certain turns, plow straight through the terrain of plot’s linguistic generation to deeper-going questions of genre and narrative temporality, plot time and its human violations—from Lukács to Jameson, Watt to McKeon—may or may not be a surprise in the coming chapters, but it is certainly their point. Less easy to anticipate, except by isolated example, is a further point that can emerge only from a continuing experience of such prose. For a structural grasp of genre can often be manifested by a smaller-scale dialectics, one induced by the volatilized diction and syntax of plot’s actual momentum. Such effects can even transpire, as we’ve seen—and at the lowest threshold of effect—in the “clos/ze” reading of a single phonemic (and hence lexical) difference as it works instantaneously to “synthesize” a death by locomotion. Or when “awakened” rouses a death already inherent in the transgressions of desire. Thus do the most fleeting increments of plot surface for analysis only along the phrasal rails of enunciation, the to and fro and forth again of narrative writing as such.

† Introduction na r r at i v e i n t e nsion

The method first. Then a sense, a forecast, of its controlled testing over reconsidered Victorian terrain. Together: the engagement of narratography with novelistic violence under generic description. Again, too, backlog becomes prologue in the recognized departure of this approach from the established premises of its “parent” discipline. Divergences have to do with both scale and mediation. Left unexamined by traditional narratology, for instance, and programmatically so, is the functional difference as storytelling medium between fi lmic process and prose succession. This, of course, pinpoints no failing of narratology, but instead its very mission. Like its cousin “ologies,” the human science of narratology aspires to be pan-descriptive in its axioms. The result is a kind of lower limit to its focus. That’s where narratography comes in: ad hoc, site specific, materially determined, medium-steeped. A recent collection of essays called Narratologies doesn’t dilute the methodological goal of its discipline with that plural title. There are many ways to skin a cat, and always have been, but none of them leaves you with the surface features by which the feline makes its sinuous mark on recognition. Anatomy is one thing, even Northrop Frye would have been quick to acknowledge, and criticism another. Narratography finds its allegiances in the latter. Closely attuned to textures of execution, my approach has no stake in peeling away the layered functions of either language or celluloid, say, to lay bare the abstract girders of formal structure. It remains caught up, sometimes tripped up, by the surface adhesions of technique, where a degree of resistance to governing narrative formats may well set in. Narratography would name one way of plotting-out such resistance. Concerned alike—but separately—with the graphemes of literary manifestation and the graphic increments of visual texts, narratography is the calibration of storyline as material sequence, from line to line, frame to frame. With written narrative in particular, it monitors those recognitions by which the work of literary structure can (13)

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introduction

be found carried into the crevices of lexical and syntactic evocation—and often renegotiated there. Verbal adhesions can in this way yield analytic traction. Narratography thus charts how reading works to process not only the separate arcs of represented action but the rub and tension of narrative in action. Before its more schematic alternative was dubbed narratology, of course, there was narrative morphology: in the work of Vladimir Propp, for instance—with dramatic functions or vehicles rather than characters disclosed at the rudiments of the folk tale, abstract and commutable factors underlying portrayed events. Tapped in this way was the bedrock of the new science. Concerned not with the morphemes and phonemes of language but with the formative units of represented action, such analysis put up little resistance to being reborn, decades later, as structuralist narratology, when its schemata were mapped by A. J. Greimas onto a preformulated communications model of sender and receiver rather than, say, Propp’s donor and helper functions.  This transition was smooth enough sailing because the message function and its means were figured as interior to plot—rather than a question first of the carrying medium. In which case more theory would have been needed—or more something. Narratology really came of age in the scanning and sorting of longer forms, where temporal as well as spatial paradigms are needed for compassing the transits of plot, its relays and returns. The history is a full one, but its turning points can be briefly told. Beyond the crosssection of melded sociolects called out by the Bakhtinian “chronotope” as rudimentary narrative category, later and more rigorous topologies of narrative chronos (in the work preeminently of Gérard Genette and Paul Ricoeur) examined the manifold mimesis of temporality—its gradients, shifts, and lacunae. Building on such investigations of narrative time, the psychopoetics of Peter Brooks went on to elaborate a Freudian model of the “drives” as the motoring temporal dynamics of narrative, including the unconscious pleasures of deferral, repetition, and closure. Seeking the springs of narrative impulse beneath any given story, Brooks’s work runs parallel to, though mostly independent of, the rise of cognitive narratology. For one approach, narrative is a deep, quasierotic need, for the other an abiding perceptual skill. Certainly neither account depends on the conditions of a given textual instance for the programming of narrative as psychic or mental structuration. And when literature, in particular, offers the test case for such narratology, as it does so successfully in Brooks, the obvious prominence of temporal closure tends to be theorized with no necessary recourse to the local rhetoric of its facilitation, which is often thick on the ground even as plot thins out.

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Analysis is mostly aimed at the timeline of plot rather than the timed effects of its verbal processing. Yet these are effects whose density often arranges a microplot all its own—especially when intractable narrative energies, building toward closure, cannot otherwise be released or concealed than by the strain of wording. It is hard to overstate the “linguistic turn” in the consolidation of narrative study—even when the linguistic medium is minimized in analysis, or even when the further turn is taken, as with Brooks, into a psycholinguistics of unconscious narrative impulse. In this respect, Tzvetan Todorov’s “grammar of narrative” offered, early on, the definitive structuralist breakthrough, where all predication of story begins in the disequilibrium necessary to unsettle a subject into questioning or quest. Things must be set right again over the length of narrative duration, brought round to rest, so that the time of story becomes the very course of restoration. In the most “grammatically” parsed of all narratologies to follow, Roland Barthes’s S/Z generalizes the hermeneutic code (of mystery and its keys) to a broader field of interpretive enigma and (re)solution and then, on the occasion of a single Balzac story, folds it together with his other linguistically modeled codes before slicing up their functional effects into over 500 incremental and dovetailed “lexia.” In all such derivatives from the linguistic turn, segmentation is at the core of the enterprise, with the lump presumptions of beginning, middle, and end refined into smaller and smaller units of narrative ingredient. Granted, this morphological tendency leads, in Barthes, to so furious a subdivision of the text that the linguistic model seems almost to have carried us back to the linguistic effect itself. Barthes delivers, that is, what is almost a stylistic account of Balzac, where segmentation would indeed be pursued into the very granules of lexical succession. Almost but not quite: the “lexias” are never caught back up for Barthes in the syllabic and lexical weave of the narrative sentence itself. Barthes’s attack may not murder to dissect, but its scintillating precisions don’t linger to reassert the syntax of textual advance after tabulating its codes. In contrast, narratography would retrieve the incremental time of the “readerly” for consideration as such. And do so, in this book’s case, by submitting to the multiple perturbations suffered in and through Victorian prose.

Norm and Violation: Linguistics, Stylistics, Psychoformalism If prose is where the action is in narrative writing, what sort of violence may be endemic to its power as well as merely incumbent on certain of its representational tasks? And if prose has its own heightened episodes, how

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are their discharged linguistic tensions to be coordinated, in our thinking about Victorian fiction, with the narrative intentionality of plot’s own depicted violence from novel to novel? To begin addressing this, one must step back—back to the page—from more than one current scholarly paradigm: not just from a transmedial narratology that looks beyond prose or picturing to the architectonics of plot, but from a period ethnology that looks beyond wording, even when not overlooking it altogether, to the crests and eddying of its cultural discourses. We can, in fact, step further back into the Victorian period itself to amplify the assumptions of this latter approach. A contemptuous Lord Henry Wotton, in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), admits that he wouldn’t mind authoring a novel, something truly novel and “unreal,” yet at the same time snidely despairs that there is “no literary public in England for anything but newspapers, primers, and encyclopedias.”  This writing-off of the mass reader is a dismissal that turns, it should be noted, on the epithet “literary.” It isn’t that a new novel would have to appeal to an extra-literary interest in gossip and ephemeral fact, schoolbook verities, and received opinion across disciplines. The literary form itself— all too hideously “real,” or realist, in Lord Henry’s view—has devolved on its own fictional terms into another manifestation of the epistemological bias of “newspapers, primers, and encyclopedias.” It is, in effect, a genre problem. Yet this dismissal might have occurred even more forcefully to the Decadent Aesthete from a perusal of the next fin-de-siècle’s output of Victorianist commentary than from his own moment’s novels themselves, in their often luridly sensual, stylistically indulgent, sexually ambiguous, and surprisingly violent contours. For latter-day scholarship has come to find something akin to his imputed “public” attitude toward Victorian novel reading in itself compelling, productive, even of foremost concern. Books, we have learned to know, were after all cultural instances and instruments as much as artifacts, prosthetic at least as much as aesthetic. That’s the going line. Clearing houses of contemporaneity and its ephemera, middle-class lesson plans within a regimen of acculturation, global anthologies of politically disseminated “truth”—topical, pedagogic, encyclopedic—that’s often what Victorian novels have sounded like under recent academic scrutiny: books anecdotal, ideological, quasi-imperial in their scope, or in other words socially cross-referenced, interpellatory, and both compendious and territorializing in their discursivities. I am not, of course, exaggerating. This disciplinary stance has itself been turned “encyclopedic” in the latest “primer” of Victorian fiction,

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Key Concepts in Victorian Literature. See amid its topics, for instance, the alphabetized entry under “Violence.” After rounding up the usual suspects of both state and street violence from secondary cullings of the “newspaper” archives, and just before zeroing in, for some reason, on represented whippings and beatings in Dickens, there is—almost as an afterthought—the question of language: “There is also the violence of the English language.” One perks up at this potential curtain-raiser for a treatment of writing’s own melodrama, only to settle instantly into a predictable and narrowing restatement. For the sentence continues: “There is also the violence of the English language or of the imperial ‘mother tongue’ to take into consideration, and thus the violence of Victorian literature itself, which reflected and to an extent constructed Victorian ideas and attitudes, and their representation throughout the modern world” (139). Quite apart from any such imperium of the hegemonic word, in the process putting its colonial readers under the bilingual lash, the novels to come, as I read them, are written not in British but in English. Amenable to contextualizations local and global, of course, their prose also engineers from within the shape of its own understanding. And suffice it also to say, for now, that their form as much as their content, their performed sense of their own genre, is what makes the novels in themselves cultural studies. What is violated in these fictions is not first and foremost a literate community by the imposed snares of rhetoric but a linguistic norm by calculated deviance. The novel violence that preoccupies these pages is closer to the strains and constraints of prose’s own institution as narrative discourse than to the coercions of national politics and its bureaucracies. Closer in this sense, though less extreme and distantiating of course, to what Roman Jakobson saw inherent in literary language: a veering from routinized discourse into its systemic mutations. Th is is where the rigor and glint of Jakobson’s perceptions render them endlessly suggestive even for a medium—Victorian prose—very far from his own explicit concerns. Never more clearly than under Jakobson’s notice, form begins in deformation, elsewhere called its “alienation” effects. Such is a “violence purely linguistic” that Jakobson finds “motivating temporal narrative succession” only, at the ground level, though the “real temporal succession” of words themselves in sequence. In the chapters to come, this is where the pacing of phrase, even the onset of syllabification, can seem synchromeshed—in precisely its “temporal succession”—with the violation of time’s cruel tricks in the sequencing of plot. Turns of phrase model turns of fate—and do so, in narrative prose, by propelling them.

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Stressing as Jakobson does the sliding scale between metaphor and grotesque metamorphosis in the opening essay of Questions de poétique (“The New Russian Poetry”), the principle is later expanded to a general prosodic rule in his “Principles of Versification,” where the beat of meter is understood, for instance, as a violence against the pace and cast of everyday expression. According to Jakobson’s later and far better known formulation in “Linguistics and Poetics,” the poetic function is modeled on prosodic rhythm but extended to all kinds of phonetic and grammatical recurrence. This is the function that maps (or “projects”) extra degrees of equivalence and echo onto the normal run of combination: projects or, one might say, imposes. This enforced recurrence can certainly be conceived as an aggressive superimposition of pattern upon randomness. Earlier in Jakobson’s linguistic thinking, and under the term “violence,” it was indeed seen as such—as exerted and coerced—in all the potential wrench to expectation this incurs: a breached expectation of both syntax and psychic affect. It is this kind of violence that litters the passages, and impasses, of Victorian narrative writing. But why exactly “violent” in Jakobson’s sense? He doesn’t expatiate, but the emphasis eventually becomes clear. In order to acknowledge fully such wording’s excess, we must keep its deviance from passive acceptance as, in the loose sense, “poetic”: as something softened by the aesthetic rather than braced and assertive in its verbal cast. Writing at this level of verbal insistence, whatever the content of its phrasing, sustains the disruptive force that its intensification would seem to intend. And for this Jakobson finds no better word than “violence.” Indeed, this is a term whose own rhetorical violence, as thus deployed, consists in a defiant overriding of all expressly negative associations in the pure abstraction of verbal force itself and its defied linguistic complacencies. As paradigmatic options are overexercised across the build of combination, for instance, they are exerted in an undue measure of recurrence. This estranging of expression’s normal unpatterned flow, this alienation of words from their mere service as meaning, this jolt to expectation, this imposition, always has about it, for Jakobson, the surprise of the violative. Victorian fiction is alive with such strategic deviance. Novel violence regears the narrative time of telling according to the aggressive pace of phrase. It does so either to thicken the story’s own tension or to replay it in isolation at the linguistic level. The reason should not be hard to highlight. For the narrative thread of such fiction, line by line, is continually yanked taut in the stylistic raveling up of broader plot turns. It vibrates

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everywhere—and measurably—with the upsets to expectation it is strung out to delineate. But that vibratory energy, displacing the contours of a scene by its arbitrary repeats and recursions of phrase, can do more than enhance the impact of portrayed violence. It can begin instead to fi lter it out, baffle, and divert it, reformat its whole representational thrust. And so, again, a discrimination between methods. Narratology at its far edge is, as if by charter, blind to medium. Deaf as well, where syllabic prose is concerned. Deaf too, though on quite another front, to complaints against the very action of narrativity tout court in certain quarters—as a manipulative means of cognitive straightjacketing. Narratology aspires to a value-neutral overview, with no programmatic concern for the psychic violence that might underpin narrative in, for instance, realist plots of suffering and defeat. One study above all gives us terms, instead, for confronting this violence—as it may or may not be eased or rectified by the manifest exertions of its medium. This is the psychoanalytic account of form versus representational function in a co-authored book by Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit that, despite its announced topic in narrative theory and its predominant if brief examples from English fiction, has met with too little uptake in subsequent discussions of the Victorian novel. To approach their claims about the violence of narrative with Jakobson’s sense of linguistic deviance in mind, one thing is immediately obvious. In thinking about violence in literary terms, the terms themselves turn upon each other across the reversible divide of form and content. So that violence plays between both registers. Jakobson’s linguistic aggression can thus become as much the antidote as the accomplice for other kinds of depicted rather than formative violence. Substituting what one might call a psychoformalism of style for Jakobson’s structuralist poetics, this sense of things gets its most provocative formulation in Bersani and Dutoit. Given the surprising scope (or catapult) of their title, The Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art and Modern Culture, its subtitle turns out to include nothing less than the whole evolution of the nineteenth-century realist novel, both English and Continental, down through George Eliot to Henry James. In this respect, the first noun of their main title, forms, would include not just the variety of conferred suffering in such character-driven fiction but the formal patterns that not only convey but at times formally reroute (and hence sensually alleviate) such violence. Whereas characters are in fact “driven” repeatedly to death in realist fiction, with the sympathetic reader hanging on every heightened phrase, Bersani and Dutoit look back instead to a more abstract mode of aesthetic rendering and recogni-

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tion. For them, classic narrative coerces. Against its grain, sheer form disperses. Instead of the pitiless linearity that overdetermines the armatures of familiar narrative, Bersani and Dutoit return to the ritual friezes of Assyrian bas relief, with their scenes of group violence both martial and otherwise, for the braking or muting repetition of line or shape, the nonmimetic interval, the lateral skid, the softening or distracting (rather than continual reinforcement) of narrative or representational drive. As these writers see it, modern realist narrative, by contrast, serves to foreground characters as victims of circumstance, fi xating our (however sympathetic) fascination with the trajectories of ordeal and release. Antinarrative gestures would operate, instead, to disrupt these masochistic “orders of intelligibility” (87) with the “swerve” rather than forward thrust of representation (125), the unrecuperated doubling or disjuncture within continuity. Such are the effects of broken graphic parallelism and uneven spatial increments that turn the march or parade of violence in Assyrian ritual groupings away from a fascism of the collective to a play of schematic difference. Over against the often violent satisfactions of closure as theorized by Brooks, the work of Bersani and Dutoit advocates instead, if not in so many words, for an erotics of style deriving pleasure across the play of form. For these authors, in fact, there is a veritable morality of aesthetic experience when conceived in this way as a libidinal surface attention, since “the very restlessness of desire is a guarantee of its curiously mild and pacific nature” (125). Form, in short, defetishizes the violence of represented pain. Bersani and Dutoit thus mark their tacit point of departure from any valorization of a monolithic “narrative desire” (so-called in Brooks): “Intrinsically desire is perhaps a form a violence—of psychic disruptiveness or self-shattering—without a place, and which therefore never succeeds in taking place” (125). To keep it that way, according to Bersani and Dutoit, unmaterialized desire must be displaced onto form rather than cathected by plot, the latter embroiled with all its lines of identification as well as its fateful linearity. Desire’s only genuine—or ethically nerved—site in prose fiction is in fact, their work would imply, the heterotopia of writing itself: writing over and against plotting—writing as friction and give, as sensuous slippage, rather than (even if coterminous with) its storytelling function. And this level of writing is accessible as such only to what I am calling narratography, not to the structural discriminations of narratology or to the plot-freed appreciations of a stylistics keyed to authorial habits rather than local narrative compulsions.

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But something else too, where the psychoanalytic paradigm holds a yet broader sway. For the present book is less inclined (given the novels examined, it would almost have to be) than is the study by Bersani and Dutoit to dismiss the rhetorical work of identification, in the toils of Victorian violence, as little more than a kind of masochism blocked (if at all) by formal distraction. Making common cause instead with the logistics of transference in Peter Brooks’s work, the analysis to come of narrative vicariousness and its own libidinal investments must stay alert to the novel’s double game—where prose activates the same violence it helps diffract. The field of readerly fascination with a harrowing narrative, that is, traverses a prose sequence articulated by the same obtruded formal features meant in part to deflect or defray the terrible expenditures— become readerly investments—of just such sacrificial plotting. Reading for the plot, even reflexively for its impact in reception, remains a reading of its words—in the grim shimmer of often blistering episodes and, at the same time, in a stylized fl ight from their content across the very contours of their designation. That’s about as pure as form gets in traditional fiction: a modest adulteration of plot’s driven flow. Art, as one might paraphrase Bersani and Dutoit, can no more than partially violate the norms of novelization whose transpicuous violence it abets. Those remorseless norms, like secondary processes in psycholoanlysis (123), can only be undone by the sporadic upsurge of something approximating, for these writers, the force of primary desire. Such unleashed intransigent rhythms can alone hope to divert attention from the fetish of story, its verbal voyeurism, so as to rechannel desire away from narrated endurance and its perverse appeal. Serving to buckle, shunt, or displace the libidinal energies of viewing or reading, the surface tension of phrase per se turns these energies rippling and polymorphous rather than enchaining them to the climacteric of plot. “A kind of restless attention is perhaps a sublimated version of desire’s mobility, a desexualized, purely internal imitation of sexual selfdisplacements and self-shatterings” (123). Because Assyrian monuments to slaughter and victory are more graphic in every sense than narrowly anecdotal, response is invited to their visualization not just their scenes. That’s their twofold art, as abstract as it is narratival. To the extent, instead, that the Victorian paradigm of novelized violence is a cathartic one, its derivation from ritual sacrifice makes its quality of identification and displacement the very crime of realism for Bersani and Dutoit. As a mode of disidentification, the subsequent turn to modernism is for them, in later commentary, the deliberate rescue of the

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explicit by the abstract. But such modernist distanciation finds many of its verbal materials, they might have added, in the stylizations of earlier modes, including realism’s own attempted palliation of narrative assault by an assuaging form. Such are the literary violations of normative prose that service any number of realist aggressions before being assimilated more fully, under modernist auspices, to the nervous ferocity of the signifier per se. In just this retrospective light, though departing here from Bersani and Dutoit, we see more clearly how the craft of evocative deviance at the linguistic level, even in the traditional realist novel, may itself moderate, by its own rhetorical warp, the grievous events it delineates. Of this psychoformalist intuition, Hardy would offer perhaps the ultimate test case, where, as more than ever before, brutality is at once captured and alchemized by an anomalous intensity of phrase. In sum, the theoretical triangulation in view here (Jakobson, Bersani and Dutoit, and Lukács coming) is meant to clarify an independent textual one (plot, style, narratographic reception). The scenes to which we will be turning, in their strata of event, technique, and its recognition, are often as savage as they are linguistically contorted as they are both gorgeous and inordinate; or, put the other way round, as stylized as they are verbally aberrant as they are brutal. Let us allow for the moment, after Bersani and Dutoit (though with realism altogether failing this standard for them), that form is the displacement—from content onto language—of “desire’s mobility.” Reading against the grain, rubbing a narrative text the wrong way: this, then, becomes the erotics of reading in its truest ethics. Engaged by effects restive and skittish even when tethered to theme, narratography is meant to trace this drift of the signifier from within the fi le and rank of story, its plot and its hierarchies of characterization. So that this scale of attention may well seem elicited against the streamlined impetus of fictive prose. Sublimating violence from within the very picturing of its scene, such effects move to stylize the devastations of story into some degree of redemptive shape: the shape of form itself, abstract, detached, disinterested—even when operating in close coordination with the investments of empathy across the punitive reversals of Victorian plot. In Jakobson’s terms, then, crossed with those of Bersani and Dutoit—and retaining (more than the latter authors might wish to do) those of Peter Brooks as well—we might say that the violence of language, its drastic swerve from referential stability, is dispatched to formalize (and at times defuse) that more focused violence rendered in language by the histrionic agonies that multiply across Victorian plots.

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Generic Grief Unmarried mothers are banished, maddened, and left to die so often that the strategic silencing of one alone among them can seem, in Little Dorrit, to speak up fiercely for the aggrieved suppression of the rest. An unfeeling husband drinks himself into raving oblivion after sadistic assaults on the person and spirit of his sexually betrayed wife, the title figure of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. In The Mill on the Floss a radiantly vital daughter is beaten to a pulp by patriarchal and social pressure until drowned by objective correlative in a natural catastrophe. A wronged nubile farm girl, the eponymous Tess of the d’Urbervilles, is goaded into murder and ritually hanged. And so on. As part of the Victorian novel’s own growing pains, this extreme generic grief—and its often formal cause in unresolvable structural contradictions—is underwritten everywhere by style. It was otherwise at the inception of the genre. In Fielding’s picaresque from the preceding century, there are, to be sure, fisticuffs along the roadway, sudden robberies, attempted ravages. But much of the cruelest behavior and the most traumatic consequences, the real human pain and psychic devastation, is reserved, as in Joseph Andrews, for interpolated tales. Their squalid or tormented reality is set off, set back, from fictive plot—as it will be, if only at the very outset of his career, in the inlaid and antiPickwickian tales of Dickens’s first Victorian masterwork as well. Though Fielding’s plot sends Jonathan Wild straight to the gallows, prose never gets inside the inevitable terror of the moment. Within the abstracted confines of such poetic justice, nothing human feels really violated. In the narrative ventures first giving rise to the novel as we know it, mortal violence tends in this way to remain mostly a flat fact of mimetic life. Even exceptions to this rule in the eighteenth century must exonerate the fiction-making agency that narrates them. The affl ictions visited upon Richardson’s greatest heroine are enveloped vividly enough, but protectively encased as well, in the second-order narratives of epistolary report. There is no supervening narrator, personified or not, to blame for her violation. In Austen, to make the novel more real, which is to say more domestic, both this kind of violence and this kind of epistolary buffering have to be sloughed off entirely—until they burst through again, even as structurally recontained, in Mary Shelley’s choice of a frame tale for the murderous severities of Frankenstein. The eventual eruption of such extreme and violating events, physical and psychic both, into the texture of the fictive real comes only with Dickens, and from Oliver Twist on, when it is taken up by the disem-

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bedded voice of an omniscient and rhetorically driven narrator, whether masked as a first-person persona or otherwise. In this form it remains thriving in its fevered and riveting effects, on and off, for the rest of the Victorian century. And this breakthrough into direct medial (rather than remediated) violence has waited not just for the frenetic urban melodrama of Dickens’s stories but for the unprecedented nervous energy of his writing. Plotting the psychic and corporal damage its prose at the same time rises to manage, certainly the Dickensian novel isn’t alone for long. In Victorian storylines, violence repeatedly incites to style. The Brontës, Eliot, Collins, Hardy, and the rest all follow suit, however much they might try to domesticate their own plotted and rhetorically augmented turmoil by the harmonizing closure—that enduring touchstone of narratology— imposed most often by marital resolution. As with other and more errant storylines as well, what results is of course the “sentencing” of characters to their plotted fates. Even with the courtship format, however, narratographic response may often be unsettled by the linguistic tension that results from forcing that closural telos of marital convergence upon the form of story. Reading thus authorizes a reactive disposition quite apart from any authorial intention. With the burden of a post-providential narrative design felt in the stress of its signifiers, intension seems a better term for the force vested in such prose wording. Without authorial personification, reading thus discovers its own second thoughts in relay across the frictional inferences of prose. Reading brings words into tension with each other and with its own slippery work. Linguistic impaction, prose impact: such is the inscriptive event of narrative in action—an action at times deviant, seductive, even voyeuristic (hence incriminating) in its transferred affect and deferred paths of identification. These involve certain rhetorical exactions of a familiar sort: parallelism, anaphora, internal echo, the cadences of syntactic emphasis itself, the whole fiber of literary writing in prose. Now one word, now two, the coinage intension is meant rather loosely, of course. But not lightly. It flags an effort to keep narrative language from growing transparent to its own instrumentality: an effort to link its consideration, in fact, to the “new materialism” in literary study rather than to a more phenomenological mode of reader response. Why, that is, aren’t words themselves—this book can be taken to ask—counted among the materialities looking to be rescued by “somatic” perception from the abstract blandness of “cognitive” apprehension (Bill Brown’s formulation of William James’s dichotomy)?  Why wouldn’t one want to attend more closely to exactly that verbal materiality whose ubiquitous subsuming to designation is one of the chief

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burial grounds of the “thing” in the “object”? Noting how William James works “within and against the associationist tradition,” Brown quotes the American philosopher on the way our habitual perceptions of objects (in their function rather than their material constitution) “plough deep grooves in the nervous system” (4). Couldn’t this observation just as well be made about the routinization of words themselves, rather than heavier and more rounded items, in their use and exchange value? The syllabled thing becomes in this way the signifying object (of semantic comprehension). In the medium of decoded prose as well as of everyday vision, the “grooves” of recognition tend to benumb the tracks of response. Marks and phonic signals in their own inscriptive right, descriptive words readily become enervated when processed as mere signs. Only a certain kind of “literary” or “letteral” reading can again unnerve their work in the supposedly neutral rendering of places, events, emotions, and those pieces of the material world that populate or impel them. Revisionist materialism, as practiced by Brown and others, would retrieve the imagined things depicted in fiction from the “intentional objects” of their assigned role in discourse or even plot. Concomitantly, a narratographic response can rescue the somatically engaged materiality of language in prose fiction from the intentional object of sheer representation. Put it, then, that the idea of intension—always manifest in the affective if not overtly grammatical or phonetic friction of a prose sequence—is a way of keeping in mind the unsteady transference that narrative writing always more generally intends, where what goes only half said by the text is up to reception to read in, read back in. And it is this transferential function that must indeed be factored in alongside the libidinal abstractions of stray pattern and broken rhythm in the counter-narrative psychoformalism— or libidinal “stylistics”—of Bersani and Dutoit. In Victorian fiction, of course, the vagaries and undertones of verbal intension don’t override the authorial intention to hook and move us. Rather, they make our involvement yet more sensually involuted, more sinuous, fragile, and keen, both discontinuous and hence all the more intermittently arresting. Distinctions need keeping, and proportion too. Human violence and linguistic deviance are never equated in what follows. Any point of convergence between the wear and tear of human suffering and the friction of its prose treatment in no way subsumes the former, thus anesthetized, to the latter. The broken neck has no equivalent in the broken syntactic rule, nor cruel aggression in lexical transgression. Wracked, battered, and emaciated bodies, betrayed and crushed hope: these devastations are graphed by verbal strain rather than reduced to it.

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Then, too, narratography may certainly be elsewhere and otherwise engaged by different plot material. But how is it put to a unique test by the tribulations of narrative violence, however muted in ferocity? How is a narratographic response enlisted by the local increments of prose mediation in cases where narrative at large seems mostly comprised of the implacable toll taken by time?  Besides the murders and druggings and sexual victimage and public executions and the rest, the drownings and deliriums, the stabbings and poisonings, there are, of course, the less melodramatic, more subtly graded hues of violation by which subjected selves are invaded, devitalized, or effaced, phrase by phrase, in the press and intensity of a pervasive novelistic psychodrama. Here too, as well as in the histrionics of mayhem or despair, narratography is on call to measure the diff used tremors, displaced and recirculated, of plot’s own force. Even when they pass almost without recognition, certainly without the recoil of a full-fledged shock effect, their textual affect may catch hold in reading. Almost by syllabic and syntactic emblem at times, such tremors and displacements are manifested in a way that can work to figure—in their own balked momentum and sudden lunges—the halting forward drive of untold riven lives. That’s what Poe is here for by clarifying contrast, an ocean apart from Victorian narrative practice. His language is at seething play in the vacuum of all credible plot. Its violence is that of a pure unhedged deviance unmoderated and inflamed, pure style—as the modernists were quick to notice and champion in the phonetic excess of his cryptic introverisons. Fraught wording is the beginning and the end of it. Narratology has little to tell us in Poe about the curvature of event and resolution, the various subsidiary impulses or lines of action that structure is called upon to equilibrate. Everything is arrowed toward one unabashed purpose: the quivering thrill of the story’s hermetic conceit. In the verbal reductions of Poe’s phrasing, the pulse of fervid writing—sometimes even allegorized as such—constitutes its own menacing but evanescent plot. Though aestheticized to a fare-thee-well, the novel violence of his prose is at least as aggressive and egregious in its anti-novelistic animus as in its febrile bloodletting. Poe’s is a violence you cannot make good on, cannot rescue for the ordinary sentimental resolutions of nineteenth-century plotting. This has to do in part, so we’ll find, with how thoroughly it feels steeped in a materialist view of language that brooks no organic idealization (no appeal to “natural language”) beyond the grist and twitch of manic enunciation itself—and that also aspires in the process to no organic form at the narrative level either, no transcendence of the hypersensitized instant.

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If all prose violence were like Poe’s, there’d be no need to consider the overstepped bounds of nineteenth-century verbal decorum in light of the novel’s evolution as genre. But it isn’t, and there is. To encounter the composite work of narrative form via the interlaced networks of its verbal sequencing is to grasp the often searing logic of temporality in Victorian fiction; to do so across the syncopated timings and chronic misfires of its actual grammatical momentum; and thus to see anew, through such irregularities of story, the larger crisis of time at the base of the entire genre. Such an approach neither digs nor widens any trench between practice and theory. Instead, it brings the analysis of prose fiction into line with the broader ken, and gauge, of more abstract (less pointedly interpretive) claims about the philosophical and social history of the genre—and, thereby, about the novel’s foundational place in modern culture. These claims include most prominently, in Georg Lukács’s enthralling if thinly illustrated Theory of the Novel, the dialectical perception of ironic reversal as no less than a violent—and genre-defining—hinge. Everything rotates on such irony, often turning the novel’s whole world upside down. It is precisely this “extreme violence” (Lukács’s central phrase, 85) that gives birth in Continental letters to the Romantic—which is for our purposes the Victorian—novel of “disillusionment,” with all its scathing narrative inversions and its chafing, or at times dubiously alleviating, turns of phrase. Little “sweet violence” here, in Terry Eagleton’s titular phrase about a tragic genre that seldom takes shape in British fiction— nothing ultimately therapeutic about this kind of psychic contortion and depletion. Appreciated, via Lukács, as a structuring premise of nineteenth-century realist fiction, this generic and conceptual violence— the unremitting force of irony itself—will be further monitored in these pages for the very tenor of its delivery system not just as fictive, but as frictive, prose: its delivery over time—and finally as narrative time. There once more—in the transferred effects of enunciated story—all operative intention finds its never fi xed acknowledgment in the give, and yield, of phrasal intension. What undergraduate students would be likely to call the epitaphs to the coming chapters have all been drawn from Lukács’s Theory of the Novel. The students would almost be right this time, for these epigraphs do selectively eulogize, from the vantage of a modernist stylistic fragmentation whose indulgence and defeatism Lukács hated, everything he found more purposefully earned by the self-infl icted (but also, of course, socially determined) ordeals of nineteenth-century realist writing. Imagining how a sense of narrative irony’s “extreme violence” in Lukács (with

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its aggressive reversals of perspective) would be addressed by Jakobson’s “violence purely linguistic” in the cadences of representational language (with its acknowledged double temporality, part narrative, part phrasal) is part of it. Aligning this speculative conjunction with the psychoformalist theory of narrative deflection in Bersani and Dutoit (with its libidinal displacement of the violent signified along the kinetic tracks of the signifier) is to imagine how all three perspectives might together help gloss the same passages in Victorian fiction. That is the experiment to follow. In the process, a recovery of certain Lukácsian perceptions should be of further use in reviewing—and mobilizing for newly located occasions of textual irony—the subsequent genre theory that has followed in a more sociocultural and political vein (Watt, Jameson, McKeon, Gallagher) from the pathbreaking theory of the novel as genre in Lukács’s own preMarxist—though thoroughly dialectical—period. What Lukács would identify for the prenovelistic world of the epic as a case of “gratuitous violence infl icted on the organic” (77) is instead, for the secular modernity of the novel, a necessary “stylisation” (77) in the absence of any organic or “constitutive” (77) life forms in the first place. Coherence in the novel must be made rather than found. Narratography attends that making as much as do the categorical determinations of narratology. Among the assumptions of both approaches, this: that the truly novel violence of fiction is formal, perspectival, structural—rather than narrowly administered by direct representation. Th is is the case whether that violence is arranged by the gross reversals of plotting, by the bevel and inlay of its discursive framing, or by the skewering slant of a single devastating phrase. And of this fundamental novelistic (rather than simply novelized) violence of classic fiction, structural rather than incidental, and turning on the negation of epic totality by estranged desire, Lukács is undoubtedly the great exegete. Like Hegel before him, Lukács leads rather directly to Lacan. In each, the subject is constituted under the eye of its own negation or erasure as focal consciousness, requiring its own othering as object. Th ink of Dr. Jekyll as the literary scapegoat for all three positions at once. When, according to The Theory of the Novel, the felling ironies of time must in effect be characterized for (and within) the subject who suffers them, agency lapses to the bitter empiricism of its own recognized defeat. “I” becomes the alienated “me” beaten by circumstance. What begins for Lacan in the transit from an imaginary to a symbolic order is for the Hegelian Lukács the always ironic discrepancy of self-consciousness—but a discrepancy given unique form by novelization. The point is thus to recognize a psy-

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chopoetics of desire in novelistic plotting: a sustained diagnosis of narrative time, that is, as the very medium of desire and its negations, with all the disjunctive focalizations of the subject that unfold over this plotted duration. The epic’s very relation to the novel becomes that of plenary selfpresence to disjunctive agency, self (or in Lukács’s term “soul”) to sundered subject. Much comes of this. On many fronts. But not least in the tensed, cumulative phrasing, attuned to the more broadly delineated phases, of plot time. It is there that narratography listens in. For it is there that a genre’s deepest determinations can be found yielded up by medium: in short, by the blended labor and interplay of the novel’s material base in the inscribed dialectics of prose friction. On this score, the pages so far should be enough to introduce the how and the why of narratographic reading. Now for the what. Which fictional scenes await us, and what of them? How do they negotiate as form the violence in which they trade?

1 The Omitted Person Plot l i t t l e dor r i t ’s fau l t

Estrangement from nature . . . the modern sentimental attitude to nature, is only a projection of man’s experience of his self-made environment as a prison instead of a parental home. —luk ács, the theory of the novel (64)

The “self-made environment” of domestic life in the modern social field is repeatedly mistaken for given, rather than for constructed, in the very vocabulary of its regrets. Though pining for a lost naturalness, so far from a quester is the protagonist of Dickens’s eleventh novel, so little prone is the “dreamer” Arthur Clennam to actual quixotic errands, that constraint and denial seem like “second nature” to him. That’s exactly the doubleedged phrase used by Lukács in The Theory of the Novel (62, 63) to isolate a sense of the pervasively artificial in modern experience—once it has undergone its deep naturalization, and thus fi rst stage of denial, as the simply conventional. While the novel we know as Little Dorrit (1855–57) was still in the planning stages, Dickens’s provisional title, Nobody’s Fault, would have (ironically, of course) deflected all ethical responsibility onto the cruelly inevitable and the socially enforced. Ultimately, though, in the most “sentimental” of all refamiliarizing gestures, the book that later emerges under the name of its marriageable heroine does attempt turning back to the poetry of earth—and, in connection with it, to a human wedding supposedly natural enough that no plot-long barrage of artifice could ultimately prevent it—so as to redeem the world. What arrests attention at the close of Little Dorrit, however, is partly the labor it takes to arrest the unspoken violence of that final plot turn into matrimony. Prose works phrase by mellifluous phrase to staunch the (31)

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flow, to pull tight the tourniquet of marital closure before the last emotional bloodletting of desire. This rescue action is not a matter of rhetoric divorced from narrative, style from plot, but rather an enlisting of the one in service to the other: the requisition of writing by the agenda of represented event, here in a bridled and (in its own way) constrained march to the famous finish lines. Where narratology concerns itself with the structural formation of story, narratography can note the marked prose of such deformations. Its heightened (rather than elevated) level of attention can register a dissonance even in those superficially serene, legato cadences that bring Little Dorrit to rest amid a surrounding fretfulness. It is there, in a descent from the wedding chapel into the jostling Victorian cityscape, that hero and heroine begin taking their no longer solitary way even as, by frictional evocation, “the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward [sic] and the vain, fretted, and chafed, and made their usual uproar”—an uproar into which the new couple, five times reiterated, accepting their lapsarian condition, “went” bravely “down.” Plot itself subsides into the tapestry of social acceptance. Until then, however, parallel plotting has worked overtime to throw its trajectory of mystery and disclosure into relief against various backdrops of communal indifference. The quester hero has withered into the detective; all energy is retrospective; the police keep to their beat by patrolling the self entirely from within its own diurnal rounds. While Arthur Clennam, guilt-laden son of a grasping mercantile “house” that has been his only home, has been seeking all the while to know the nature of the crime for which his father, before dying, had hoped to cleanse his conscience, in the counterplot the prison girl wronged by Arthur’s parents is edged into position to accept his hand in marriage. Without solving the crime, he marries the victim. But this convergence of plot strands in the love-knot has allowed the detective line to slip away entirely—or, more to the point, to be summarily truncated. How so, and at what emotional cost, is the focus of this chapter. How we go about noticing such repercussions is the methodological topic. The argument is inevitably twofold: a case for something all but insufferable at the close of this vast, troubling novel, something whose brunt is borne by the medium of prose itself, and a case for the exemplarity of this burden as a proving ground of narratographic attention. Beyond the broad reorientations of the linguistic turn, narratography is drawn as well to narrative impulses at work in the single turn of phrase—and not least when a long novel inches toward the irreversible dictates of its end. Even with language gradually dammed up in this way,

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or leaking unexpected associations under pressure, syntax, in its potentially slipping hold over diction, is likely to feel the strain—and make it felt. While honoring a disciplinary debt, for instance, to Todorov’s broad-gauged and almost metaphoric “grammar of narrative,” any suitably tensed reading of Dickens needs as well a vigilant sense of grammar’s own disruptive narrativity. Sometimes a meliorating social realignment will work to smooth things over and out. Under the rule of poetic justice, the founding disequilibrium of Dickensian narrative seeks equity in the end, not just stability—seeks but does not always find. There may well be crimes answered. There may or may not be detection, reprisal, restitution. But there is always a continuous sentencing. With the yields of a narratographic approach still pending, what may appear paradoxical en route, given this book’s announced investment in the texture of the written, is that much of this first chapter’s evidence is for a good while entirely made up. Not out of whole cloth but from some gnarled threads of provocation in the text as we have it, I will be spinning out an imaginary novel as counterplot. Th is effort may appear in progress like an arbitrary concoction imposed upon the novel’s quite recognizable convention: namely, its sketchy (indeed euphemistic) handling of background details in a Victorian illegitimacy plot. But the specter of paradox is in fact chimerical in this case. By that I mean this: narrative texts are always, in literary form, writing more than they straightforwardly announce. And straightforwardness, in the case of plot analysis, is exactly the issue. Against such linear momentum are inscribed phantom half-stories—if not whole throttled chronicles—along the underside of grammar, diction, and the forward drive of their meshed linguistic expectations. Narratography is a term of engagement for the way we might sample and decipher that underlying excess, might enter into imaginative transference with its reticences as well as breached repressions at the level of wording itself, might let that wording tug at the thrust of story—even if it offers an intractable snag in the fabric of the supervening rhetorical design. A certain kind of reading tries sorting (without smoothing) this out. At any point in a novel, but especially in the compressions and exclusions of its closure, narratography would offer a finely calibrated meter of vetoed alternatives. Registered by the ripple effects of linguistic energy in excess of denoted event, these are verbal perturbations inevitably falling below the radar of a general narratology, whose tendency, when trained (in both senses) on Victorian fiction, is to remain preoccupied more with the logic of closure—mortal, marital, sociopolitical—than with the lo-

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gistics of foreclosure in the stress of wording itself. Yet it is only across the local ironies and evasions of the written that meaning may be found laboring away at its own construction, borne on the back of prohibited options—or, more to the point, interdicted ones—that may churn unworked in the eddying of the text. Narratology tends, in effect, to diagram structure, however dynamic. Narratography would come closer to graphing a process—and its local machinations. It offers, in progress, a reading of style for its own plot. However fanciful and extreme the agenda of dredged-up narrative restoration in the coming pages, then, its oddness is only in the end heuristic. Such an exaggerated sense of the unwritten installs an alternate narrative universe far from the normal experience of any given novel. But it does so only to forefront the lesser and inevitable counterplay that operates along the line of any fictive response, including a whole range of metaphoric equivocations and reversals in the ambivalent slack of fictional language, its oscillations and ruses, its rhetorical saliencies, elisions, and outright silencings. And let it be clear up front. Narratography isn’t regularly concerned, and certainly not by definition, with the return of the repressed in so blatant a way as the coming fantasy novel imagines. Its response isn’t, as a rule, counter-narratological at all in this encompassing sense. But it does involve, in conception as well as in practice, a way of reading the textured pace of the written, with its unruly skids and jolts, against the overriding—the more abstract and immaterial—force of the plotted. I hope I have said enough to license in advance the present experiment, even though—in its test of such deciphered latencies—its operation lingers far out in left field before coming to bat for any direct attention to the text as we have it from Dickens. Conceived as if from behind the bars of one virtual prison, with the general tenor of its violence debarred from disclosure on the main stage of Dickens’s final volume, the invented novel will appear in what follows via the italics of a foreign and alienated English voice. From there we return to Dickens’s own text to see if it does indeed bear the disfiguring traces of such an entire alternate plot, including the prolonged solitary confinement of its silenced agency. Although the kind of metanarrative digression involved in this launching fictional gambit has no equivalent in the chapters to follow, there is nothing coming that is not, in a broader sense, akin to its procedures: keyed, that is, to the contours of the half said along the ridges and gulfs of the written. The more alien to critical protocols this opening fiction naturally seems, the more closely it is meant to probe the condensations and erasures of plot’s

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own censoring violence in the standard Victorian case. Untold stories of this sort are the infrastructure of an entire genre.

Barred Narrative Even with long-dead authors, criticism traditionally favors a grammar of the historical present. But bear with me, instead, for an exercise in the hypothetical future—as we skim through next year’s heralded “backstory” novel, or literary prequel, hatched some years before in the Manhattan office of a rather middle-brow but decidedly high-profi le literary agent. The scene is no more conjectural than it is probable. It was there that a minor British novelist with some modest popular following even in the States, and a respected Oxford lecturer in fiction as well, specialist in the English and Irish novel, had the seed of a new book fi rmly planted. “Can’t you of all people think of another great novel, Victorian would be just the ticket, deserving that Jean-Rhys-style ‘other side of the story’ treatment? Tales from the madwoman’s attic, you know. Hey, maybe three crazies at once. Dracula through the glazed eyes of those Transylvanian brides: a fugue of erotic soliloquies, how about it? The Wide Black Sea? ” The agent’s pitch, well rehearsed, was amiable and ingratiating at first, then a bit hectoring. “You know: a Lolita’s Lolita, that bit. Maybe Sue Bridehead Revisited.” He was visibly proud of that one. “Just kidding, but you catch my drift. A gimmick, sure, but what isn’t these days? Just don’t give us Middlemarch by Dorothea’s maid. Hey, maybe Causabon in Love. Okay—but I’m serious in principle. It’s almost foolproof. I know, I know, but it’s fail-safe just because it has been done. Doesn’t mean the idea’s done in. It’s just become a recognized subgenre: girls with pearl earrings and all.” That, too, got a frown. “Yeah, yeah, but I mean something bigger, more powerful, as I say, more Victorian. A character whose melodramatic story would be so gripping it would eclipse the original, pull the rug right out from under it, turn it inside out. People love that. Canon aura plus oneupsmanship all at once.” Our author-to-be was growing exponentially defenseless, seeing his future unfold before him—if not yet the rave reviews. The upshot, and to instant fanfare, will hit the shelves under the title The Story Left Behind. An advance blurb on the jacket, from Dame A. S. Byatt no less: “This stirring epistolary novel seizes upon the repressed underside of Victorian sexuality, and the covert sadism of its puritanical norms, and lets out the full wail of jailed desire.” Reviews follow suit. So what lost story has been lucratively restored this time? It hadn’t, in fact,

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taken our lecturer-novelist long to land upon just the right source text. An unlikely candidate maybe, with so little to go on in its own pages. But that was exactly the hook—at least once the agent’s prod had been administered. It had everything, Little Dorrit did—everything and then some, its excesses cloaking a final suspect reticence. The black hole (the hero’s real mother’s real backstory) was just waiting not to be plugged, as Dickens did, but to be plumbed—and plundered. The trouble was mainly with the dense event horizon of the plot surrounding it. Even committed to the agent’s idea, how could he ever get past that final massing of histrionic disclosure while at the same time get its unsaid consequences across? Whenever our imagined author had braved the novel in lecture, even with students who had kept up with the reading, his strategic eleventhhour summary of the thickening plot always seemed like a shock tactic: an assault on memory and credulity at once. The mold is set at the outset, he always wanted the class to see. It all begins, dozens of chapters back, with that sadsack midlifer in crisis, Arthur Clennam, en route to London after two decades with the China branch of his deceased father’s underspecified colonial enterprise: vague money, bad vibes. Arthur has drifted homeward again to his loveless mother to sniff out whatever the family secret was that had tormented his father on his deathbed. No sooner is he repatriated, and yet again realienated, than Arthur is perplexed to find that Mrs. Clennam has chosen to employ the daughter of a debtor’sprison inmate to do menial seamstress work. He knows he’s onto something, but he can’t separate his free-floating attraction to the diminutive prison girl, Amy Dorrit by name, from his sense that the family may owe her something more like accrued financial (rather than spontaneous emotional) interest. As suspicions mount, his sleuthing is suddenly derailed by more urgent concerns and by at least half a dozen apparently unconnected subplots. Above all, we see how the use value of money always precedes its truth value. For lots of money suddenly starts changing hands. Amy’s poorhouse family comes into a fortune from the first of the novel’s two unexpected wills, separating her from Arthur as the Dorrits embark on a showy Grand Tour—even as Arthur is getting embroiled in the national craze for stock speculation and ends up symmetrically imprisoned for debt himself. This is exactly what keeps him, feverish the while, from being privy to what the blackmailer Rigaud has independently discovered about Mrs. Clennam’s prolonged conspiracy to defraud Amy: first of all, that Arthur’s orphaned father had been forced by his rich uncle,

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under threat of disinheritance, to leave his lover and their new child to marry the well-heeled but heartless woman who became Mrs. Clennam and who has since perpetuated the family lie that she is Arthur’s natural mother. But that is only the half of it. On his own deathbed years later, the guilt-stricken uncle had crafted, the blackmailer has found out, a bizarre will that is determined to leave something to someone even if the victimized illegitimate mother cannot be found, or is found dead. Even a proxy recipient will help ease the old man’s conscience, and it turns out that Amy Dorrit has come to fi ll that place by a byzantine zigzag of descent. Direct reparation for the uncle’s cruelty has certainly been impossible. For Mrs. Clennam had long ago driven the real victim and mother out of London—and slowly mad—and finally, so we’re told, to her death—by consigning her to the keep of Ephraim Flintwinch, identical twin of her own factotum, Jeremiah, who connives with her in suppressing the inconveniently sentimental will of Uncle Clennam. It is only thanks to the blackmailer Rigaud’s accidental meeting with Ephraim in Antwerp that this dark secret has sprung its leak. And why was Ephraim there? To escape creditors—and debtor’s prison, naturally: in other words, to twin this very motif. Inspired by his dubious success in managing Arthur’s mother, the second Flintwinch has joined the national craze for overinvestment after the death of his charge. The implied chiasm is sublime—as our hypothetical novelist always nudges his students to appreciate. While lunatics have rashly speculated in corporate bonds, Ephraim has “speculated unsuccessfully in lunatics.” In fact, Amy herself has been left poor again by the stock crash and can therefore meet Arthur on his own lowered terms. After the space-clearing demise of her father, all that plot needs now is another and more sudden death by freak accident (Rigaud’s), a traumatic paralysis (Mrs. Clennam’s), a swift sweep of the maternal secret under the rug again, and a new marriage (Arthur’s to Amy) can begin on modest though emotionally solvent footing. Even that sizeable majority of his students with no allergies to happy endings still can’t help but see the forced march to a marital closure. By contrast, all a new and oppositional novel would need to do in answering back to all this would be to dust off that secret of the real mother and let it breathe at last—breathe long enough to feel its own final asphyxiation. It wouldn’t be easy, but the choice of novel seemed just right. In the event, not a single review would doubt it, either. The TLS is wholly enthralled. Equally smitten is The London Review, which opens its lead notice celebrating “a tour de force that intrepidly impersonates the tra-

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vails of an anonymous incarcerated madwoman who has forgotten her own name and signs only ‘the befallen one’ to a stream of letters penned as if in blood.” The New York Times quickly weighs in as well, lending the achievement an eye-catching contemporary slant: “The poignant search for the birth parent in so many recent novels and literary memoirs, as in so many real-life stories—with their often thinnest of paper trails building slowly toward tentative letters across the gulf of years—is devastatingly reversed here. What happens, with an unholy sense of suspense, is that the hero’s mother, banished to little more than a footnote in the original, rages her way back into plot—through her unmailed rants alone—to remake the whole lumbering thing in the battered image of her own accursed, accusatory words.”  Not just the choice of foil text but the epistolary gamble itself certainly seems to have paid off, its rants addressed as much to the scribbler herself as to that woman of ice, that Clennam woman whose given name I couldn’t remember now to save my life. As if there were any life to save. All there is left for me is to keep telling the story over and over again, spelling it out in order to believe it. It seems too cruel to be true. And all this writing entrusted to Ephraim Flintwinch as go-between, of all people! What a name: the man of steel who winches me tight with those bolts when I, as he calls it, “go off ”? Oh, if only I could go off once and for all, one way or the other, rave my way past all this. But no, it just goes on. After all those words, and these words, and these more, by now that miserable orphaned girl and mother, that no one, she who was once me, has almost succeeded in writing herself out. Playing off the working title for Dickens’s own book, Nobody’s Fault, our Oxford-don novelist had wanted initially to call this ingrown epistolary novel Nobody’s Story. As academic chance would have it, as discovered to his dismay in the footnotes of a senior essay by an American exchange student, there was already a book of literary criticism (awardwinning, he learned later) by this very title—on an earlier moment in the British novel, to be sure, but still. . . . The agent wasn’t fazed, but it didn’t sit well with the writer.  The bloom was off. Especially because the claim of that scholarly study, bolstered by eighteenth-century economic and philosophical theory contemporaneous with the birth of the novel, was that we are free to invest in characters largely because they are unreal, common property, porous to the invasive imagination of the reader, unprotected by laws against trespass, let alone copyright. Quite by accident and entirely by contrast, our novelist’s present trick was to reverse this whole received textual premise, to turn it quite literally “inside out,” as the agent had off-handedly suggested. How? By making a doomed and marginalized minor figure, one who appeared merely as an explanatory

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sidebar in the original plot, into a real person yearning to break her way through into her rightful place within a novelistic fiction. Though the fallback title worked out well enough in the end, the author’s scruples against Nobody’s Story appeared at the time a galling setback. So it was back to the drawing board, indeed to Dickens’s own: back to his original sketchy notes for the story in his preserved chapter plans for Little Dorrit. At just the point in Dickens’s outlined plot where all the madwoman’s writings are to be finally discovered in a stash of letters, Dickens reminds himself to work this up in the actual drafting of the chapter. The note reads simply, resonantly, with that rhetorical resonance Dickens can lay claim to even when jotting notes to himself: “She had left her story”—with a careted insert after the first word, expanding the scant indication to “had implored to see her son.”  In fact, this brief telegraphic reminder is more than the novel itself makes good on. The mother’s craving for a visit with her child is replaced by a capitulation to guilt, confession, and a plea for forgiveness. It’s just as unlikely as it sounds, this sense of penance rather than victimage—and just as briefly dispatched amid the other strained and improbable turns of the denouement. The missing mother’s story itself goes missing, left in the dust by the momentum of the requisite marriage plot. There it is, then, the new title needed: The Story Left Behind. The wordplay wouldn’t be too arcane for the trade press reader, nor too blatant either. Now you see it, now you don’t. The whole plan was crafty enough. All depended on whether our novelist could really pull it off. Or put it over. Along with the abandoned mother’s own traumatic memories of the doings back in London, enough rumors reach her through Flintwinch that eventually a spectral form of Dickens’s main plot should also seem to have bled through between the lines of her own letters. Famous details ought to come across as the shadow story of her own emptiness and dementia, the dye stain that throws her own unslaked cravings into contrast. “Great stuff . . . keep plugging,” shot back the agent’s email. And then the real inspiration struck. Right from the start, this unearthed epistolary underside of the omniscient triple-decker had seemed a canny enough move. But as the writer plowed forward only by burrowing deeper into the pangs of the suppressed story, a wilder idea had slowly dawned. And couldn’t be shaken. Our novelist-critic had decided to go for broke, cashing out his whole idea at the metafictional level. It wasn’t just that the source text in Dickens holds back more than its form can tolerate, and is rather drastically warped out of shape by this containment action. It occurred to the writer that no reader would recognize this sooner, or with more ferocious elo-

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quence, than the plot’s own posthumous lover and mother, if only somehow she could be resurrected—or, that is, would not yet have died—when the novel arrives in print. She would make the story’s ideal “against-thegrain” reader. What an idea: the madwoman reading Jane Eyre in her own attic! And the longer this idea got brooded over the more it seemed to have driven straight through gimmick to masterstroke. Textual empathy always approximates identification. Here we go the whole distance: the reader lost and found at once in the book that delineates and elides her own life. More, too, to be perfectly frank. For amid the “trenchant ingenuity” the reviewers could be dreamed to applaud, there might be a further delicious twist. Our scholar-novelist could well imagine his most pretentious counterpart at Cambridge being forced to lecture enviously on the novel someday soon in his widely attended narrative theory course. One could almost hear him, strain in the voice and all: “Put simply, metalepsis takes place, for instance, when a character is, as if real, made present to his author or to the reading of his own novel. Thackeray reveled in it, among the Victorians, and we see it again in, ahem, last year’s The Story Left Behind.” As for the agent, he balked at fi rst, but came round after reading some more sample pages. “Beautiful—not just slick, beautiful—you’ve taken the whole subgenre and really upped the stakes. By all means run with it.” Not just a sly turn, this—a full boomerang effect. But along a slow arc, building momentum as it goes. After all those years expended in the feverish penning of an already smudged-out life, the heroine learns to her horror—the first hint dropped in a garbled remark by Flintwinch one besotted midnight—that it has all been for nought. She quickly teases out of him that her words were never in fact posted at all, were shown to his twin brother instead, secreted away in a locked box by that infernal mirror image of her jailor, and then somehow returned to “her” Flintwinch for sequestering. And why did the other Flintwinch’s wife, the cowed Affery, servant to Mrs. Clennam, not see that what she thought she saw was really in fact happening, all that midnight funny business? Why did she let her husband beat the truth back in her? Maybe the letters should have been written to her instead all these years, to Affery, to wise her up. And more awful yet—here’s the terrible twist, leaving the source novel far behind—their writer learns now from her own Flintwinch that those letters had been lately sold for a song (a drinking song at that) to a respected gentleman who made up part of a large party one evening at the local ale house, and who, having heard the merest gist of her grief, wanted the whole chest of letters shipped to London. She learns, too,

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that this gentleman trafficker in recorded lives happens to be the famous novelist Boz, in town for some public appearance. Flintwinch had somehow horned in on the long round of toasts and grown talkative with the famous man, who let him know just the use he was hoping to make of these letters. Ephraim was assured on the novelist’s departure that, if that poor unfortunate’s tale is half as strong as he makes it sound, the good chap might look for the story of his mad female charge in a serialized fiction a year or so later: under assumed names all round of course (the great novelist winked), and backdated—the latest fad—into the recent past. Looking for a big finish to a novel he’d been planning, Mr. Boz hoped her crazed tale would turn the trick. And in leaving he raised a glass to her, after ordering Ephraim’s fi lled yet again: “Count on it, my man, the madwoman will have left her story!” This is to be the last chance, then, for her stolen and now resold life— its last chance for release from all this manacled, mangling silence. Time is a sickly blur until the novel numbers begin appearing. Even Ephraim is interested after his sluggish fashion, and brings the first installment up to her after showing it round the pub in one of his stupid boasts. But wait. Little Who? What did any of this have to do with her? Marseilles? That prison isn’t her prison. Not that next one, either. As the numbers drag on, it comes to her ever so slowly. Comes to her that there, burning through all these aliases and inventions and irrelevant digressions, there is her own story blazing out at her after all—as if through a chipped prism, facet by facet, time and again. Never by name, or even in person, nonetheless she sees her own poor self everywhere. From early on, she is the secret fact behind every deprivation of the hero’s life, every jaded feeling with which he turns from the world. She is what is missing in him. Surely, then, she is what the novel will have to make up for, bring forward in the end. She hears echoes of her story in the words themselves, the sly chime of letters, the names for feelings that were hers to begin with. Echoes of her fear in the name Affery the servant, who is afraid of everything. And should be. And of her Nemesis in ClenNAM, MRS. And of the word “son,” her son, buried there in every “prison.” It makes her dizzy, this spin of letters, just like when she writes, the words thickening as she sounds them out. Was I really to have come into money if I could have been found? Or if not, another girl long ago befriended like me by the same Mr. Do Right, the kindly befuddled Dorrit? That’s sure a long way round the barn for Boz’s reader. And so it is his niece Amy who finds herself in my place. And more and more in my place, I see, as the chapters peter out. They keep saying “Do Not Forget,” but no one seems willing to remember. There’s that Rigaud or Blandois or Lagnier,

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whatever he chooses to call himself, the man of many names where I have none. However that greasy fraud is pronounced in French, there he is in English, that Rigaud, goading the old lady with snatched phrases from the will, rubbing it in. In the face of her haughty denials, why doesn’t he at least read one of my letters to shut the old buzzard up—or force her hand? Even if they call me dead they can still give me a mouth. So if those letters Boz bought so cheap aren’t up to his standards, why doesn’t the great writer rewrite them himself, compress my ramblings, make ‘em tell— isn’t that the phrase? They’d tell, that’s for sure, tell too much. Why am I brought back as a curse and a scourge—and then given no words to curse with? And even what leaks is lies. There’s Flintwinch talking about me to his mistress, how “she had been always writing, incessantly writing—mainly letters of confession to you, and Prayers for forgiveness.” Never, never a one. No repentance. Just pent up hate. And after all this, will that trunk of my letters never be produced? Will my secret be trapped away in the asylum of Affery’s mind, where it will all seem like a dream anyway? Strange how Affery’s aff rights are always real, straight through to the end. She thinks I’m alive. Boz gives her that one last hallucination, which he knows to be true as well. She thinks I’m the force that’s bringing the house down, not a ghost but a real presence. True enough, I’d gladly think. Listen to the way Affery begs Mrs. Clennam to let her take over my keep: “Only promise me, that, if it’s the poor thing that’s kept here, secretly, you’ll let me take charge of her and be her nurse.” But no, they all seem willing to agree, I’ve been “ dead a score of years and more.” Not just that, for they say my dying coincided exactly with the moment “when Arthur went abroad.” Do they mean, does Boz mean, that in turning his back on his motherland—to join his father in the business out East—he as much as did me in? Or that without me here, even unknown to him, there was nothing left for the son on native ground? Even in their lies, they’re never all wrong. And certainly not in their worst fears. I must copy it out, this passage, just to make sure I’ve got it right. What I hear is Affery shivering to the bone with a sense of my frightful claim on them all: “So much the worse,” said Affery, with a shiver, “ for she haunts the house, then. Who else rustles about it, making signals by dropping dust so softly? Who else comes and goes, and marks the walls with long crooked touches, when we are all a-bed? ”

Affery really believes I’m lurking somewhere there, stirring or scratching, like the sound of my own quill maybe, trying to make myself heard. In all that

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sifting and silting and crumbling, she hears me gnawing away at the rotted fortress from within. But my raspings are not really “signals,” since no one can decipher them. No one in the house but that twitchy servant woman has ever taken the least notice of those scraped traces and scraps of me. So those crazings are only silent scars all up and down the plaster. The writing on the wall, I’d like it to be: a prophecy and a doom. Dust to dust for them all! But no, there’s no reason to hope that I alone could bring them low in their lies. So I suppose those muffled sounds Affery’s so afeared of are more like me turning the very pages of the book that erases me. She’s right in one way, I guess. While I read about it, read my way into it, this disintegrating Clennam world is my only abode. But knowing better, I can’t abide it. What? ! No! Now suddenly the loathsome Rigaud is dead too—and even this sweet justice ends up a bitter pill. Though he’s squashed with his ugly moustache like a whiskered rodent under the beams of the house—the house that my living ghost has, after all, brought thundering down—there is no relief in this either. He’s “rubbish” now, but always was. Affery’s voice did come “with a shiver” when she spoke of my walled-up truth, and now I’ve shivered their timbers, all right. But my secret is buried in that villain’s smashed brain. Oh, wait, bless her: here comes Tattycoram, who steals the chest from the icy, manhating Miss Wade, who could never have known what to do with them, my letters, anyway. They scream of everything she has choked to death in herself. Of love not wanted, therefore not wanting. Now they are to be turned over to my boy’s wife-to-be. How will they at last come out, those words of mine, of me? I could almost write it myself, what I guess they call the “revelation scene.” Let Arthur learn of love’s price from the written words of his own lost mother, voiced by his new motherly child bride—a final reading to him in the prison, where he has long been too weak to read for himself. But no, when the opportunity comes, she never says a word. She takes up that other unidentified book instead, reading aloud just to kill time—and from some irrelevance not even named or summarized. But what will Boz’s own reader think, or those who listen to his book read aloud? Without even telling him what the papers are, Amy asks Arthur himself to destroy the will, to burn it up—of all places!—in their last cozy prison fire on the eve of their wedding. What kind of prenuptial vow is this unspoken vow of silence? Why can’t he know about me, my Arthur: about his mother who loved him, or at least the idea of him, loved him to melancholy and to madness? Why must he go to the altar still believing that the Clennam woman was his closest blood kin, thinking still that what was forbidden to him in her heart was actually a mother’s love? So he’ll appreciate Amy more? This is insupportable. And Arthur, after the long mystery story you’ve had so weary a part in,

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why would you sit still for the destruction of evidence? I know you’re only a character, not my real son, but I still don’t understand. What does the book mean by it, mean by you? What if she kept handing you things to toss in the fire for her? Would you really let her burn each of my letters, if it came to that, one after the other, without a flicker of curiosity? Don’t you see that all this is just what it looks like, a funeral pyre? Don’t you see what Amy is up to when she asks for a kiss as “charm”? Don’t you see her turning your wedding pledge into an exorcism? So Boz is only another drunken boaster, I guess, like Rigaud or Ephraim. And so I don’t leave my story here at all. I only leave behind the hope of its ever being told. Is this what novels always do to life, tear its heart out? Little Dorrit! What a weak, mean title. How much it hides away, how much it buries unmourned. Thinking of my stolen letters, then, and my baby taken, and my motherhood undone, I’d have called it The Undelivered. And then I’d know it was my story, and others might too. . . . Breaking off with its last epistle into the void, off the book went to the agent, then in quick succession to press, print, and wide transatlantic acclaim. Everyone hears the heroine’s story at last—and comes to see her point about Dickens’s ending. Quoting The New York Review of Books: “All those unrewarded lives that the ruthless plot instinct keeps at bay in the juggernaut of Dickensian romance, all the deflections and submergences on which it fuels its progress, come back to haunt it in this searing tale of denied desire.”

Dysclosure As indicated at the start, there is a methodology behind this portrayed madness, which a few pages of more familiar reading should be able to bring out. In this case fantasy is only a prelude to narratography. I’ve tried prying open the gap between Dickens’s jotted plans for his finale and the actual pages that got sentimentally worked over and flattened out. One can virtually hear his implied italics first time around, his rousing emphasis on “She had left her story,” and then the friction of its erasure later, turning the banned mother first penitent, then silent. And even without this recourse to his number plans, we sense a tension in the plotting itself, as well as in the writing. Surely there is either undue scrupulousness or covert self-interest in Amy’s last act before inscribing herself in the marriage book, where she becomes a Dorrit no more, but now Mrs. Clennam the second. What, then, is really at stake in her destruction of a private legal docu-

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ment before the signing of a public register? Perhaps she is acceding to Mrs. Clennam’s wish to keep the secret from Arthur if, on reflection, she agrees that the truth would do him no particular good—and this merely to help the woman save face in the suddenly opened eyes of her victimized charge. Or perhaps Amy herself is fi lling a void in his life without the risk of naming it just yet. Why wouldn’t the truth have done him good after the long lie? And anyway, do the dead have in their own right no claim on the living? Didn’t Dickens for a moment see otherwise, in a flash of notebook inspiration potent enough to justify the contortions of the denouement, even while he later contrived to smooth over that claim with a meliorative vision of continuity rather than of rupture and return? What I am calling narratography is a way of listening in on these final exertions of the prose, transacted at the far margins of plot—and of eavesdropping, indeed, on their own scrambled figuration. As the chapter “Gone” executes its wrap-up and wind-down, the autumnal Clennam “sat listening to the voice as it read to him” and “heard in it” much of comfort (2.34:776)—Amy’s voice, of course, the only voice let through to him now. We notice that he is not said to have heard her exactly, let alone her words, but instead to have sensed in the sheer aura of her voice, heard in rather than from it, “all that great Nature”—in its decisive assonance—“was doing, heard in it all the soothing songs she sings to men.” Across this phonic slope of vocalic descent, harmony is sealed tight with the inverted cognate object of “songs . . . sings.” But no rhetorical singsong can keep a certain psychic dissonance at bay, one that can be more closely calibrated by narratography. “At no Mother’s knee but hers”—nature’s, not Little Dorrit’s; careful now, she’s a fiancée, remember, not a mother—“At no Mother’s knee but hers, had he ever dwelt . . . on the harvests of tenderness and humility that lie hidden in the early-fostered seeds of the imagination.” This is Wordsworth by the numbers, recalling The Prelude’s “Fair seed time . . . / Fostered alike by beauty and by fear” (1.305–06)—including that secondary intertextual slide, given the Clennam family context, toward the “Foster-child” and, yes, “Inmate Man” (st. 6) of the Intimations Ode and its mortal “prisonhouse” (st. 7). The evocation pushes off again with a ripple of iambic monosyllables: “But, in the tones of the voice that read to him, there were memories of an old feeling of such things” (2.34:776). Why the but? What is in fact being conceded by this opening adversative conjunction? The tension of tense itself seems to need graphing—even as it frustrates it. Arthur hears the music of autumn in the present reading voice, the deepest rhythm

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of nature—even as, unlike most children, he has been forced to grow up without a comforting female presence in his life. But, still, he does appear to have distant memories of that other kind of mother’s knee, of feminine nurture itself, or at least its timbre, rather than just nature’s abstract maternal personification. At least by osmosis from Amy’s voice, the hero is lulled into feeling less deprived than he might. We, in our turn, can either let all this wash vaguely over us, or pause to chart the unstable cultural and familial logic that impels it. We can do likewise with the sociopolitical logic of a burst of comic rather than lyric prose to follow at the wedding, where the ingenuity of lexical form again takes upon itself the role of softening its own content. The one character whose fate is not yet logged in or predictably tabled must be brought to book by the wedding ritual. For this loose end is a true loose cannon, and his powder needs dampening. The pattern is not unfamiliar. The repeated self-division and self-doubling of characterization has already pictured for us the riven and nearly effaced hero, who was once to have shared eponymous honors with a satirized bureaucracy in the broad application of the novel’s working title, Nobody’s Fault. The novel also literalizes elsewhere, materializes, such psychic splits in the character constellation of the two Flintwinches—with the “twin” at the heart of their shared surname—and in the “mermaid” bifurcation of Arthur’s former heartthrob, Flora Finching, half sympathetic disappointed widow, half blithering romantic virgin. As it happens, and for no other good reason than the parallelism, it is Flora herself who appears on the arm of the last of these halved subjects in the novel’s final illustration for the wedding party. There beside her is a two-faced social agent as well, but one caught this time in the throes of his normalization. This is the downtrodden rent-collector for the gouging slumlord Casby. Half raging insurgent, half patient and mild-mannered friend of Clennam’s, this is the character whose eccentric name, Pancks, spells out by perfect phonetic anagram that primal violence of humiliation in spank. Certainly with no pangs whatever, the actual retribution he has exacted is to have molested his archenemy in public, assaulted and mocked him. In full view of the local populace in Bleeding Heart Yard, Pancks has shorn the locks of his hypocrite boss, the false patriarch Casby. Here is an act of pseudo-revolutionary, and entirely local, defiance that nonetheless comes as close as the slum-dwellers of the novel will ever see to that running of blood in the streets across the channel. No proletarian revolution for England—only the unrest that fuels the plot of ambition itself: a correction from within of the middle-class system.

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The vengeance of Pancks’s fiery radicalism, flaring up just two chapters before the end of the book—and thus closer to being a climactic moment in the novel’s social counterpoint than one may tend to remember—must somehow be quenched if society is to get on with the business of business as usual, as well as its own patrilinear continuance through marriage. There is no better place to perform this dousing, this ritual cleansing, than at a wedding. Narratology’s work is regularly concluded in such a ceremonial event. Naratography alone would keep reading on. What it hears in this case is a stunning concision of phrase at this marriage of the businessman down on his luck and the poorhouse scion moving up: a wedding that Mr. Pancks must snuff out his recent asocial fury in order to attend. Such is the legally sanctioned ritual at whose margins he is (parenthetically and proleptically) so richly remunerated for his glancing witness. In the bourgeois novel, quiescence needn’t be its own, or only, reward—at least when the system is fully up, oiled, and running. “Mr Pancks”—parenthesis—“(destined to be chief clerk to Doyce and Clennam, and afterwards partner in the house)”—and on the sentence goes, as if earning this fate in advance: Mr. Pancks, that is, “sinking the Incendiary in the peaceful friend, looked in at the door to see it done” (2.34:785). The preceding run of phonetic irony is accompanied by its own graphic sinking from the capital I of “Incendiary” to the alphabetic as well as temperamental leveling of “friend.”  In its figural and phonetic economy, that brief participial phrase is one of the great turns in all of Dickens, with its evoked soothing bath in the symbolic font of all fellow-feeling. Overseen conjugal bonding, reduced to the “it” of pro forma social function (“to see it done”), is not only the antecedent but the prototype of those mercantile partnerships (here parenthetically foreordained) that are just as important as familial unions to the maintenance of the cultural order—and of its communal symbolism. With the inspired phonetic play of “sinking the Incendiary in the peaceful friend,” including a last sibilant hiss of singeing rage against the abluting waters of sentiment, the comedy of figuration itself submerges the full tenor of its vehicle. Glimpsed in the very metaphor of sinking, nonetheless, is the widespread suppression without which, for a Victorian writer like Dickens, social and financial amelioration cannot be achieved. That Dickensian phrase is so flexed and vibrant that one might almost miss the deadening of energy it depicts. Certainly the potential socialist time-bomb that George Bernard Shaw found in this above all of Dickens’s novels is by that one figurative turn ever so deftly defused—as if the energy of inven-

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tion alone could make up for the return to conventionality in the described event. Given this cooling off of social unrest, this drowning out of its disquiet, to say nothing of its disclosed reward in the offing (chief clerk, then partner!), it is perhaps less of a surprise to see what follows. For Arthur himself, a page later and at last, loses even his longstanding sense of loss—of fundamental incompleteness—in a muted new social identity: sinking one part of himself into another as he had earlier imagined his wholesale drowning, as “Nobody” anyway, in the emotional river of no return. But this is really to say that the brief remainder of Dickens’s last chapter has a major piece of psychological work to accomplish, whatever its other attenuated narrative tasks. Having desexed marriage, it must now unsex maternity. This figural task, defusing the cruel fate so lately revealed under its heading (the abandoned, maddened mother), is required so that the spectral shadow of the motherly does not swallow up Little Dorrit’s marital role entirely under its symbolic rubric, or at least not hers alone. In order that Arthur should not be compromised by marrying his mother, he is turned into a feminized nurturing agent as well, his masculinity absorbed by new connubial purpose. In leaving off, the chapter goes about this work quite unobtrusively, in its very last paragraph, after holding us suspended on the threshold of the penultimate one. No sooner has the couple signed the marriage register, that is, than prose takes a deep breath for them before descending into their life of selfless service, a shared life fused in the final paragraph, by assonance and alliteration alike, in a coupling “inseparable and blessed.” Just before, “they paused for a moment on the steps of the portico, looking at the fresh perspective of the street”—that painterly dead metaphor giving way to trochaic, then spondaic stress—“in the autumn morning sun’s bright rays, and then went down” (2.34:787). In escorting the couple down across a magisterially cadenced passage, the prose takes off. In an bravura run of syntactic terracing, that phrasal verb, “went down,” cleansed of any condescension in its stairstepped descent (and massing its music, as noted earlier in this chapter, against the coming din of “uproar”), strikes the keynote of four more clauses pivoted on it. The first two are fragments: “Went down into a modest life of usefulness and happiness.” Not “modest lives,” plural? No, their reward, if also perhaps their atonement, is to be at one. So it continues. And remember that the detached subject is not so far back as to have been forgotten: it’s the newlyweds together that the prose speaks of still. “Went down to give a mother’s care, in the fullness of time, to Fanny’s neglected children no less than their own” (emphasis added). Modest utility has

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been subsumed to a single gender paradigm. Against such a figural conflation, it is hard to retrench. Certainly the next sentence alone, even if it tried harder, couldn’t set the trouble right, with its mention of that further “nurse and friend” (plural this time, unless synonymous) they also “give” to Tip. Sprung from “give a mother’s care,” parallelism all by itself has grown derailing. Give a nurse? Give suck or succor? Further, too, the feminine dominates as sole antecedent in the pick-up clause, where Tip is “never vexed by the great exactions he made of her.” Whether Arthur is tacitly slotted in as bedside friend and brother-in-law or male nurse in this loose and dubious syntax, there was, as we saw, no ambiguity at all in the pronominal grammar of the preceding sentence, where, tendering along with Amy “a mother’s care,” he has inherited the same maternal role from which he in his own right never took solace. He has answered the lack by embodying it—and not as psychological diagnosis any longer, but as cadenced moral uplift within the last distended cadenza. For the protagonist to become his own lack, of course, is only a felt castration if he feels he has something to lose. And thanks to Amy, Arthur doesn’t realize that anything has been lost, that there has been any story to compare with hers, any love like it, or even as strong in another and more fundamental way. Yes, in giving up the name Dorrit just before the close of her namesake novel, Amy has become her own antithesis in Mrs. Clennam, agent in turn of the same “suppression.” With the result that the more insidious role-reversal yet, the real identity-transfer, is that of Arthur for his own silenced maternal origin. Unprocessed mourning cannibalizes the other whose absence it cannot accept, whose very recognition the narrative has blocked in order to transmute it. As narratography rather than narratology is scaled to register along the lexical, syntactic, and figurative terrain of fictional prose itself, the arc of Dickensian plotting cannot afford in full view to lament its founding victim, nor let its hero elegize her, nor let the heroine acknowledge her—let alone (and because of) the place she holds in her stead. And not being able to love the mother, or mourn her, the son has become her. Here lies the keenest if quietest violence of the novel: the double silencing of male as well as female energy even in their most defining of adult relations—and the foisting-off of all connubial desire onto a life of communal duty instead. This is no bypass of typical Dickensian characterization but a recognizable path through it. What we have entered upon here—a muchfrequented terrain in Victorian criticism—is the Dickensian prehistory of psychoanalysis. In her study of melancholia, Julia Kristeva deliberately

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casts the assumptions of “classic psychoanalytic theory (Abraham, Freud, and Melanie Klein)” into the voice of the aggrieved subject who must incorporate rather than relinquish a lost object that is ultimately resented for its absence. The headlong associational logic runs like this: “Because I love it, and in order not to lose it, I imbed it in myself; but because I hate it, that other within myself is a bad self, I am bad, I am non-existent, I shall kill myself.”  The specter of male “non-existence” in the case of Dickens’s “Nobody” derives in part from the fact that the other within cannot ever be mourned. This is because, like the all-but-explicit suicidal drift of Clennam’s consciousness itself, it is only partially recognized, and then mostly in metaphors and slips of phrase. Arthur doesn’t really think of drowning himself, even as he yearns for the river’s oblivion. Nor can he let go of another life either, let alone his own, if it has never really been his to surrender. The absent mother cannot possibly be mourned, that is, because such a loss is already “imbedded”: incorporated as an absence. Even if Amy relents and he is finally wised up in years to come (after Mrs. Clennam’s death, as the exposed woman herself proposes to Amy), still Arthur’s self-predication might well remain entrammeled in the reversible snares of melancholia: Even without killing myself, I am nonexistent, I am in essence a maternal descendent of nobody rather than a chosen lover of anyone, I am the mother I never (knew I) had. As far as the novel has chosen to go with its marriage plot, its prose shuts down on a stark model of psychic damage as much as on some healing tale of its local repair. And there is a curious symmetry in all this. The novel ends up being as much about substitute relations and deflected lines of dependence as is the ludicrously circuitous will of the old Uncle Clennam: a narratively inset text (mostly paraphrased by allusion rather than quoted, except for a stinging phrase or two thrown out by Rigaud) that treats unknown and unrelated legatees as exchangeable proxies for wronged familial objects. In the novel rather than the will, it is clear from early on, long before her service to Arthur in the prison-turned-nursery, that Amy, whose natural mother died in giving birth to her, has become a surrogate mother herself—“Little Mother,” as her addled charge Maggie dubs her—and for this deformation of girlhood all fingers are, of course, pointed at the shiftless father, William Dorrit. At the same time, all the vaguely erotic patriarchal fi xation that pervades the novel as the fl ip side of its satire—all the worry it seems to invite over whether Amy is too young for the hero, drawn to him too much as a placeholder for her failed father, able to accept the one only upon the death of the other—is an attenuated characterological diff usion of a fiercer psychological insight. Oedipus is

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the least of it. Sure, Amy mothers Arthur as well as just nursing him. To this extent, at least, he may be getting what he wants. Amy as well: if her adored father was a child, why not her husband too? In structural terms, the necessary death of Amy’s father in advance of the marriage would be narratology’s way, one way at least, of tracing this pattern. But narratography’s more tight-strung reaction is jarred, as we have seen, by a further dissonance in the conversion of roles. What sets in as a result is articulated not so much by enlisting narrative grammar as by twisting it out of true. The unspoken psychic pressure on Dickens’s stylistic cadenza reveals itself only by inference in the novel’s final sentences— but an inference having precisely to do with the inertial momentum of narrative to this point. On the other side of the destabilized marital equation in which a lovelorn man finds a second mother in a wife, the false mother in Little Dorrit is not (not yet) dead. So the new stand-in mother keeps the false mother’s secret, rejecting the dead father’s will (even in its intended financial benefit to her personally)—and thus accrues instead a huge but inert power in her harbored knowledge. Discharged all but unconsciously as the end draws near, the banked power of this withheld knowledge can seem to backfire into prose. It isn’t just that Amy implements (or even incorporates) Mrs. Clennam’s manipulation of Arthur’s consciousness. Given the hero’s unsexing by both the syntax and figuration of the couple’s envisioned future in the last paragraph, narratography makes its way, despite the greased wheels of closure, along the not-quitecovered tracks of wording itself, with its elided antecedents and collapsed grammatical identifications. Not a bypass of typical Dickensian characterization, then—all this about displaced identification, introjected desire, figurative incorporation—but rather, and again, a recognizable path through it: through and beyond its methods, in fact, and not only forward to psychoanalysis but back to founding determinations of the novel as genre. Questions of genealogy, personal as much as literary, are regularly—and regulatively—inseparable from the cultural dichotomies that a given historical genre arises to navigate. For Lukács, it is the role of the post-epic hero, from Greek tragedy to the nineteenth-century novel, to seek for a meaning that is no longer given (presumed) in everyday life, for a way to find essence again in mere existence. An ontological given (being) has become instead the mainspring of an alienated epistemology (the quest[ion] of value). The terms are thus closely parallel to the dialectics, in Michael McKeon’s commentary, of worth versus birth—class mobility versus natal status—as determined, in effect, by epistemological investigation versus

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ontological (or social) assumption—and as illustrated by a foundling plot like that of Joseph Andrews. A century farther along in the institution of the novel, of course, and turning further on the vacillating middle-class estimates of innate worth versus net worth, Arthur Clennam’s withered sense of inner value stands in inverse proportion to the unrevealed truth of his birth. And what the orphaned Amy gets in her contracted nuptials, by the criss-crossed purposes of overcompensated loss, is less a second father than a denatured mirror inversion of the same imaginary mother she has succeeded, after years without one, in becoming. At the eleventh hour, Dickens’s tacit changeling plot switches two motherless children at one stroke, bringing them into a perverse new exchange with a single maternal ghost. By contrast with its culminating evasions, Dickens’s novel has begun on the level playing field of the genre. Ethics and epistemology are closely correlated at first in the hero’s most pressing question: who has been wronged by my family, what guilt induced by my class station and inheritance? The question, however, does not survive the suppression of its eventual answer. It is gagged once and for all—and bound back into marital closure. For most of Dickens’s story, the hero has been searching in the dank basement of his estranged domesticity for an incriminating family secret. As it turns out, that secret is the hero himself; his denied status as stepson, the ongoing site of the crime. Clennam always felt guilty for not loving his mother—and especially for not being loved by her. Now he needn’t, because she isn’t. But the secret of his birth, as mitigating his ingrained sense of worthlessness in the eye of the false mother, is unleashed by narration only to be reabsorbed by characterization within the situational ethics of special pleading, spared shame, and the heroine’s own incompletely examined motives. Here structuralism and dialectical historicism, or, more to the point, narratology and genre theory openly converge—but under assault by the crossfire of a single novel’s own unmastered textual ironies. The epistemological metaplot of detection that helps found the grammar of story in structuralist narratology must thus confront Dickens’s deliberate upending of that format. His plot serves in this way to rehearse the inchoate maneuvers of the novel as fledgling form, negotiating between an emergent aesthetic of verisimilitude (realism) and an ethics of social station (plot reward), between the evidentiary and the providential. In a genre-deep rapprochement called out by the tensions to which narratography is keyed to respond, the true and the good—or, in other words, the touchstones of detection and restitution—are seen as correlative (but

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by no means equivalent) features of novelistic plotting. And they have surfaced in Little Dorrit, under duress, from their own prehistory. For here is a Victorian text whose closure asks us to accept that the epistemological motor of novelistic plotting must suddenly be subordinated to the conjugal motive of its value-laden teleology. Overriding the detective prototype, such is the courtship novel in its most attenuated and dilatory form. Failing all lived cultural totality, failing even a structural unity capable of being mapped back onto the rendered world, the violence of this Dickensian ending is to settle for individual union at all costs, whatever unethical deceits must be prolonged, whatever truth must be deferred. Need it be said? The obvious alternative in the case of Little Dorrit would clearly have been less manageable by plot or genre. Clennam coming to the marriage altar (as ethical reward for selfless devotion) to find it a symbolic baptismal font as well (the abused child epistemologically redeemed by a corrected parentage) would not have made for a readily stabilized closure in the marriage-plot mode. Rather, it would have left the hero with too much on his mind: an entirely reconstituted subjectivity, in fact, to be actively grappled with and rethought, rather than just a depleted self to be sunk gratefully in another. The failure of dialectical resolution is absolute—and now complete. Forget social totality. Even formal unity. To stave off all further worry over the hero’s status as son, his straitened union, its figured prospects having been quietly feminized, is reduced to the unitary. Yet the nagging fact remains, and lodged right at the genre-founding crux of ethics and epistemology. For there is no denying that the withheld truth would have held a decisive ethical charge, removing the unearned guilt of years, releasing the unloved son to a different autobiographic consciousness altogether. The promissory morality of soulmates as helpmates in the novel’s last paragraph—returned to a society that has previously contributed to their exclusion, to perform what service they now can—is of course stationed to outbid all epistemological regret. Yet to the supposed selflessness of this social ethic, the self-knowledge of the hero has been entirely sacrificed. What might have done him good is subsumed to his doing good. A logic like this does have its own communal morality, of course, but only if articulated. Instead, we get, unadmitted, a sublimation of the sexual into the social subject. In this way the closural immanence of form within the compromises of Dickens’s story is neither providential nor evidentiary but merely and remorselessly conventional. Merely, because conjugal love has been unfleshed into duty by an ideology of the so-called work ethic. Remorselessly, because the pace of

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closure excludes all talking-back from within the plot. But not seamlessly, since the false notes remain, jangling, reverberant. They remain, that is, for the reader to read—and this as a certain lingering discord that outlasts plot itself. In what we’ve stumbled over in the novel’s final paragraph, the discrepancy between knowledge and desire takes the form of a verbal deviance writ small, a mere glitch or two at the level of “agreement,” a predication no longer “justified” in the linguistic sense—but also in the ethical and the epistemological senses as well, given that it implies a not only vaguely morbid but a downright deceptive variant of the marital two-made-one. Dickens, that master vernacular syntactician of nineteenth-century prose, regularly flawless in the virtual subplots of his own periods and subordinations, is hereby caught out in a psychoanalytic as well as a verbal solecism. That his hero is subsumed to the heroine in their giving together “a mother’s care” to the next generation is more, as we’ve seen, than a Freudian slip of gender (dis)parity. Dipping into the future, this phrasing is also thrown back one generation into the masked and misrepresented past. There is no need to exaggerate. The grammar itself would be negligibly, perhaps only negligently, “off ” if it were not so obviously onto something more deeply ingrained in the plot. Then, too, another slip of syntax has preceded this one in the same sentimental vein, where indirect discourse has Arthur musing on Amy Dorrit as fi xed point in his life, the “termination” (sic, for terminus as destination) of all its good: “Everything in its perspective led to her innocent figure” (2.27:702; emphasis added). But disorientation within the extended painterly metaphor—life as a landscape with only one figure—has set in a sentence before, and could easily have been prevented. Surveying the vista of his own poor story, Clennam saw all lines converge upon Amy: that might have been one version of the sentence’s intent. Instead, the phrasal grammar is so thoroughly decoupled as to drift again into solecism: “Looking back upon his own poor story, she was its vanishing-point” (2:27:702). A dangling modifier for a life left hanging. It is not just that the famously precinematic Dickens here breaks the 180-degree rule of continuity within point-of-view editing, so that directionality itself—and priority with it—spins on its axis. In this respect, Amy does unnervingly offer a rear-view horizon as well as an arriving point of rest: as much lost maternal care as present alleviation. Beyond this spatial reversal, however, there is the grammatical lapse—or gap—itself. For in the loosened grip of syntax, Amy is also, for Arthur, his life’s point of preemption, eliding the male subject position altogether at its evacuated focal point. Even the metanarrative trope of life as “poor story” has become a kind of dead

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metaphor for the place-holding protagonist. Paradoxically, co-optively, with the pronoun “she” taking the hero (in his retrospective “looking”) as the only available antecedent, Clennam is as much feminized by such unlicensed syntax as he will later be in his grammatical subsumption to a “mother’s” role. This whole moment of narrowed but totalized “perspective” is prototypical in its slippage of scale. Even in seeking a graphic or painterly mastertrope for its own implied narratology of closure, the novel’s summary gesture invites again, and instead, the less settled narratography of contradictions in process. To call the subsequent lexical effacement of the feminized hero in the final paragraph a “displacement” and “condensation” respectively—of maternal absence upon and then within the very identification of the marriageable male—is to begin suggesting, with the unconscious of Dickensian grammar caught out in this way, the slow moments where attention itself might be caught up by such disjunctures. For unconscious is just the word. In this sense one can only follow out the prose’s diff usive lines of stress—and their hairline cracks—in and through the transferential recognitions of that analytic session called reading, where writing escapes, by exceeding, the thematic delivery system known as plot. By the invested give and take of such legibility, in this and many another fictional case, the psycholinguistic trace of elided desire is offered up to registration. It comes to us, as we bring our recognition to it, along the serial slippage between plot and its inscriptive medium, between the manifest propulsion of event and a subterranean impetus glimpsed on the run by the kinks of wording. But is it possible, one wonders, to put this more simply? Couch it this way, perhaps: concerning the unrevealed mother, we can never be sure what Dickens meant to finesse or massage or avoid or foreclose—or, alternately, what he himself as author may have entirely repressed—in the psychodynamic of his narrative plotting in Little Dorrit, from chapter plan to finished book. All we know is that it is his writing that appears to be no more than half conscious of these operations—no more but no less. It is this reciprocal remainder, under the transferential analysis I am here calling narratography, that keeps the legible text in play across the more imperious pacings of plot. Th is, again, is prose’s own intension. Traditional narratology well knows the implacable nature of plot’s marital vanishing point. But it is narratography that can take up with a story where narratology, even sometimes where plot, leaves off. Granted, the fantasy phase of this chapter’s experiment has, in its extremity, respected no proper bounds. But in just this way I have hoped it might appear exemplary, at least in the following sense: to remind us that a narrative’s

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most urgent, disturbing, even insurgent meanings often come through between the lines of plot, subliminal, figured rather than denoted. Narratology knows all too well the stranglehold and exclusions of the marriage plot. Narratography would experience them from the ground up, tracing the fold between a book’s rhetoric and its actual writing. In Fictional Truth, Michael Riffaterre sees the subtextual energy of fiction standing in the same relation to plot as does the unconscious in Freud to the system of conscious perception. Like the unconscious, and revealed only in neurotic signs or symptoms of the otherwise functionally repressed, subtexts are therefore timeless, reversible, cumulative. If denied maternity (its removal by death or its falsification) locates one such subtext in Little Dorrit—strung along in counterpoint to the failed father motif, for instance—that matrilineal subtext has its perverse and unexpected returns across the marital trajectory of the son himself, as he is sped along the monorail of its domesticating engine toward the anticipated goal. With its instances taken in the aggregate, any such subtext, according to Riffaterre, is a phenomenon transcendent to change, or, if you will, subtendent to it. It thereby lies, in the last sentence of his study, “outside of time and impervious to its ravages” (111). Plot is the map of those ravages. Narratology understands this. Narratography would re-experience it—and do so in a transferential exchange, against the medial flow, between a nervously cued attention and the insinuated unconscious of the text itself. So I return to this chapter’s fantasy novel one last time, anomalous though it is, as an exemplar of more familiar novelistic tendencies. I do so in order to make clear the methodological inferences its concoction does not entail. Narraratography per se has nothing to do with the conjuration of wholesale counternovels. Albeit an assiduous close reader of fiction, that Oxford don is no practitioner of narratography—or at least not in anything we’ve heard from him here. He is a virtual biographer, in other words a fiction writer. Narratography’s work in this chapter has come later. The invented contrapuntal tale of the lost mother prepares the way by taking to a dilated extreme the fleeting thoughts anyone might have in learning of her so suddenly, and then learning no more, and then in being denied even the closural satisfaction of watching the hero find out the stunning truth. All this, though quite possibly transpiring for the reader in only a second or two of reflective recoil from the headlong settlements of the plot, makes its narratographic mark (a matter always of diction, syntax, and punctuation) only when the very word “mother” (possessive in every sense) is seen to assimilate the male hero to its lexical

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confines across the prose cadence, and grammatical antecedence, of plot’s marital aftermath. Hence the strictly heuristic value of the so-called Story Left Behind in staging by exaggeration the everyday wake of narrativity in verbal action. In short, any narrative sentence may well have a backstory. Not necessarily distended or suddenly truncated; not by definition brutal or suppressed or moving or any one thing in particular; and not necessarily longer than the plotted tension of the preceding sentence itself, or paragraph. But often at least a little violent in the way it impinges on a subsequent phrasing and disturbs its footing or its gait, knocks it off guard, angles it elsewhere. This is why the approach of this book is in fact narratival rather than strictly (whatever that might mean) stylistic, and why its commitment to intensive reading comes into sync with the impetus of plotted structure rather than just local representation. And why, further, this chapter’s inflated exception can still prove the rule of the minuscule. Whole lives, of course, don’t usually lie battered, absented, and returned by deformation under the tread of such friction in prose. Broad swaths of plot aside, it is in the immediate pace of the sentence that some aspect or facet of an advancing story is often bent noticeably out of shape. Narratography, in this sense, becomes the tracking of syntax and of the words it marshals for the microplots, one after the other, of their own proximate backstories. Upon which reading erects its intuitions. Now psychoanalytic, now generic and historical, broader methodologies collide—merge and rework each other—across the medial (in this case linguistic) workings of text, including their workings upon us. That dialectical congestion of historical discourse out of which the novelistic genre arose does not vanish into the suddenly thinner air of its hermeneutic spiral. Such a dialectic sustains the very terms of reading’s feedback loops, where the checks and balances of thematized form and formalized value are reconfigured yet again in the zone of uptake: a response by no means detached, as etymology might suggest, from the judgments associated with responsibility. Whether or not, for such reasons, we would want to call narratography an ethics of reading in its own right, one thing is clear. Its formal vigilance is anything but cold to the exposed ethical discrepancies of content. Exactly because it does not subordinate medial hypersensitivity to the broader comprehension of a governing narrative system, it can become a rigorously epistemological mode of textual attention. Narratography is keyed in this way to the vicissitudes of plot as they are ferried along the thick and thin of syntax itself and the micromanagement of its lexical succession, including both the elisions and the blind

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spots of overdetermined figuration. Between the science of narratology and the practice of narratography, the basic methodological difference remains. Whatever narrative essentially may be as modal form, criticism might also want to ask how—and just where—a given narrative does what it does: at once for, to, and with the reader. In registering this, narratography draws out a difference within—as well as across—the increments of narrative meaning. It thereby charts more closely the junctures, and disjoins, between rhetoric and writing, the imprinted inferences that may evade intent. Only in this way can it begin to graph the latently inscribed across the novelistic surface of the said. Hence, in sum, the wager behind this chapter’s fantasized counternovel. The unnamed mother of Nobody is scarcely a universal plot matrix. Nonetheless, and though not typically personified in anything like this way, writing is always giving voice to, or letting loose words for, more than it narrates, calling out on the run its own contradictions and evasions, telling more than the told. Lukács saw in the post-epic world of modern fiction, way before a strictly modernist writing, a denaturalized existence in which any sense, any myth, of organic and generative continuity in the social sphere had given way to estrangement and psychic orphanage. As noted in that brief anti-Romantic epigraph, the “parental home” had been replaced by “the prison.” In this one respect, at least, and backed by dozens of crossreferenced settings, Dickens is one notch more dialectical than the Hegelian Lukács. As antithesis disappears into the negative reversals of irony’s “extreme violence,” for Dickens in Little Dorrit, the Victorian home has become its own prison. From such a life sentence in Arthur’s case, so we are invited to think, the only escape for the inmate son is opened by the imaginative ventilation of Mother Nature’s first rather than second voice—even as its incarnation in the heroine routes the hero, via culture’s “second nature,” toward the most conventional of domestic assimilations. So much for the exploratory potential of “biographic form” (77). Indeed, for Lukács, the whole work of the novelistic “life story” is symptomatic rather than naturally ordained. Epic totality needs no biographic formalism. “In a world situation where the organic was the alldominating category of existence, to make the individuality of a living being, with all its limitations, the starting point of stylisation and the center of form-giving would have seemed foolish—a gratuitous violence infl icted upon the organic” (77). In Little Dorrit, Dickens comes so close to sensing the futility of such a formal gambit, even in the established formats of his chosen genre, that he barely infl icts this individuality at all on Arthur Clennam—and robs it from his real mother altogether. In

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the process, he transforms his initially vitiated hero, one Nobody, not anyone really, into an agent who must earn the very privilege of biographic shape as if it were an accomplishment rather than a premise. But no sooner is this formal vantage achieved as an explicitly perspectival stance—“Looking back on his own poor story”—than it is subsumed to a union so absolute that difference itself, sexual and psychic, disappears into unitary communal purpose. Think of it this way. Biographic teleology would offer the “gratuitous violence” of individuation itself if there were any organic order outside of hierarchical capitalist organization to aff ront in the first place. Instead, what replaces that original violation of totality—by personalized history itself—is the second or “extreme” violence that remains internal to, rather than just characteristic of, the biographic plotline of prose fiction’s maturity as genre: namely, the self ’s pivotal objectification by way of ironic reversal and its consequent leveling reflection in prose. Arthur speaking of himself in third person as Nobody is Dickens’s clearest case of this pivotal, suicidal, anything but incidental violence. In contrast to the numb woe of such social nullity in Dickens, there are no characters like this in Edgar Allan Poe’s writing, none so outerdetermined, no such ordeals. Unconcerned with the “extreme violence” of ironic distance under a middle-class ideology of biographic structure— preoccupied with neither such naturalized linear form nor with the searing reversals of philosophical reflection—the violence of Poe’s writing, ubiquitous and gripping, is of such a different order that an extended submission to its self-consumptive frenzy in the next chapter should bring into clearer profi le all the formal coercions of novelistic “projection” and abstract coherence that his short forms, in their concision, tend to dismiss. Poe’s work isn’t just anti-Victorian; it’s anti-novelistic. His writing articulates no totality. It merely sustains a tone. Poe doesn’t plot a meaning or even develop any real momentum—and certainly no contemplative follow-through, none of Barthes’s “pensive” realist residue. He only probes the distended and unreal moment. In Poe, what we might call plot is no more than aberrant mood inflamed to exhaustion and sinking under its own weight. In the unprecedentedly “gratuitous violence” of sheer “stylisation,” however, Poe does one unrelenting thing that allies his work with the other masters of nineteenth-century English fiction—and brings him into eccentric alignment with them here. And it is to his own cryptic analysis of just this function that we need next to turn: an analysis coextensive with the vaporized narrative drive of his preposterous plots. For as much as Dickens, any of the Brontës, Eliot, Hardy, anyone else,

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and entirely as liable to narratographic signals as the rest, his script is everywhere keyed to its own transmission as prose effect. As we are to see in some auto-allegorical detail, Poe’s is a medium without a message. His writing often does little more than come to grips with its own hold upon us. We turn to it less to throw contemporaneous Victorian novelists into further relief than to establish a baseline not only for an utter unity without totality but for a subnarrative energy— and hence a liminal narratographic interest—without anything like the normal ambitions, or realist ambit, of typical novelistic plotting. Affect is achieved by Poe entirely without its normal vehicle in credible story. Story—or its signifying form. Achieved—but at the same time mocked, compromised, wholly evacuated. An aggressive aura of audience address is so pervasive and fevered that it disappears into mere inscriptive force, pure rootless mediation. Going nowhere fast and furiously, Poe’s stories, spent in sheer verbal expressiveness, transmit themselves to death. Along the way, their own prose friction wears them to shreds.

2 Attention Surfeit Disorder a n “ i n t e r r e gn u m ” on p oe s c r i p t v s . p l o t

The short story is the most purely artistic form; it expresses the ultimate meaning of all artistic creation as mood. . . . It sees absurdity in all its undisguised and unadorned nakedness, and the exorcising power of this view, without fear or hope, gives it the consecration of form; meaningless as meaningless becomes form. . . . —luk ács, the theory of the novel (51)

Poe’s isolated seething Nobodies are offered no salvage action even by the culturally sanctioned vectors of plot, no reclamation of manic and self-consuming solipsism by either generic or social totality. His prose has the formal coherence of intensity rather than extension, “purer” by far (in Lukács’s sense) than Dickensian realism because not obliged to impose unity on a vast swath of divergent narrative events. The tightly circumscribed moodiness of Poe’s characters, often first-person narrators, their words distended by obsession and penetrated by hysteria, makes for a writhing duration cut loose from biographic momentum. All is over when the fever pitch of the moment wanes. The harder-won equilibrium of novelistic closure operates otherwise. It is often paced to soften broader and intractable social discrepancies either manifested as formal imbalance or suppressed as such. Making things up though it did, the first chapter still probed to something of fiction’s typical make-up, at least in the overriding of cancelled options. We are often inventing alternate eventualities as we read—and doing our own job of sweeping them from mind as fast as plot rules them out. One form of narratographic transference arises when the traces left by such (61)

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abandoned or excised plot lines in the circuit of response seem traceable to verbal lesions in the text itself, thereby colluding with the readerly drive in the undoing of alternative options and untaken narrative turns. In the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Anne Brontë that occupy the next two chapters, however, the traumatic material is wholly out in the open. Violence is not withheld but instead rhetorically propelled. Rather than being quietly passed over, the torments of “story” (even without much real plotting) are explicitly passed on as confessional discourse. In this lies the potential double violence of their writing: not only what is done within story but what is done with it in delivery, or in other words how the tale, once fashioned, is framed for transmission. If it seems strange to include a maverick American short-story writer in a book about the British novel, be assured that it might well be. But this is a book, instead, more broadly about the novel violence of fiction as practiced and maximized by nineteenth-century prose. And Poe’s distillate of the linguistic issue is unmatched. Hence this chapter’s “interregnum” (Poe’s term, in the last story taken up here, for a preternatural interval between chronological phases). The interlude is also an intercession, both in my selected Victorian readings and in literary history itself. For the fraught intension of Poe’s almost counter-narrative writing offers a wild hiatus rather than smooth transition between the reigns of Austen’s realism and the more violent melodrama of the Victorians. For Poe, strident violations of every prose norm are the very stuff of his innovation, the true allure of his lurid verbal turmoil, whose rotary agitation of syllables presses forward relentlessly, motoring its own local climaxes even while driving their narrators mad—or madder. And when a given story’s whole pivotal revelation—and this is not uncommon—turns out to depend on an isolated lexical twist, then analysis has more than its usual work instructively cut out for it. At such moments narratography may find its whole agenda embedded by tutorial—though in such a reduced compass that there is scarcely any narrative on which to pin its linguistic apprehensions. In terms of the Venn diagrams posited earlier, stylistics so wholly overlaps into narratology with such writing that there is little genuine plot left, little temporal drama, except the verbal churning of the prose itself. In the luscious, punishing surprises of Poe’s narrative violence, what transpires across the high blood pressure of the prose isn’t a typical matter of form answering to content in the tremors of frenzy or dementia. Though unabated on the surface, the sufferings of his narrators—and the sadomasochistic shivers of response—tend to get emptied out into the

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abjection of mere lettering. Repeatedly there is nothing left at the climax of a narrative but the final squirm and tingle of articulation, the shooting pangs of lexical recognition in the fevered blur of echoic diction, syntax, and the melting border between them. One result is that Poe often treats the nervous skittishness and pustulent guilts of his hyperconscious narrators as little more than an overreading disorder—and then puts his own reader through the ordeal as a kind of therapy, hallucinating patterns in the darkness, figures in the carpet, designs in the chaos, malevolent schemata in sheer descriptive excess. His mad narrators are not banished from keenness but trapped in its excruciations, bombarded with sensation rather than armed by it for any achieved meaning. Imaginative release has become debilitated sensory abandon degenerating further into perceptual fi xation. In the process, linguistic violence (Jakobson) is exerted upon a language whose ordinariness is nowhere to be found. Certainly the “unfettered plasticity of prose” in the novelistic epic (Lukács, 58–59) seems instead shackled in Poe to its own militant, airless exacerbation. This is the first and largest way in which Poe’s resuscitated gothic, dredged from the preceding century, is tortured into the parody of an intervening Romanticism, with its cult of sensitivity and its redemption of paranoia by pathetic fallacy. In Poe, the denatured world, speaking through you as it may, is still really out to get you. Here is also where the subgenres of a narrative “poescript” begin sorting themselves by triangulation. The three chief modes of his work are canonical in the commentary, though more vexed as categories than often appears. “Arabesque” terrors must chasten their own tendency toward the lexical excesses of the comic “grotesque.” That much is clear. At the same time, out the other side of a fantastic palpitation and delusion in his horror stories comes, by contrast, a new hermeneutic energy altogether: the ratiocinative episode of strict decoding rather than perturbed overreading. Cool detection rather than agonized reflection. The tales of ratiocination, including the detective story, thus come into being as if to recuperate the mad ravings of his hypochondriac gothic. And the verbal lampoons (the “grotesques”), produced alongside the supposedly more convincing or affectively vivid “arabesques,” enter into their own counterpull with the other two modes. Out of this three-way tension among hysteria, verbal histrionics, and cerebral hermeneutics, the most memorable of Poe’s writings venture in this sense a single thought experiment: What if being in the world (due to mental disorder, drugs, alcohol, wasting illness or, alternately, sheer perceptual genius) amounts to a maniacal hypersensitivity to its surfaces as signs? The corollary (and in every sense rhetorical)

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question: What if true reading were a cognitive dis-ease? For such a restless condition of decipherment, Poe’s art amounts to something between aversion therapy and homeopathic cure, venting its frenetic tendencies through their own controlled exercise. The coaching role of the focalizing narrator in this dubiously purgative aesthetic is never clearer than in the self-diagnosed virtuosic tortures of “Berenice” (1835). The unnamed male narrator of this early story is a study in fi xation, particularly textual fi xation. By his own admission he suffers a “monomania, if I must so term it,” that “consisted in a morbid irritibaility of those properties of the mind in metaphysical science termed the attentive.”  Preternaturally alert to pattern, rather than meaning, in all about him, attentive rather than “speculative” (644), the unidentified narrator is, by cognitive reciprocity, the ideal reader of Poe. As if suggesting as much, the narrator boasts that he is able to “muse for long unwearied hours with my attention riveted to some frivolous device on the margin or in the typography of a book” (644)—as inconsequential, perhaps, as the decorative fold of typographic soundplay in the swallowing up of “riveted” by “ frivolous.” The narrator of “Berenice” is one of the many in Poe who suffer for their author’s whims of inscription, made to read their inhabited space and their lived desire only the way Poe has written it. For he is the scriptor who can speak through another of his narrators, in “Ligeia,” and with a supposedly straight face, of the “tumultuous vultures of stern passion” (171). Or can he? Isn’t this perhaps funny—close cousin, say, to a homophonic pun? Don’t Poe’s assonantal assaults on prose decorum, his paronomastications of the language, bring together, indistinguishably, the giddy ingenuity and the doggerel thump? Isn’t this a deliberate overdoing of what he intends in his lengthy essay “The Rationale of Verse” by the phenomenon of suff usive phonic iteration? Extending the principle of alliteration beyond initial and internal consonants to “infringe on the province of rhyme” (918), Poe stresses the equivalent of an “attentive” debility that, once narrativized, can no longer be seen as “rational”—but becomes instead a textual insignia of the deranged. With several of the stories, the minor critical debates over which are arabesques and which merely grotesques—which genuine gothic fantasies, which fripperies of comic fancy, which authentically traumatic, which fi ligreed frauds—are debates that sharpen the wrong knife. In a good deal of Poe’s writing, each mode is equivalently and risibly excessive, over the top and beneath credulity, each an egregious sendup and a strange letdown at once. If the arabesque is kitsch melodrama, the gro-

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tesque is kitsch farce. Both are jokes, hoaxes, now relying on the most perfervid of rhetorical vaunts, now on the bluntest of punning, each ingenious in the extreme. In Poe’s genre oscillations, the floreate and the folksy are equally forced, so that the far reach of neurotic tremor comes to seem merely the fl ipside of the belly-laugh, the raging wail the inverse of the sardonic groan. One mode clinically humorless in the throes of its panic, one loony with fi ligree, one monotonously dark, one farcical and carnivalesque, one unraveling in terror but mounting toward climax, one wandering and chatty but tighening toward a cunning punch line: each mode stands as the structural mirror image of the other—and more. In transaction with the reader, they are closely complementary, part of a psychoeconomy of response. Each heightens the senses to the same pitch, putting the reader on the alert for sudden irruptive thrills or on the defensive for the pun no one could have seen coming. Paranoid attention (many a narrator’s private failing in Poe) seems in turn the only proper response. Beyond the arabesque and the grotesque, that third subgenre of Poe’s production, the ratiocinative or scientific tale—and its offshoot in the detective story—is merely the dramatization at the level of content of this formal curiosity under heroic rein, this hypersensitive attention channeled toward reason rather than emotional release. It is Romanticism gone strictly to the head. The scientist, the detective, the decoder: these are readers manqués, agents of receptive decipherment within the story. They are the madmen remade in the image of mastery, incarnating the virtue of lunacy’s defect in the suspicious translation of all phenomena into a cabalistic code. All three modes—horror melodrama, verbal slapstick, detective or scientific thriller—are to evolve, of course, not only into the stock-intrade of American popular literature but also, as mental processes, into a quite different split tradition, now literary, now instrumental. Th is is the legacy of occulted meanings that forks into high modernist literary experiment on the one hand, cybernetic encryptions on the other. Noting this, a recent book by Shawn James Rosenheim stresses the second lineage, including its own mass-cultural impact in cybernetic application. Rosenheim’s work repeatedly bespeaks a concern with the “itinerary of the signifier” (3), including “metonyms, allusions, etymologies, and associations of all sorts” (28), even “anagramming” (46). He notes how the specific densities of Poe’s textual habits, rife with secreted or occulted energies, anticipate a Baudelairian (and later Eliotian) modernism. Despite such broad literary-historical claims, however, the book puts most of its emphasis not on the verbal practice of Poe’s actual stories but

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on the theme of cryptography—and its cultural afterlife. But another “itinerary of the signifier” is the path between marking and remarking, often in Poe littered with wordplay and figured as mesmeric thoughttransference. Indeed, in his mixed review of Hawthorne’s short stories, the gothic fictionist as critic speaks in inchoate phenomenological terms about the reader enjoying the “novelty” of a thought as “really novel” because, by some strange private circuit, it seems to be “absolutely original with the writer—and himself ”: sui generis, so to say, but only by a generative transference. Poe thus speaks clairvoyantly about a clairvoyance simulated by reading and codified by reading’s later theory. In the case of his own stories rather than Hawthorne’s, some hypertrophic verbal arabesque can be found prosecuting a secret mission of the signifier on its way to a destined vivification in the mind of the reader. This close anticipation of Georges Poulet’s “Phenomenology of Reading,” where, famously, “I am the subject”—the subject, not the object—“of thoughts other than my own,”  might well have directed Rosenheim’s argument back toward the linguistic constructedness of such a mystified internalization, rather than forward toward modernity’s literalized electrical telegraphy and the subsequent refinements of cybernetic mediation and mass communication. Rosenheim does promise at the outset a central attention, given Poe’s “systematic investigation into the nature of language” (3), to a “constellation of literary techniques concerning secrecy in writing,” including “private ciphers, acrostics, allusions, hidden signatures, chiasmal framing, etymological reference,” and so forth, even “disappearing inks.” These aspects are intermittently touched upon, but without being related to Poe’s style tout court. As if derived from cyptograms, however, aren’t many of Poe’s “letters,” even at the alphabetic rather than the epistolary level, quite shamelessly “purloined”—stealing from word to word along the hidden corridors of sensation? When translated into prose, the “Rationale of Verse” (from Poe’s essay by that title) can seem anything but. It can symptomize instead an irrational addiction to the signifier. But it is in just this way, nonetheless, that such phrasal opacity—and its induced recoils—leads to the “powerful transferential effects” not just of “Poe’s secret writing” (14), where Rosenheim locates such language (within the explicit rationales of cryptography), but of his literary poetics in general. Think of the poem called “The Sleeper,” where an evoked reparative languor is made overwrought by a remarkable cross-word phonetic chiasm: “Looking like Lethe, see! the lake.” Poe’s prose is almost equally quick to mobilize such cryptophonic excess.

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Poe/tics We are closing in, that is, on a subterranean bond between the cryptographic instinct and a more unmotivated phonological undertone, between a semantics of concealment and the ephemeral antics of syllabic echoism. A point of comparison. In his influential essay “A Few Words on Secret Writing,” Poe objects to a particular kind of encipherment in which a single alphabetic integer has to do multiple duty for different letters. If the word “wise” is to be written “iiii,” by what wisdom, Poe implies, is one to decipher “iiiiiiiiii,” given the daunting algebra of its combinatory possibilities? Such iterative effects only work if they are not meant to carry meaning in themselves but merely to float its signifiers: if they operate, that is, strictly as a poetic vehicle. What is this problematic of the i-string in secret writing, for instance, but the mapping upon logic of a phonetic effect already mined by Poe in a different key, gratuitously euphonious rather than evasive? One thinks of the narrator of “Berenice,” the heroine’s cousin, characterizing the difference in their constitutions while growing up. “I, ill of health” (643), he readily admits (versus her condition as “agile, graceful, overflowing with energy”)—with his self-characterizing pronoun degenerating into its sickly attribute like the decontraction (under erasure) of a no longer consolidated volition in “I’ll,” thus leaking in turn the antithetical desideratum of the phantom counter-clause “I, ill, love health.”  This internal withering at the level of wording itself is, of course, chimed with that other antithesis in the parallel elliptical grammar of “she agile” (643). How many i’s in a row, we might ask, does it take to fashion a cryptogram of identity and its differences? We are again caught between a “rationalized” poetics and the tics and spasms of poescript. It is this bloodless clotting of the i—this draining away of credence by the signifier from any enworlded or embodied signified—that invites a second point of comparison, farther afield. Farther by far. For Poe’s “ill” can perhaps be taken to descend as generic rather than genetic defect, within the distant family resemblances of English fiction, from stray traces of such a phonemic malady in—of all places, and on one recent account—Jane Austen’s late, failing prose. As D. A. Miller reads her, Austen eventually slackens in a career-long vigilance against her own verbal fluidity and allows her prose to become entrammeled by signs of its own writing, its own signifying maneuvers. But Poe of course goes so far as to turn anything like Absolute Style, the early Austenian triumph, into a contrary writing effect so denatured and linguistically forced as to

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seem downright clinical. Writing away like the resident stylistician of his own sickly script, Poe’s norm-violating novelty has become entirely antinovelistic. The more modest flaws and defaults Miller ponders in Austen amount to a twofold fall from the sublimed consistency of Style—via the descent through personality—into intermittent textual opacity. The slip into a more gendered and invested tone in Persuasion, sometimes edgy rather than seamless, opens—in some inexorable way—the further linguistic floodgates into Sanditon’s irrelevant play with the signifier. Until then, and on anyone’s account, a major formal achievement. Couched in Lukács’s terms, Austen, exemplary novelizer, has found her own quintessential way of compensating for the post-epic rift between being and essence—where existence and meaning, or otherwise duration and its purpose, are no longer transparent to each other, as they were in the self-realized action of epic heroes. Austen forges her compensatory formal gesture by making the nonbeing of Style itself over into essence. Prose alone, in the keep of No One, carries the essential meaning that characters can only fitfully strive for in the frustrations of their being, their being somebody. Only with the precipitous split between Style and persona—in Miller’s sense of the embodied authorial intrusions of Persuasion—does the divided composition of novelistic character begin to unsettle the otherwise totalizing voice of discourse. And after this, it threatens to blow the prose of Sanditon (as Miller audits it) to phonemic smithereens. If agreeing with Miller that these shifts represent a deep and symptomatic trouble, we could agree with him, too, that one sees it coming as early as a trivial wordplay on the name of Wickham and his disclosed wickedness (87). Yet as part of the contrast with Poe (look ahead to the onomastic phantasmagoria of “Will-I-am Will-son”), it is important to appreciate not only the lack of salience given to Austen’s linguistic fi llips, over against plot, but the way they might in fact be read otherwise—as part of a subterranean semiosis rather than just as surface flak. But to be more specific about the link between Poe’s impish syllabic eruptions and the lexigraphic twitches of a supposedly abased (and even abrasive) écriture in Austen, we recall lingering over the stuttering, almost oxymoronic “I, ill of health . . . she agile” in “Berenice.” The lower-case i’s have it. At least they have that antithesis in a stranglehold of constricted subjectivity, as they do with a strangely similar case in Austen’s last and unfinished novel. This is the regretted wordplay that offers Miller’s capping evidence of stylistic morbidity in “the unfortunate phrase ‘our health-breathing Hill’ ” (90). The phrase is pressured to “breathe health too heavily not to give the game away” as a kind of

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“onomatopoeia” of “respiration.” It marks, for Miller, a foolhardy move on Austen’s part scarcely improved when the faint gust of the aspirate— propelled by a backlog of H-words earlier in the plot—further serves to detach from itself “one phoneme in particular: ill ” (90). Offering in a sense the title scene of Miller’s chapter, with the dropped aspirate of its own punning rubric, “Broken Art,” we have a case of Austen Style collapsed into the fractured counterplay of gross phrasal dissonance. Style would be seen falling to pieces in Poe as well, if there were any cogent plotting whose texture it might rub the wrong way. It is precisely in losing her uphill battle against the repressed stray signifier, then, that Austen comes into unexpected alignment with Poe. Together they illustrate a Janus-faced crisis of prose-writing: the one author trying to keep plot, and its identifications, from eluding the control of a comprehensive ironic mastery; the other so indifferent to the felicities of any comprehensive form beyond echoism’s unified field that he nearly scuttles plot altogether for a sheer inscriptive facility. The one so readerly that the totalizing narrative coherence of form must be reified in the disembodied spectacle of Style; the other so writerly that there need be no sustained narrative to read. At a minimum, then, we want to entertain Miller’s overall point about Austen long enough to propose its counterpoint for the later nineteenth century. Say that Austen’s writing finally slackens in its pellucid checks and balances and gives way at the end to “the irrational dreamwork of the signifier” (Miller, 80), troubling the waking work of plot. If so, Poe’s prose—reduced to the entrancement of pure “mood” to begin with—is the unchecked nightmare of that same signifying process. And if Absolute Style in Austen—registered as the assured but always fragile immanence of totality in a Lukácsian sense (my genre-focused adjustment of Miller’s terms)—has begun with Persuasion to cede its narrational integrity to the quirks and querulousness of a characterized persona, then this, too, has its Lukácsian aspect. The new stylistic persona, the toppled “Stylothete,” seems to inherit the contagious tension typically disclosed within character between subjectivity and its disenchanted selfobjectification: or say between the cogito and the reflexive me myself. If so, such a self-directed analytic of the subject, glimpsed in the narratorial personification of the Austen voice in all its late shakiness, has grown rampant two decades later in the paranoid hypochondria of the confessional Person in Poe, where self is always, in a grammatical sense, the patient of its own passive vulnerability to neurasthenic assault. And where the assault is registered in the frenetic congestion of an unconsciousness

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let slip in the skid of alphabetic sounds. Once more, the “extreme violence” of Lukácsian genre theory pairs with the “violence purely linguistic” of Jakobsonian poetics for a narratography of involuted desire and its clinical self-objectifications.

Imperversity At its most turbulent, this paranoid “poescript” goes even beyond the dizzy, meretricious antithesis we left off with—between the “agile” and the “I, ill of health” in “Berenice.” In its unashamed finale, that story makes even more lunatic demands on the cryptanalysis of Poe’s stylistic legerdemain from within its gothic paraphernalia. The decimating clincher comes with a verbal bravado that flouts all bounds, either of taste or narrative tact. Overattentiveness pushed to obsession: these, again, are the narrator’s self-diagnosed clinical symptoms, especially as he ends up being riveted not just by typography (his typical failing) but by the idea of Berenice’s teeth, buried with her, naturally enough, in her tomb. These teeth become the grinning flashpoint in a blatantly overcoded motif of the vagina dentata that fi xates the narrator after the death of his lovely cousin. Her death is the absolute truncation of desire that would seem to plunge him back, further yet, into sexuality’s own castration anxiety. As if the dental structure of his beloved’s mouth were associated with speech as well, the narrator admits that he is locked in the jaws of his obsession as before he had been susceptible to strange typographic rather than somatic fi xations: once the paginal, now the displaced vaginal. Laboring to explain his mad interest in her rows of teeth, and his plan for the mutilating exhumation of them by “dental surgery,” the narrator, out of the blue, swerves into an echoic and abbreviated bilingual aside, transcribed elision and all. Introducing a fabled homage, he begins in a miasma of assonance and alliteration: “Of Mademoiselle Salle it has been well said. . . .” Such singsong internal rhyming sets readers up—if also our own teeth on edge—for the strange cryptogrammatic transformation to follow. The proverbial literary encomium to which the narrator alludes in French, “que tous ses pas étaient des sentiments” (“that all her steps were feeling”) now gets syllabically resculpted into a bizarre phonic gargoyle. Without acknowledging the transpositions at play in his anagramming of “des sent(iments)” into “ses dents”—and certainly without admitting that his whole tale has here confessed itself as one long expatiation of an appalling translexical pun—the narrator adds: “I more seriously believed que toutes ses dents étaient des idées” (647).

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This insane transcendence of the body in the work of mourning becomes a parodic reversal of materialism. And if her teeth are pure ideas, then his idée fixe (the unsaid verbal matrix of the whole almost plotless tale) is only a response in kind to the fi xed jaw of rigor mortis that he must tear out. “Des idées!—ah here was the idiotic thought that destroyed me! Des idées!” (647), including the deranged free-associational slant rhyme between the otherwise antonymic idea and idiocy. There are, of course, no ideas here, only linguistic things—especially the echoing dental sound of d caught up in a delusion so entirely self-generated that syllables follow suit as if spiraling off into endless iteration: des i/dées i/dées i/dées. And not only is the fi rst person plural recursively reiterated. By a subsidiary pun, the demented narrator’s fate is indeed decided (décidée) well in advance, as if by the bilingual intertext itself. Such charnal word play is indeed modernism in the making, leading on to the verbal involution of Baudelaire and Mallarmé, Roussel and Leiris, and of course, in English, to Joyce and Nabokov. Never again, however, will its device, in narrative, be so entirely bared—grinningly so, one might say—by being stripped of all plotted conviction. What results is a laboratory of narratographic reading in the absence of all narratological prompts except the death wish itself, of story as much as of consciousness. To the extent that Poe anticipates high modernism, he foresees exactly its critique by Georg Lukács, where the emphasis on subjectivity in such post-realist writing is a closing out of the world in which all that is left is style itself—or, in our terms, the descriptive motive forfeited entirely to the inscriptive. Everything in Poe begins in the burden of fi xating words—and ends there. Few stories make this more lexically apparent, over greater stretches of the text, than “The Imp of the Perverse” (1845), whose fi rst sentence sets, by echo and anagram, the unshakable hold of its phonetic matrix: “In the consideration of the faculties and impulses—of the prima mobilia of the human soul, the phrenologists have failed to make room for a . . . primitive, irreducible sentiment” (392; emphasis mine, except where present already in Poe’s italicized Latin). From there out, the impish syllable of the keynote “impulse” beats out its pulsing iterations across the text, with the evoked demon no more willful than the very prose that diagnoses it. Under analysis in this tale is the “impulse” to do oneself in, violate one’s safe haven, plunge into self-incrimination, pervert one’s security into exposure. In the particular case of this one thin plot, such an unwilled motive amounts to the narrator’s urge to blurt out a confession, years after the fact, to a murder long forgotten. Th is was an ingenious homicide involving, of all things, a poisonous reading candle invented to

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murder a man known to love reading in bed, an invention based on the narrator’s own previous reading in French. The illumination by which text is consumed consumes the reader’s own life. Discussing this tale in relation to the cogito in Descartes and Emerson, Stanley Cavell, alert to its “word imps,” notes also the title’s pun on the perversity of verse effects themselves—call it the aggressive overpatterning of reference. In this way, as the tale races to conclusion, it is as much a lexical as a psychological suspense that mounts inexorably, across the at first almost “imperceptive” (282) desire to approach “impetuously” (282) a memory tugging at one’s mind—like the return of “some unimpressive snatches from an opera” (283). What results, climactically, is the uninvited vocalization of the narrator’s guilt in “the long-imprisoned secret” (284) risen now to speech. In such an imp-acted turn of syllables, the “violence purely linguistic” of Jakobsonian recursion stages before our ears the return of the criminal repressed. It is part of Cavell’s suggestion that ordinary language must keep in abeyance all recognition of these “cells or molecules” (124) of wording in order not just to keep meaning afloat but to buoy consciousness upon it. The self-infl icted perversity of unintended confession, or any other such involuntary masochism, is thus the psychological equivalent of an unguarded attention to stray morphemes and phonemes rather than policed meanings: signals or emissions that, like poison smoke from a reading candle, can invade the continuum of consciousness—the very text of identity—and destroy it. Poe’s reader might well respond to all such wordplay simply by writing it off—just as it seems tossed off in the first place. Often, of course, there would be little left. Poe’s texts, whatever the topic, frequently end up being about nothing more compelling than their own twitchy verbiage. Their climaxes are merely fever spikes of the pen. So that either arabesque fantasy or ratiocination can turn on a dime, or a plug nickel, into hoaxing grotesquerie. Sometimes, however, rather than just subjecting readers to it, Poe’s phrasing takes as its subject the psychosomatic effects of such wording, as with the overt thematization of voice, reading, and inscription in the three stories that await us. The first of them, “William Wilson” may be the closest Poe came to a real plot, a doppelganger fable (and negative Bildungsroman) with an unevadable moral point, yet one whose doubling evinces not just psychic schism but the irrepressible twinning of pun, beginning of course with the impishly embedded “I am” of the pseudonymous title. Again, then, we find the fallen “I” of a borrowed subjectivity, tunneling beneath intent to rob desire of its will. Though one of the most narratively detailed and solemnly moralizing of

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his arabesques, Poe’s story seems in execution, and right from the first, less like a spiritual fable than like something between a dilated joke and a verbal puzzle—while in the process offering what amounts to a sustained mockery of literary semiotics as it would later be formulated by a textual decoder like Riffaterre. Poe’s sabotage of deep structure—his sabotage by exaggeration—runs as follows. The narrator of “William Wilson” is another of Poe’s typical libertine degenerates, a sinner wracked by the “spectre” (or phantasm) of his own damnation. In giving free reign to his criminal indulgences from childhood on, he has been checked only intermittently by a lookalike double bearing the same name (whatever that might really be, for the eponymn has altered his original name to spare the guilty) and speaking to him, by constitutive debility, only in chastening whispers. Get it? Though Todorov’s brief remarks on this version of the doppelganger plot make no mention of this metafigural dimension, “William Wilson” in fact offers a perfect illustration of Todorov’s generative principle that fantasy amounts to taking the figurative literally—or, in other words, arises from the artificial animation of a dead metaphor. Even if the story alone didn’t call up the unsayably clichéd matrix “the voice of conscience” for the narrator’s barely audible undertone of self-incrimination—as “imprisoned” does in “The Imp of the Perverse” by a strictly syllabic route— the idea of a “speaking conscience” is implicitly sounded (by intertextual resonance) in an epigraph from Chamberlain that itself contains an odd typo (uncanny slip?) on Poe’s part, a missing preposition inserted later by editors: “What say of it? What say [of] CONSCIENCE grim, that spectre in my path? ”  The question—at least for awhile—isn’t, despite the slip, what conscience says, but what there is to say about it. Only the coming writing will answer—and only then by the extended figurative conceit that fantasizes conscience as a second self mounting an assault on the inner ear of guilt. “The fair page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation” (626). Fair copy risks erotic violation as a virgin page. To keep the metaphoric subtext of “voice” in operation along the track of confessional script, however, the narrator insists upon eschewing all detailed “record” of past sins and the “unspeakable misery” of their aftermath (626; italics added). Hyperbole is itself a parable in this case, for the narrator’s ethical castigation by his better self can only, in fact, be “whispered”—traced in cognition at the very threshold of perception. One has to move no farther into the tale than its third paragraph for the next and third appearance of this subtext (Riffaterre’s term for the returning

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node of an already established structural pattern): a subtext derived from the barely deflected voice of conscience matrix and yet again modeled by dead metaphor. Here we learn that the narrator’s weak-minded parents, from his childhood up, offered no check to his selfish and evil cravings, so that “my voice was a household law” (627). By a kind of ethical irony, it will later be the voice of the law that taunts him in the person of a “spectral” (the epigraph again) doppelganger who can only whisper, but in the same “key” as the speaker, of things otherwise “unspeakable.” From here out, readers are attuned to this ethical double through such silent sibilance as we find describing his “singular, low, hissing utterance” in all its “whispered syllables” (635; Poe’s italics). Here is a distended onomatopoeia requiring, as subvocalized prose, almost none of the “faucial and guttural organs” (631) at the back of the throat that we are told have been impaired by the alter ego’s “constitutional disease” (631)— constitutional, and figuratively constitutive. Enacted further forward in the mental mouth, the rumble of guilt comes closer, as it were, to an endemic surface effect of strictly textual diction. Then, too, the only way that this rendered voice can be emphatically raised beyond a silence almost as extreme as a page’s own is by means of italics: deployed upon the double’s introduction, and here again later, to emphasize precisely how he can never pitch his recriminations “above a very low whisper” (631). As it turns out, this same recourse to italics—as if to an internal but nonetheless estranged language, a veritable foreign tongue—marks the speech of the double at the close of the story: as if he were speaking instead, and simultaneously, in the narrator’s own voice. For there, once the double has been stabbed in rage by the narrator, it seems like “I myself was speaking while he said”—in an impossible apostrophe—“how utterly thou has murdered thyself ” (641). Kill your conscience, lose your better self. A narrative construct bald-faced enough to introduce the mumbling double as one whose native congeniality of temper with the narrator kept them, while still at school, always on “speaking terms” (630) should not surprise us by collapsing at last into a deflating pun on “utterly.” Faced with page after page so entirely “unsullied” by the real, one doesn’t know whether to cry or laugh. Throughout, the gloom has been both ludic and ludicrous. As if “William Wilson” were a mystery of lexical and syllabic encryption rather than a supernatural fable, a detective story rather than an arabesque fantasy, its overstrained semiotic contract with the reader is in the end, and quite literally, worth only the paper it’s explicitly written on. And the voicings it precipitates. With all realist characterization disappearing into a single saturated mood of

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retrospect, Poe the writer ends up interested for the most part only in charactery—now in its secret phonetics, now in its material modes of inscription. In the paired stories remaining for discussion, the famous “Fall of the House of Usher” and the little-discussed “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains”—stories about the odd power of written story—reception is materialized as a kind of telekinesis. And in the course of both, plot itself discovers its destiny in the throes of lexical density, each gothic arabesque knotting up in the end around just such a scriptive as well as phonetic anagram.

From Transphonics to Trancescrypt In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the reading scene in question is an oral recitation of a noncanonical intertext. It thus replays the scene of Poe’s own probable reception at the popular hearthside to which his tales were marketed. In the other case, the obscure “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” the nameless text is being written at the moment its effects are actuated, as if reading intervened at the very point of articulation, dividing inscription from itself along the flow of an enunciation whose affective radius is greater and more immediate than otherwise dreamed. In each case, the material thickness of wording per se, its lexical motion, finds its counterpart in a violent action that is little more than a metaphor for writing’s own reception. But the further point that brings Poe’s work to notice, by way of clarifying exception, in a book on Victorian novels is this: that these effects never in the end cling to the mystifications of phenomenology—as is regularly the case in the world-building duration of Victorian novelistic prose. Though they take us in, according to the trickster’s sense, Poe’s verbal turns are not consistently meant to invite us into any world space delimited by our suspended disbelief. They often reduce before the mind’s eye, instead, to the strictly graphic inscriptions of material textuality. It is in just this manner that they may so unabashedly isolate what is otherwise orchestrated into subordination by nineteenthcentury plots: the carrying force of inscription itself. At its pivotal moment, literally its hinge point in the creaking of the tomb door, “The Fall of the House of Usher” showcases the power of melodramatic reading: indeed, the virtually teleportational power of a single word. Who can miss the self-promotional mise en abyme that makes far more trivial literature than Poe’s come alive, by ironic citation, from within a tale of premature burial? It is no less a character than the narrator himself who, substituting another’s language for his own—and

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hence suspending Poe’s own prose for a double-voiced citation of an earlier potboiler—makes bold to read aloud in order to soothe the frenzied distress of Roderick Usher. His choice of text is the crass bombast of a romance called Mad Trist by Lancelot Canning. With its pulp thrills, this text might perhaps distract Usher from his monomaniacal brooding over the fear of his sister having been prematurely entombed. Such is our narrator’s desperate plan. It has its precedent—and its general cultural logic. The enunciated trials of literate fiction are there to distract us from fears less speakable. But sometimes art strikes a keener vein, cuts to the quick of life’s own worst terrors. Such is the case here, we are to think, in parable. The moment comes when the oral recitation of a cheapjack dragonslaying adventure has arrived at just the point where, in the faux-antique pleonasm of the romancer’s prose, a heraldic shield clangs upon a silver floor with “a mighty great and terrible ringing sound” (244; emphasis added). Poe must have liked the chiming internal reverse of “terrible” itself against “great.” But that’s the least of it. Poe’s story may seem to respond further, and more fully in kind, to its trash antecedent—and by what one might call narratographic rapport. Mighty and large, mightily large, the shield’s greatness redounds from the echo chamber of the concurrent narrative with a comparable clangor audited in “real” rather than representational space. This we realize when another “mighty great” racket occurs at just this moment—by freakish coincidence and, beyond onomatopoeia, a rare homophonic anagram (great/grate)—in the horrid “grating of the iron hinges of her prison” (245). Together with the alphabetic return of “iron” in “prison,” here is proof of his sister’s living burial in that carceral metaphor for the family vault. And this within a deafening sense of the unhinged. Even the scenic details of Usher’s inhabited space, in short, feel like, sound like, a barrage of psychic projections, here free associations from the aural prompts of the narrator’s reading aloud to his own character. After this textual phantasm of sound overriding sense—and, at the plot level, of mind over matter—it is almost as if the text needs to return, even in cataclysm, to its graphic basis as arabesque scrapings on a surface. With objective and subjective states continuing to violate each other’s borders right through to the end of the tale, a primal rift famously cleaves in two the mansion of Usher along its deep irregular flaw. This is the violent arabesque “zigzag” at which the narrator, in a final splutter of syllabic anagram, “gazed” in the last instant before collapse. Much of the time in Poe, the reader is just gazing at patterns etched by the zing

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of letters, whether the scratchings play with or against their phonetic emphases and residues. So, too, and more explicitly than ever, by the twofold trick ending of “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” which thus becomes the Tale of tales in Poe, not only for its undermining of plot by sheer typography but, at the same time, for its melodramatizing of reception as black magic. Once upon a time there was an uprising in Benares, half a century before the story’s 1827 Virginia setting: known for the fi rst governor-general as the Warren Hastings rebellion of 1780. It gets recounted in historical outline, and only at the climax of Poe’s tale, by one Dr. Templeton, then a young medical officer in the British service, whose dear friend Captain Oldeb died in defense of the British stronghold. In Dr. Templeton’s subsequent civilian career, he studied on the Continent, became a follower of Mesmer, and, when emigrating to the fi rst of the American colonies, met there a “neuralgic” patient who uncannily resembled his dead friend. This was a man named Augustus Bedloe, who, when we meet him, after years of Templeton’s hypnotic ministrations, is so gaunt and debilitated that—in one of Poe’s typical assonant circumlocutions, this time a hyperbolic parody of cognition itself—his eyes “convey the idea of the eyes of a long-interred corpse” (679). With this insinuation of Eastern reincarnation smuggling its way into the story of hypnotic science, the tale plants itself firmly on the unstable ground between the two poles of the fantastic as defined by Todorov, the supernatural and the psychological, here the marvelous of metempsychosis and the mesmeric uncanny. But each, in this case, offering only a so far undisclosed figure for literary writing itself—and its galvanizing impact. Two false leads help define the coming twists—indeed the double helix—of Poe’s arabesque. Out of nowhere, the long-lost revolt is restaged in the mind’s own hallucinatory theater of war, like the return of an imperial repressed. As if he were there then, in Benares, rather than here now, on “native” American soil, Templeton’s patient lives (again) through the valor and death of the doctor’s former friend. This happens during a trancelike “episode” in the Ragged Mountains near Charlottesville one autumn afternoon, while the ailing Bedloe is trying to walk off the effects of an overlarge dose of morphine administered by the good doctor. We get the picture soon enough, or so we think: an opiated mirage, which will then turn out, in the first phase of the trick ending, to have replayed—in its delirium—a previous empirical reality. The additional fact that the whole baffl ing adventure in the Ragged Mountains takes place “during the strange interregnum of the seasons which in America

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is termed the Indian summer” (680–81; Poe’s emphasis) is another double irony, from whose oblique clue the italicized Latin actually seem to deflect attention. For “Indian summer,” that vernacular dead metaphor, may well be the figurative matrix from which the entire fantastic plot explodes into literalization: a zone hovering not just “between reigns” but in a temporal limbo between historical epochs on separate continents. If one were to take “Indian summer” (American versus East Asian) as the quintessential Todorovian pun (the figurative turned exotically literal even as it anchors the fantastic as a merely extravagant version of the everyday), it would be quite of a piece with the rest of the lexically indulgent narrative. The tale is a tissue of alliterative and assonant linkages, where a “wind” like a “wand” sweeps away a fog to reveal how the river “wound” (682). Paronomasia masses against representation in the arbitrary thrum and rumble of free phonetic association: a “violence purely linguistic” by any other name. Synesthesia itself becomes neurasthenic when, in the recovered scene at Benares, a “strange odor loaded the breeze” (682), accompanied by the iterative syllables of a “continuous murmur” that “intermingled . . . the peculiar hum of multitudinous human voices.” Death comes, more syllabic than somatic, during a “rash and fatal sally” amid “crowded alleys” in which the “arrow of a Bengalee” (686) does its lethal work. Such relentless surfeit disorders of the phonotext are not just part and parcel of the style’s own oversensitivity training. They prepare us at the level of prose texture, more pointedly yet, for a final typographic twist. So far, Bedloe’s recounted dream vision still hovers undecidably, in genre terms, between the uncanny and the marvelous, hallucination versus supernal return, triggered either by posthypnotic suggestion or by immortal transport. And in just this respect the plot now thickens. The frame tale’s unnamed outer narrator, finally appearing on the scene alongside the two principals whose preternatural bond he has been describing, sees a portrait of the long-deceased Oldeb and mistakes it for the ailing Bedloe. Instead, an act of representation has retained the image of the dead in the very picture of the living double a century later. But a second irony of representation cuts deeper into Poe’s interests. It turns out that Templeton, during the whole episode in the hills, has been there at his desk, not painting, but dredging up and transcribing from memory the excruciating scene of his friend’s death, writing out the fatal sequence in his notebook. He has been doing so, that is, exactly while, miles away, his patient has been re-experiencing that fateful scene. The ink, we are told, has only lately dried on the relevant pages. It is as if the blood of

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the referent flows again—and is drained once more—in the veins of each new textual performance. What derives for the modern reader from this emphasis on textuality is almost a parable of psychoanalytic transference in its two dovetailed aspects. One facet of the process looks back into the past whose shocks it “transfers” into the present; the other involves a displacement from the recovered trauma onto the fascination of the receiving subject or analyst. By a unique dispensation akin to the operative function of all narrative writing, Bedloe is able to survive the same virtual death which, if he had been an actual reader of the absent manuscript, he would have been moved to identify with. And such is the case even though, in this quite anomalous instance, that death was in fact always and already his own. During this proxied-out hypnotic recovery of the past, Dr. Templeton was not just lost in thoughts of a past friend, a reverie that spilled over into the mind of his mesmeric appendage in Bedloe. Th rough narrative’s own familiar form of sympathetic rapport—defamiliarized here with a vengeance as psychic thought-transference compounding the premise of reincarnation—the remote-control function of literature becomes preternaturally moving at a considerable remove from its source. The most striking anticipation of the story’s final disclosure, tethering the trauma to its source in an explicitly written narrative, comes when that inner narrator, Templeton, tips his manipulating hand. Bedloe has paused in the account of his ordeal in the mountains, and Templeton speaks up as follows, as if recapitulating a last remark in the vocabulary of both discourse and traverse: “[But] proceed. You arose and descended into the city” (683). Even an attentive reader may be hoodwinked by this, may momentarily forget that Templeton is not reprising words already dispensed by Bedloe. More obsessed than even we are with his own story, Bedloe himself knows better. He echoes the verb, accepts it as if it were a coaxing repetition, but only in “profound astonishment,” since he has not yet mentioned this sequel to his auditor. “I arose as you say, and descended into the city.” Just exactly “as you say”: as you mention now, and as you were saying (so we are shortly to discover) at the time, saying by writing: your words my command, your inscription summoning the experience for me from within my unconscious prehistory. It is not just here—with that tacit narratographic pivot around a now slack, now reactivated idiom like “as you say”—but in every line of this transferential tale that the doctor puts words in his patient’s mouth as well as their signifieds into his mind’s eye.

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Textual “Converse,” Narrative Telempathy Thus does Poe’s story work to blur any fi xed distinction between hypnotic suggestion and long-distance telepathy. Each is folded into the other as a trope both for reincarnation and for textual conjuration, where the dead always live again in the reader’s lively engagement with representation. Beyond this inference so far, however, we get one more twist of the screw, and then another, coming round full circle to the issue of textuality and its engagement by a yet more estranging turn. Above and beyond the call to interpretation, that is, this tale of the fantastic becomes in fact literary in the narrow sense of strictly lettered, hemmed in by typography. We could well have seen this undermining turn of plot coming—or almost—along the grain of the prose’s shameless wordplay across levels of enframed violence from the rehearsed death of Oldeb in the hills to the second and independent fatality of Beldoe under doctor’s orders. In the topographic vicinity of a “stray temple” at Benares (683), just for instance, a stray snakelike arrow enters one man’s anatomical temple, and years later the patient of a man named Templeton, having endured again this fatality, survives only long enough to have that doctor apply, accidentally on purpose as it were, a poisonous leech to “a small artery in his right temple” (686). And even this bloodletting becomes in itself a psychic trope as well as a verbal pun, the suggestion emerging that we are not just poisoned in a sense, as with the reading candle in “The Imp of the Perverse,” but indeed drained by our identification with text, all but vampirized. Thus does Poe’s story anticipate by half a century what I have elsewhere singled out as the late-Victorian “gothic of reading” in British fiction. And if murder by poisonous candle wax at the scene of bedtime reading is a “description or fantasy” of writing’s effect, in Cavell’s sense of “The Imp of the Perverse,” then all the more so here. The pen with which Templeton traps Bedloe in the past, or otherwise brings the past fatally alive again in him, might as well have been dipped in poisoned ink. But Poe’s script now quickly moves to dismantle its own rhetoric— together with its spooky circuits of transference—by the irruption of affect’s own material base in typography: the story reverting, that is, with impish perversity, to its undisguised imprint basis. Our otherwise mostly redundant outer narrator—who comes into his own only in the final moments by making the plot’s last discovery—finds that the newspaper report of Bedloe’s death prints his name without the expected final e that we’ve been used to reading, thus knocking the plot’s mortal recyclings for

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a final loop. He asks the newspaper editor whether there is some “authority” for a spooky symmetry he detects in this unprecendented spelling of the name without its last silent phoneme “ ‘Authority?—no,’ he replied.” No authoring at all, in fact, just an accident of the signifier. “ ‘It is a mere typographical error. The name is Bedlo with an e, all the world over, and I never knew it to be spelt otherwise in my life’ ” (686). (Just such a typo would, of course, put much at stake for a writer named Poe with a silent e, as well as for his demented poetics.) Knowing better than the editor, though, the narrator knots off the tale with a rhetorical question about this spelling and its linguistic return of the metaphysical repressed: “What is it but Oldeb conversed? ” (687). Obverse in spelling their names remain, or say inverted. But the true “converse” between them has been a silent textual relay—as if from beyond the grave. What this letteral determination of identity also brings out is a case of subjectivity so dubious and relativized that its parasitic doubling across the generations can be imagined to depend entirely on the nonsignifying presence or absence, alphabetically installed, of a silent differential mark. Thus is plotted irony determined by the swerves and reversals of prose itself. For such shuttling and “converse” of letters, rather than any sense of autonomous utterance in communication, is where in the end, even if by typographic farce, all disclosure rests. In an odd conflation of a genre’s defining poles at this impasse of the fantastic, what the contingent typo gives us (after Todorov’s distinction) is a last uncanny ratification of the preexistent marvelous. What the letteral determination of identity also brings out is a case of subjectivity so relativist that its parasitic doubling across the generations can be imagined to depend entirely on the nonsignifying presence or absence of a silent vanishing character. Why not, when the human subject is in this case its own transtemporal palindrome? But with or without the silent “e,” the phonic mirror reads clearly—even though incurring a certain further murkiness. Under the impress of Poe’s subsequently typeset pen, that is, one senses—through a rootless overtone of the typographic uncanny—not only the chiastic old in Bedlo but, by way of a macabre association slung between Oldeb and Bedlo, the monosyllable dead itself struggling faintly to say its peace. Thus do the gaugings of narratography take the measure of such plotted irony by the swerves and reversals of prose itself. “Authority?—no.” No intention either, necessarily. Just prose intension. As usual in Poe, nothing survives intact, nothing resembling plot’s normal resolution and the inferred continuance of its people. Nothing except the medium’s own material components: letteral, then lead; com-

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posed, then set in type. Much has been vitiated in the process. Character, setting, and plot are, of course, the threefold ingredients of traditional narrative. Poe’s prototypical story bleeds them all dry in a depopulated nowhere of eventless repetition. This is a metempsychotic limbo where what’s left of character—mere shell rather than vessel—is suspended beyond place and time in a fatal hiatus, invaded by experiences not its own. Subjectivity has lapsed, by doubling, to a second-order function of an eclipsing former mortality from another mental hemisphere altogether. In the Lukácsian abstract “purity” of this drained reality, the short story as genre is epitomized in the “absurd” tonalities of its form per se. By definition transmissible, pervasive, all that remains is a “mood” whose inevitable transfusions—figured here in bloodletting as well as hypnosis and teleportation—operate between the text and its narratographically traced upload by patient or reader alike.

Set-backs and Frame-ups Mood, we’ve been saying, is everything in Poe: mood and its medium, its communication. Cathartic is too strong—and too classic—a word for his effects. Therapeutic, too clinical finally. And too upbeat at that. Exorcism may be closer to the (purely typographic) mark. “Dispossession” might be another word for what Templeton’s writing generates at one remove in old Bedlo. Not directed toward Poe at all, let alone toward this story, the prominence of this last term in a recent work of narrative theory should help us extrapolate further from this one plot by Poe to a revisionist narratography of discursive framing. In an explicit challenge to traditional structuralist concepts of event-centered narrative theory, with its actants and plot trajectories, Ian Reid argues for a frame-based sense of narrative transmission or “exchange.”  The rhetorical thrust is as important to him as the plot vector. Yet his introductory chapter remains, it seems, only tentatively entitled to its provisionally staked-out new ground. The question mark of “Beyond Narratology? ” suggests not that Reid can’t be sure just where his claims are taking him. It admits, rather, that one can’t confidently assume the outer bounds of a standing discipline from the limitations of its practitioners of record. Th is would have to be true. Unlike Reid’s study, however, the present book is intended to test those narratological limits at the inner as well as outer envelope of actantial process in fiction: in other words, along the seams of wording as well as at the tangency—or point of transit—between text and its receptive field. And here, what links up the evidentiary base of my fi rst three quite

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disparate chapters is just this: that wording, narratographically registered as inscriptive process, is the true node of intersection between text and what Reid calls the “circumtextual” framework: a framework evoked from within narrative by the discerned mechanics of impact—or, in other words, its affect as verbal “exchange.” I have elsewhere argued that the endearing of the audience through the transferences of affect and fascination—an act of rhetorical “conscription”—is typified for the Victorian novel by the frequent appearance of audience apostrophe (as in Jane Eyre’s “Reader, I married him.”). Other rhetorical inscriptions of the reading moment follow, logically enough, from that paradigm of second-person address, linguistically cued as well as verbally captured. Recalling the grain of my earlier book’s method in its negotiations between micronarrative functions and macronarrative structures, and pursuing its implications for the figuring as well as factoring in of an audience, the coming chapter on Anne Brontë’s frame narrative could well be called “Beneath Narratology.” This is because concern rests there with the verbal procedures by which fictive writing itself, as storytelling, brokers the transaction on which—more explicitly than in any of Reid’s examples—such narrative prose founds its exchange value. Certainly any critical book, like this, needing to return, however peripherally, to questions of address and transmissal in the violent plotting of Victorian melodramatic prose, including its ravages by structural irony and local phrasing alike (Lukács and Jakobson), has use for Reid’s transactional model. I introduce it here, in advance of Brontë’s framing parable, both as a further gloss on the transference and countertransference worked through by “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” and, more importantly, because Poe’s whole approach explodes the warming hearthside proprieties of so much normative domestic storytelling, in Dickens, all the Brontës, Eliot, and onward, whereby violent event rallies a community of the attentive. It must be guessed that part of Reid’s reticence in claiming too much, too soon, for his corrective approach (in its tentative push “beyond narratology”) is no doubt explained by the fact that certain ready understandings of “narrative exchange” (from Roland Barthes to Peter Brooks) would place even his fresh considerations squarely within the parameters of the received field, broadly understood—at least well within what we understand more loosely as narrative theory. In stressing his limited and provisional rethinking of the narratological terrain at its outer borders, Reid coins two new categories, “substitution” and “dispossession,” for what may be called the lateral and the vertical displacements of story,

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each of them “exchanges” in its own way, whether as thematic surrogate or wholesale divestment. The copresence of these two functions, if not their precise distinction in each case, keeps returning as a leitmotif across Reid’s chapters. At the (horizontal) level of plot, the former term, “substitution,” names the alternation within recurrence, for instance, by which one actor becomes the double of an earlier one: sharing the actantial role in different forms, so to say “exchanging” functions. The second (or vertical) relay (a different kind of “substitution” in a sense, though not characterized as such by Reid) is one of perspective more than of agency, by which a narrative is bartered away to become the property of a second party, its point of view “dispossessed” in transmission and claimed by another. In Poe, for example, even as Oldeb is “substituted” for Bedlo(e) in the horizontal (and recursive) timeline, this event itself is under twofold dispossession, fi rst (from within) by Templeton as explanatory prose narrator and preternatural scribe, then by what’s-his-name—we’re in fact never told—in his narratorial writing out (both senses) of the overidentified subject’s twicetold life and death. Examples only help show how close Reid’s twofold template is to the double sense of change in psychoanalytic transference: edging forward from past event or incarnation to present return as well as from teller to identifying listener. A far better known and less convoluted example than Poe’s (somewhat less at least) may clarify. To distill Reid’s post-actantial categories (those two kinds of schematic rather than characterological displacements known as “substitution” and “dispossession”) from a single canonic example not offered in his discussion, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness may well come, famously overdetermined, to mind. Marlow (the colonial adventurer) is “substituted” for, along the course of his own retrospect, in the coils of unflattering self-recognition, first by his predecessor Fresleven, now dead, and then by Kurtz, soon to be dead—all this in a relay or “exchange” of actantial subject positions. In the process, and as an inseparable consequence, Kurtz is dispossessed of his story by Marlow’s inheritance of it as his “choice of nightmares.” This is a story that comes literally to haunt Marlow, until he can “lay its ghost” by one means or another, first by its euphemistic conveyance to interested parties on the Continent, then, in fuller form, to a captive British audience on deck— and through them, of course, to an English-speaking print readership via the auspices (somehow) of the unnamed witness (Poe’s anonymous frame narrator reborn). This outer purveyor of the tale is the figure (in both senses) of narration whose intervention moves a private oral tale along

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toward accessible public novella, where the economies of “exchange” are at last openly commercial, whatever else they entail. I trust this may help bring Reid’s contribution into focus as a more generalized account, for instance, of Roland Barthes’s “contract narrative.” In monitoring the negotiations that lead to any such contract, one is drawn to even smaller and more explicitly linguistic increments than Barthes’s serial lexia. Narratography specifies, as it were, the subclauses of contractual affect. In this respect, as much as with Poe, though at the other end of the Victorian century, Conrad’s undercover writing—the secret agency of his prose—seems at times to signify more than it can actually bring itself to sound out, for all its lexical congestions. Just one example should call to mind the phonetic density of such effects in their complex narratographic entailments. So back to the classroom. For over a decade in the teaching of Conrad’s story, I have indulged myself in a bit of controlled testing in the laboratory of spontaneous oral performance. Having asked students to study the opening pages before our upcoming class meeting, I have then called upon one of them at random, a volunteer or otherwise, to read aloud the ominous second paragraph on the “sea-reach of the Thames.” Such a test of lexical tensility isn’t meant to depend on reading aloud, just on the premise of a phonotext in narrative prose. And in graduate and undergraduate courses alike, this experiment in the flux of the signifier never fails. In those sails standing upright “in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits,” the student, having done her homework or not, always reads “sprits” as “spirits”—and usually (as a result?) “varnished” as “vanished.”  Ghostly phonetic losses, by any other name. Phantom failed anagrams. Two elisions, two previsions. A spectral dialectics of the written over against the read is thus resolved by the ironic double vision of the tale to come. That first slip of the eye is no doubt partly induced by idiomatic association with the impressionist “gleams” just before—gleams rather than, say, glints. These slips also operate in anticipation, perhaps, of the next sentence (by a conceivable leap of the eye): “A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness.” In the off rhymes of Conrad’s prose, substitution and dispossession are manifested as alphabetic functions even before characterological and narratival ones. The outer anonymous narrator who has substituted himself for the teller and dispossessed Marlow of his own story (in what I’m assuming would be Reid’s way of putting it) may, according to a narratography of the launching paragraphs, seem haunted by this narrative relay avant la lettre, even in the errant letters of his own framing words. According to the

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“anticipation of retrospection” that anchors one major strand of narrative theory, as it is most usefully formulated and explored by Peter Brooks, the foregone conclusion of Marlow’s bleak story, mortuary and spectral both, has made its impact before it is even introduced as a plot logic. Or say that the textual unconscious speaks like a language even before its lines of transference and countertransference have been traced. So far, only the reader is caught in the mesh of double-voicings that will come to organize the psychology and the ideology of the text once it becomes a colonialist tale. So far, then, only narratography, not narratology, can overhear—as inscribed—this divisive pull of meaning from within its own staged alternatives. For his part, Reid never quite works out the relationship—be it homology or not—between the surrogate actantial roles of temporal “substitution” across plot and delegated storytelling functions, as constituting in fact two related kinds of dispossession. Th is is my way of putting it, not his: to highlight the common logic of substitution (as alternation) that subtends them. These functions, in sum, of distributed being and distributed telling may in fact turn on each other—and in both senses: a reflex and a vendetta. When this happens, narratography takes hold as an analysis of the subject’s relation to its own objectification in words. Reid never pursues in any depth his early allusions to Marcel Mauss and the culture of the gift as a model for narrative transactions, which will return for our different use in the next chapter on Anne Brontë’s frame tale of narrative debt. But Reid’s urge to move beyond the functionalist dyad of story and discourse is clear, with its self-limiting emphasis on the “what” rather than the “why” of narrative (19). So there’s no reason to let go of Reid’s guiding terms just because they don’t set fully to rest his dissatisfaction with mainstream narratology. Especially little reason when we’ve just read a story by Poe where supernatural “substitution” has led to preternatural “dispossession” in an exchange effected at once by historical reincarnation and textual telepathy. Inscribing the past has generated its substitute in the present—or activated its latency. Why do we accept with fascination this metatextual exchange, ultimately this trade off of presence for evocation? Certainly Poe’s fiction offers an unabashed and even-handed bartering of credulity for amusement, suspended disbelief for the thrill of suspense itself. Why are we so ready to make this trade? Precisely because the story is written, written with such lurid color and fierce panache. And knows it. That’s its point. That’s its exchange value, rather than just its verbal gift. Even when being fi ltered, as in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” through droning popular intertexts like Mad Trist, vivid writing can all but raise the dead.

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To just this exaggerated extent Poe’s turgid phantasmagorias work to generalize the condition of all literary experience. Yet in this case any potentially full emotional circuit, any ultimate telempathy, remains blocked at the level of sheer sensational shock. So the question remains how the devices of substitutive and dispossessive reframing might operate in an opposite genre from “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” not a short hoaxing gothic but a bulking Victorian novel of sentimental melodrama. If certain terms remain applicable, including the syllable-crowded dividing line between textual narratography and a broader-gauged narratology, then the turn from Poe’s mood pieces to Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall should cut deeper—and take us farther—than mere contrast. For Brontë’s main plot recounts a long, relentless, and debauched ordeal that strips life of all possible meaning (this side of religious damnation or divine lenience) as well as of any remaining vitality. Rescue lies only in distance and transmission. By such distancing, Brontë’s structure outdoes even the twofold palimpsest in Poe of a narrator retelling the unprecedented power of another’s writing. Brontë’s harrowing tale of alcoholic degeneration—in being twice re-transcribed from its original inditing in the heroine’s own diary—achieves its own fable of textual conveyance, without any supernatural transference (Poe’s specialty), well within the epistolary conduits of its social realism. On the way to this novel, let us return to the present epigraph on shorter forms one more time. For there is another aspect to Poe’s thickly mediated “mood” in the evolution of literary genre across the realist century: not just the anti-novelistic but again the protomodernist dimension. I refer to the place of mood’s “absurd” compression as the forerunner, for Lukács, of plot’s historical collapse in the alleged world-excluding subjectivity of much twentieth-century writing. If the short story form is the “purest” (read: most attenuated) of all post-epic modes or genres, this suggests in fact its closeness, for Lukács, to a kind of lyric solipsism. Though Lukács doesn’t say so at this point in his commentary, the turning inward upon mood, upon subjectivity—especially in the grips of such stylistic overcompensation as we find in Poe—anticipates (as Poe’s writing does in so many other ways as well) the modernist self-engrossment that Lukács will later castigate as anathema to novelistic possibility. In the pulling back from action to subjectivity, from social reality to a withdrawn psychic register, modernist fiction makes, for Lukács, the false effort to find in self a world, in consciousness alone a totality. The short story, too, in its focus on mood rather than action, on affect rather than the quest (however failed) for organic coherence, has thrown over the

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post-epic motive altogether: namely, the intent to recover (and only by seeking over time) an essence in life, a significance in being, a reciprocal organic connection between self and its lifeworld. Another way to put this subjectivizing displacement of totality by a straitened tonal unity—a way less Lukácsian, more Lacanian—is to note that signifying effects in Poe are structured in language like the unconscious. They are to be mentally grasped by the reader—along the peaks and valleys of graphophonemic excess—through a textual transference wholly unconcerned with the real and hence untouched, for Lukács, with any enlivening social imagination. Form emerges in Poe as a signifying force without (rather than within) life. The resulting transference, however overwrought in a given reception, is as empty as it is compelling. And it is against the backdrop of such narrowly inscriptive and rhetorical melodrama that the very different work of novelistic chronology and its sustained readerly response comes clearer in the next chapter, where a thematized verbal transmission is figuratively resocialized, and cumbersomely at that, within the cultural circuit of Victorian domesticity. It is true that either of these first two chapters could have come before the other—even as they both lead straight to Anne Brontë by contrast. The perversities of narrative expectation they chart are wholly complementary. The trick in that one uncharacteristic novel by Dickens (with an uncharacterized heroine in absentia) is to give us so much labyrinthine and contrapuntal multiplotting that to register style, at the last, as being powerfully inflected by a story wholly untold comes with a genuine shock. The opposite trick in many of Poe’s stories becomes almost a joke: to give us so little plot that style has nothing left to do but manifest the verbal contours of the raw subjectivity it reports. In both cases, narratography reads the virtual traces of a story, conveyed along the syllabic heft and rhythmic clefts of fiction’s subnarrative prose. Dickens goes first in our consideration, then, only so we see more clearly how Poe goes farther—in precisely his attempt to eschew the whole novelistic institution already consolidated by Austen and earlier Dickens well in advance of Little Dorrit. Poe’s short stories are potshots taken at the social orchestration of the everyday in mainstream fiction. Whereas narrative totality in Little Dorrit is imposed by closure against the residual trickles of the unsaid, narrative gives way in Poe either to the simply unspeakable or to punning double-talk. Unlike Austen, Poe has no “realism” from which it is necessary to expunge the threat of the signifier. In the fictions to come, and in ways prepared for both by the marginality of such prose inten-

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sion in Dickens and by the self-quarantine of its intensities in Poe, we will find that the stylistic grain of narration more steadily articulates the channeled violence of story. It does so even while attempting to staunch its traumas with the communicable—and communalizing—affect of impersonal, selfless, but not wholly aesthetic fellow-feeling. This includes the odd combination of surrender and expropriation flagged so blandly by that idiomatic hyphen yet explored with such structural insistence in the novel that first concerns us as we return to full-length Victorian narration—here in the form of a redoubled courtship plot: once disastrous, once deferred by the very chronicle of that former disaster when engaged as a novel-long reading event.

3 Mind Frames a n n e bron t ë ’s e xc h a nge ec onom y

The irony of the novel is the self-correction of the world’s fragility: inadequate relations can transform themselves into a fanciful yet wellordered round. . . . Because of this contingent nature, the relatively independent parts are more self-contained than those of the epic and must therefore, if they are not to destroy the whole, be inserted into it by means which transcend their mere presence. —luk ács, the theory of the novel (76 – 77)

Lukács’s Theory of the Novel summarizes the synthesizing operation necessary for fiction’s representational “parts,” never self-sufficient, to be seen as part of: “In contrast to the epic, they must have a strict compositional and architectonic significance” (76). No longer “essential,” they must be made to mean rather than simply let be. To the extent, however, that such a totalizing architectonics of form rather than content may well involve the engineering not just of mimesis but of transmission itself, Lukács is not likely to note its operation. For just as there is no real theory of plot in his approach, there is no reception theory either: no sense, in particular, of a “contextual frame” (Ian Reid’s term again) disclosed by rhetorical enactment from inside the apparatus of its own story. Partly resulting, perhaps, from his indifference to Victorian fiction, this may be the thing that Lukács misses most crucially in novelistic design—what I have called elsewhere its structured designs upon us. But what he finds in the genre at large—finds necessary to it—is clear and persuasive. Parts must be oriented toward the whole, must tend de(90)

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liberately toward whatever unity they are capable of achieving. In another of Lukács’s dichotomies between epic and novel, elements in the post-epic genre are no longer organic and “constitutive,” which is why they must be rendered as systemic and “regulative” (70). In just this sense, though, there is a frequent regulatory system in Victorian narrative (caricatured by the ghoulish lampoons of empathy in Poe) that seeks, paradoxically enough, a formal rounding off in the contact zone just beyond plot—in the theater of reception itself. The invented rather than given circle of form must in this fashion encompass the very circuit of textual exchange in a culture of narrative transmission and response. How Victorian fiction attempts to structure its own (often improving) public consumption from within the novelized rendering of violated lives is a good part of our subject from here out. Never, though, will the structuring architectonics be more clearly laid open to view than in Anne Brontë’s case, where her whole lacerating central narrative is, in effect, “inserted”—on the frailest and most bizarre of provocations—into its own implausible nesting of response. The “mere presence” of her grueling plot details does not, could not, validate their existence. They must be presented. And seen as such: fi ltered and digested in the process of their narrative interchange. In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, far from anything like an enacted poetics of fiction, what Brontë renegotiates for the reader is a question of quasi-fiscal transaction and exchange far closer to the everyday cultural network of marriage markets and social encumbrances. Transaction, exchange . . . or say, more specifically, affi liation, even kinship: with all the parafamilial expectations that narrative in this sense entails. The bond of narration (bond as linkage, bond as contract) takes us, as Reid’s model would suggest, “beyond narratology”—but not beneath the radar of narratography—into the “circumtextual frame.” Besides alluding to Marcel Mauss on the gift economy, Reid mentions in passing LéviStrauss’s argument “that kinship systems should be seen as producing personal interactions, not as being produced by them” (5). Family is the name not for intrinsic, inalienable relations but for their manufacture and enforcement. Implying that this understanding looms large in the transactions not only installed but made thematically explicit by literary reading, Reid seems poised on the edge of a thought he never quite phrases: that texts themselves generate reader positions whose cultural constructions are regularly masked as natural relations. No fiction, in entertaining this parafamilial model, could make it less thematically central perhaps, even while leaving it all the more pervasively implied, than Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Here is a

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novel whose narratee—having demanded the story be mailed to him— has his actual familial relationship to the narrator left carefully, indeed wordily, underspecified until near the very end. This may well be so that, by then, the obligation to narrate can already have waxed metaphoric in its communal intimacy—with family bonds becoming an ingratiatingly tacit figure for the rhetorical ambit of mass fiction at large. If so, this is a gesture institutional as much as psychological. It operates a domestication of literary commerce for which the occasional vocative (as with “Dear Reader”) is only a pointed trace. In the case of Brontë’s novel, however, to explore just why fiction gravitates to the familial mastertrope in advance of seeing how—indeed in how gingerly a fashion—would be no explanation at all. Everything depends in her narrative on a strident unlikeness quietly set right by an only slowly disclosed logic; and on the prose that articulates this transition—through diction, syntax, and a rather obsessive fund of mercantile figuration. And this is a prose available—especially when breaking into ecstasies of desire and solicited reader recognition—for the close-grained transferential apprehensions of narratography. The perspectival adjustments thus effected depend in turn on setting into place the narrator’s explicit “frame of mind” within the novel’s own framed tale.

Nested Tendings What is the difference for a theory of the novel as genre, rather than for narratology—and for genre in its social function particularly— between story and the metanarrative that encloses it, seals and delivers it? Varying Lukács’s terms in moving beyond their actual application in his work, the totalized shape of story finds inserted elements playing their part only if they feel concerted in a shape that not only engineers plot but structures response. It does so in a zone embraced—and necessitated—by any will toward totality: the zone of totality’s recognition as such. In this sense, the whole can well be greater than the sum of its parts—but often by constituting not their manifold suggestiveness alone but the entire responsive field of their apprehension, inclusive rather than conclusive. Brontë’s novel stretches this Victorian principle to a point one might call paper thin. For the unapologetically chronicled miseries of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall have, as formal structure, next to no meaning at all except in the response—and not just as negative object lessons against the evils of drink and the wages of self-indulgence. Response extends in this case to the vexed mix of identification and distance that sets in with respect

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to plotted violence and its self-interested outcome for the narrator in his role as character. The so-called “frame tale” thus serves to reframe reception inside the story, to make it, too, systemic rather than sheerly contingent. But varying the metaphor of the “frame” might be a first step toward clarifying its effect. Revisionist thinking in cognitive narratology has proposed a model drawn from transparent “windows” rather than material “frames”—and this in the special digital sense of their layering and unpeeling on screen, or, in microprocessing lingo, their “stacking and popping.”  According to this recast narratological model, the frame is sensed to disappear entirely (even if temporarily) in our experience of the framed—and thus to belie these very terms. In the alternate vocabulary, then, whenever the founding narrative context of any such subsidiary (rather than enframed) text—the latter “attached” to a supervening discourse in the manner of a subfi le—later reclaims our recognition, the top fi le has been “popped” (that is, removed). It is as if the window previously before us has been “minimized” (or temporarily vanished) in reception. Until then, however, it is all there is, ruling out the time-honored symbiosis of framing and framed. In the thick of exposition, you often momentarily forget that Nellie Dean (through Lockwood) is telling this, or Charlie Marlow (through the nameless shipboard narrator), or John Dowell, or Nick Carraway. At whatever level of transmission, you encounter not the telling but the told. Trying to concentrate at the same stratum of attention on the join of the two, or the truncation of the one by the other, as might be possible in the plastic art from which the frame paradigm derives, is all but impossible in the phenomenology of reading. Concentration is exclusion. And, analogously, a return to the host document is total. It isn’t finally a matter of surface and depth, main platform and its inset or embedded second stage. Each level exists, though alternately, in the same plane, on the same conceptual playing field. Hence the appeal of such computer models in rethinking the sometimes counterintuitive logic of framing. On this revisionary understanding, the wholesale “retrieval” of an underlying story would supplant the alternate and more insistently spatial metaphors of inner versus outer telling. It is in this way that, though putting the materiality of print formats into partial eclipse, cybertext throws their structural function into clearer outline. That, at least, is one recent narratological hypothesis. In considering Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall from this angle, however, one is equally encouraged to reread the novel in light of that other revision of “frame theory” already put into dis-

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cussion: the variable (ultimately extratextual) “exchange” model sketched out by Reid—and flagged in its suggestive paradoxes by an epigraph from Jacques Derrida’s influential sense of the “parergon” in Truth in Painting: “Framing occurs, but there is no frame.”  For Reid, this becomes more a rallying cry for a “circumtextual” sense of narrative transaction— narratology crossed with cultural anthropology—than a new way into the dynamics of conventional narrative embedding. But much in his adjusted sense of things bears directly on the sociocultural “exchange value” of story in Brontë’s novel—even when we are bearing the architectonics of recess and enclosure fully in mind.

Textual Account, Narrative Credit Out of her short life’s greatest sustained grief—in the alcoholic degeneration and death of her brother—a Yorkshire writer of the late 1840s sets down a relentless indictment of human abuse. Whether we know of this or not, then or now, we in the audience have the novel it became. For Brontë has fictionalized the dreadful saga as a brutal marriage plot, rescued it at the last minute with a happy second wedding, and further distanced the sponsoring pain and mourning by publishing it as the pseudonymous novel by one Acton Bell. Yet that is only the beginning of the novel’s distancing work, the outer shape of that labor. Inside plot, the account of the cruel and self-destructive drinker is at fi rst disclosed only to the suffering wife’s private diary. This text is then read once in violation of her wishes by the debauched husband himself, and then again once after their separation—and at her behest this time—by a new suitor, who assumes her to be either separated or widowed. The packet of pages has in fact been passed on precisely in order to explain her necessary coolness toward his advances. This later recipient of her text, tendered a harrowing narrative in not quite cold comfort for banned sex, is none other than, in his turn, the novel’s main epistolary narrator, reporting on it all in further painstaking transcription and transmission to an eagerly reading friend. This is all as messy and improbable as it sounds. But it is along with that latter reader, over his undescribed shoulder so to say, that we too read the many chapters of the heroine’s diary, making do, as the letter-writing suitor-narrator had himself been forced to do for so long, with savage melodrama instead of savored passion. The bargain may be a poor one—but deeply familiar. For a second time, but laminated upon the first, a recipient’s captivation by these diary pages stands in for something like the institutional reader’s own sublimated fascination with a

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novel’s leading lady and her hair-raising tale. The cover story of “a true and faithful account,”  including its mercantile dead metaphor, cedes instead to Victorian fiction’s usual asking price. The narrator’s invited reading of the heroine’s diary, rather than the husband’s forced entry to her pages, certainly offers the highpoint of his own posted memoir—and hence the centerpiece of our main narrative. Yet this reported diary reading has been removed from any real immediacy by the undermotivated rewriting of the whole story in a series of letters dispatched a full two decades later. These are the script installments sent by the narrator, the hero Gilbert Markham, to an importunate urban counterpart named Halford, who has been awaiting some kind of narrative in delayed return for a lengthy personal reminiscence on his own part at their last meeting. The voluminous text as we have it thus constitutes a command performance: its mildly coerced execution (by Markham at Halford’s curmudgeonly insistence) being at once impersonal, perfunctory, and improbable to the hilt. The surprise isn’t so much that numerous critics have found the bulking embedded diary in Helen’s hand a strain on probability and a hopeless forfeit of all dramatic immediacy. More remarkable is that these same critics have mostly blinked at the absurdity of what we might call the story’s second-generation textuality, complete with its Herculean labors of transcription, weeks on end of lengthy letters to London in recompense for a spontaneous oral narrative long ago delivered by the recipient—and of which we know nothing. Well short of this, even otherwise appreciative commentators, whatever their degree of admiration for the central story of Wildfell Hall, have regularly regretted its diary structure as lumbering and counterproductive. Alternately, a more recent wave of feminist criticism tends instead to blame the epistolary narrator for the expropriation of the woman’s story, repackaging it as he does for further male consumption. Now, a cognitive rather than a structural model might mitigate this second objection with a sense that—in reading the “subfi le” of Helen’s words (cited at arduous length from their transcription in the hero’s own journal)—we would be so entirely immersed in our own reading that we would forget that anyone else is doing such reading before us in a perhaps more questionable way, preceding and in that way “framing” ours. But this aside, and tabling for now Reid’s sense that any such “dispossession” of her voice is endemic to narrative exchange, one returns to the first complaint. Ultimately, after her prolonged reserve, Helen Huntingdon’s exonerating sad story—opinion once appeared unanimous on this point—would have carried more dramatic charge if its purport had been conveyed to

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Markham in a lengthy scene of emotional outpouring and checked affection from the long-suffering heroine, who would, she admits, return his love if only she could. To baffle this impact with a diary has seemed to many critics an entirely baffl ing move on Brontë’s part. As either a pallid borrowing from, or a wry send-up of, her sister’s mediated narrative in Wuthering Heights, the purpose has seemed unfathomable. At least the ferocity and anguish of the Heights had an initial status as engrossing oral narrative, however we think Lockwood has managed to pass the story on. By contrast, no explanation for a written text in Wildfell Hall has felt satisfying, let alone decisive. Certainly one cannot assume that Anne was so shaken by trepidation over sending into print the already fictionalized family tragedy lying behind the autobiographical material (Branwell Brontë’s own adulterous scandal and drunken decline) that she overdid the protective sheathing thrown up around it. The whole mechanism is just too ponderous and forced, even for that. Such are the objections. Of all the judgment in this line, that of the novelist George Moore was perhaps the most condescending. Though ranking Anne Brontë very high on the list of English novelists, he set a longstanding tone of dissatisfaction with Wildfell Hall in his complaint about the awkwardness— and lost opportunity—of Brontë’s decision to embed a written narrative rather than mount a melodramatic revelation scene. He suggests that “almost any man of letters” would have advised Brontë instead to produce an “entrancing scene . . . of the telling” with the two principals on hand—advice that would have come in no uncertain terms. But can Anne Brontë really have needed a “man of letters” to school her in the opportunities made available by the imagined presence of a female narrator in revelatory distress? The complaint amounts to this: what possessed this Victorian novelist to think that the exchange and reading of a text (in the case of the diary itself) could possibly be as compelling as its story would be in the less mediated form of face-to-face orality? Two responses seem possible to her squandering in this way the tremors of immediacy, the fi rst in the form of a counter-question. How unlikely is it, really: the offered diary rather than a proffered tale? Is it so hard to imagine, simply on the face of it, that a Victorian woman—like Anne Brontë, just for example—might feel more comfortable baring her soul in written prose rather than in person? And a second rejoinder (around which the reactions of this chapter begin to gather) would start with a sense that her story is only meant to be as captivating as a novel, a written and read text. This can hardly be a source of regret for the author’s own literary audience—including the critics who think her novel so good

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it could even have been better. The evidence necessary to demonstrate this claim, that Brontë is in fact flagging her novel as novelistic, crosses provocatively between the laborious outer narrative—where a voluminous confessional text is loaned, recopied, and then again retranscribed into posted letters—and the events vividly retailed in the inner diary that started this textual chain reaction. Such evidence responds to the question about how Brontë could have allowed the former to spoil the latter, to blunt or numb it, by letting us doubt whether in fact she did. What if the layers of transparency are also refractions? What if the faithful retellings of the frame tale are there to tell instead of the story’s own power? Indeed, given the most familiar form of the testamentary manuscript in English fiction of the preceding century, we are likely enough to catch the intertextual resonance. As if the device were borrowed from seasoned attempts to frame and authenticate the otherwise incredible machinations of gothic terror (and its found manuscripts) in some distant lair or far past, we can see how the layered transmission of degenerate villainy in Wildfell Hall actually tends to augment rather than muffle its violence. Its overall effect works, in this sense, to gothicize both its morbid villain and its marital ordeal by erecting around them a cordon sanitaire of reporting script, both at the moment and in later transcription. The device of a muted, neutralizing frame, down through Walton’s script in Frankenstein, to say nothing of the damage control and trauma management of Lockwood’s diary in Wuthering Heights, is a staple of extreme melodrama rather than a drain on its affect. But the question of formal transmission scarcely stops there. For within the past tense of this plot as a courtship novel, once Helen’s story is “delivered” not orally but as transmitted text, its status is refigured as fair trade. At which point the stress—and strain—on questions of mediacy, inscription, and transference grow only the more dense and explicit. More directly in Wildfell Hall than in any other novel of the period, the profit economies of narrative fascination are laid bare: so bare as to seem exploded by metaphoric exaggeration. The set-up is so preposterous that it inevitably self-detonates. But what is left after its premise has collapsed under its own contorted weight? What is the novel really suggesting about the reading of its own story? The narrator’s addressee, the citified Halford, despite what Markham reminds him (and thus tells us) about his correspondent’s native reserve, has originally shared with Markham, for which he is thanked on the novel’s fi rst page, a “very particular and interesting account of the most remarkable occurrences of your early life” (9). But having once given such an “account,” Halford, in a different

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sense, now keeps accounts. And calls in debts. When Markham was too tired, at the time, to respond in kind with a recitation of his own, and excused himself by saying he had nothing comparably interesting to relate, his interlocutor not only became peeved and sullen on the spot but has harbored a grudge ever since, we are to think, casting a pall over their subsequent correspondence. Months later, with Markham housebound alone during rainy weather—buried in reveries, old letters, and his voluminous musty journal—the time seems right to make amends with a more than full response. This is one of three things: silly, strategic, or parabolic. Or a little of each. Either Halford is a petulant boor obsessed with emotional bookeeping in a ledger of human interchange not yet balanced, or else Markham is overstating the demands made upon him for the redemption of his narrative debt, doing so in order to mask his own pleasure (or relief) in telling. Or else—if narrative is contriving to emphasize twice over the satisfactions of formal written textuality, crafted and meticulous, by contrast with casual oral reminiscence—then the novel seems bent on generating a double fable of its own reception. Can we possibly believe, for starters, that Halford would have preferred an extemporaneous, rambling account of Markham’s past, with a hazy paraphrase of the heroine’s desperate diary, itself containing as it does the harrowing melodramatic core of the narrative—would have preferred this to the several-hundredpage transcription of highly accomplished literary writing that the plot unbelievably provides him? Wasn’t the novel as such, under whatever disguise and by any other name, well worth waiting for? At this early point at least, the sanguine purchaser of the new Acton Bell volume, for one, has every reason to hope so. The novelistic valence of these London-bound mailings is, however, unconvincingly sidetracked into a concern not for justifying, against all probability, their indefatigable length and writerly flair, but rather (and true to gothic form) for defending their authenticity as strict report. So that Markham closes his prefatory cover letter (and metatextual cover story) by assuring Halford as follows: “Among the letters and papers I spoke of, there is a certain faded old journal of mine, which I mention by way of assurance that I have not my memory alone—tenacious as it is—to depend upon in order that your credulity may not be severely taxed in following me through the minute details of my narrative” (10). In the continuing subtext of economic metaphors, there will be no “tax” on the reality quotient as long as the “account” gets paid in full. If we fall for this windy notion of a fact-checking source text, or even notice it as any-

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thing more than a transparent convention, we are stationed to appreciate the redoubled veridical weight attached to the unedited inclusion, deep within his epistolary reminiscence, of another more privileged fi rstperson text: namely, Helen’s extraordinary diary, reproduced verbatim, and for a second time, from his own past record of it. Recapitulating one of the origins of novelistic fiction in the epistemological valence of epistolary confession, here is yet another novel whose central plot is at once masked and authenticated in diary form. Helen’s is indeed a private journal stretched out now, in Markham’s recopied holograph, across twenty-eight “chapters” of its own (as he calls them) rather than merely referred to for confirmation. But documentary veracity can hardly be expected to settle an issue that has always seemed—to the novel’s detractors at least—dramaturgical instead. Or even ethical. Well before we arrive at the inner diary, then, we are prepared for its deficit in presence by a fullblown prototype of narrative compensation. The effect is as diff used as it is purposeful. At the manifest expense of unmediated oral exchange for her extended revelation scene, and stretching the inner diary to virtual novel length (four chapters longer than her previous novel, Agnes Grey), Brontë has, for one thing, translated her story more openly into its own condition as a written narrative. She has thus converted the most interested party on the dramatic scene, the riveted Markham, into an immobilized reader, extrapolating from his position into that of another reader reading (the laconic but impatient Halford) and, through him, to our own direct response—all this in order precisely to secure, rather than in any way to abdicate from, the emotive force of disclosure. At the same time, Brontë has generalized our identification with Markham in the first place by underspecifying the scene of his own reception, let alone Halford’s later. Each locates in turn merely the unpictured site—or, more abstractly yet, just the general condition—of domestic reading. In the original space of “my room,” that is, Markham, sitting down before the table, “opened out” the manuscript—which he calls in the language of windfall profits “my prize”—and, in a further loaded phrasing, “delivered myself up to its perusal” (15:128). The ceding of consciousness is total: a wholesale giving over to the gift received. Moreover, in the process of relaying Helen’s story later to Halford, by postal delivery, he does to Helen’s manuscript what Brontë has done to the longer narrative that contains it, dividing it up by chapters and bestowing upon them titles of their own. Or, in other words, novelizing it: “It begins somewhat abruptly, thus—but we will reserve its commencement for another

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chapter, and call it,—[The Warnings of Experience]” (15:128; his eccentric punctuation for this imposed format). If we hadn’t come to this realization sooner, here it would have become unmistakable that Brontë is narrating the story of fictional impact itself as parceled out by plot.

“Delivered Myself Up”: Plot’s Reciprocal Transaction As narratography registers that phrasal switchpoint of “delivery” between writing and reading acts, we find the two performances meeting on the common vehicular ground of textual transit, textual duration. For the phrase “delivered myself up”—in other words, gave myself over to what has been given me—suggests exactly recognition’s answer to the relay of confession. In this case, prose’s transferential impact derives from its simultaneous capture of two contradictory—or at least colliding—vectors of desire, at once expressive and receptive. What is relayed fi rsthand for Markham’s reading in Wildfell Hall is a novel-length document whose veracity leaves no shred of doubt in one reader’s mind at least—with the text’s unstinting picture of a rapacious and degraded boor of a husband who despises everything in his wife that shines. Even when the story is painful, it throws her heroic profi le into high relief. Halford is bound to see this too, when perusing the documents years later. Reading will have its costs but also its rewards. For beyond the otherwise inert circumlocution already quoted from Markham’s justificatory rhetoric about a levied strain on belief (“in order that your credulity may not be too severely taxed”), with its added etymological hint of “credit” in “credulity,” are further and yet more unmistakable signals of narrative material as an economy of exchange, soon to be driven not only home but over the top. What Brontë does, in net effect, is repackage the tendered sexual contract (Helen to Markham: If you still want a marriage after reading about this one, and can bide your time a while longer, I’m yours) as the sociable bargain at one remove (Markham to Halford: You’ve told me your story, I owe you mine in return). Yet this last, we are to find, is a generalized social contract (again quasi-anthropological) that becomes, however homosocial in its fetishizing of the woman’s story as the legal tender between men, at the same time renucleated as a familial transaction. Such is an exchange in which address is met by intimacy in the delivering up of—and over to—a fascination that always comes with a (psychic) price. At the close of the prologue (comprised of the fi rst signed and dated letter to London), the demanding Halford is rendered as a mere placeholder for all narrative craving. The man of constitutional reserve who

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nonetheless requires a story as the fulfi llment of a gentleman’s agreement is in this way first and foremost a representation of the urban(e) bookbuyer: true statistical destination for the marketed fiction of the rural novelist. Whatever he has done in advance to deserve a story—in this case, and against his predilections, by telling one of his own—the novel opens, as in a sense all novels do, with the bargain already struck. Right from the start, that is, the “not naturally communicative” (34) recipient of a novel-length story may well seem mute by the very “nature” of the fictional institution’s one-way circuit of dissemination, his silence emblematic. Between him and the story’s participant witness, the narrator, lies the debt of plot as the latter’s promissory note (the I-owe-you-one gambit). In tune with the general circulation of stories in the mass mediation of Victorian leisure, narrative production is always in arrears. And impersonal. Confronted with this invoiced backlog of overdue story, and despite the epistolary fiction of direct address, Markham writes momentarily of (as well as to) his epistolary recipient, identified as “friend,” in a strangely disengaged third person, for “I am about to give him a sketch—no, not a sketch,” but rather (again) that “faithful account” (1:10). The narrative contract gets odder yet in the tacit specifications of its subclauses. Nothing has transpired between this opening gesture and the start of the next chapter, nothing that we know of, to reassure Markham that Halford is satisfied. Yet the hope that this is true (and given the quality of the tale, its virtual certainty) returns him to the almost hallucinatory immediacy of direct address, for “I perceive, with joy, my most valued friend, that the cloud of your displeasure has passed away . . . and you desire the continuation of my story” (2:22; emphasis added). With the language of calculated worth transferred to the story’s recipient, does the narrator’s perception appear somehow clairvoyant? Or simply axiomatic for the institution of reading? The recipient is given no voice, just a presumed desire fulfi lled in the moment of its imputation. From here on, everyone is content simply to read on, you and me and Halford alike—without having our vested interest further solicited or coddled or thrust upon attention in any way, except for an occasional moment of rhetorical address. This is to say that as the narrative begins, we are drawn in as readers by being, like Halford, subtracted from the action we desire, factored out. We are eager to hear, not of our own eagerness, but of characters and their travails, their desires and dashed hopes. So it is that in this protracted opening apostrophe (in the form of epistle), Halford seems confirmed in his role as nothing more, nor less, than a delegate of the Victorian public at large: written off as genuine character by hav-

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ing words put into his mouth through text. (N.B. Anything further we are to learn about the relation of Halford as reader to Markham as writer will only enter into this preassigned format of interchange, converted in process from local characterization to emblem of mass response.) Halford, then, is simply the site of a story’s accessibility as such. By extrapolation, of course, this place-holding function entails a book-buying as well as story-reading public. The two men’s interchange becomes— because it has been nothing more than this from the start—an allegory of commercial dissemination itself, in all its simultaneously figured hearthside intimacies. By the end of the fi rst chapter, with one scene-setting stretch of narrative prose behind him, Markham the recountant throws open the full vault of his fiscal tropes, cashing them in with spendthrift abandon. Having called the chapter “the fi rst installment of my debt,” he then goads the figure into an almost baroque conceit: “If the coin suits you, tell me so, and I’ll send you the rest at my leisure: If you would rather remain my creditor than stuff your purse with such ungainly heavy pieces—tell me still, and I’ll pardon your bad taste, and willingly keep the treasure to myself ” (2:20). Hoarded “treasure” is giving itself one last chance to remain outside the circuit of contractual exchange. Compare this to the first paragraph of Anne Brontë’s previous novel, Agnes Grey, where the “nugget” of “instruction” in all literature is mentioned in passing as its “treasure.”  Whereas a single metaphoric fi llip does the trick in that case to emphasize literature’s extranarrative yield, there is an entirely new premium on fiscal figuration in Wildfell Hall, imposed by a dominant discursive system of credit and recompense. We have embarked on the inexorable laws of marketplace rather than parlor. Given the structure of debt rather than desire in this case, the economic figure swells to a kind of imaginative usury of returned outlay, forcing a repayment with compound interest. An overdue narrative exchange seems in this way to have been unilaterally renegotiated to the mutual satisfaction of both parties. The idiomatic “piece”—a term crossing between literary production and legal tender—is the least of it. Even Markham’s valediction over his signatory mark, “Yours immutably,” borrows from the figuration of precious metal to suggest the unalchemizable state of essential and unalloyed human substance: the supposed material base of all narrative mimesis. As a rule, narrative does not depend solely on the chain of evidentiary command and its derivative line of receptive descent—even in the case of so-called frame(d) tales offering ingrown parables to this effect. Roland Barthes long ago wanted to show that such structures were less fi xed than one might think, and that some of them were likely to refigure their own

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more complicated transactions with the reader. As it happens, Barthes’s mercantile paradigm of the bourgeois text as “contract narrative” finds its most explicit Victorian incarnation in the metaphors, though not exactly the structure, of Anne Brontë’s Wildfell Hall, whose narrator is the signator both of the letters and of the bargain he thereby fulfi lls with their posting. Th is is the case even though in its central narrative act Brontë’s story does not, unlike Balzac’s, either intend or entail a further tariff in reception—but seems to have come before us already as a debt settled. Famously, the auditing Marquise in “Sarrasine” (Barthes’s proof text in Balzac) is being titillated by the narrator’s erotic tale—or such was the plan, at least—until its gendered violence shuts down her desire entirely. We cannot be sure what effect on Markham’s desire Helen may or may not intend by sharing her prose—other than offering an explanation for desire’s unactionable status so far, given her marital state. But the epistolary novel that shares her story in turn with Halford by offering a careful retailing of its every word (and one chooses the verb carefully) is already the elicited payback, as we know, for a previous act of narrative outlay. Halford has “shared” some personal tale or other, and now the exertion has become coercive. Every gift has a price. So even here Barthes’s paradigm would seem to apply at an underlying level of assumption. Stories not only beget stories but are recurrently sprung from an established culture of storytelling. For Barthes, that culture is always in a definitive sense economic. Brontë’s novel bears this out even in its difference from Balzac’s ironic frame. As a published fiction impersonating a posted nonfiction manuscript, its pages have been produced in response to an epistolary dunning where the promised and overdue payment is expected in the currency of narrative voice itself. If the economic model stands confirmed, then, it is by half measure. With no expected recompense, even in kind, for this always belated telling in Brontë’s structural logic, half of Barthes’s exemplary template may seem lopped off in advance, or already ex post facto. But in fact the application of “contract narrative” to Brontë’s logic goes deeper than any superficial narratology of sender and receiver, which was the reigning structuralist paradigm (via Greimas and others) in the moment out of which Barthes was writing. On the face of it, Barthes’s commentary develops a theory of the frame(d) tale mounted precisely to distinguish it from “the so-called principle of ‘nested narratives’ ” (89). Moving beyond the received vocabulary of structuralist narratology, that is, Barthes detects instead the dynamic leveling of container and contained as well as of message and delivery. In Barthes’s effort to find reported

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action structured—rather than just plotted—according to the transactive protocols of reporting itself, and vice versa, no “hierarchy” (89) is established in narrative levels, no subordination assumed. Whether framed or framing, each phase or level of story admits—and transmits—the libidinal economy of the other. In the spirit of Balzac’s irony, we may well say that each becomes the other’s frame-up in process. When the narrative drive is folded over itself in this way, or tucked into itself, story can only be understood as “product and production” alike (89), or in other words both “merchandise and commerce” (89): packaged happenings and their invested transfer. By what Barthes calls a “dizzying device,” the narrative thus “becomes the representation of the contract upon which it is based” (89), its condition of possibility written into view. In Barthes’s attempted unsettling of a structuralist model of container and contained, his work might be seen to anticipate the immanent relativity of the “stack” in recent narratological thinking, with each plane of attention wholly enveloping us until dropped back to its platform within the circuit of the same program. What his idea of the “contract narrative” certainly does is to highlight the oddity of Brontë’s comparable trope when doggedly exfoliated within a given novel. It isn’t just that Brontë’s epistolary set-up has prearranged a storytelling debt so as to justify an extravagant return. Nor that she has pressed the notion of confessional accountability into a full-scale system of textual exchange value. More to the point, we sense these metaphors as deriving from a kind of narratival unconscious in the normative prosecution of nineteenth-century fiction at large. Wildfell Hall issues quite unabashedly from a Victorian discourse of print interchange, dependent on a general circuit of investment and withdrawal that takes shape as a more or less intimate mode of emotional give and take. The novel as genre circulates as a coin of exchange wholly caught up, therefore, in an underlying psychoeconomy of narrative. Brontë comes almost to the brink of explicitness, as if to remind us that we’ve paid good money to be harrowed. Outer and inner narrative thus gloss and interrogate each other in respect to the transferential relays of reading. Markham to Halford: I know how much you want this, so here goes. Helen to Markham: I know that nothing else permitted to us will do, so here is my story as a written text. At both levels, the desires of the Victorian textual public are both configured in disguise and thereby conscribed by indirect exemplum. Only when the internal story itself has unfolded in terms of reading, its prevention, and even its false suspicion, however, is the text ready to close round on itself with a further sociological inference about the domestic confraternity of mass consumption.

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Episodes form the Abyss: “Have You Been Reading Novels? ” Right from the start, as we’ve seen, Brontë’s story works overtime—and not always underground—to invoke the parameters of its own public consumption as novel. Prepared by an emphasis on verbal intake and its deflections in Markham’s establishing narrative of the diary is a frustrated scene of reading within it, or rather a sustained crisis of reading, that resumes the structure of reception from inside the sufferings of narrated duration. Associated with the heroine’s own blocked access to the diversions of literary plot, this violent scene lends early shape to the grotesque conjugal mismatch recounted by Helen’s aggrieved text. The moment of reading in question (or, more exactly, its mean-spirited interruption) thus stands out as an event of textual mediation negated by plot. It would certainly contribute to exemplifying in this way Leah Price’s notion of “reader’s block” in narrative representations of the book as material object rather than temporal experience, an object flung away as projectile (or used as barricade) rather than thrown open for immersive pleasure. In narratological terms, and especially given the epistolary apparatus of Brontë’s text, one might see this counter-literary action as the ultimate reduction of novel as spatial form: a blunt objectified missile rather than a pointed missive encountered over narrative time. This scene of book as weapon (conjured, of course, by the textual violence of its report in the diary) has had its ironic reversal carefully set up. Much earlier, when first falling prey to the slick charms of the rakish Huntingdon, Helen confides to her diary that “I cannot enjoy my books, for they have not the power to arrest my attention” (16:130). The caution couldn’t be clearer, even in this (for Helen) exceptional case. It is those not open to books who are most prone to the emotional misjudgments often diagnosed, as in Brontë’s novel, between their covers. For Helen’s lapse of literary attentiveness she will indeed be punished—and by the very marriage to which it renders her vulnerable, where the couple’s growing distance from each other, and Huntingdon’s own “ennui” (24:208), is measured yet again by his own (and far more inveterate) indifference to books, a temperamental imperviousness to their lure. Living strictly for the moment, Huntingdon can abide only quotidian print, so that “he never reads anything but newspapers and sporting magazines” (208). Though with no use for literary reading, he still knows the power of a good erotic story to divert attention—and to infuriate where it cannot titillate. His “favorite amusement” is in this way to “tell me stories of his former amours, always turning upon the ruin of some confiding young

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lady or the cozening of some unsuspecting husband” (24:208). Such is the standard subcultural fare of Victorian light pornography, and the Brontë heroine will have none of it. At fi rst she remonstrates, but then she tries going silent, as if to turn the assaulting narrative into sheer text rather than aggressive interlocution. But she only turns herself into a text instead—and, worse yet, a misinterpreted one, for “he reads the inward struggle in my face, and misconstrues my bitterness of soul for his unworthiness into the pangs of wounded jealousy” (208; emphasis added). Huntingdon becomes the deluded hermeneut of his own auditor’s supposedly triangulated desire. In the process, Helen’s dead metaphors of linguistic decipherment flow straight from her deadened hopes. Just two chapters earlier, the bride-to-be couldn’t wait until mere correspondence with Huntingdon would be replaced by fleshed presence, so that they might “exchange our thoughts without the intervention of these cold gobetweens, pen, ink, and paper!” (22:200). Now she has only inked paper, her own here—as, before, that of published print—to comfort her in what a later chapter title calls that “Dual Solitude” (36:320) of mutual avoidance she shares with her husband during her attempts at book reading. Whereas prose, as erotic go-between, once pandered to an immediate desire, it must now sublimate the cruel betrayal of that desire with the retreat to strictly textual event. In this pivotal scene of combative narrative and sabotaged reading, as soon as the self-serving turpitude of Huntingdon’s autobiographic stories has abated, Helen sneaks back to the protective custody of her letters and books. All the while Huntingdon “could not force himself to read” (24:211), using a book only as a weapon to hurl at his disobedient spaniel. Unmentioned by title, this book, reduced to sheer tool, hits his wife instead, “rather severely grazing” her hand. In an almost parodic way, reading comes between them. Helen now returns to her own reading material in disgust, and he can’t abide it. “What is that book? ” he whines. “I told him.” But not us. All we know is that it is “very” interesting, like books in general. As Helen notes in her diary about this fi rst affective deadlock with her husband: “I went on reading—or pretending to read, at least—I cannot say there was much communication between my eyes and my brain; for, while the former ran over the pages, the latter was earnestly wondering when Arthur would speak next” (24:213). With “communication” blocked, all that is left for Helen is to continue transcribing her anguish in the mute pages of her diary, an act of record she figures to herself as the need to “confess” her growing contempt to “silent paper” (29:243). And it is this all but strictly inward admission that will later ripen into a

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reciprocated marital overture when this same paper, and countless pages like it—in its emphatic materiality but also in its signifying anguish—is transmitted to her suitor (and our eventual narrator) as one step on the return to human interchange. In connection with the ongoing and implacable violence of Helen’s husband, there is an even more intriguing reflexive episode linked not to a real if unnamed book but to a falsely suspected one: a novel in the hands of a too impressionable reader. It is a case of the whole novelistic genre voicing itself through the rhetorical question of a single classbased confusion. As Helen’s bleak story unfolds on her pages in time present, the maid has seen more of it at one point—and its indiscretions behind the scene—than the heroine. Concerned to warn her mistress about the adulterous threat of Lady Lowborough in the house, the servant Rachel seems at first to Helen inexplicably upset. Here is what we get of the fi ltered interrogation scene in the anomalous quotation not of dialogue but of an already indirect discourse, as Helen tries to determine what troubles her maid: “Was she unwell? No. Had she heard bad news from her friends? No. Had any of the servants vexed her? ” (33:297). Illness, commiseration for the distress of others, or pity for one’s own mistreatment—three primary affective registers in the plot of this novel as a whole—are summarily ruled out. And then a return—suddenly and, one has to say, novelistically—to straightforward dialogue: “What then, Rachel? Have you been reading novels? ” (297). No, she swears. But we have been, one novel at least—as the recovery of standard novelistic quotation helps emphasize. And that novel is about to swerve into the most squalid of adulterous melodramas. For readers to recognize this reflexive gesture, including its gentle sarcasm, is only an invitation to recommit yet more knowingly to the charter of classic fiction and its entailed empathies. There was, in short, nothing wrong with Helen’s progressive guesses about her servant. If somebody isn’t in dire straits, then maybe Nobody is: once again Catherine Gallagher’s name for the permeable essence of a fictional personification. Furthermore, if Rachel had been able to throw herself into a novel or two, she would, of course, have been the envy of a mistress almost never able these days to clear her own head for reading. Instead of the free communication with other minds through textual transmission, Helen’s “locking herself in the library” (38:349) is more often the sheer seeking of shelter rather than the retreat to a mediated commerce with the world. But then again who in the world would gravitate to the tremulations of fiction when one is living in a gruesomely melodramatic novel already? The novel violence of

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Victorian fiction is only for those spared the time for it. The inversion at play here—and very much at work—is as conceptually emphatic as it is structurally arresting. Yet again, that is, a metafictional moment in Victorian storytelling—the servant’s suspected submission to the truancy of fiction—bores straight through represented event into the domain of novelistic response itself and its uneven development at origin. Implicated in this passing moment—indeed swiftly recapitulated in miniature—is the much debated eighteenth-century counterplay between a morally elevated and a merely emotionally heightened response to novelistic plotting. In the genre-founding moment, this was pictured as the difference between proffered lesson and engaged identification, tutelary effect and dramatic affect. Yet the first requires the second, depends upon the emotive impact it must eventually transcend into lesson—or at least into meaning. Genre theory and cultural historicism here converge, for instance, around the complementary findings of Michael McKeon and Catherine Gallagher. For McKeon, the self-justificatory didacticism of early novels rests, in the first rather than the final place, on a sympathetic identification with characters. This is what early novelists themselves recognized as the sine qua non of engaged reading, though not its terminus ad quem. Such is the inevitable, and quite serviceable, identification that must be at once fostered yet also held in check, lest reading lose the aesthetic distance (not yet so-called) necessary for genuine ethical response. For Gallagher, in whose model the counterswings of a formal dialectic have been largely rewritten as the interchanges of a cultural economy, the very nonentity of fictional characters is what permits us sympathetic access to their private feelings. Here is where political economy rethinks the much softer science of contemporaneous “moral sense philosophy” in her work. Real personhood entails rights of propriety, of property itself, that would forbid too much intimacy of representation as a kind of trespass. Only Nobody’s story is one to which every reader has a right in the marketplace of narration. Yet the exchange value of fiction, as Gallagher closes her final reading of Maria Edgeworth by reiterating, must strike another delicate balance, one to be understood in explicitly fiduciary terms. Whereas in McKeon’s evolutionary dialectics of fictional genres, the novel’s foundational tension is one between, let us say, didacticism and voyeurism, moral pedagogy versus (even while availed by) emotional projection, the emphasis is different in Gallagher, less genre bound—part, instead, of a broader socioeconomic discourse. Hers is certainly a book that could be seen to fulfi ll Reid’s speculative program for a “circumtextual” frame “beyond

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narratology.” Whereas McKeon balances epistemology and ethics within a dialectic that leads on to the emergence of the aesthetic as a novelistic category, Gallagher’s metaeconomy of fictional reading in Nobody’s Story negotiates in closely parallel terms a constantly readjusted tug between instructive recognition and vulnerable internalization. According to the historical debate retrieved differently by each critic, the case is nevertheless strikingly similar. Epistemology willingly compromises with empathy at every turn, empiricism with idealism. The objectively evoked character or event must pass through subjective affect before ever becoming an object lesson, whether positive or negative. For Gallagher, in this sense, Nobody’s story is valorized in its universal availability precisely through the balance struck, time and again, between human exemplum and receptive empathy, between recognized impulse in narrative action and the vicarious feel of its introjection: once more, as in McKeon as well, between didacticism and sympathy or, more broadly, between representational details and their identificatory entailments. But as Gallagher casts the matter in closing, borrowing from Edgeworth’s own economic metaphors of debt and credit, it is just such a continual equilibration that requires the vigilant weighing of fiction’s “interest” against its “principle” (Gallagher’s own wordplay) in resistance to the forfeiting of either. What funds a story, its ethical emphasis, should not, in sum, be mortgaged away too soon in capitalizing on its sheer fascination. But neither can literature hoard its power. If no feelings were put on loan in reading to begin with, there would be no psychic credit either to cash out or renegotiate. Gallagher’s is a dialectic by any other name, but one in which no synthesis is fi xed within the continuing round of a demand instilled by supply itself. Tapped by Brontë’s passing irony about servant reading—when immersed in the book’s larger figurative context of debt, investment, and return—is the whole mercantile face of the rising novel industry as its tropes have become laundered and commonplace by the time of the Victorian fictional institution. Evident here is the genre machine whose collective circuit of emotional outlay and reward is no dearer in the price it exacts than endearing in the rhetoric it installs— except, that is, for the shortchanged scapegoat in this case, the heroine herself: prevented from reading by the events of the reading we’re doing. For when Helen next “took up a book and tried to read,” she found that “my eyes wandered over the pages” so that it was “impossible to bind my thoughts to their contents” (43:387–88). Instead, she can only write—so as one day to be readable. Having “recourse to the old expedient,” she added more lines of output (rather than intake) to “my chronicle” (388), that last

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term so familiar from the documentary prehistory of fiction and now adduced by sedimentation, as if by genre archaeology itself, within its more evolved form as domestic fiction. In its virtually antiquarian complication, hard to miss for any reader then or now, Brontë’s slide, across the same moment of interrogation, from “Had she been ill? ” to “Have you been reading novels? ” speaks novelistic volumes. It is as if a single narrative, well along in the institutionalization of the genre, were fossilizing for a moment the rhetorical choices from which the force of fiction itself arose, in all its originally debated contagions and transferred anxieties.

“Stamped upon my Mind” But the multi-staged parable of reading isn’t over yet, not with the oblique joke about the novel as a carrier of malady and malaise. With Markham’s anything but disinterested reading of the diary itself, the ethical question of reading grows yet more unflattering, so that eighteenth-century fears of suspect titillation and festering vicarious investments may seem coming home to roost. After the secrets of her “silent paper” have been ravaged by her husband, they are received in manuscript by Markham and read, we know, with unstinted curiosity well into the night. Like the brutal husband in a different sense, Markham too is forced to see something of himself in its pages. He finds there the lifted veil of his truest desire, the potential chance of consummation, the wish-fulfi llment scenario of triangulated passion overcome at last by the humiliating degeneration of the rival. For all the unabated misery of the tale, he feels a “selfish gratification” (45:397) in reading on. Embarrassed though he is over his own motives, Markham, in short, wishes Huntington dead—though he can only fully admit as much after the fact, as we’ll see. In like manner, as an audience looking for a satisfying domestic closure, we are chastened in advance for our own investment in the heroine’s release at any cost. To read the denouement in this fashion, as a scene of reading, is no doubt prompted by the way in which a link between the narrator’s feelings and those of his presumptive audience has already been made explicit. Thus Markham’s question to Halford as the diary is wound up, epitomizing the mechanics of readerly identification: “Well, Halford, what do you think of all this? and while you read it, did you ever picture to yourself what my feeling would possibly be during its perusal” (45:402). Perfect—the flaccid, prim diction of “perusal”: an affectation usually associated in this novel with the shallow skimming of a text rather than the throes of fascinated participation. Though the answer to Markham’s own

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rhetorical question is the deflating “most likely not,” can there in fact be any reader able to forget for long that another reader is there before us, in both senses, who is at least as likely to be taken aback by his fulfi lled fantasies of retribution and “poetic justice” as we, novel in hand, could possibly be? Only if we feel at least a little guilty about our readerly interest from here out, that is, do we apprehend the full depth of our commitment until now—in precise contrast to Huntingdon, whose incapacity for reading left only one way to plumb and so prove his soul: deathbed trauma and its spiritual inefficacy. Hard to ignore, then: the inferred sociology of reading so far in this self-staged middle-class aesthetic. We are reminded that servant tastes are closer to the normal consumption of the Victorian readership than is the degenerate indifference of an idle aristocracy. But those norms are about to be tested at their limits by the final wracking decline of the gentried scoundrel, as its report goes beyond the close of the diary to the subsequent letters posted from the sickroom. Given the unrepenting villain’s battle to the death with his own soul, the marriage plot almost pales—at least for chapters at a time—into afterthought. Markham is marginalized by the very drama of the tragedy that indirectly empowers him. Held off for as long as possible, and then unfl inching in the grotesque contours of its object lesson, the scene of Huntingdon’s last tortured days is the true heart and soul of the story for Brontë. As focus of the book’s dramatized religious treatise on divine forgiveness, tacit even in Huntingdon’s contempt for his own afterlife, what takes shape for most of its pages is a spiritually agonized death scene unprecedented even in the mortuary annals of Victorian fiction. It is a scene too painful, we must finally want to think—even as novel readers—to have wished visited upon anyone, even any nobody, scurrilous villain or not. Helen’s final letters about this torment—offering the plot’s run-up to the marital finale—are no more intended for Markham’s eyes than was the diary at the time of composition. They are passed to him through the intermediation of her brother Lawrence, to whom they are addressed— and this without her advance knowledge or approval. An expedient, yes. But whose? Merely Lawrence’s, or Brontë’s too? For the brother, the choice is clear, given Markham’s avid interest in the matter. Lawrence can either laboriously itemize all the gory details of Huntingdon’s further decline, including his sister’s state of mind through it all, or else he can leave her to report it in her own words from bedside. He takes the easy way out. “This mode of procedure”—note the labored, almost euphemistic redundancy—“suited him so well that thereafter he always pursued the

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plan of showing me her letters at once, when I enquired after her, if there were any to show: it was so much less trouble than to tell me their contents” (49:439). We can well imagine Helen having the same thought for expediency in turning over her diary to Markham in the fi rst place. Further, if the brother were actively pandering to Markham’s marital hopes, his tactic couldn’t be more apt. What Lawrence cannot be expected to have guessed, however, is that the would-be lover, our narrator, is taking mental copies of these letters—by which, through tertiary transcription, their gist will later be conveyed to us as novel readers. Explanation, on Markham’s part, arrives in the grammar of Petrarchan eroticism: “I devoured those precious letters with my eyes” (49:439) and “never let them go till their contents were stamped upon my mind” (49:444). Stamped, as if by involuntary impress. The passive grammar escalates yet again in the scene of resulting inscription, when “the most important passages were entered in my diary” (444)—as if through no conscious intervention. The shunt of grammar into the passive voice at this turn marks a narratographic clue to a Victorian myth of narrative transmission as a whole, where a story’s most intense moments seem rendered indelible by the force of their own emotion, rather than by the rhetorical labor of exposition. And yet the heavily padded prose of Markham’s checked (because embarrassed) eagerness for finality tries at times to neutralize the reported tortures of Huntingdon’s last days. “The first of these communications brought intelligence of a serious relapse in Mr. Huntingdon’s illness,” our narrator puts it blandly enough in one of several sentences paraphrasing Helen’s pained report. But as quickly as he can he reverts to her exact words, so that the appended letters feel from here out mostly continuous with the diary we’ve had cited at length and in toto—and do not implicate the would-be new husband in any undue gloating over his predecessor’s fate. As a result, Helen’s writing-to-the-moment comes across unabated. It is almost as if we are placed in unmediated sensory contact with the dying body. “He keeps me night and day beside him. He is holding my left hand now, while I write; he has held it thus for hours sometimes” (49:445). From eventual corpse to handwritten and read text is almost a direct material conduit, with life drained from the punished villain onto the page of renegotiated desire. Having allowed that “no words can describe his anguish,” Helen has closed the previous letter with “I can write no more” (444). But she has soon girded herself again for the task. As introduced by Markham years later to Halford, “the next” letter “was still more distressing in the tenor of its contents” (444), with again that neu-

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tralizing, almost euphemistic diction. Description begins with his own paraphrase: “The sufferer was fast approaching dissolution—dragged almost to the verge of that awful chasm he trembled to contemplate, from which no agony of prayers or tears could save him” (444)—even as each dragged-out torment edges the speaker closer to the marital “verge” or threshold that the first husband’s death will unbar. There follows, in Helen’s own words, “another paroxysm of shuddering horror” and a final burst of “groaning and lamenting” both remorseless and inconsolable, in which state, she is sure, he “cannot linger long” (446). By the time we enter again upon Helen’s own direct discourse for the opening of the last letter, the adverbial phrase “He is gone at last” (447) all but reverberates with the narrator’s own sigh of relief—as well as hers. At last! The place by her side Markham has so long awaited is fi nally vacant. It is only here that her own writing—so vivid in capturing Huntingdon’s living hell on earth, his immanent retribution—moves instead, in a last remedial moment, to refigure the long death watch as a phase of purgatorial cleansing rather than the onset of eternal damnation for the unrepentant soul. For “whatever purging fi res the erring spirit may be doomed to pass through,” Helen, speaking for Brontë’s own doctrinal equivocations, can’t help but hope that divine mercy “will bless it in the end” (447). By internal assonance and syllabic rhyme alone, prose thus enacts rather faintly the swallowing up of the “erring” in all things “purging.” But even those still living in the novel need some purging of their own. When all is over, when the last delirious spasm of the doomed man has subsided, only then does Markham admit what we’ve long suspected, acknowledge it perhaps for the fi rst time even to himself. He admits not only that he has been able to “do nothing to lessen” the “trials” (49:447) of his beloved, but that “it almost seemed as if I had brought them upon her myself, by my own secret desires; and whether I looked at her husband’s sufferings or her own, it seemed almost like a judgment upon myself for having cherished such a wish” (447). The whiff of apocalyptic vocabulary that wafts over this line cannot be accidental. The “judgment” so punishingly visited on the husband for his cruelty—and blasphemy—is partially displaced onto the reader of the wife’s narrative, not for any guilty behavior on that reader’s previous part but for an unsettling complicity in mixed feelings over the blackguard’s rapid decline. As readers, we know the feeling. To call up Frank Kermode’s sense of an ending, apocalyptic judgment and narrative closure have rarely been so covertly ensnared in the knotting off of plot. Or so strategically entrammeled with the logic of response. Anyone engaged with this story, from the level of diary

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through journal to epistolary transcript to print novel, has been tainted with at least a little sadism in response. And that’s exactly because of the way we’ve been invited, by prose alone, to share the narrator’s “frame of mind” via the subtly registered rhetorical adjustments of identification’s verbal machinery.

The Medial “Frame of Mind” To anticipate the thrust of my own epilogue on the submission of novelistic prose to “media study”—and with evidence, at that, from the least gifted or ambitious “stylist” among the fiction writers discussed in these chapters—it is time to resist explicitly an attitude toward the prose of fiction that underlies one of the most influential theories of the novel since Lukács. One can do so simply by remembering that the genre of prose fiction is more in a given case than a dialogic blend of discursivities. It is also a prolonged act of wording. Its hold on that attention involves a recognized linguistic mediation from moment to moment. Th is is not as easy to forget as the criticism finding it easy to dismiss would have us think. Stressing Mikhail Bakhtin’s rejection of the formalist “bottom up” approach, whose narrowly linguistic “poetics” supposedly runs aground when faced with larger story forms, a leading commentary on his work seems to secure his distance from the lexical or syllabic grain of all polyglossia. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, for instance, state without qualm or qualification the fundamental premise of dialogic narratology, whereby the novel is not a lingustic act so much as a genre discourse. “After all, we respond to utterance, not to phonemes; fairy tales and novels, not syntactic or grammatical elements, are what most affect us.”  Really? The effects are not in fact local at all at their most intense and moving? This is just where these coauthors, licensed by the adjectival form of the word from Bakhtin himself, offer up a neologism to label his approach as a “prosaics” rather than a poetics of fiction. By contrast, narratography encounters the text in action: as mediated, via “phonemes” as well as other morphological and grammatical units. By contrast, but not instead. For called out by narratography are decisive facets and increments of the genre effect itself, including here in Brontë, as in Dickens before, its courtship plots and their social teleologies. Even in a lesser stylist like Brontë, the largest arcs of structure can be discovered in the flanging of a single phrase. Early on in Wildfell Hall, the effect is distilled to a low-profi le pun by which the narrator’s “musing” on the texts handed over to him has put him in the right “frame of

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mind” for “amusing his friend” (1:10; emphasis added). Phonetic reciprocity works, almost subliminally, to naturalize the give and uptake of story in its first narratographic indication. Transference is performed before our ears. And this effect—the inherent conversion by novelistic culture of private reflection into mass entertainment—is accompanied by the further phonemic fit between text and its ultimate audience in this same introductory passage, where “my crusty old friend” is identified as the ideal audience for “certain musty old letters and papers” (10; emphasis added). That such echoism is neither brilliant nor salient, nor indeed in any way exceptional, is just the point. Thus does prose deliver itself in the standard broadcast formats of Victorian print media—as part of that Victorian “soundscape” of public culture that tends to be lent no ear by a cultural studies interested only in real or represented—rather than immanently textual—noise. Over fifty chapters later, as Markham journeys by coach to propose to Helen a decent year after her husband’s death, he echoes the dead metaphor of “frame of mind” (1:10) from the opening address to Halford—as it has now been made more nearly accessible to that fictionalized reader in our stead. The “frame” is available at least as “idea” if not for full emotive participation: an idea taken up by the narrator’s correspondent second self—and through him by us. For Markham allows that, after all his prose exertions, it is indeed possible for a reader to have “some faint conception of my frame of mind at the time” (52:472; emphasis added) as he speeds by coach toward Helen. And he seems to be making sure that such a pervasive heightened euphoria is allowed to saturate his own diction. The climactic description of his prenuptial bliss begins with “the very fact of sitting exalted aloft” on the coach ride—which has already turned the “fact” figurative in the split between metaphoric and literal height. It is this tropology of elevated spirits whose syllables now cut the grooves of the remaining evocation. With the hero thus “exalted”—and with “halt” negated there in the kind of false etymology that will dictate the rest of the passage—he is a character rendered unstoppable in his race to his erotic finish line. In such “exaltation,” the mere act of “surveying the snowy landscape and sweet, sunny sky, inhaling the pure, bracing air, and crunching away over the crisp, frozen snow, was exhilarating enough in itself.” Prose friction waxes almost autoerotic in its sufficiency, more than “enough” in itself. Not every reader will catch this, or be caught by it—as with so many things, including so many linguistic materialities. But they are there in narrative writing nonetheless, awaiting the unwary and the vigilant alike. Under the aegis of lexical intension in the case

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before us, the libidinal drive of syllabification itself and its progressivetense grammar has its own psychic arithmetic: exalt + inhale = exhilarate, in a spurious etymology of sincere uplift carried on the routine crinkle of alliteration. Who says a reader doesn’t “respond to phonemes” or to “syntactical and grammatical elements” for that matter, as the very matter of conveyed story? Just as internal and external registers of energy surrender their boundaries in this giddy play of prefi xes, so does this scene as a whole in Wildfell Hall pass from writer to reader in the intake of transmission. With all marital hurdles removed by the same plot that has imposed them, the journey is, and figured as such here, now all but complete. Conjugal anticipation is a “fact” so crucial this time that it must be quite soberly spelled out, even leadenly. For “add to this the idea of to what goal I was hastening, and whom I expected to meet, and you may have some faint conception of my frame of mind at the time” (52:472; my emphasis on a phrase almost too knotted up to decode on the run). Just as the prepositional phrase (“to what”), used as object of another preposition, empties out the center of the locution by exposing its structural vacuum as a strictly pending end, so does the another vacuum await the reader. A merely “faint” idea of the hero’s connubial mentality is on offer: the oldest of narrative tricks, protesting too much so as to force us into insisting that we’ve all been there, that we meet the narrated feeling halfway—with instinctive recognition, conscripted by its very evocation. In the whole rhetorical structure of the text for which this final rhapsodic eff usion is a synecdoche, no pleasure can be dampened by transmission. The writing out of this memory, along with its imagined reading, only channels and enhances its effect, performs and redoubles it. After whatever anomalous violence, desire is continually refamiliarized by identification. It is upon this kind of psychic ground that fellow-feeling is further metaphorized as a family bond. Here the dialectic of genre is found taking a defining Victorian turn. A former pragmatic dichotomy, with its tacit hierarchy, is synthesized anew. One eighteenth-century fictional agenda—to point a moral through the recruiting of empathy—has become in Victorian fiction a self-fulfi lling if also market-confirming circuit. The empathy derived from shared “frames of mind” is now the very point—but generalized to a social ethic in itself. All the while, such vicarious inhabitation of fictional character is avowedly constructed rather than assumed, generated by writing as the very justification of the genre as a print form. The charge of such writing is scarcely diminished by being figured initially as Markham’s own

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sublimating candlelight assignation with the mere signifiers of Helen’s text. Oral delivery would have been exponentially more dramatic? What, again, makes one think so? What makes one think of a textualized event as somehow a diluted intensity rather than the very stuff of novelistic fascination spelled out from within a given plot? For the Victorian audience, such is the near-universal fascination—a commonality therefore natural rather than just cultural, institutional, and commercial—that brings people together (unseen) within the abstract social body of shared imaginative satisfaction. All that remains, in Brontë’s case, is to turn that abstract commonality into a domesticity, by one mode of refiguration or another, and the Victorian novel is home free. Empathy that insists on its own facilitation, rather than prevention, by written text is just what makes a public out of a mass, or, more protectively yet, out of a mob. In eighteenth-century popular narrative, which bred sympathy in order to nurture truth in the form of the middle-class reality effect, human interest was the universal lure of any more particular ethical lesson. In the subsequent institutionalization of Victorian fiction, and in a mostly depoliticized vein still, common interest—shared (and potentially congregating) fascination—is the further lesson driven home. Such is the case with Brontë’s threefold fable of transmissive power—straight through to its final coach ride toward marital closure and domestic settlement. Through it all, prose remains the one and only vehicle by which the reader of such melodrama can come along for the ride. Structural narratology would be quick to diagram the nested format of prose relay in Brontë’s text. Bakhtinian prosaics as well as many of the historicist approaches that his work (along with that of Foucault) indirectly license would map its intersecting social idioms—religious, medical, devolutionary, patriarchal, and so forth—at given junctures. But only narratography would engage the very prose of such junctures as the lexical and syntactic momentum by which plotting gets on with it. Though unmentioned by Lukács as an armature of the genre’s compositional architectonics, it is clear that by his lights this rounding out of form in a prestaging of reception would constitute a weak or even negligible version of totality, contingent and ephemeral, no matter how rhetorically codified. Nor, in the case of Wildfell Hall particularly, would the invested narrator’s at best barely repressed—and intermittently acknowledged—gloating over the terrible death of a marital villain rise to anything like that level of ironic distance that constitutes, for Lukács, the “extreme violence” of great novelistic reflection. We’ve so much seen it coming, this unedifying desire, in our own mounting response that

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we’re almost relieved to be skewered by the same passing irony. The dialectic of desire and violence thus finds its only hint of resolution in the zone of cued reception, unlocalized, circumambient, far from totalizable, but nonetheless architectonic in its formal structure of embedding or superimposition—even before its further anthropological ramifications in kinship patterns. What Brontë does to conscript her audience—and in this case by the abrupt swerves of empathy and recoil—is as much a part of the generic conversion of existence (that is, of representative characters and events) into communal significance as is the notably more engrossing and more profoundly troubled ways in which, for Eliot or Hardy, reception is plotted out from within the very will to narrative violence. So then: in moving from Brontë’s horrific spellbinder to the more complex violations and torments chronicled by Eliot and Hardy, a point of methodological clarification—and continuity. The moment when relevant parameters of the storytelling function are seen to entail a broader sociology of popular consumption is not by any stretch a moment at which either narrative or textual analysis must cede the baton to something different called cultural studies, let alone throw in the towel. Instead, it is where the related considerations of such methods converge upon the very juncture of narrativity and textuality. And do so—summoning a narratographic response in the process—to reconfigure the decisive figural horizon, rather than some immeasurable receding limit, of the Victorian storyteller’s mimetic work. As more than strictly a plot device, the schematic engineering of Brontë’s self-encasing format, improbable and clumsy as it is, becomes on reflection an exemplary blueprint of novelistic response. The pain of duration must be graphed, large-scale and small, on the way to a double compensatory yield, in and beyond the text. Along the axis of event, the inherent violence unleashed over time must be given shape: its span construed as an arc. Along the axis of its retelling, in turn, the gap between report and response must be further spanned as a bridge. Such, indeed, are the architectonic orientations of plot and receipt. Such, too, are the ways that structure turns interpretable. At adjusted levels of magnification, what seem like scholarly cross-purposes can reveal themselves as rather thickly entwined in the mesh of reception. In a frequent if twofold resistance to Brontë’s narrational format, as we’ve sampled it here, there is a latent dialectical tension between aesthetic and ethical judgments: one that can best be resolved—as it would have been for Victorian readers— at the genre level. But this would happen in regard to that contractual

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outward face of genre unexplored by Lukács (and so crucial, even though unspoken, to de Man’s argument with him in the next chapter): namely, its contact in reception. What one comes in this way to recognize is that structural criticism and feminist critique intersect, after all, upon two different facets of the same issue, displaced from the machinery of plot onto the machinations of response. In that critical cause célèbre of the protracted diary insert, the reception of Helen’s bleak tale goes undramatized even as its details are vividly transmitted. And in both respects open to objection. On the one hand, the story is too intense and intimate, and too harrowingly violent, to settle for the supposed placidity of textual dissemination. On the other hand, the story is too personal to become legal tender in a bargain between men. It is the undecorated and unglossed, let alone unvarnished, nature of this private transcription that explains—even years into the new couple’s subsequent marriage—why it can still seem, to dubious readers, like a heartless violation to pass the story on. Again, then, the critical debate diverges from the same bone of contention in the assumed confessional authenticity of the discourse: botched drama versus breached sanctity, miscalculation on Brontë’s part versus her own implicit demurral from the male co-optation of female narrative. The private has gone public either way with its questionable textual turn: whether committed to script without the intimacy of voice, or passed between men in a transmittal without permit. We may eventually realize, however, that the latter violation—not ignored but recognized by structural inference in the text—is the exception that proves the rule, and secures the regime, of the former: pirated intimacy writ large as voiceless institutional narrative. Here lies the plot’s recuperation by genre at two strata of apprehension: first by the suspended interdict on invaded privacy, then by the troping of that condition as a parafamilial bond so genre-determined, we are now to see, that it replays the novel’s own emergence as domesticating operation from the cultural valence of those prenovelisltic “secret histories” explored by McKeon. As usual, Lukács can be brought into fullest alignment with more recent genre theory like McKeon’s and Gallagher’s through the question of structural totality—and its defaults. Certainly no novelistic subject could more fully suffer her own objectification (the chief reversing turn in Lukácsian irony) than when, quite beyond her husband’s demeaning treatment of her, Helen tries to bring some order to the long nightmare by writing it all down, textualizing her own experiential self, turning her “intelligible” and focalizing I into an “empirical” object and victim. No knowledge is wrung from this reversal, nor any

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totalizing design, just the steady fact of abjection, diurnally endured and inscribed. And no ulterior motive. It only later falls out that when Helen offers Markham her diary, she is offering all there is left of her at that pass: not the proof of damaged goods but the objectified subject she has become. She is offering, that is, the only intimacy, almost clinical, she can at this point promise: unfl inching self-witness.

Going Public: Familiarization by Exchange At the level of genre, we are by now in a position to understand the imputed dramaturgic flaw in the novel—its supposed staving off of emotional human contact by the merely written story—as being linked quite directly with the de-eroticized familial impact that its structure of reinscription seems meant to refigure in broader institutional terms. In novel after harrowing novel, the domestic body politic of a Victorian readership is fashioned, sustained, and perpetuated—as with the family itself—over the body of the woman as generative token of desire and exchange. Her body: living or dead. Her violation: always in the interest of the reader. We began examining in Little Dorrit how the mother’s missing person (and her suppressed letters)—long after her remembered body has been converted from that of lover to mother to solitary inmate to corpse—is silenced and internalized as the very price of the second-generation marriage plot. More typically, it is an on-stage rather than off-stage victim who rivets attention as the very stuff of familial—or socialized— perpetuation. But after the sufferings of flesh and spirit into which her first marriage has sunk her, Brontë’s Helen—withdrawing from the scene of her own comprehension as narrative subject—chooses this time around, with Markham, not to put her body on the line, or not yet, but only her inked words. For Markham, then, to recopy those words and pass them on to a male reader in another household is less an expropriation of their female source than a proof of their domesticating function as told tale. Years removed from Helen’s time of trial, this prolonged gesture of epistolary address to Markham’s dear if demanding reader doesn’t feel, in regard to the woman’s story, like a molestation or a psychic rape. In fictional terms, it is the very name of the game. The sting is defused by genre, where invaded privacy becomes empathy. Here, again, is where the received public form, and forum, of Victorian fiction strives to normalize its own redoubled scene of violation and trespass, first the husband breaking in on Helen’s private words, then the novel breaking out with them. If, as cultural premise,

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sexual and hence familial continuance itself requires the initial exchange of a woman from sister and/or daughter to exogamously contracted wife, in the novel this is the concern, first of all, of narrative plotting. Stories of a melodramatic Victorian cast are passed around—and down—in a quite different sense, of course, from the exchange of women, but with an oddly similar effect in regard to that frequent female privacy they may seem (but never really) to ravage and to that patrilineal continuity they sustain: a noncarnal knowledge turned inside out for wider consumption and presumptive empathy. The figural effect of this, as we need finally to remark in closer narratographic detail, is made to seem less like random titillating gossip in Markham’s case than like the anecdotal foundations of an extended family unit. It has been suggested by a recent critic that the death of the aristocratic slacker in making way for the bourgeois suitor centers the novel not on the woman’s story at all but on evolving prototypes of masculinity in the Victorian middle class. The genre implications of such social history would not be far to seek. In this respect, one calls to mind McKeon’s sense of aristocratic versus progressive ideology, interlocked as it is with a dialectical tension between idealism and empiricism, as surfaced most prominently in the adjudications of birth (class) versus worth (ethics). This gets played out by Brontë in another key, not so much in Lukácsian “architectonic” terms as in explicitly architectural ones. These are terms that would come to the fore in Victorian fiction, for instance, in the ideological tension between the ancestral manor house and the new middle-class domestic interior that succeeded it as predominant plot locus. For McKeon, any such binary would be a matter less of narrative setting than of genre mindset, where “the deep interiority of characters often is disclosed in complex association with that of houses” (Secret History, 710). The relation between the house of fiction and its included homes is in fact typified for McKeon by such terms of early modern domestic architecture as “privy chamber” and “common passage” (710). Victorian evidence needn’t be entertained by his historical argument to be of interest for its genre determinations. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, for example, is named for the place of its own devastations—not for Lockwood, the dim intermediary, as The Tenant of Thrushcross Grange. Her sister’s novel takes its title, however, from just such an unspecified inhabitant of a retail property. It is named not for the aristocratic manor where Huntingdon dies in gentried isolation but rather for the rented house where Helen moves to escape him before the last phase of his decline. Wildfell Hall is not where she writes her diary, then, but merely the transitional site from which it is dispatched

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to its first reader. On the way toward a yet more dematerialized locus of domestic affi liation in the metropolitan reading act, the book may thus seem named for that leased or sublet space of narrative communication that is always, for a visitor like Markham in our stead, tenanted by attention alone. Apart from any valorized allegorization of domestic space—of domus as ethos—Brontë’s novel houses its structure of reception within an atmosphere of literary commerce. Almost counterintuitive at fi rst, perhaps, that’s what all those fiduciary tropes of trade and coinage and profit and return seem there for: to keep the factory of Victorian fiction in view even in the midst of its sublimation by intimacy and surrogate presence. For the institution must in this way be figured (and so derealized) before it can then be made to appear more akin to the aura of domesticity than to the produce of industry. There lies the second phase of Brontë’s metaphorics. Storytelling is like a negotiated bargain that’s also like a gift, securing a community that it begins by presuming. That’s no doubt why it is through the mediation of Helen’s brother, no less, that her would-be lover gets more of her nested story than she intends, long before another male confidant gets to read all of it in a fresh hand, a fresh transcription. In all this slotting, stacking, and rebracketing, the fraternal bond of disclosure feathers its own narrative nest. Weighing and measuring the fiscal tropes that accumulate around this ideological turn, narratographic attention—metaphoric, textual—resists any such naturalizations of the storytelling bargain. It thereby brings these metaphors into conjunction, and precisely as read, with the competing paradigm of family intimacy and reciprocal immediacy that makes every Victorian reading—of manuscript or print, and at whatever distance—a veritable affair of the hearth: centripetal, clannish, consolidating. The novel’s version of an epic of the tribe. To this end, and only near the end, the missing puzzle piece is eased into place. With nothing explicitly said about it as a metanarrative turning point, we may realize only belatedly that Markham’s sister Rose, who first called her brother’s attention to the charms of Helen Huntingdon, new tenant in the neighborhood, has herself been married, at some unspecified date after her brother’s wedding, to—of all people, and in order the better to represent all readers—that brother’s present London correspondent. It is this couple to whom Mr. and Mrs. Markham make an annual city visit, bringing news from the countryside. As does the latest Yorkshire novel by a Brontë sister, for that matter. Halford’s claim on Markham, then, more familial than strictly personal, isn’t entirely with-

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held until this point, just muffled by phrasal deflection. It is swathed at the start in the most wordy and obfuscating of details—and has soon gone strictly tacit. This, one suspects, so that it can emerge in the end as a vital function rather than a self-evident condition of narrative work. Surprised on the last page of the novel, as we might well be, to fi nd Halford living with Markham’s long-forgotten sister in the metropolis, we may look back to see what we missed—or forgot. Nothing in the opening letter of the epistolary frame, certainly: where Halford is made to seem like a craving recluse, fetishizing the stories of others to fi ll a vacuum in his own emotive makeup. But there it is, the clue, lurking forgettably and rather obliquely in the first chapter: the muted and dispensable allusion we no doubt put from mind long ago. We readily forgive ourselves, that is, for failing to retain this give-away aside—since it passes more like a throwaway, as uncompelling as it is unpursued. On her fi rst mention in the narrative, mannered and roundabout, here is the relevant allusion to Rose’s beauty in the addressee’s once and future eye: “I need not tell you that this was my sister Rose. She is, I know, a comely matron still, and, doubtless, no less lovely—in your eyes—than on the happy day you first beheld her” (1:12; Markham’s emphasis). Eager for some taste of plot, we no doubt skip right over this. Yet these and related circumlocutions are so loopy that they ultimately inscribe the novel’s whole social field as a closed domestic circle.  For what makes Halford near kin to the narrator, as we say “closely related,” is not Rose so much as the shared narrative that intervenes between her early entrance and Halford’s never explicitly named status as “brother-in-law.” It is the law of genre itself that, at one remove, weds the narrator with his reader. Unhesitant telling first generates the “intimacy” of their relationship and then finds that connection inferred (well before named) as if it were in part the result of a solely narrative or epistolary rather than an indirectly familial entailment. The legally sanctioned connection is ready to be made explicit, in other words, only when the transaction is complete, the rural scribe no longer in arrears, the story dispensed, posted, and presumably received. For oral delivery and its called-in debt, the “contractual response” requires a delivered manuscript to dispatch the obligation. But without a larger context in the novel’s “architecture,” that trade-off would have registered simply as barter, primitive, dead-ended. Such quantifiable rather than qualitative transactions couldn’t pretend to found or sustain a community, as Victorian fiction does. Surely that must be one of the reasons why the narrator’s strictly contractual “bond” was made to seem so forced and unlikely in the onus

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of its paperwork, chapter by transcribed chapter (as they were explicitly called). The supposedly better reason, the kindred bond, needs time to emerge as a kind of figurative ratification. Effect is backdated to cause. After the long wait by Halford for Markham’s transcript, that is, just the fact of his receiving it at last—simultaneous of course with our reading of it—seems to make him family. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. The story thus unfolds as the fostering (rather than the proof) of a spontaneous fi liation that begins in the idle curiosity of narrative interchange. To put it in straightforward Lukácsian terms: there is nothing organic or “constitutive” about such a family, whether as kinship system or as a trope of readership; it is simply “regulative.” By such arbitrary systems of circulation and connectedness—forged by narrative curiosity, even empathy—is a cultural circuit yet again naturalized: in this case literate narrative culture as the site of those nonorganic ties that bind. The verbal basis of this binding, linguistic as well as narratival, is nowhere made clearer than in the plot’s final permissive nod to transmission, licensing the going-public of a private ordeal. At just this turn, therefore, a final narratographic disjuncture may stand as exemplary narratological flash point: exemplary because wavering and evanescent, flashing past in a momentary double-take. This is the ambiguous rift—between phonetic and graphic signifier—located along exactly that great divide of (mediated) narrative past and discursive present. The moment arrives just before the end, with our narrator once again addressing his remediated epistolary text through Halford to us, and with the following implicit gesture of permission: I am reading and copying out this letter of Helen’s to Lawrence again, even as I once read it in the first place before committing it to memory; I am, in short, reading it into evidence for you. In this manner of transit, the letter’s gist is turned over to Halford free and clear, no strings attached. Words to this effect are inferred, if via far fewer words, in this last second-person address from narrator to his citypent reader. “I read it and so may you” (47:423). As we saw in Dickens, lazy grammar may trigger a braced narratography. I once read it and so may you choose to read it. That makes fine sense in context but faulty syntax in the given elliptical phrase. But, then again, Markham must be reading it now (then) in the present tense, while transcribing both it and his remarks about it. Indeed, anything but two present tense verbs in the elliptical parallel would produce a colloquial solecism. The linguistic paradigm of conjugation might here seem to be caving in around one of the most radical homographic ambiguities in English-language reading: the tense of “read” itself, with long or short e respectively, in the preterite

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or present tense form of the verb. Instead, what Brontë’s micronarrative prose seems offering is a laminate of two time frames within one inferential “frame of mind.” Far more close-grained than what Todorov long ago dubbed, by a distantly linguistic model, the grammar of narrative, in this case we find the language of emplotment pivoted around the metanarrative of fictional grammar itself lodged in a redoubled transitive verb. With the immediate present of our own attention being extrapolated in this way as well, every novel reader rather than manuscript reader is there, nowhere and everywhere, waiting like Halford not so much to be conveyed a tale from the past—even one already read, remembered, and transcribed somewhere in another phase of that same past time. We wait instead to read along (here and now) with such writing as if via the shared medial energy of its witness. Such, of course, is a mystified condition of fiction taken to psychotic extremes in Poe’s “Tale” of a relived compositional moment rather than its subsequently deciphered words. In Brontë’s novel rather than Poe’s “arabesque,” we are concerned with more standard deviations in reading’s internal measures. Yet whatever a novel’s inset reframings of textual energy, genre continues to offer an outer historical frame. Hence Lukács. Hence McKeon. In each, genealogy may at times feel immanent in a given text while at other times finding itself downplayed. Most recently, McKeon has investigated a genre-buttressed domesticity, in fiction down through Austen, as involving sequestered or forgotten narrative precedents in the so-called “secret histories” of a previous discursive moment, including the roman à clef of private scandal as well as the behind-the-scenes exposé of political intrigue (Secret History, 469–73). The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is perhaps the most notorious Victorian example of the former, reworked by embedding as a courtship story. It is certainly the novel whose tropes of reception owe most to the family secret with which it goes public into print. With a sympathetic ear always waiting in the wings of response as the narrator’s virtual brother under the law of genre, the confessional narrative that risked airing (in thin disguise) the saddest of Anne Brontë’s domestic tragedies—the fatal disaster of her own real brother’s alcoholism—labors in a different key to keep the story, as fiction, all in the Victorian family after all. This is where method has entered at the cue of genre. Narratography looks to the fit and slippage of this encompassing structural conceit. It engages in process with the narratively-paced figures of economy and transferential exchange, of identification and distance, that labor to hu-

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manize such delegated interest in the schematically domestic vein of a mass Victorian genre. That engagement is a way of reading, above and beyond the recurrent miseries of plot, what we can usefully recognize— after its prototype in structuralism’s “substance of the expression”—as the more directly hermeneutic “content of the form.” Rooted in a conception very much like Lukácsian “architectonics,” this is where the failed human totality of social realism yields to the harmonizing gestures of social ritual, where the logic of narrative gives way to the communal logistics of reading. Absent the integrated community of the epic past, even nature is no longer organic for Lukács in any accessible literary sense: neither terrestrial nature nor, in Lukács’s terms, its social double in bourgeois “second nature.” Abstract and regulative rather than organic, coherence must be contrived rather than revealed. Produced. To repeat this chapter’s earlier paraphrase of Lukács, the “inserted” detail must be concerted by aesthetic will, orchestrated: harmonized rather than found already in tune. For the tropology of novelistic reception in Victorian texts, it is often the figure of the domestic family—halfway house between biological nature and sociological culture—that appears to humanize the narrative institution as a tenanted reading space. And strives to give that space a manifest axis—linking writing to reading within a functional architectonics of textual desire itself. Such is the novelistic desire that works toward a meaning well beyond, for instance, the demeaning of marital passion in a plot like Brontë’s. George Eliot’s more ambitious and far sadder novel, The Mill on the Floss, tries coaching that delivery system of textual desire from deeper inside rather than outside a transmissible story world, with its own “gratuitous” and even more incommensurate violence. It does so by stationing a nonnarrating character (no narrator, that is, in any official or structural sense) between us and the heroine—along the very channel of response—a character who is nevertheless bent on turning being into meaning across the third term of inscribed “belief.” The strained brilliance brought to bear on this attempt by Eliot, indeed necessary to it, is a measure of just how fragile an adequation there is, for novelistic form, between human duration and—all organicism long gone—any principle of organization that feels more than merely connived by rhetoric.

4 Of Time as a River t h e m i l l of de si r e

The mood-conditioned pseudo-lyricism of the novel of disillusionment betrays itself most obviously by the fact that subject and object are sharply separated in the experience of remembering. The harsh and depressing quality of such works is therefore due not so much to the intrinsically sad nature of the content as to the unresolved dissonance of the form—to the fact that the object of experience is constructed in accordance with the formal laws of drama, whereas the experiencing subject is a lyrical one. —luk ács, theory of the novel (127)

In George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), “the experiencing subject” is so “lyrical” a “one” that it splits in two, torn in half by its own desires. Timing the heroine’s rending decline, cadenced language tries rising to the occasion of a lyric defeat that the reader’s pity alone can justify. Only reading can make over the “unresolved dissonance of form” into a signifying thematic shape, its violence shaded off by the effects of style. Straining the fi laments of phonemic linkage in a transliteration of high Romantic sonority—and this in the attempted formal rescue of narrated devastation—Eliot’s novel stretches the rhythmic demands of empathy to new rhetorical lengths. Her narrative emerges as an unprecedented testing of the reader’s disposition toward the ethical momentum of narrative prose itself. For us in the process, it is a methodological test as well. Narratology (as we know) clocks both the wide arcs and minor epicycles of plotting on their way toward closure, “resolved” or otherwise. Narratog(127)

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raphy (so we’ve seen) locks in on the resistances and hidden impulsions set up by the force of writing along the way. Writing as read. The psychoanalytic dyad of transference and countertransference—so often thematized by frame narratives, so often activated by marked but less englobing devices—is one provisional term for this relay of technique as affect. In response to The Mill on the Floss as an unframed tale of social woe, narratography would intercept the analytic transfer from the shape and drive of prose to the recognized form of its delivered manifestation as emotive force. Read this way, narrative prose operates as if it were shadowed by a linguistic unconscious surfacing in kinetic symptoms available only to verbal detection across the sequential turns of story. Given the eccentricities and referential decenterings of text as such, narratography locates the symptomatic points where story passes over from plot to response, text to rechanneled expectation, apparent evocation to spurred provocation, pun to double-take, loaded verbal twist to recognized thematic demolition. The effects to which narratographic attention is thus drawn in The Mill on the Floss are less implications than dialectical oscillations, derived again in Lukács’s sense from the “unfettered plasticity of prose” (58–59)— and not quick to be latched back into stable reference or even the fine balance of ambiguity. Especially not when recruited in the prosecution of a grueling narrative fatality like that of Eliot’s heroine. The violence of event is heightened along the track of exuberant—even when brutally freighted—wording. One extreme yields to another. Writing writhes with the violence it at once depicts and, by phrasing, half de-pictures into a more abstract meaning. The narratographic reading of such writing takes up in this way the somatic charge and cognitive recoil of violence under conversion to significance. In Eliot, by contrast with Dickens or Brontë, there is ultimately no structural deflection of traumatic event, either by the ousting of plot details (the interdicted story of Arthur’s mother) or by their outering in the transmissible form of a framing pretext (Helen’s diary coming to us via Markham’s transcript and his later posted copy). Chapter by building chapter in The Mill on the Floss, as in Tess of the d’Urbervilles to come, the heroine’s sacrificial narrative is all we have, tracked by an impersonal narrator who chooses to personify her function only—and vanishingly—in the opening interlude of The Mill, and to recuse himself entirely in Tess. In either case, we are far removed from the self-lacerated “I” of a typical Poe story, where our own receptiveness is figured by association as a torture chamber of ghoulish psychic transfusions. And equally far from the

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socializing norms one finds marked out by the transmissive vectors of the frame tale in Wildfell Hall, with its labored premise of indentured representation in respect to a harrowing narrative owed, invoiced, past due, and finally remitted, with its interpretation mostly certified on delivery. In The Mill on the Floss, the heroine’s bitter story, except for a graveside coda, is over when it’s over. Since its plot is not consistently inflected by the act of its dramatized telling or rewriting, it is conveyed only by prose’s own internal variances and ironies. Called upon here is a mode of narratography that does not feed on shifts between levels of representation, calibrating a tacit span between the told and the telling. Instead, narratographic reading monitors the ambivalent wavers and second thoughts of reception along the continuous run of narrative syntax and the forcibly syllabled words that trip it up from within or ripple its surface in waves of building pressure. In analyzing these nodes of compression and association, of condensation and displacement, no effort is made to psychoanalyze the writer, let alone the reader. Rather, narratography debriefs the whole circuit of textual transference and countertransference known as reading, where unconscious associations seem to lend verbal form—hence force—to all that cannot be quite spelled out. That such a verbal relay system should be found operating every bit as grippingly in the omniscient ruminations and ironies of Eliot’s narrative as in its overt staging elsewhere by frame structure can only go to show how transference locates, or let us say continually relocates, one of the inherent functions of intensive reading. The medium is realized in mediation. Its syllables turbid and limpid by turns, like the river to which it devotes its climactic tour de force, Eliot’s prose in The Mill can at times seem to clot the meanings allotted to it, coagulating into new ones in the slowed flow of plot. In reaction to this, a closely gauged wavelength of attention—a new bandwidth of reception—has seemed called for. This is why I have stressed how narratography, at the very intersection of textual and reception theory, is keyed to those pressure points where text passes over, with or without the auspices or conduit of a frame, from the incremental articulations of story to its programmed response in the reader. As evident by now, such a reactive reading works to decipher, as a subplot all their own, the lexical ironies it finds inscribed in the progress of plot. What is transferential about this level of attention is the way decipherment is solicited to draw into the open what narrative writing half secretes (in both opposed senses): invited to educe what prose elusively inscribes. Response operates in this fashion, however, only in order to accept the

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text’s own unconscious (or pre-rhetorical) suggestions by way of reading them in: back in, where they always seem to have come from. And that reading back is actually performed from within Eliot’s novel—or proxied out by it to characterization—in tutor scenes, early and late, as obliquely linked as they are jointly exemplary. Such inferential instruction is empathic first, then ethical—or, more aptly, the two together. Certainly plot’s tragic toll in this novel must seem earned by the close bond between enlisted sympathy and social critique. As much as for any character in Victorian fiction, Maggie Tulliver’s doom is designed to move us: move us in recoil from the stereotypes and hypocrisies of provincial culture, its social and emotional constraints alike. Whelmed by too much checked desire, Maggie Tulliver is swept forward by the drift of figuration to a drowning flood so metaphorically inevitable that the only way we didn’t see it coming is to have repressed it in our own desire for the suspense of plot. The rising of the river Floss in flood, true to its own millennial cycle, is so imminent throughout as to become immanent in the prose itself—in its virtual embodiment of the heroine’s “lyric” subjectivity in flux. As such, the scene of drowning—in its role as deus ex machina, and anticipated by a pervasive sense of inward destination—is certainly an upriver task for narrative language. Waters of destruction shouldn’t be valorized in advance as poetic justice—couldn’t be. Rather, this organizing figural logic needs to be meshed with the pace of the writing itself, which will seem to harbor it, then release it, like a natural overflow of its own narrational force. It is this return from the exposed signifier to an acquiescence in the signified that narratography follows out. And it is here that irony levies its most direct tax on the very strains of phrasing (lyric and overexerted at once) sustained across the flow, and the quiet forcing, of Eliot’s prose. And how should we feel about this rhetorical death drive? And why? The novel tries building in its own answers. With its opening and entirely open frame, The Mill on the Floss turns nostalgic autobiography (the unnamed narrator’s hazy passing retrospect) into a veritable figure for identification more generally. But this is only before it dissolves the whole inaugural apparatus into a mere allegory of dreamlike invention. No sooner implanted than dismantled, this initial framing device dissipates on the spot into the historical tense of a fictional chronicle, with no return to the locus of narration from the social sphere of plot. The sympathetic vibrations established between the unnamed autobiographical narrator and the emergent heroine in these first pages must, from there on, be delegated as pathos—within the provincial ethos of plot—to an alternately

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bookish and scribal character, that reader and metanarrative letter-writer, known in both aspects as Philip Wakem, whose expressive intuition is installed as the reader’s own further tuition. After the opening pages, then, a personified narrator with a Wordsworthian measure to her phrase, recognizable as Eliot herself at her most pastoralist, gives way to a depersonified narrative discourse. Only much later in the story do we return not just to the perspective but to the prose itself—at first unconscious, then written out—of a participant witness as figured reader, articulating the plot in his own invested words of response. A reader to be narratographically read in turn. And it is only after this—in the distended rush toward death to which only omniscience is privy—that Philip Wakem’s epistolary narrative to his own distanced heroine is supplanted in the last pages by Eliot’s resumed version of the story to us. The late rhetorical maneuver is definitive in its inversion of interpretive focus. Redoubling identification, we take up the heroine’s own newly vacated position as reader of her own story in Philip’s letter, a reading under the force of its sympathetic comprehension. In its dizzying ingenuity, this gesture of Philip’s writing falls so little short of the spectacular that it makes a spectacle, even before the fact, of our own riveted investment in Maggie’s tale. Accommodating this effort at a characterized reception on Philip’s part (and its retained aura in aftermath)—and in conjunction with it, at two seemingly unrelated but in fact closely coordinated points—The Mill on the Floss waxes openly narratological in its own right. And in its own interest as palatable fiction. Justifying its storytelling work by authorial divagation—no easy chore, given the questionable logic of Maggie Tulliver’s cruelly denuded life and death—the novel theorizes what the rest of its narrational function will then feel freer to enact: the ritual annihilation of its heroine. To these separate but tightly correlated passages we turn first, as they attempt to authenticate the violence from which they lift away, even while folding just that validation back into both the run of plot and the texture of its figurative prose. Eliot’s theory of narrative contingency in these passages, involving as it does the reader’s own tacit complicity in narration’s potential violence, invites a confrontation between genre theory (as cultural representation) and its deconstruction (as rhetoric)—or in other words between Lukács and his critique by Paul de Man. Each position can be seen under the shadow of narratology and its rules of closure; each as inflected by a vectoral linguistics of narrative flux. To anticipate: the time taken by a death deferred is either the space of essence in a life without other meaning than

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its own lived duration (Lukácsian “disillusionment” recuperated) or it is the troping of ironic discrepancy as temporal disclosure (de Man’s “rhetoric of temporality”). And if these alternatives amount, instead, under the force of form, to a dialectic of their own rather than a mutual exclusion, how does the play between depicted violence and structural vehemence get traced in the linguistic unconscious of prose’s own narrative drive?

“Vicissitudes” of the Written Propelled by the post-Romantic tensilities of its supple, often selfliquefying, prose—and crested upon its dolorous euphonies as the end draws near—the story of The Mill on the Floss is perhaps unique in Victorian fiction before Hardy. Unique in its monolithic cruelty. Unique in its sense of devastated human potential—and not just squandered hopes, but possibilities actively laid waste by plot. Indeed, possibility is just what plot obviates stage by stage in the heroine’s narrowed sphere of motion, leaving nothing ahead for a life over before it has barely been lived. Steadily, inexorably, the world of the fiction shrinks in promise for its focalizing heroine. In the end, it is through the collision of temperament with social impasse, and by the rhetorical collapse of vehicle upon tenor, that Maggie is made literally to drown as if in the figurative flood of her own paradoxically dammed-up appetite for life. Given the story’s willful and naïve but ferociously sympathetic heroine, prose must work overtime to anticipate this fate as well as to mitigate its bitter contingency in formal terms. True to the oxymoron of Eliot’s emergent realist aesthetic, disaster must seem at once incidental and providential. So aware is the narrator of the scapegoating involved in the heroine’s lethal fate that intruded commentary pretends to defend against any such charge by actually blaming the situation first on the reader, and then—in a famous demurral from Novalis—on the arbitrariness of circumstance. To accomplish this, in other words, the narrator twice steps forward in narratorial persona to address the seesaw of personality and event, of human urges and their foiling by circumstance. The first of these closely linked metanarrative passages sounds at the outset like an homage to Austen in a wry drawing-room aside. Nothing like that for defusing a sense of undue violence. The narrator’s passing remark could indeed have been skimmed over as light comedy if it weren’t located so near the end of a building tragedy as far from the Austenian mode, in the new psychic starkness of its human outcomes, as the Victorian novel has ever before seemed. Alone in her room, and thinking of

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her first leisured evening in “good” society, Eliot’s low-born heroine is all a-tingle just remembering the “vibratory influence” (6.3:384) of Stephen Guest’s baritone voice, issuing as it did from a more than ordinarily handsome face. You and I are supposed to be the experienced sort not inevitably vulnerable to such silliness, an audience thus cultivated in two senses at once, both by our previous educative reading and by the present ironic solicitations of Eliot’s knowing prose: “Such things could have had no perceptible effect on a thoroughly well-educated young lady, with a perfectly balanced mind, who had all the advantages of fortune, training, and refined society” (384). Even if our own fortunes are wanting, our refinement limited, we are worldly wise enough to know better than to think that sexual charisma knows class barriers. With its own internal balance of epithets, the wry turn is already complete, rounded in its own sarcasm. Without our being able to gainsay it, the joke is over before the real irony has even announced itself. Yet we don’t wait long. The next sentence drops the other shoe in explicit direct address: “But if Maggie had been that young lady, you would probably have known nothing about her; her life would have had so few vicissitudes that it could hardly have been written; for the happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history” (6.3.384; emphasis added). Capped by an allusion to Montesquieu via Carlyle, the real point of this aside may easily pass unnoticed—as it has routinely been ignored in commentary. It is not that a biographical entity known as Maggie Tulliver has come to our attention—like pockets of British or French history, say, in Eliot’s intertext—through her various travails and sufferings over time. Insinuated instead, given Maggie’s fictional status, is the axiomatic sense that “vicissitude”—taking the form of what narratology tends, since Todorov, to call “disequilibrium”—is necessary for an experienced duration to be “written” in the first place as a “life” story. In Lukács’s terms from the latest epigraph, there must be a “drama” before it can be processed in memory—and by memory’s equivalent in structural form (or, in Lukacs’s specified sense, “biographic form”). There must be some vitality of lived action in advance of any lyric reflection. Then, too, under the regime of verisimilitude, all unfolding grief must be seen in part to be the heroine’s problem, not just the writing’s: her problem not only with herself, of course, but with the world—and the world’s with her. And our problem? What uneasiness does this incur for the act of reading? At this point, at least, we are asked mostly to look away from such questions. Don’t think that any of this is hyperbolic, the passage insists: an innocent and sheltered girl, unlike the sophisticates of

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your acquaintance, might well act this way. And trust me, suggests the narrator, about the rest of it too. All the unhappiness sensed coming, all the cross-purposed agency, is justified by Maggie’s nature as well as by the requirements of a written story. Yet the sediment of cruelty remains. In the libidinal economy of reading—as Lyotard might have rephrased it—the heroine’s death is a small price to pay, we’re asked to think, for the therapeutic privilege of identification and distance at once. But this is only if Maggie’s death, or at this point the unshakeable sense of her fatal lack of fitness for the world, is understood to be first and foremost a represented sadness, not an imposed design—a trial by duration open always to plausible contingency, not straitjacketed by the aggressions of a melodramatic plot. Hence, three short chapters away, we come upon the famous passage (and yet more famous intertext) not just alluding to predecessor volumes on the distinction of national misery but naming a specific author and qualifying his claims about the teleology of character. After the Carlyle allusion about the individuating vividness of unhappy fortune, we are given yet more analysis of Maggie’s sensibility, with plot held in abeyance. We move, that is, to the centerpiece passage from Novalis on the ingrained nature of any such deviant fate. And to approach this moment, we pass again through the epistemological subterfuge of our having “known” the putative reality of Maggie. We have just been reminded about the power of music over her, this time about what it is in her that makes her respond so vividly, and vulnerably, to it. Following the earlier mention of her “vicissitudes,” we have been told— concerning the “vibratory influence” of Stephen (including his voice, of course)—that its seductive appeal is partly by contrast with all the “jarring sounds and petty round ” of her daily “tasks” (6.3:385; emphasis added). In this ad hoc subsuming of content by form, we hear in prose the numbly jarring off-echo of plot’s own discontent. That the phonetic effect is itself a routine and trivial one seems exactly its reflexive point. Moreover, the blatancy of this tinny chime appears designed to highlight the insinuating subjectivity of the next rhetorical turn. For against this besetting dissonance, Stephen’s voice plays directly to what the plucked adjectival chord progression of Eliot’s own phonic crescendo (pulling out all the glottal stops) calls the “highly-strung, hungry nature” (6.3:385) of our susceptible heroine. Prose has thereby tuned its own “holds,” its own phonic ligatures, to the “intervals” (6.6:401) in music that attract and discompose her. Reading is set in resonance with character itself. Here again is where style conduces to narratographic reaction at the micro-level: compensatory, but ironic as such. With the iterative syl-

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lables and sensual thickening of “highly-strung, hungry,” hypersensitivity seems appetitive and craving not just by definition but by the lexical cling of designation itself. To recognize a discordant music in the plangent vacuum of Maggie’s days is thus to hear the intervalic differences (within assonance) of irony itself in process. It is also to hear the legacy of Romantic assonance and its terraced overlays as they are put by Eliot under special narrative pressure. Then, too, with its tacit suggestion of the deprived body as latent aeolian instrument, the guttural undertone of “highly-strung hungry” is somatically performed, which is to say vocally figured, by the empty swallowing it kinesthetically evokes. Here is the foregrounded matter of the signifier—but routed back through the material apparatus of a reading body primed for affective identification with Maggie. Such, once more, is that something novel in the violent strategies of Victorian fictional narrative: the eagerness to enlist Romantic sonority, as Poe instead explodes it, so as to punctuate the often strained deviances of melodramatic plotting. Poe is the parodist of a visionary Romanticism, reveling in the ethereal thrills of psychotic delusion. Eliot is its ironic realist, dragging its cadences down into tension or forlorn dispersion. If the vocal cord twice plucked in “strung hungry,” with its minimal chord change, were a lone or even fairly isolated example in The Mill on the Floss, it might hardly be worth mentioning. But such effects are everywhere. Priming the notice of narratography, Eliot’s plot seeks in style—or, as we will eventually want to say, form seeks in verbal force—its only model for a meaningful energy, if not a clearly consolidated pattern, beneath the tragic apathy and fatal cross-purposes of human event. Writing becomes the sublimation en route of its own violence. It bridges the saddening (Lukácsian) gap between defeating circumstance and its lyric recuperation in memory: the gap of Romantic irony itself. In expatiating briefly on Maggie’s craving for “concord,” the narrator deploys a somatic figure that feels transferred from the sensuous appeal of melody to her inscribed “book of studies” (6.6:401; for études; the word “Studies” capitalized for clarity in some editions). But other books, other studies, cannot be kept far from mind, since Maggie the avid reader is eager to make music over into “a more pregnant, passionate language” (401). Not content simply to swoon over melody (even when carried by the lilt of Stephen’s voice), she wants to understand it—and in a sense fend off its sensuous allure: “to taste more keenly by abstraction the more primitive sensation of intervals” (401). Th is is also the case, so we are no doubt to think, with the beneficent and palpable notations of Eliot’s

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own prose, harmonizing catastrophe by the poetics of form itself—and this in a chapter whose title, “Illustrating the Laws of Attraction,” would seem targeted at musical harmonics as well as at sexual magnetism. In other words, reading sublimates Maggie’s hunger (“taste”) for heard music. Reading The Mill on the Floss as we are, we ought to know how this could feel. But the narrator immediately arrests this embedded theory of intervalic textual abstraction in prose—this displaced musicology of narrative writing—to put virtual words in our mouths, rather than just to evoke language’s tacit recognition as such. For “we have,” we are reminded, been acquainted with the heroine too “long” a “while” to want more of such psychological analysis. Even at the price of foregoing Eliot’s prose harmonics for straight plot, our ascribed desire is to get on with it: to hear of Maggie’s “history,” not her “characteristics.” We don’t really need or want to learn more about this starved spirit per se and its all too familiar denials. Exposition must yield again to story, at whatever cost. The novel’s own uniquely fragile balancing act between private and public consequence, personality and history, psyche and society—and this given the admittedly punitive nature of narratability itself—is a violence foisted off onto our own sense of impatience as readers. Show us what actually happens to such a sensibility as your heroine’s in an alien and exclusionary social world: this is all we are now said to ask. And furthermore, don’t tell us that it’s altogether inevitable, since we can’t quite foresee the consequences from where we sit, open book still in hand. It’s been clear enough that trouble is brewing on the horizon, deep trouble, but how exactly does it close in on Maggie? Otherwise we’re just stuck here, stalled like the heroine. In the deepest rhetorical sense, it is entirely symptomatic that the book’s structural imperative is pictured back to us as our own narrative need. Since “you have known Maggie a long while,” you “need to be told, not her characteristics, but her history, which is a thing hardly to be predicted even from the completest knowledge of characteristics” (6.6:401). And this is because, as we all realize—with the humanizing appeal to the first-person plural clinching this ready assumption—“the tragedy of our lives is not created entirely from within” (401; emphasis added). By now we are fully prepared to acquiesce in such a truism, even in the novel’s own specified plot turns. The preparation has been explicit and discursive. The immediate run-up to this moment—where, from within the nuances of characterization, we are conscripted in direct address as tacit advocates of narrative drive—is as famous and detachable a passage

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as in any Eliot novel. Articulating a broad principle of her fiction that will be rearticulated later in Middlemarch, its place in The Mill on the Floss is even more pivotal. “ ‘Character,’ says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms—,” and we hang on the word in suspended quotation long enough to start clustering our own associations around it; this, until they are syntactically dispelled with the exhaustive Romantic equation that “character is destiny” (6.6:401). Inaugurating the vest-pocket narratology to follow, the passing narratographic irony of this grammatical hovering is clear. Despite emphatic repetition in such an oratorical aside, character (like the noun itself) can in no sense stand alone. Enter Eliot as theorist of the novel, in her wittiest sparring posture. “But not the whole of destiny.” If there had been no murder in the family, even Hamlet might have “got through life with a reputation of sanity, notwithstanding many soliloquies, and some moody sarcasms . . .” (402). Eliot knew well such an alternate route for an introspective main character. In just this respect, Middlemarch can be seen as a lenient retelling of The Mill on the Floss. In particular, even the marital microcosm of social solidarity in the later novel is glimpsed in The Mill as a feasibly alternative—if narratively unavailable—plot line for is own heroine. Th is we hear in the voice of “the world’s wife,” or in other words the social chorus of St. Ogg’s society (7.2:490), which would have been quick to rationalize Maggie’s marriage to the deep-voiced Stephen if only she could have seen fit to betray his fiancée, her cousin Lucy, and rid herself of any felt obligation to the subtly intelligent, doting, hump-backed Philip Wakem. In the eyes of the world, her impractical self-denial instead, even after all the worst damage has been done, is what marginalizes her irretrievably. So readily is an alternate ending to be imagined for Maggie’s story that what the spirit of St. Oggs drafts for her is—by a striking transtextual irony—a near equivalent to the final marriage plot of Eliot’s own future novel. Despite the heartaches that litter its path, the social transgression it involves, still “what a wonderful marriage for a girl like Miss Tulliver— quite romantic! Why, young Guest will be put up for the borough at the next election” (491). Just think of what a novelistic romance it would (and elsewhere will) make! A dashing, self-indulgent young suitor destined for public duty and bringing a passionate woman’s energies to bear on it, as a way for her to break out from domestic constraint—and from a posthumous, all but testamentary familial interdict—into the world of purposeful action: that’s the fantastic alter-plot. Romanticize this a notch further and you have Dorothea Causabon, née Brooke, chafing against the stranglehold of her aged husband’s will (rather than, as in Maggie’s

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case, her dead father’s oath-ridden Bible, with its legacy of resentment) until she is rescued from monotony and impotence by the political ascent and sexual glamour of Will Ladislaw. In short, again, character is not the “whole” of destiny. It does not compass the entire determination of a life, no more for Maggie (or Dorothea) than for Prince Hamlet. But what circumstances will continue to route and derail the possibilities of Maggie’s character? That is the question. Only a tragic hero’s fate can turn on the essentializing dilemma of whether “to be or not to be.” Instead, in the social time of the Victorian novel, a character must ask whether—and what—to do in the world, even if this is only in order to discover what she is. In a novel, it isn’t only that time will tell. The actual telling over time is the work of plot, which is a missing term in Eliot’s invocation of the “written” in its dependence on “vicissitudes.” It is also a missing term—the idea of emplotment—in Lukács’s Theory of the Novel. And plot is the real destiny of fictional character. Despite Eliot’s disclaimers, we encounter at almost every stylistic turn, every turn of overcoded phrase, her text’s own efforts to align the aberrant tracks of foreordained event with the traits of the subject, to correlate destination if not destiny with character, to make fate flow from within. The implied theory of mimesis operating here has its methodological consequences for reading, as one might expect. On the one hand, if character were the whole of destiny, there would be no science of narratology. If, on the other hand, circumstance were all, there would be no realist psychology. As more evidence from Eliot’s own prose will show, we might ultimately want to say that narratography is geared to remark—at the narrowest possible scale—certain isolated stress points of interference between character and circumstance, impression and event, over the course of lived (that is, plotted) time.

Novel as “Biographic Form”: Prose Fiction and the Rise of Time In our best thinking about the novel as a fictive genre, its history also incorporates its prehistory into the bargain—a prehistory strictly generic in Lukács’s case, with prose fiction established as a formal declension of the epic; elsewhere, a history cultural, contextual, and philosophical. Ian Watt sees the evolving prenovelistic form as reflecting, in part, John Locke’s empiricist emphasis on the duration of human consciousness. One result is that the cause-and-effect chain of fictional plotting not only mirrors but works to codify an emergent personal psychology rooted in the continual impact of past on present in mental operation. Here is one

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decisive checkpoint for Eliot’s later refinements of novelistic duration in respect to what Lukács identifies as the genre’s predominant “biographic form.” No character in English fiction before Maggie Tulliver has ever been more caught up in, or tortured on the wheel of, the returns of the past into the present—or, equally, by the failure of such recovery. This is the novel’s Romantic backlash, where past feeling comes not in Wordsworthian aid of fresh feeling but in an excruciating vacuum as a sheer measure of loss. Long before this moment of inverted Romanticism in Eliot’s writing, however, temporality as a force for change in prose fiction has become—in a quintessential novelistic conversion—the generic content of its own form, a theme as well as a structure. The novel as genre arrives as a laboratory of human time under empirical comprehension. Comprehension in its linked senses: bracketed in its full duration and grasped in its transformations. For Watt, moreover, the fact of fictionality doesn’t in the least disqualify this kind of novelistic displacement of scientific epistemology by verisimilitude. For what is codified by the genre is a matter of perspective: a way of seeing the world, whether any given narrated world is true or not, document or fabulation. Prose fiction particularizes the universal without predicating its existence, either as instance or as model. According to Michael McKeon’s notable extension of Watt’s empiricist (and tacitly phenomenological) approach, these particularities are importantly social as well as epistemological, concerned with ethics as much as with empirical truth (a distinction already touched on in connection with Little Dorrit). In the novelistic episteme, the de-idealization traced by Watt, its empiricist specification, could not help but confront, as in Lukács, the gulf between what is and what seems, the inherent versus the superficial. But this procedure confronts as well, according to McKeon—and in socioeconomic and moral terms alike—the equally marked divide between the merely honorific (status or class) and the genuinely worthy (merit). Here, one might say, is the value theory of political economy applied to fictional negotiations between an inherited (hence fi xed) aristocratic or genteel station and its antithesis in a mercantile and class-defining social mobility. Here too, though, we find again the difference (unstressed by Watt or McKeon) between ontology and epistemology—and this as a philosophical reorientation, no less, of the interaction between character and contingency: “she is” versus “she does,” the inbred against the discoverable, the axiomatic against the circumstantial. In the period that mainly concerns Watt and McKeon, the founding dichotomy in pre-Romantic individualism lies, therefore, between the

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hierarchically anointed role versus, in common parlance, the self-made subject. Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss enters this tradition with a new (if partial) candor about the violence of individuation itself. The first great English novel of “romantic disillusionment,” as Lukács might call it (were he ever to have mentioned Eliot), is in this respect pitiless. Character is one thing, destiny another: the latter, like plot, being rooted in personality but vulnerable to all things extrinsic, accidental, empirical, and in themselves meaningless. Only irony can coordinate such a disjunction as a pertinent difference. In Paul de Man’s “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” it is in fact irony that offers the model of narrative form itself. Phrasal discrepancy—the rhetorical dialectic of reverse suggestion—is mapped onto fictional duration, that is, as the very logic of plot. In the ordinary understanding of irony on which de Man initially draws, one thing means another thing, often its opposite. In fictional plotting, as if the tongue were always in fate’s cheek, one expectation after another is reversed by event. When irony is narrativized in this way, novelistic time is thereby exposed as rhetorical. By this de Man means a matter of suasion more than natural sequence, built by argument rather than by sheer augmentation from scene to subsequent scene, structured rather than simply unfolded. Rhetorical almost in two senses at once: troping by succession while convincing us by the naturalization of that cause-andeffect series. In the fiction of disenchantment, the internal fissure of irony is thus strung out across succession as the conceptual slack—or emplotted lag—between desire and its defeats, whose apprehension (charting the fall from expectation it constitutes) is exactly the “extreme violence” of Lukácsian disenchantment. In formal terms, the process is one whereby contradiction is spatialized as an unappeasable temporal gap. Or say that irony, as a wrenching function of genre, is schematically rethought at the scale of narratology. But the crucial term of “temporality” behind de Man’s figural reading of plot structure—tied as it is to his earlier critique of Lukács in the same volume—isolates, to borrow the dichotomy of de Man’s overall title, exactly the “blindness” at the core of Lukács’s “insight.” Given his later chapter on “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” de Man certainly wants to applaud the tensed linkage in Lukács of “organic nature, irony, and time” (104). But he finds their interrelation developed in a mode of false triangulation. The convergence of terms in itself offers an insight of “major magnitude”—but the conclusion is “all wrong” (104). How so? Time materializes for Lukács as an active agent in the novel only when, de Man thinks, it can be transvalued into a psychological compensation for shape-

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less losses. The case, however, is a little different than de Man makes it out. In The Theory of the Novel, Lukács’s point of departure is the literary condition of those Greek heroes who, by definition, live the eternal presence of their epic essence. Since they are themselves, there is no need to perform themselves. Nor to evolve over time. The emergence of the novel as genre marks in part the literary novelty of real duration. And temporality doesn’t have to be named to be recognized as constitutive. That would of course be Lukács’s readiest defense against de Man. To stress by designation, as for instance Eliot does, the “circumstantial” (rather than its equivalent, the temporal), or in Lukács’s own terms the “contingent,” is not to deny the medium of accident and its manifestation—the medium of time itself unfolding. Thematized or not, time is always caught up in the novelistic flux of life rather than in the transcendental fi x of meaning, always steeped in being (or becoming) without the manifestation of essence. As Lukács will eventually spell out along with the post-Romantic novelists, time is the mark, the successive demarcation, of the absence of inherent or immanent meaning in life, the slipping away of event into sheer evanescence. With reflection alone as lyric stopgap, all retrospect becomes epitaphic and, as such, ironic. This is indeed, for Lukács, where the initial gulf opens between transcendent idea and experienced world. Ideals (plural) result: nominalized, abstract, ungraspable. Defeat follows—and its hollow wisdoms. Ideals are the proof of what isn’t, the proof in turn of the real that excludes them. The contingencies of existence keep such ideals from ever coinciding with experience, and time has finally become not just Lukács’s, but the world’s own, name for its disappointments. This leads not just to a chastened romanticism, but to the very romanticism of such disillusionment, however pinched and resigned: a romanticism whose chief field of affect is time under the twin aspect of nostalgia and decline. It is true of Lukács, however, that duration is named as such—de Man’s notice here is undeniably important—only when its sheer entropy can be overcome by its frank recognition as a negative totality. This is because what is new in the mid-nineteenth century for Lukács, starkly and unmitigatedly new with Flaubert, is the reification of time’s own categorical essence, its lifting away from mere phenomenon into idea (and idealist negation). In a highly de Manian formulation never in fact quoted in the critique mounted by Blindness and Insight, Lukács himself has put it this way: “The greatest discrepancy between idea and reality is time: the process of time as duration” (216). The only way out of the impasse is to turn time itself into an idea as well as just an irritant, a concept rather than

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just a benumbing fact: the idea, in short, of becoming without meaning, the very medium of existence. Looking ahead to one of the last throwback novels of such disillusioned romanticism, from the next century, one could vary E. M. Forster’s secularized borrowing from Michelangelo on the spiritual power of death (in life) so as to say of temporality instead of mortality—and in its equal violence—that “Time destroys a man: the idea of Time saves him.”  Time, as we’ve seen Lukács seeing all too well, is what comes crashing into fiction with the collapse of epic unity. To be construed as meaningful in and of itself, time must be purified to the form rather than the content of duration—or (to anticipate) identified as a force in itself rather than just a play of forces, but now a totalized one, deferred to reader recognition in its manifestation of ironic plotting. What is lacking, for de Man, in this account of representation (besides the tangent zone of reading and interpretation) is the entire constructedness of fictional time: namely, its sequential rhetoric—even in its most negative and untransfigured valences. Yet, as we’re noticing, the tread of time does not go missing in Lukács (on the way to his chapter on romantic disillusionment) to quite the extent supposed by de Man, even though its textualization goes unexplored. In the world of characters, time is in fact all that can, as it were, be counted on. In all its subtractions. Reality, under realism, is for Lukács entirely dispersed and “contingent.” Over and above this level of aleatory event, composition is a representational imposition. The brute fact of biological duration, in all its accidents and aff ronts, requires that form be given to (or conferred by) mimesis rather than relied on to be directly mirrored from life in the work of representation. In a post-epic moment, meaning must, in short, be formulated rather than found, delivered up by art rather than divinized by living itself. This is what pits the character who seeks meaning against the material world that refuses it, that in fact throws subjectivity back on itself as an alienated objectivity. “The contingent world and the problematic individual are realities which mutually determine one another” (78). That mutuality is above all dialectical, turning on the moment when the subject is objectified as its own (inevitably ironic) object of reflection. Hence, again, the predominantly “biographic form” of the realist novel. Such a formal option is central to an emergent genre struggling to get time on its side—if never on the inside of its characters as a telos of self-realization. And it is this sense of time that Eliot lifts to the status of a self-authored epigraphic keynote in the fifty-seventh chapter of Daniel Deronda (1876). Subordinating the temporal to the ethical in Eliot’s

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epigraph, examined duration always involves the “after-throb” of action, whether in guilt or disillusionment: “Deeds are the pulse of Time.” Whereas time for Lukács is the medium of a never complete “becoming,” for Eliot’s moralized emphasis that medium is instead the capillary action of the deeds themselves as they pulsate in event and mental recurrence. But in neither writer is time itself romanticized. Neither Lukács nor Eliot fall as far short as de Man assumes for the former in the recognition of novelistic time as a rhetorical fabrication, a plot-dilated irony, whether of emotional discrepancy or of outright recrimination.

Temporality’s “Extreme Violence” We have begun to glimpse how Lukács’s terms can be rather directly translated into Eliot’s. For “biographic form,” write Bildungsroman. For contingency, write the baleful fortuity of narrated circumstance. For the “novel of disillusionment,” in short, write The Mill on the Floss. As follows: “An interiority denied the possibility of fulfi lling itself in action turns inward, yet cannot finally renounce what it has lost forever; even if it wanted to do so, life would deny it such a satisfaction; life forces it to continue the struggle and to suffer defeats which the artist anticipates and the hero apprehends” (118; emphasis added). In that last phrase is one of the clearest breakpoints in Lukács’s study between form and content. Yet the novelistic author, of course, doesn’t merely anticipate but actively invents the disasters of the ironic Bildungsroman. Scarcely just intuiting the worst-case scenario, novelistic writing scripts it. And with this process the reader is complicit. Eliot’s narrator, so we’ve seen, goes so far as to blame us as interested parties for Maggie’s suffering, to conscript us as accomplices in just the kind of extreme contingencies that make for good narrative “writing.” In the name of vicarious understanding and its ironic reversals, such “apprehended” suffering remains the primal violence of novelistic design. It is, as we know, Lukács’s noun too. Such “extreme violence” results, in his phrasing, from the disjuncture—stretched out on the rack of years—between subjective impulse and its repelled hope of fulfi llment in the world: a disjuncture only surfaced to view in formal “reflection,” or in other words in a mimesis turned at least implicitly contemplative. To repeat: “The need for reflection is the deepest melancholy of every great and genuine novel. Through it the writer’s naïveté suffers extreme violence and is changed into its opposite” (85). The writer’s—and usually his hero’s as well. This reflective negation of inaugural possibilities, this recognition

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of life’s inexorable checks on desire, is the sine qua non of mature novelistic writing. Otherwise, fiction would lapse to the pure subjectivity of a mode like lyric confession: expressivity without the worldly constraints carried by resistant social event. Instead, in major novel writing there is a negative interplay between agency and context that we’ve found Eliot characterizing as the tug between “character” and “circumstance,” the founding opposition of novelistic person and rendered society. Such is that extremity of negation by which the dialectic of self and world is reciprocally intensified, often without any imagined synthesis or resolution. In Victorian fiction this standoff is mostly overcome, by a fragile synecdoche, in the harmonics of self and Other sounded by marital closure in the courtship plot: a frail solution nowhere mentioned by Lukács as part of the novel’s chastened epic ambition. And if you can’t see your way clear to seeing yourself mirrored and confi rmed in the romantic Other, you may end up seeing yourself as Other. Hence, again, the “extreme” molestation of the subject in reverting to its own objecthood from the point of view of all that falls outside it. Extreme but generically mandated, according to Lukács. The purely subjective stance, as in a confessional outpouring, cannot anchor a narrative, nor can its attempt at projecting itself onto the objective environment be more than the naïve subjectification of the world. So far—as yet—no story: no novelistic art. Indeed the rise of the novel, born of structural irony for Lukács, is coterminous with the same developments Watt traces in the advent of empiricism and the new paradigms of temporal consciousness that led from Locke to Defoe et al. Lukács has, though, as usual, a longer perspective yet in view. The earliest relevant passage in The Theory of the Novel, as discussion moves through “the history of forms” toward the birth of prose fiction as we know it, contrasts “the intelligible ‘I’ of man” in tragic drama with the “empirical ‘I’ ” of the epic agent (47): the scrutinized soul versus the unproblematic character. With the arrival of the novel as cultural form, however, we may say that the empirical self, as also now a cognitive or subjective agent in its own right, may be seen to confound the very premise of intelligibility. What comes of this epistemological crisis—though Lukács leaves the whole turn at best implicit in the broad reversals of his genre trajectory—is that the dialectical contrast of the previous epochs is now redeployed around the emplotted ironic reversals of their successor form. For in the genre of the novel, the hero searches for self-recognition, for the meaning of being, in the empirical setbacks of his own always incomplete becoming. In the grips of a hero’s resulting “reflection,” the previous genre distinction (drama versus epic) be-

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tween the intelligible and the empirical character is translated into prose fiction, that is, as the “violent” tension of intellective versus objective aspects of the same self: the cognitive versus the empirical agency of consciousness per se. In novels of disillusionment, a focalizing narrative subjectivity, often devolved upon a central hero, is reversed (over time) into an objectification of the embodied “I,” thus establishing—without of course stabilizing— an ironic distance from identity itself. A distance into which reading slots itself, an accomplice after the fact—feeding on the form’s own need for interpretive participation. Eliot’s novel, as already suggested, begins in a veritable allegory of this process. Unprecedented in fiction of the period for its lack of either motivation or integration, the opening of The Mill on the Floss goes so far as to stage the moment of reflective comprehension in the very process of its delegation—across affi liated subjectivities—from a narrator to a heroine who will come only slowly, across the torturing setbacks of plot, to “apprehend” the shape of her endurance. By which point the tale of agency has been absorbed into the finality of novelistic form, into an impersonal fictive totality. That’s exactly the trouble, according to Paul de Man, with any such Lukácsian formalist default. Rather than an appeal to extranarrative totality and its tacit aura of spatialized form, rounded in sufficiency, closed upon itself, what de Man would stress instead—and as reading’s own supplemental work—are the recognized “rhetorical” disjunctions of textual irony that gape into prominence (and grow readable as such) over the course of plotted time. And in that readability lies, though this is not de Man’s point, a further acquiescence in the interpretive yield of narrative violence. In Eliot’s case, as we’ve seen, time’s sequential assault is to be constitutively forgiven—on the reader’s shape-making behalf—for what it does to character. Forgiven, more questionably yet, in the deceptive name of realist contingency rather than narratorial destiny. In this circuit of lost opportunity and response, plot’s toll is too easily conflated (and confused) with time’s stolen hope. Pace de Man, Lukács doesn’t miss this as a genre feature. We might think of it this way in The Theory of the Novel: time as a novelistic category is either invented or at least hypostatized by nineteenth-century disillusionment as the novelistic residuum of duration itself, a crystallized structure of loss. As well as the only medium of its recognition. At issue in de Man’s response to all this is the rift between an organic world, including human nature—as given in the epic and taken from the novel—and another organizing principle that would stand in its stead,

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would supervene and alleviate, yielding up something otherwise perceptibly essential in the place of a lost immediacy of meaning. Yet this would be to locate totality outside of the representational system altogether in the dialectics of response—or, in other words, in the coils of the hermeneutic circle. Which is just where Eliot needs to locate value as well, if only by default, in The Mill. If Lukács leaves the interpretive site of totalization either unstated or unexplored, he does so, at least in part, to retain the full post-epic dramaturgy of time rendered rather than merely taken by narrative. In the spirit of de Man, but refashioning his paradigm in grammatical rather than rhetorical terms for a moment, one might say that time in narrative is the syntax of irony, a form made immanent only by plotted content. In Eliot’s extreme experiment, The Mill is exposed in operation as the mill of narrative mechanism per se, driven by the same waters that will finally drive Maggie down. Plot’s inexorable momentum works in this way against the advertised Wordsworthian organicism of Eliot’s local rhetoric, which is manifested in incessant figures of a rooted, deeply entwined, and naturally branching childhood strengthened by the bast and fiber of home thoughts and irrigated by fellow-feeling—all of it ironically unavailable to Maggie in her familial deprivations. A flowing or flowering oneness with the world, either one, was a mythic gesture even in Wordsworth. Here it is a mystification and a psychic impasse. And here, too, this debunked myth of oneness—of lived continuity with the world of “first” and “second” nature alike—closes an intertextual circle. In The Theory of the Novel ’s supposed effort to redeem time as category from the slings and arrows of organic life per se, de Man reminds us, only in passing, that “Lukács was thinking of Novalis” (57). The thinking is quite specific at one point, and suspicious, for the novelistic “author,” as Lukács insists (and as Eliot demonstrates), has by generic definition “lost the poet’s youthful faith ‘that destiny and soul are twin names for a single concept’ (Novalis)” (202). One-sided and richly answerable from elsewhere in Lukács’s book, de Man’s critique has been worth dwelling on precisely because any reading of The Mill on the Floss as a structure of disillusioned romanticism—and what other reading is there?—might well wish to begin by agreeing that, apart from the particular targets of de Man’s objection, plot and its medium are the continuous missing terms in Lukács’s genre theory: plot, where temporality as theme comes into direct alignment (if never exact congruence) with time as textual medium; where, in turn, narratography often spots the very moment of disjuncture between plot and medium

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projected from representation to recognition across some foregrounded and destabilized phrasing. And one set of phrases above all others in Eliot’s novel: those whose metaphoric stress, even whose overlapping syllables, link time’s steady loss with the Floss river under the sign of both biological and millennial time. Even for the beaten and bested characters of nineteenth-century fiction, in Lukács’s view the fact of “being borne upon the unique and unrepeatable stream of life cancels out the accidental nature of their experiences and the isolated nature of the events recounted” (125; emphasis added). Brandished in Lukács’s language is Eliot’s own mastertrope in an explicit dead-metaphoric phrase, the “stream of life”: what Riffaterre might identify as the serially repressed matrix of her entire novel. Yet “stream” remains a figure, a metaphoric forcing of continuity upon sequence. Any connatural bond between self and world, harbored as it is by the notion of subjectivity as telos, is, of course, an idealism that novelistic action is more than likely to defeat and discredit. No synthesis between inner and outer, no equilibrium even, can be achieved except by some supervening formal system. In Eliot’s novel, certainly, when plot’s founding temporality is set in motion as the “stream of life” across local figurative motifs of watercourses, channels, inlets, rivers, and tributaries—including the archetype of the scourging Flood itself—it’s hard for her reader to miss the so-called “rhetoric” of ironized time that shapes such plotting. And hard for Lukács’s reader to think of his genre theory as missing this either. Not from within yearning but ultimately from beyond it, a subject objectifies itself at the distance of foiled desire. Time is the medium that both causes and conveys this. Any conceptual (and again supervening) purchase on the founding binary poles, any gesture toward an achievable synthesis, can only, for Lukács, be made novelistically immanent as a formal resolution, not as a turn of event or spirit within plot. Meaning breaks from narrative action rather than emerging as a lucky break, or momentary revelation, within it. Once more we encounter the fundamental Lukácsian conversion of form into content—and then back again at a more abstract level. In this case: fi rst duration into theme, then theme (the meaningless of time) into constitutive essence. Along with his mention of “the unique and unrepeatable stream of time,” Lukács has also spoken of time as “inexorably existent,” so that “no one can any longer swim against the unmistakable direction of its current nor regulate” its temporal momentum with the “dams” of idea (124). Like a river, time must run its course. In the paragraph from The Mill on the Floss immediately following Eliot’s own loaded disquisition on Novalis, Eliot writes of

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her heroine, soon to drown, that her as yet “hidden” end, her “destiny,” must wait “to reveal itself like the course of an unmapped river” (6.6:402). Prophecy is perversely seeded in cliché. What will emerge depends in part on what comes to Maggie, of course, as to anyone. So far the writing is trying to finesse what plot cannot directly address, reminding us ominously that “we only know that the river is full and rapid, and that for all rivers there is the same final home” (402). Across the headlong assonance of “that . . . and rapid . . . and that” within the intractable prophetic arc of “know . . . home,” the intension of prose friction (intention once again aside) makes its further alliterative mark along the fricative syllabification of “rivers full . . . rivers. . . . f inal.” In this way a rhetoric of temporality can be found floated upon a stylistics of the interval. That’s at the alphabetic stratum alone. Within the supervening logic of the trope, the charted “course” of the river is also its felt coursing. Both “full and rapid,” its weighted vector is dynamized as a medium. The point is obvious, the rhetoric ingrown and almost flagrant: even given the fullness of who Maggie is, we must still wait to see what she does—and what is done to her in the defeat of her overflowing desires, where what wells up in her is often so brimful that she can be submerged and choked off by it. In the work of plot, being and becoming must be linked to happening, outcome to contingency, character to circumstance. Yet by troping her life as a course of unknown duration despite its thematically certain end, contingency is overdetermined by dramatic irony, figuration shriveled to mere prefiguration. We can sum it up this way: accident drenches—and finally drowns—the heroine in the very symbol of her own being. Th is is Eliot’s ultimate formal gamble, her move to assuage the gap, and synthesize the rift, between character and incident. Such is the design upon us of plot all told, its narratological conversion of the pitiful to the epiphanic. Carried along by this plot, narratography nonetheless resists its naturalization by stalling momentarily over the subsidiary tropes that would secure it, tropes that even penetrate, as we will find, to the phonetic fissures of syntax itself as the medial residuum of the signifier. Never more strikingly solicited in Victorian fiction than by the phonetic eddying and backwash of The Mill on the Floss, narratography stays vigilant to just this sliding byplay of the novel’s mediating prose—and especially to those passages, associated with Philip Wakem’s distanced intimacy with the heroine, that read our own reading back to us. And do so just before releasing narrative—now preordained in its response—back to the heavily stylized apocalypse of private annihilation. Put another way, character in Eliot’s fiction is inflected by, among other things, verbal circumstance.

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“Metaformal Grace” / “Transferred Life” In the toggle of my subheading, the first phrase is Lukács’s (as a synonym for a positive totality); its personification Eliot’s (for the borrowed vitality of a heroine’s emotional alter ego). The telos of Eliot’s plot is the turn from reflective grief to the totality of elegiac form—and this as mediated by the associative logic of figuration. Moreover, this transition from lived misery to formal mastery is brokered by, and embodied in, one character above all in The Mill on the Floss: the heroine’s disappointed lover Philip, that sensitive and deformed surrogate—as he will become—for the reader’s own exclusion from Maggie’s world. Phrased otherwise, the only thing that can make good on the heroine’s wasting fate is the good it can be imagined to do us—and, furthermore, can already be imaged as doing by proxy from within the text. This restorative force transpires across Philip’s own elevation, even before Maggie’s actual death, from mourning to the state of meaning. Hence the exemplary value, the almost parabolic role, of Philip’s hard-won selfless affect as he lives through (in both senses) Maggie’s suffering and survives to tell of it—and of its potent hold on him. More to the point, however, he does so not as her doom’s residual legatee and impersonal narrator. He tells Maggie’s story back to the heroine herself. This happens in a letter that struggles to justify her grief on the way toward her death by drowning. Without benefit of our omniscient narrator, Philip writes to her what he knows must have happened in the suspected elopement with Stephen. He thus gives her the chance to read of her ordeal, rather than merely endure it, to read of it briefly under a sympathetic spiritual analysis, compressed, distilled, and totalized by a comprehensive understanding and forgiveness. He offers this grace of form, in fact, in the explicit terms of a returned “gift.” With the heroine almost too numbed by misstep and ill luck even to think straight, Philip takes up the reflective function and helps not just to objectify her own life for recognition—but to render it subjectively again, as if from the inside. In a sense, Philip has thus taken over from the nameless narrator of the prologue, who passed the baton to omniscience early on. Now it is left to a character’s own written prose to formulate the meaning of the story on the very eve of closure. By Philip’s ultimate term for an unshaken faith in Maggie, as we’ll see, he finds a cure for skepticism in that quintessentially novelistic ratio of being to meaning he calls “belief.” Trying like the reader to extricate plot’s spiritual gist from its sad contingencies, Philip’s language thus positions us for the one remaining turn of plot: the

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sudden death by unmapped flood waters in a stream so symbolic that one sinks in it as in time itself, recovering in the process—in a fleeting reenchantment of the world—the long-lost currents of childhood. Until Philip’s letter, there have been two faces to his empathy: depending on whether his sensitivities are facing forward or back. Nearing the end, in outward communication to Maggie herself, he seems able to bestow upon the heroine what Lukács would call that limited mode of “metaformal grace” (102) ordinarily reserved for impersonal narrative closure, a totality removed from the partialities of existence. By contrast— and this is the other facet of Philip’s empathy—there is the shock of prefiguration. Facing into the future from within the plot, and hence in his role as the anticipator rather than the interpreter of disaster, Phillip seems almost to script the fatality in advance. It’s one thing for the novelist after Austen to claim unimpeded access to the inner lives of others through the indirect discourse of characterization. But projecting that access, that intersubjective attunement—that form of self-effacement, yet ultimately that form of power—back into plot is likely to happen only at the risk of the uncanny, of the clairvoyant or the telepathic, as in Poe, even of the emotionally invasive or vampiric. Instead, Eliot’s impulse is to personify sympathetic apprehension as an indwelling grace. Thus does she compensate the disabled Philip Wakem, who adores Maggie, with so thorough an empathy for her heroine that he is with her even in her coasting toward another man, living in and through her passion and ethical panic, both to Philip’s pain and to his spiritual exaltation. All this he will spell out in that final letter to her—well after we have seen its emotional force in action upon him in his role as a speculative plotter of her future: an action that amounts at one crucial turning point to a premonitory dream vision like that of the narrator’s own in the pastoral proem. But more than this is accomplished when Philip’s desire dips into its unconscious fears. To take the psychoanalytic measure—and scan the narrative horizons at the same time—of Philip’s premonitory nightmare, we must first return to the opening of the novel to mark how mimesis dreams its way into its own setting before coming fully awake to plot. In a Wordsworthian gambit of tranquil restoration almost narcoleptically figured, what the narrator evokes by present description (“I remember . . . I remember”) is her having long ago paused on a stone bridge—a quasi-natural extension of the land—at exactly the moment when a little girl stops at water’s edge, facing a swollen “stream” that “half drowns” the bank under a sky whose “clouds are threatening.” It is a case of narratology by stylistic premonition in a novel that will end

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in that girl’s storm-tossed descent beneath the same waters, engulfed by the overflow of passion’s own tidal swell. The parallel between present remembrance and past avatar seems to conjure the girl as a younger self, but a self who will never have survived, we are to find, into such nostalgic reflection. As this brief descriptive proem quickly fades to a plot of monolithic disappointment, what narratography, even so far, can add to the fleeting dual perspective of such an opening is to calibrate the slack in grammatical ligature that abets a curious semiconscious parallel between reflective scene-setting and triggered plot. Suggested in this way, through the merest nodding-off of prose itself (into lyric diff usion), is the passage’s forced strain toward continuity across the years. For the narrator turns from her position on the bridge to the girl who has been standing “on the same spot”—not on the bridge, we quickly correct ourselves, but on her own standing-ground—“the same spot at the water’s edge since I paused on the bridge.” This miniscule adverbial ambiguity projects its own dreamlike equivalent of temporal suspension into the tacit confl ation of identities. The meditative arrest of the two human figures—youth herself being a rhetorical figure for consciousness in another time and condition—is thus emblematically coterminous so far. But plot must immediately begin separating the motivated trajectory of the young girl from her deceptive teleological incarnation (given the impending tragedy) as a potential narrating voice. In Lukács’s terms, this means setting loose a version of the “empirical” from the “intelligible” I—or, more precisely, the objectified from the cognitive self—in order to activate mental setting as the site of plot. Whatever empathetic unity of understanding has been implicitly vested in advance in the discourse of this nameless autobiographic decoy, the voice of this persona must now be stripped from the doings of the emergent heroine, who is sent fresh into event to pursue the seemingly unmarked but in fact thoroughly inscribed course of her own decline. Reversing the terms from this chapter’s epigraph, here lyric subjectivity precedes as residue the dramatic action it does not so much catalyze or precipitate as simply distill—and this in elegiac anticipation of the actual plot. Just as the narrator’s arms are starting to grow numb from leaning on the cold stone, the girl goes (is in fact sent by narration) inside from the river bank, back to family life—back to those social constraints, whatever their fireside temptations at the moment, that are always, from now on, to be interrupting her satisfaction in the outdoor world she so freely and fi xedly loves. The Wordsworthian fall is upon her. All is now tainted

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by the rational: “It is time” she “went in, I think” (1.1:8). From here out, countless dead metaphors of natural impulse for the onrush and drain of emotion, for tidal sweeps of feeling, begin circulating through the text. In just this regard, we are reminded that Lukács sees in the romanticism of disillusionment a compound alienation from two natures at once: impersonal and often insentient nature, strictly speaking, and what we have seen him term the “second nature” (63–64) of society, equally given to the individual life yet entirely constructed by culture, even while deceptively naturalized in its normative bulwarks. Alienation from the landscape is therefore, in the novels Lukács studies, a back formation from social estrangement. This fits perfectly—up to a point—the case of Maggie Tulliver. Nature’s fullness does become lethal to her in the flood because of the killing effect of a repressive society’s “second nature.” But it isn’t that simple. Because Maggie is herself presented as naturalness personified—and not least in her frustrations, repeatedly described as bursting the seams of propriety, swamping her own judgment, drowning her will in the undertow of native and ungovernable impulse. Playing a double game, figuration aspires to a dialectic all its own, whose strain tells upon the registers of narratographic reading at every other turn. From the point at which heroine and plot together detach from the “metaformal” voice of the inaugural narrative discourse, second nature begins encroaching poisonously onto fi rst, especially in its pastoral rather than fluvial aspects—weeding out the very roots of its own would-be emotional tenacity. Returning to the imagined scene and final domestic trope of the elegiac opening, the door is closed behind the heroine’s fullest prospects once and forever by plot itself, for which the launching narratorial daydream is both metaphor and also matrix. “Ah, my arms are really benumbed,” adds the bestirred narrator, for “I have been pressing my elbows on the arms of my chair and dreaming.” Architecture fades away to architectonic emblem: the proverbial bridge to the past. Yet it is a structure too frail in this case to sustain its engineering across the long arc of plot. As an autobiographic gesture of Romantic nostalgia, this whole retrospective (and, in light of the coming fatality, paradoxical) apparatus vanishes now into thin air. Summoning back the scene of her own youth, it would seem, and displacing it onto Maggie’s, has been the necessary first—and credibly unconscious (dreamlike)—move on the narrator’s part in initiating her tale, which then takes on a life, and death, of its own. It will need, or tolerate, no return whatsoever to this vaporous scene of inception—with its passing narratology of fateful forecast and its fleeting narratography of phantom coterminous habitation (“on the same

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spot”). There is to be room from here out only for Maggie’s own person, not for her virtual future avatar, in the selfsame Wordsworthian “spot of time” along the ultimately lethal Floss. As plot opens out to a wider social scene, the narrator withdraws to a choric rather than a personified function in order to micromanage—at the level of diction and syntax—both the coming premonitions and their figuratively redemptive dead end. The merest shadow of a narrative persona has thus been thrown over plot in the mode of authorial comment but never again stationed, located, or personified in any similar fashion. Dreaming one’s way into Maggie’s story is a function eventually delegated not to an authorial persona but to a substitute for the reader in our by now cumulative investment in Maggie’s fate. Having developed her brief dream scene as prologue, Eliot then goes so far as to yield up her very seat in the easy chair of reflective invention to her most obvious functionary within the plot. When Philip, many chapters later, “threw himself, with a sense of fatigue, into” his own version of the opening “arm-chair” (6.8:427), he is in his “painting room” rather than some generalized and idiomatic drawing room. This is a specific site of representational labor in which he finds himself “looking round absently at the views of water and rock that were ranged around ” (emphasis added)—with that almost narcotic repetition stationed to precede the moment when “he fell into a doze” (427). Apart from prose echoes, one vector is undeniable. Down into his chair he throws himself, and further to sleep he falls, complete with its subsequent dream of a symbolic plummet for his beloved Maggie—and, as it turns out, its now hallucinated further “view” of both “water and rock” as if they were retinal afterimages from his own drawings. By such means has the initial domestic “absence” been redoubled. Not just absent-mindedly staring at the images of absent things, he absents himself further into their nightmare reconfiguration. The very materials of his mimetic art—of Eliot’s too, of course—are thus ominously recombined in a fantasized vision of a torrent and its threat of rocky impact. No benign Wordsworthian “sounding cataract” (“Tintern Abbey,” line 76) of externalized “passion” (line 92) here, in the “pathetic” fallacy of “an appetite; a feeling and a love” (line 90). Instead, a hungrier desire in Maggie, gone unelevated and unsublimated, is projected as catastrophe. For it is in this ensuing dream that Philip “fancied Maggie was slipping down a glistening, green, slimy channel of a waterfall, till he was awakened by what seemed a sudden, awful crash” (6.8:427). The door opens—and his mind with it, again, to consciousness: the recognition that his father, Mr. Wakem, has come to wake him—with even

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this tacit wording spun into the vortex of dream association. How immediately, though, has the dream been left behind? Are we meant to sense in exit from its vision the same abrupt transition that plunged us from drawings of rock and water to an oneiric waterfall? In other words, is the noise of the “seeming” crash perhaps enclosed by the far rim of Philip’s sleep—as the nightmarish thud of Maggie’s implacable fate—as well as offering the dream’s point of foreclosure in the noisy real? If we suspect this in retrospect—suspect that Philip is awakened by rather than before a violent truncation within a clairvoyant fantasy—then it is no doubt in part because of the internal telos of Eliot’s own grammar (and its syllabic obtrusions) in this scenario of nightmare. For after the thickened ligature of “glistening green,” caught up as it is in the slimy lubricated rush of this erotic fantasy gone fatal, lexical compression is released to a more encompassing irony. Across a partial anagrammatic topple from “waterfall” to “awful”—in the skid of reading itself—we hear again those staged accidents of lexical cadence that offer narratography’s most ingrained clue to the pace of the inevitable. And that’s only the first phase of Eliot’s coordinated, spooky effect. In Poe, the notion would have been worked up as a full-blown trauma of extrasensory perception. For the most uncanny aspect of this so far strictly figurative violence in Eliot’s plot is that, just three pages after Philip’s dream, Maggie has a comparable hallucination of her own in one of her heady waking encounters with Stephen. The fleeting moment brings into dazed focus her own fears of “slipping.” In fact, this highly charged erotic sensation makes explicit the sexual submission—the veritable fall—that Philip’s unconsciously punning “waterfall” dream has literalized. With Maggie smitten by the immediate thrill, and thrall, of Stephen Guest’s touch, what prose gives us amounts to the recurrent nightmare omen behind the glamorous dream-come-true of erotic fascination. For when Maggie takes Stephen’s arm in an unguarded moment, her reach for support results in just the opposite. In the ensuing momentary swoon, she loosens her grip on herself, so that she was “feeling all the while as if she were sliding downwards in a nightmare” (6.8:447). Adverbial wording itself graphs the relay from Philip’s anxious premonition to this waking analogue for it. This is not a dreamlike fall exactly, but a drop “downwards” both “in” and implicitly “into” a nightmare. And one not entirely her own. In effect, Maggie—even while awake at least in body—is having Philip’s own worst armchair dream of her sinking integrity, her drowning of moral will in betraying her cousin Lucy’s trust (and Philip’s last hope) by the fl irtation with Stephen.

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The almost telepathic bond forged here between the heroine and her transferential alter ego in Philip sets the figurative template for the metaphorics of watery annihilation to come. This imagery continues implicit, for instance, in Maggie’s summary fears about the “submergence” of “personality” in “the will of another” (6.13:467). Thus the further challenge to Eliot’s metaphors. Rescued to some degree for “personality” rather than lodging merely a natural analogue for its pitiless social circumstance, her heroine’s watery end requires, as noted, not just a diluvial accident but a figurative immersion in the superfluity of her own passionate nature: an epitome and a fulfi llment rather than a surrender. This Philip also comes to recognize as soon as Maggie has gone astray—and drifted downriver—in her boating excursion with Stephen. Having foreseen her watery plummet as a nightmare landscape, Philip now images to himself the actual scene of her last-minute resistance along a waking waterway. People have started talking left and right about the shocking elopement of Maggie and Stephen, but only Philip can really picture the event from the inside, taking on the role of its ideal reader even without access to a written text. In this way, and for a second time, his foresight into Maggie’s spiritual crisis is timed to precede and inflect the actual scene of Eliot’s narration when plot finally catches up with the boating couple.

“Wrought Out,” Wrought Up Here, then, is the way Philip’s fantasy cuts through rumor to spiritual and erotic probability. “His imagination wrought out the whole story” (6.13:462), the passage begins, with the undertone of the overwrought: hinting at exactly that pitch of envy and projection to which Philip’s powers are wound up. He has “wrought” rather than just “worked” it out, implying further the shaping imagination of a narrator rather than just of a paranoid suitor. So, too, with the choice of “story” rather than “situation” or “affair,” where indirect discourse not only seems to ventriloquize Philip’s worst-case scenario but, at the same time, appears to be exposing—by a decided metanarrative turn—the busy labors of the novelist as plot engineer. In the process, as if resonating with the emotional crossed-wires involved in Maggie’s dilemma, Eliot’s indirect discourse comes to muddy the clipped grammar of Philip’s own clairvoyance: “Stephen was madly in love with her; he must have told her so; she had rejected him, and was hurrying away. But would he give her up, knowing—Philip felt the fact with heart-crushing despair—that she was made half helpless by her

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feeling toward him? ” These last two clauses are not easy to read. An extra effort of attention must be made to keep the stinging pronouns (for his rival) clear of his own governing noun. Those potentially ambiguous “he’s” and “him” mark the very strain of Philip’s exclusion from the scene he despairingly conjures. And yet there is a truth, too, in the grammatical waver, since, beyond her sexual yearning, part of Maggie’s helplessness, the other half, is indeed her sentiment toward Philip. In the end, feeling is a force divided against itself, as traced here along the inner span of its own designation. It is for the sake of others that she cannot act for her own sake, on her own erotic account; it is her love that keeps her from her desire. Narratography registers the cleaving, in both senses, of her own sentiments through the sounding board of an excluded lover who has become not only her ideal reader but her temporary narrator. No sooner has Philip “wrought out” the scene of Maggie’s temptation than Eliot herself resumes the narrative challenge, solo, just a couple of pages further on. As she will do again after Philip’s subsequent letter, in her return to plot at floodtide. Even earlier, though, with passion putting caution at risk, plot must again attempt the hopeless task of equilibrating character with circumstance. Reading of Maggie alone on the river with Stephen, one can almost taste the temptations of her craving nature as prose gives us—gives rather than simply depicts—the synesthetic blending of sense in a “delicious rhythmic dip of the oars” (6.13:464; emphasis added on the appetitive—in answer, finally, to her long-starved “hungry nature”). In fact, the alliterating d picks up on the elided phonetics just before in the personified “young, unwearied day”—rather than “young, unweary day”—as if spelling out alphabetically, and even under local negation, the eventual drag of passivity that comes to the weary when hope is worn down. Holding this back for a self-enacted prose interval, the lightly iambic thrum of “delicious rhythmic dip” offers a protective lulling that also keeps at bay those words between the lovers that would, in the sudden reflex—or reflux—of conscience, become a fatal “inlet to thought” (464; emphasis added). In silence, they luxuriate in that “grave untiring gaze” of reciprocated desire (6.13:464) whose phrasing recruits the phonetics of prolongation and ligature in a last clutch at happiness. As the reader’s own gaze is made voyeuristically privy to this scene of erotic indulgence, narratography goes further in all but eavesdropping on the enunciation itself. For with “untiring gaze,” writing’s quiet velar and glottal snare is smoothly mutual and binding, rather than viscous and thickening—as, by contrast, in Philip’s “glistening green” waterfall. Yet no less treacherous. For in

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the further syllabic eddying of this seductive fi xation, such a blinkering “gaze” envelops the oblivious couple, only a few lines later, in an “enchanted haze” that is also, by the lapsarian slackening of ethical vigilance (and the drifting dental sound of “d”), a spiritual “d (h)aze” as well, rapidly disenchanted. With the short-lived couple carried along, so to say, by a force bigger than both of them in this accidental elopement, narratology would of course mark a defining fork in life’s river of no return—and in the heroine’s cloven subjectivity as well, torn as she is between kinds rather than degrees of love. At tighter scale, narratography charts the medial riptide of this suspended indulgence. Even two distinct syllables, now fused, now dissevered, as in the case here of erotic “be . . . longing,” can trace a far broader pattern than that operating within their own lexical compass. The impetus of desire, that is, courses through the prose of Stephen’s slick tempter’s excuse at the start of this fateful excursion, when he insinuates that—since “we shall not be long together” (6.13:464)—why not one last outing? Contradicting such a plaint in the face of Maggie’s increasing resistance, he is cornered into the further desperate promise that in fact “he would belong to her forever” (469). Backing off from this, prose moves in recoil to Maggie’s final negation of desire in “We shall not be together” (6.14:473), all longing and all future duration ruled out together. Chief among the ironies in this syllabic process is that Stephen’s pivotal romantic eff usion (his promise to be hers always) inverts the same social norms that are being flouted by the absconding couple—as expressed by that voice of patriarchy, the father and lawyer Wakem, in saying to Philip that “We don’t ask what a woman does—we ask whom she belongs to” (6.8:426). Recalling the terms of class status versus empirical verification in McKeon’s account of the rise of the novel, here is the Victorian return of the birth-versus-worth dialectic under ironic scrutiny in a protofeminist key. Almost without knowing it, this seems to be part of what Maggie has come round to resisting, finally, in keeping her own sad counsel—and her own bitter distance from Stephen. “We shall not be together,” Maggie must insist. “We shall have parted” (6.14:473). Grammar offers its own allegory in the choice of transitive over passive voice. The will to act (suggested in the phrase “have parted” rather than merely “be parted”) is all that can explode the fantasy and lassitude of being-with. In compensation by displacement, the only reversal of such human distance comes, in textual terms, with the tombstone inscription Maggie will share with her brother: “In their death they were not divided”—neither from each other nor against themselves, as much an ontological consolidation as a quasi-incestuous bond.

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And between the severance from her suitor and the fatal reunion with her brother in the flood, the third man in Maggie’s life is, as we know, triangulated more as her life’s interpreter, formerly narrator, than as a bodily participant in it. Earlier, Philip saw Maggie’s erotic deadlock all too clearly in prospect, and narrated it for us. Now, he phrases it back to its heroine herself, with new understanding, transmitting in a last letter his devoted overview of her own life. Having once “wrought out” the “whole story” as surrogate narrator, he now writes it out. In the process, Philip speaks not just of his moral faith in Maggie’s spiritual wrestling. He also speaks up for the poetic license of Eliot’s gathering tragedy—and its deeper if improbable verisimilitude. First off in the letter, in a language of aesthetic credence as much as ethical trust: “I believe in you” (7.3:520). He always has, and it has bestowed on him—this fully suspended disbelief—an ability to live in and through another’s sensibility. He calls it the “gift” of “transferred life” (503): a gift that is not only bestowed but innate. Like a reader’s sympathy, investment is a deftness of empathy as well as a debt owed to the heroine for her vividness. Not a borrowed or a vicarious life: a “transferred” one, in all the lateral exchange of energy this implies, the giving and the taking part. In Philip’s bookish and aesthetically buttressed remove from social contact, that “new life into which I entered” in knowing Maggie configures the reader’s own emotional access in its more erotically disinterested vein. Like the reader, Philip has seen the peace of approaching the other “not with selfish wishes—but with a devotion that excludes such wishes” (7.3:504)—excludes even when it cannot preclude, marginalizes and transmutes, or in a word sublimates, them. The violence of her ongoing sacrifice remains. What is new here is the explicit yield of the ordeal. A recent account of reading’s ethical valence in Victorian letters gives us further terms for this, even though Daniel Deronda rather than The Mill on the Floss is the critic’s chosen example from Eliot. In The Burdens of Perfection, Andrew H. Miller follows Stanley Cavell’s arguments for an overcoming of philosophical skepticism (by “acknowledgment”) in seeing Victorian moral psychology and literary rhetoric alike as modeling an intimacy not taken personally. As befits Miller’s paradigm of Victorian epistemological relations reread as social relations, but inverting the trope of wedded otherness that he sees the Victorians sharing with Cavell as one enduring perfectionist model, Philip’s written-out understanding of Maggie’s spirit transpires at a reader’s rather than a lover’s distance. His heroically disinterested knowledge of her ordeal—turned upon her now as a prose mirror—is a returned “gift” to her for all he has felt through

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her, vicariously, in separation, across her years of avid yearning and travail: what we’ve seen him specify as “the gift of transferred life.” It is a yield recognized just in time, right before her violent death. Philip’s longstanding impalpable reach into Maggie’s motives and emotions is thus an emblem of our own novelistic experience even before he spells it out in writing, for her and all to read. In the key of unreciprocated passion, his is indeed an immediacy of feeling he learns to value without taking it personally, whether as desire or its frustration. Philip’s selfless adoration of Maggie is the price he pays for knowing her as he might a Nobody, a fictional heroine.

“Forcing” It The “gift of transferred life” is, then, a characterological access to the other that is conveyed to begin with—at the sub-narratological level—through the verbal nuances and intuitions of a prose wrought up by feeling. No need of a return to that opening frame narrator when we have Philip’s interpolated letter to sum things up: to achieve a paradoxical distance from within. The epitomized ethics of Victorian plotting is delivered straight into our hands rather than Maggie’s, by letterpress instead of postmark. By Philip’s heart-wrung prose, then, we are primed for what remains—out of his ken, and awaiting only his mourning presence in the aftermath. As we know, though, this drive toward closure has been even more sedulously “mapped” and anticipated by the narrator’s own prose—and called out by narratographic flagging of all sorts. Such foreshadowing, along with such narratological foreshortening, has been variously manifested at the level of phonemic and syllabic joins, fluctuating lexical figures, syntactic latches and loosenings, even some awkward snagged ganglia of alphabetic sequence. In the process, a general rhetoric of temporality has in this case been monolithically narrowed to both a grammar and a metaphorics of omen. The flamboyant stylistic violence thus committed upon the objective sequencing of narrative gives new (and post-Hegelian) meaning—at least from a vantage in the latest revisionist narratology (Andrew Gibson’s, in a moment)—to the notion of a rhetorical tour de force. And this only because its impetus does more than propel phrasal ironies. At the same time, it unleashes a vocalic undertow that reenacts the inevitable one level down, plunged into the linguistic unconscious of narrative momentum itself. And transferentially available, like dramatic irony writ large, only along the conduits—and nervous byways—of readerly attention.

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At approximately the midpoint of the novel, for instance, the narrator steps in (or aside) with an editorial interjection: “No wonder, when there is this contrast between the outward and the inward, that painful collisions come of it” (3.5:235; emphasis added on the phonetic collision). Disaster issues, that is, from this missed fit between desire and world. The binary terms are of course parallel to those in Lukács. Here a fateful binary is backed by the anticipatory metaphor of head-on violence that will be realized in just these terms when Maggie’s boat collides with the massive flotsam and jetsam of her outward world. Apart from such direct premonition, and among the many figurations of this divide between “the outward and the inward,” has been the particularly evocative run of prose leading up to this authorial “No wonder.” Its cadences amount to a foreseeing—or forehearing—in their own right of the heroine’s eventual vulnerability to Stephen’s unctuous singing voice. For here we find the image of our heroine “with an ear straining after dreamy music that died away and would not come near to her” (235). Framed by the muting of “ear” into the final “her,” as if in the reduced volume of an echoing keynote, as well as by the “anti-pun” on “straining” in relation to “dreamy music,” is a yet more striking effect. This occurs by local phonemic anticipation when the negated “near” in the musical liaison of “an ear” slips out from under script as the ultimate metaphonemic pun on life’s unheard melodies—even while Eliot might seem to be overexerting her own rhetoric in a forced Romantic euphony. Her heroine, in any case, has later closed her eyes to her abstract musical “studies,” and gone deaf to their sounded temptations, after the final separation from Stephen. By then only the friction of prose itself (and again its fricative alliteration) can sound the phonetic intervals necessary for even an ironized harmonic pattern. For it is now “as if every sensitive fib/re in her were too entirely preoccupied by pain ev/er to vibrate again to another inf luence” (7.2:492). The novel’s cumulative motif of seductive aurality is recognized at this point only under negation, from within the throes of a phonetically evoked exclusion of all that will never again “come near” her mind’s ear. In that same later passage of blocked future “influence,” also phonically conveyed but not troped as such, all the losses and anxieties of Maggie’s life “beat on her poor heart”—not the inner beat of vitality but the outer barrage of circumstantial destiny. One result is that “hard” is sounded as the immediate echo of “heart”—“in a hard, driving, ceaseless storm” (492), with a further, half-anagrammatic specification of that atmospheric metaphor in the tenor of “mingled love, remorse, and pity.” Not merely “hard-driving,” as idiom might have it, the adjectival

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assault is more emphatically beaten out as “hard, driving,” and thus all the more likely to be heard as well—cross-lexically—as implying the riving of desire which torments Maggie with the frustrating half measures and counterpulls of her failed allegiances and emotional defeats. The force that drives is the force that rives. And the river is its final emblematic site—stretched out toward de Manian allegory in the manner of time itself as “unmapped river.” Character versus destiny again—and couched until just before the end in tropes of that unchanneled formlessness one associates with Lukács’s “bad infinity”: the deluge of inessential days in which one’s hope of meaning sinks unmet. In the swelling rhetoric of spiritual inundation and drowning, just before flood waters begin literally to rise, we find Maggie trying to convince Lucy that Stephen loves her still: “Forgive him—he will be happy then . . .” (7.4:510). The next paragraph catches hold in a stagger of lexical recoil that reads like the squeezing out—and to death—of a single phonetic cluster, with even the emergent forth finding its own later echo in the strenuousness of her desperation: “These words were wrung forth from Maggie’s deepest soul, with an effort like the convulsed clutch of a drowning man” (510), where the routine male gendering of the simile scarcely mitigates the premonition. No Victorian novel could come any closer to giving its plot away—if it hadn’t done so more quietly and cumulatively beforehand—with a single melodramatic simile. Maggie’s grasping panic in the reach for something beyond her, her stifled effort to keep breathing amid the airless foreclosures of her hopes: such figures sum her life on the way to their own melodramatic reenactment in death. In the “extreme violence” of such figuration, there waits an increasingly frenetic and unavailing effort at the synthesis of character and destiny under the drive of plot and the momentum of its mediation. With such pages as Eliot’s open before us, a forum on narratology versus narratography may be convened at a new level, in light of criticism’s most radical venture in the former. Since Nietzsche’s revisionary departure, force—even under Hegelian phenomenological redescription—may seem too abstract, too systemic: freed to no final rupture or release, too obedient to the form it manifests and propels. In the prospectively titled Toward a Postmodern Theory of Narrative, Andrew Gibson wants to shed entirely the legacy of formalist analysis is order to open the avenues of response to untold flows of a more Nietzschean impetus—untold, and not even necessarily telling in any direct way, not constrained by immediate narrative protocols. Yet he does so without acknowledging fully enough that the force of a given literary fluxion has in its own right a

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textual form. Whatever else it is, or explodes into, language is a structure as well as an impulse. Gibson thinks to go forward from Hegel without going back to him. Yet the very idea of force in classical thought—as the dynamism (however conceptually static) by which a constitutive element or medium allows the manifestation of content in a particular form— finds its subtlest rethinking in the Phenomenology (1807). This volatilization of the form/content dualism by an increasingly less tautological notion of force takes its place in Romantic paradigms to which a Victorian writer like Eliot would have been privy even without being conversant with Hegel, given her reading in German philosophy. Gibson, however, wants a shift from structure to impulse that he finds derived entirely from later nineteenth-century thought, where all potentiality remains open, and where at every turn the evident, with all its hidden engineering, gives way to the virtual. Pursuing the “energetics” of Deleuze and Lyotard, and quite apart from any thinking of theirs about narrative per se, Gibson stresses those deterritorialized or libidinal impulses that cannot be bound back into a structuring function. He champions—rather than exactly spotlighting—the oblique and unpotentiated, the lateral rather than the hierarchical, a dynamism of virtual flows and pulsional distributions. For him—but with a symptomatic reliance on prose examples from Joyce and Beckett forward—story needs restoration as a play of force rather than either a thing of content or its forms, comprising errant lines of fl ight rather than routed patterns. Yet it doesn’t take postmodern writing to show us how the obvious formal structures and carrying devices of narrative are manifest in the linkages of its own articulation, often wavering and ambivalent. To the extent that language will never entirely toe the line of plot, it always needs to be called out by reading rather than subsumed to telling, encountered as medium rather than merely as discourse—and a medium, here, not as some neutral third term between form and content but as the churning immanence of one to the other. The force of writing is continually to reverse upon itself in countercurrents and lateral drifts, to spill over from channeled description into the discontinuities and leaps of inscription itself in its morphophonemic pulsations. Thus are revealed, by readerly transference, energies that approach to something like the text’s own unconscious urges—often manifest in its abrupt jolts of lexical energy, its unexpected power surges. Well before modernist fracturings and relativities, diction in classic narrative is latently deterritorialized by the frictions of syntax. Figurative language has always known, for example, the erosions brought by metonymy across the shifting pinions of meta-

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phor. Analogously, the cohesion of character is repeatedly undone by the bundled signifiers of its constructedness. All it takes, even with Victorian realism, is adjusting the magnitude of the optic for unseen stress points to emerge. This is where period allegiances can be distracting. Now harnessed, now unbridled, the transgressive flow championed by Gibson’s polemic—if it is to offer a new and useful narratological axiom—must describe energy fields inherent in the kinetic assemblages of narrative language all told. Otherwise, one obvious risk is that the celebration of a postmodern or writerly flow can tend to mute the broader violence of narrative force in earlier writing. Tied to evidence either before or during the post-Victorian retreat from realism, however, which is to say well before the poststructuralist turn, narratography has been posited here as a matter of local torque instead. It is thereby preoccupied with the medial purchase within mimesis, often with the unhinged linguistics of narrative letters. It concerns the drive as well as the impact—force in both those common senses—of plotting per se in the artifice of its incremental maneuvers. Where narratology monitors paradigms and patrols scaffolds, narratography gauges the stress points and shifting pulls of story in action, its moment and momentum, its flux and backflow. And sometimes, thus, its mutual interferences. This doesn’t make its method essentially postmodernist, just poststructuralist. For language is in its own right a force that is also a form of expression, on a model of the coterminous rather than the hierarchical: not container and contained but medium and its manifestation, condition and instance at once, but only as experienced from within the shunt of enunciatory positions available to discourse. As it happens, language is not one of Hegel’s offered examples of an earlier Enlightenment form inseparable from its force, as for instance in the case of lightning, where the understanding of electrostatic charge is exhausted in the “medium” that defines it. Whatever her influence from Hegel, Eliot may be found offering the river in The Mill on the Floss as a clear example: its watery element imaging the law of flow and its force at once, both the form of fluvial motion and the weighted motion itself as twin aspects of its medium. Like the force of character under social formation, the form of a river is the material manifestation of its force, the shape of its course. Versions of such structural analogy pervade Eliot’s narrative. Ultimately, given the thematized drift and fluent wake of her syllables in the evocation of time’s flux, blurring distinctions between the predicated being of her heroine and her potential becoming, the force of story is the emotional torment it depicts and, by truncating, suddenly

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rescinds. Maggie must drown, as we know, in the very figuration of her own vexed spirit, swollen, headlong, insurgent, increasingly murky, and, after Wordsworth, in a cruelly literal sense “too deep for tears.” The river is in this way entirely prototypical—and the prose that goes with it. Seen from the outside, a river exhausts its definition in the energy of its own immanence. Seen from within, mediated by consciousness, the self may be such a river. Since Heraclitus, and apart from his influence on Novalis (from whom the maxim about character-as-daemon or “destiny” comes down), duration’s irreversible river is the prime metaphor for becoming rather than being: the paradoxically formless but nonetheless shaped flow into which no hand is dipped twice. The distinction between form and content, medium and manifestation, is, as it were, washed away in the river’s billionfold unity of drops in process. Its propellant force is its only form. The river is what it does. Like Maggie as character, it courses. In this sense—including even the explicit use of the term “force” for both the emotive impact and the spiritual content of Tom’s coming moment of revelation before death—we can recognize the “unmapped river” as Eliot’s most quietly philosophical mastertrope. In context, as we well know by this point in the novel, that metaphoric phrasing for time’s river as a reified futurity, with all its tributary offshoots, figures a life whose flow is identified as the variable persistence of human character so troped. The form and force alike of the “unmapped river”—but only when complicated in progress by the prose of its own ironic conjuration and energy—may be the most Hegelian thing, let alone the most Lukácsian, that the philosophic Eliot ever wrote. All postmodern valorizations aside, suffice it to say—given the further lexical and syllabic manipulations that attend this pervasive thematic—that any narratology of force and flow, libidinal, pulsional, lateral, or otherwise, has excellent Victorian evidence before it in such a novel-long tropology of desire within an explicitly mapped topography of its doom. Again: the rhetoric of temporality as a force of plot. And Lukács himself, well beyond the Hegelian moment of The Theory of the Novel and far into his later Marxist period, still recurs to a line of Hegelian resistance to any frozen categorical notions of the world’s phenomena: “The recognition that one cannot step into the same river twice is just an extreme way of highlighting the unbridgeable abyss between concept and reality. It does nothing to increase our concrete knowledge of the river.”  Instead, to concretize the river, one must know its motion— as a force of and for change, as a medium—and know it as if from within, not just by getting one’s feet wet. A single turn of phrase in The Mill on

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the Floss, one of the earlier appearances of the aquatic subtext in Eliot’s premonitory rhetoric—and one of the purest models for the emblematic nature of flow in the book—comes deflected from the heroine’s story onto the decline of her father. For Tulliver is overcome at one moment by a “flood of emotion” that “hemmed in all power of speech” (5.6:352). Here, exposed almost as a family trait, is that inner rush so familiar in Maggie’s frustrated life: the impulse that proves a counterforce to expressivity. Idiomatic and inconsequential in some other novel, perhaps, the cliché “flood of emotion” shows its true linguistic colors—in this weighted context—as a “genitive metaphor,” where the impact of the preposition is equative rather than hierarchical: designating not so much the emotion that floods (the content of an inertial force) as the emotion that is itself a flood (the form of its own medium). Extrapolated to the larger story that survives the father’s death, and to the allegorical floodwaters that close it, the grammar of rhetoric offers in this case a narratography of ventless impulse and pregnant silence. Moreover, to vary Eliot’s famous remark in Middlemarch, these (little) things are a parable. Prepositions delimit entire cognitive horizons. To borrow from Lukács, the phrase “flood of feeling,” in or out of context, “does nothing to increase our concrete notion” of human sentiment from the outside—but only from within, where the welling dwells, and where it can seem proleptic only because endemic, both incarnate and self-defining. Little things are recurrent turning points in this novel, contracting and distending attention in the mere pulse of diction. Consider in this sense the strained chiasm that sketches Eliot’s image of a “bad infinity” just before the double drowning of the heroine and her brother. Trapped between vague horizon and threatening immediacy, vastness and devastation, horizontal amplitude and sheer converging bulk, brother and sister have been swept beyond all help or control. At this impasse, converted to a hammering phrasal antinomy around the swivel of chiasmus, “the wide area of watery desolation was spread out in dreadful clearness around them—in dreadful clearness floated onwards the hurrying, threatening masses” (7.5:521). Captured by inversion in a vanishing temporal and spatial latitude, formless and undelimited, the focal point of perception is itself threatened. The effect is a pure melodrama of perspective, vacuuming out the standard breathing-room of such syntactic symmetry, sharpening it to a point of ominous collision. Within the leveled clarity of the flooded scene, spread round in a sweeping 360-degree shot of undetermined extension, lies the clear and present emergency of the river’s continuing, its still approaching, violence. The symmetry of form,

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we may say, is undone by the watery scene’s own disruptive force: a force staged in action across the stalled (and vulnerable) flow of its own syntactic trope of poised reversal. In an unusually stark and discrepant phrasal lamination, we see here the imposition of form upon content. Or, in other words, a Lukácsian novelistic perspective at work upon plot. At the level of such plotting, the flood has brought Maggie round to Tom’s temporary rescue—if not him round to her quite yet. But the whole point is that this too must come. Her last words are her call to steer the boat toward Lucy. Almost by parable, she would sacrifice herself yet again to save her cousin—as she has already done in giving up Stephen. Tom’s last words follow, responding by sudden instinct to the objective correlative of their renewed sibling effort in just that “fatal fellowship” now confronting them: the barreling forward of linked debris, “[h]uge fragments” in a mocking union of joined force. Tom’s words depend on their tacit grammatical antecedent in the idea of death itself, whose concrete signifier is always premature, always in advance of the abstract signified to which it points: “ ‘It is coming, Maggie!’ Tom said, in a deep hoarse voice, loosing the oars, and clasping her” (7.5:521). Even in the cessation of rowing for this clenched human subject, potential loss is softened to release, to “loosing,” with the instrumental sense of a “clasping” seemingly displaced from the vocabulary of an oarlock into the somatic moment of embrace. Just before this, the spatial dead metaphor of “deep hoarse voice,” that everyday idiom of tonality, marks the lowered pitch of his awe and acceptance, with its own sonic ripple seeming to pass from “hoarse” to “oars” along a phonetic field of force that sets the whole brief moment reverberating with the impact of its negative sublimity. The purified incestuous Liebestod is now fully prepared. In the recuperative thrust of drowning alleviation, distant memories of happiness return at this point in a dubious vision of childhood joy. Thus is the clasp, transferred from oar to Maggie, to be further transferred, just a few sentences later, from present terror to past delight. For, in the instant of death, brother and sister are not seen but said, posited, in the final proof of transcendental omniscience, to be “living through again in one supreme moment the days when they had clasped their little hands in love, and roamed the daisied fields together” (7.5:521; emphasis added). Time is the force that brings remission only when it closes to zero—and detonates a spatially compressed moment outside of duration altogether. Thinking back to the Lukácsian gulf between lived “drama” and its “lyric” absorption in retrospect, we may see that death itself takes on new definition in this climactic passage of Eliot’s novel. Death is time’s way of marking the

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complete submergence of past events into a vanishing instant of present reflection. This is surely the rhetoric of temporality in its most ironic (and entirely stylized) form: the telescoping of durational force into pure end-stopped fantasy—and its instantaneous effacement. Elapsed duration is metamorphosed into captured essence—and with understanding at last; with interpretation, however involuntary. For all of a sudden, facing his sister as potential rescuer, “the full meaning of what had happened rushed upon his mind” (7.54:520)—and did so with such an “overpowering force” that the phrase “had happened” seems to condense all of plot into one conjugated loss. Such is the narratography of reflection in a single grammatical shifter. Narratological irony, that is, finds itself powered—and graphed in predication—by the force of tense’s own approximation of time’s layered weight. Tom realizes, that is, not just the immediate accidents of the tides in bringing Maggie and her boat to him. He sees the bigger picture at last. He comes to recognize the yet more pluperfect tense and tension of the moment, realizes what “had happened” ever since their early days together, in the long intransigence of his grudging life and the wonder of her still offered and unembittered love. Even for the unimaginative Tom Tulliver, temporality has its redemptive if at the same time decimating rhetoric. For him, in line with the reader at last, time is irradiated with irony only in the moment of pending death. For the banished sister comes back to the rescue when it is, twice over, too late: too late to be floated out of harm’s way, too late (or almost, except by trope) to relive the spoiled years. In that horizontal influx of awareness for Tom, that “rush” or surge of recognition, that onset of final “force,” there is also—in its “overpowering” grace—a “new revelation to his spirit”: a vertical descent into “the depths in life, that had lain beyond his vision.” Here may be the most subtly charged dead metaphor in all of this novel’s overworked aquatic thesaurus. For these “depths” upon which Tom is momentarily suspended in recognition, and which will shortly bring him under, are not only metonymically linked to the present river of no return, itself allegorical to begin with, but metaphoric for the full volume of life’s spiritual inscrutability and its ineluctable power. Swept away by feeling at last, as the text all but explicitly has it in the voicing of a repressed matrix, Tom utters the heroine’s name in the retroactive form of her nickname, “the old childish ‘Magsie!’ ” And in Maggie’s elation at this unguarded recognition, his very acknowledgment works further to convert a floodtide’s “depth,” as all but unmarked idiom, into the equally muted figuration of tonalities low (rather than high)

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on the aural scale—or in other words somatically deep in the chest of transferred feeling. For “Maggie could make no answer but a long deep sob. . . .” She doesn’t weep. She has time only for a single convulsion of tragic ec-stasis, its stairstepped descent of monosyllables followed by the scalar uplift of incremental alphabetic “intervals.” This is because the depth of her inward sob, not only its spiritual transport but also its formal transformation, comes from its taking shape—once released from the “bad infinity” of a watery chaos—as a “long deep sob of ” dialectical transcendence: “that mysterious wondrous happiness that is one with pain.” Sprung from the triadic phrasing of the “long deep sob” is the metrically as well as emotionally cadenced run of phonemic recursion that makes mystery, wonder, and happiness seem preternaturally symmetrical and continuous—as if a single multisyllabled force has given them form (“mysterious wondrous happiness”) by cresting through them in series; or as if the medium they share were other than just linguistic. By a more disruptive league of alliteration and anagramming, a similar sublexical force may be seen to release the essentialized place of “pain” in the very articulation of the phonetically softened “happiness.” Beyond this, the abiding Romantic paradox of aching joys and stinging sublimity—that quintessential form of pleasure whose content is sadness, or vice versa—is captured reciprocally when the phantom participle of victory (“won” from ruin) is itself wrested effortlessly from this ambiguous phonetic node. Eliot achieves at this turn a spectral form of expression whose legible content is instead the adjectival continuum (at “one” with ruin) between Maggie’s lethargic misery and her cathartic bliss. What we also find in this climactic passage from The Mill on the Floss goes further yet to the heart of our topic. In that very phrasing of victory rescued from sacrifice, the rhetoric of temporality appears by way of an ironic vanishing point transformed on the spot into the singular doubleness of “won” as “one.” In the lexical dialectics of this inscription, abjection is subsumed to transcendence. Here again is a sense of wording in its generative flux—or say its narratographic force, on the very cusp of form—operating so as to dynamize an inert categorical binary. Such is the zone of sheer lexical potential when mapped as the neutral quadrant of the semiotic square: the double negation of both the subjective and the objective alike in the intuitive and inchoate, the latent, the formative. In this case, out of the fluctuant undecidable “w/on/e” comes, in the opposite quadrant of resolved antithesis, the both/and of lyric resonance. Performed by Eliot’s prose in this obviated deadlock, then, is a paradox you can die with at last, if not live with: the achieved (or enforced) one-

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ness of dialectical negation, transfiguring narrative violence into spiritual sign. But—even at that—only fluid, insurgent, uncertain. In this way alone can fictional prose hope to find, from within the form of plot, its no longer dispersive but now unifying (though still radically differential) force. That’s Eliot’s effort anyway. Reading is meant to respond to just such exertions. One recalls an important paragraph on the combined accident and inevitability of death, the distinction it “dismantles” between “fate and freedom,” in Terry Eagleton’s Sweet Violence: a discussion sprung, in fact, from an allusion to the tragic ambitions of The Mill on the Floss along with Samson Agonistes—and phrased almost as if Eagleton had Eliot’s critique of Novalis in mind. The critic is contemplating at this turn the very eros of thanatos: “Like the desire with which it is so closely affi liated” (and in Eliot’s case by sibling fi liation), death itself “is a link between the alien and the intimate” (121), personal and impersonal alike. The fitness of death to self is the one “sweetness” of its violence in such aspirant tragedy: turning contingency inward to meaning—a meaning carried by precisely the least turn of phrase. Narratographically tracked across the articulated form of storytelling in Eliot’s case, the opposites of pity and terror, pleasure and pain, are not sublimated together under a stable synthesis. They vie for ascendency within the same taut folds of text. Paradox works itself out in prose. Narrative takes time, and its timing takes language—a language that may then in its turn take plot by surprise. Put as simply as this chapter has been mounted to make possible, narratography is a reading of form for its own temporal force. And this is why it incurs a psychoanalytic interchange in the reading act—as always and already a readingin. Narratography’s attention hews to narrative even as it eschews the more abstracted “intervals” of conceptual symmetry for the chromatic changes—the interstices and leaps—of syllabic force, libidinal and unruly even when shackled to thematic intention, always at play within their own coursing and coruscating intension. Whether or not this “violence purely linguistic” (Jakobson) moderates the “extreme violence” of irony (Lukács) within the cultural violence of realist scapegoating (Bersani and Dutoit), only reading—in its own continuous rewriting, Philip-like—can begin to determine. Or say that, in this transnarrational sense, only reading can tell. Reading, but of a certain kind: reading the plot for its prose, or via that prose at least. Not reading through it, in the other sense, to the structures that subtend it and require no specific phrasal manifestation. The process-

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ing of language as such, in flux and undercurrent, inevitably equivocates (as would the Hegelian dialectic at other levels outside of discourse) any staid Enlightenment collaboration of form and content under the rationalized “force” of their coterminous “medium.”  Like other phenomena too, language, when read, must pass through the switchpoint of subjectivity. Encouraged by the evidence of Eliot’s supple, fluctuant writing under formal duress in The Mill on the Floss, what this chapter has gone so far as to propose, in partial homology with “force” as a volatilized rather than stable exchange between form and content, is, for Eliot—and well before any “postmodern narratology” of force—just this: that one front of textual impulsion, what I have called prose intension, is made manifest in her narrative writing as much through its frictions and leaks as through its modulated rhetorical arcs. Which leads to a further question in the present context. If the irreducible difference that paradoxically comprises the “universal medium” in Hegel is truly to be known only from within, wouldn’t this also be true for a more narrowly conceived (and so-called) phenomenology of reading as well as of spirit? Understood as a system, language works. Understood from within its alphabetic decoding and the identifications to which its subjects us, the force of its medium is to work upon us in an enunciative byplay of inscription and generative recognition. It is there that the medial force of narrative writing (the morphophonemic chain as both signifying impulse and its referential principle at once) yields up the differential suggestions of its own content. Like consciousness in the world—very like it, and sometimes in transferential enactment of the mind’s own dynamic of repression and return—reading proceeds by realizing, in fits and starts, the conditioning potential of its own medium. In engaging The Mill on the Floss in this way, one is struck in the end by the rejection, on the heroine’s behalf, of all possibility except in death. Granted, alternatives to this would have been modest enough, however infinitely preferable. Female heroism of a certain grandeur can never come again in its fabled forms. So Eliot’s later novel, Middlemarch, closes by admitting. No new Theresas or Antigones, in church or theater history: because in both understandings of the term at once, social and literary, “the medium” as such, the milieu and its means, “in which their ardent deeds took shape is for ever gone.”  Eliot thus acknowledges a world entirely post-epic in both its social setting and its mimetic imaginary: absent the pertinent “media” in either sense. Into this vacuum, the novel asserts its own mediation as the carrying force of Victorian cultural ideas. But Maggie has not been caught up in, or rescued for, such possibility.

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She can’t be said, in her truncated youth—as we hear about the “insignificant” people alluded to at the end of Middlemarch—to have “lived faithfully a hidden life.”  In such phrasing, vitality stands forth as the self-definitional object of subjectivity’s own duration. A humanist keynote thereby modulates on inspection into a synthetic interval pried open by the reciprocities of grammar itself, all within the syntactic subcode of the so-called cognate object. Though based in a linguistic specificity utterly foreign to his critical register, the effect is eminently Lukácsian (especially in its utopianism). To live a life, rather than any other mode of existence that might be predicated for such a life: that is Eliot’s most visionary post-epic gesture, reaching in a new (low) key the supposed Greek harmony between being and essence. Life vividly lived, rather than in any other way instantiated or incarnated or endured: this is the life force accessed by biographic form itself, enclosed, self-defining, retroactively essentialized, however much beset and violated along the way. Instead, Maggie dies her life. The closing moment of Middlemarch tacitly summons back the early showdown between character and destiny in The Mill on the Floss. To live a life is to dissolve category into agency, form into content, law into impulse. To live a life is to make life the exclusive medium of its own realization—and ever after, in Dorothea’s case, an unsaid “force for good.” In a new Hegelian correction (very much in the Lukácsian spirit as well) of the static binary between form and content—a correction that instead animates the difference by conscious mediation—the very force of life’s form is felt from within as the reciprocal self-definition of personhood and its lifeworld. However metaphysical, this is openly rhetorical: refiguring “life” per se out of its own duration. It reveals again, we may want finally to say, a “rhetoric of temporality” as the underlying force of “biographic form” in fiction. To live a life is to enclose its duration as a tautological energy, grounded in self-presence. Lodged there in an idiomatic wrinkle of Eliot’s diction at the close of Middlemarch, in short, is the quietly marked prose allegory of ontological integration itself, where being subsists as condition of its own possibility. The earlier novel was sadder going, to say the least. With the later alternative of Dorothea’s biography in mind, to read The Mill on the Floss is to encounter all the more obviously a human force morosely vitiated and drained away from the streaming momentum—again, the very medium—that figures it. The violence of Eliot’s earlier novel, in short, derives from the fact that life waits there unpotentiated—out of reach by character—across the gap and hurdle of circumstance, beckoning but un-

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livable. Narrative time in The Mill on the Floss is the measure of just this: at once an ongoing reminder and an inert remainder. Not until Thomas Hardy treats the temporal ordeals of a heroine with even more brutal narrative abandon(ment), and marks them out as plot’s irrevocable stages of decline, will we have again in English fiction so schematically violent a sexual sacrifice. Or so complete an inversion of Victorian perfectibility. And this time there will be no lyric afterself, as with Philip Wakem, through whose writing to recycle elapsed drama as elegiac wisdom. As narratography is primed to notice, the medium of Hardy’s prose defies that consolatory option at every turn of phrase. But the way toward Hardy is already paved with as much stylized pain as epiphany. Already the present chapter has needed to confront the unappeasable in the bridged crevices and phonic defaults of style’s ironic incantations. For Eliot’s writing cannot for a moment, or at least not for more than a scintillating moment or two at a time, disguise the fact that the comforts of The Mill on the Floss have been cold ones indeed. To borrow from Lukács again, and with his own italics applicable even to the touchstone moment of death (when suffered as the “extreme violence” of ironic reversal), we cannot easily forget that in Maggie’s case, while “the experiencing subject”—and never more so than in asphyxiation— remains “a lyrical one,” the experienced body drops into objectification as a very dead one. Exactly that vestigial Romantic lyricism is what the prose poet in Hardy will next scour clean from his narrative system, even while evoking as prototype, hidden deep beneath anything Eliot means to call up by allusion to Antigone in Middlemarch, the ritual molestation that lies behind all Greek tragedy in the scourge and renewal of violent fertility cults. Amid its other illustrative service in a narratography of Victorian prose, the next chapter also completes a trilogy of violence under analysis as transmitted textual matter. When a story like Helen Huntingdon’s in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, conveyed on paper and after the fact, serves by its very mailing to consolidate a (sub)communal public of male “relatives”— and, in structural fact, virtually to constitute their “relation”—the parallel with textual consumption in the form of novel reading is complicated by the fact (within the fiction) of a “real” pain being delivered up to reading. But without the buffer zone of narrated consumption, and its witness to a preceding historical grief, when we ourselves read unaccompanied—or unsubstituted in our curiosity—the fi rst-order fictional suffering of an omniscient narrative like The Mill on the Floss, our unfi ltered and unmotivated access to Maggie’s ordeal is all the more likely to compromise

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our fascination. Hence Philip Waken, rerouting not just a disinterested but a sexually invested understanding of the heroine back into plot as a gift to her before death. Such is the Lukácsian pivotal moment of “reflection” returned from formal order into circulation as a generosity of plot. Remove even that possibility, as Hardy does so emphatically—the chance that suffering can be made to mean anything, anything but or outside itself—and the print audience of a tragic fiction like Tess of the d’Urbervilles is left to wonder unguided, and more uneasily yet, about the difference, however it might emerge, between novel reading and blood sport. But not without some taut, knotty language to steady us in our interpretive distance, to worry, thicken, and in partial measure to deflect narrated pain with the philosophical contortions of report. Hardy’s dim view of human life is scarcely transparent in its treatment, but tensed and contracted on its own phrasal terms with the convulsions it details. His fiction works, and often against its own passive consumption, by injecting desolate recognitions into the nerved and at times spasmodic episodes of prose itself. In response to what he famously calls in Tess “the ache of modernism,” narratographic reading becomes a mode of all but clinical diagnosis.

5 Death per Force t e s s ’s de s t i n e d e n d

The worlds of essence are held high above existence by the force of forms, and their nature and contents are determined only by the inner potentialities of that force. . . . The ‘should be,’ in whose desperate intensity the essence seeks refuge because it has become an outlaw on earth, . . . kills life. . . . The ‘should be’ kills life. . . . The ‘should be’ kills life. . . . —luk ács, the theory of the novel (150 – 51)

It isn’t easy to be made readable enough for print. In the ironic plotlines of Victorian fiction, sacrificed characters repeatedly suffer for our cathartic sincerities, as if renewing us at one remove by the meanness of their own defeat. It is about to happen again in the novel taken up here. But perhaps less so this time—rather than more so—because of this one book’s own self-reflection on the sacrificial archetype. This is not the case in Eliot. Maggie Tulliver’s drastic sadness, her every hope pulverized, is the book’s purposeful (however sympathetic) sadism, even as the pleasure we are meant to derive from it remains entirely aesthetic and ethical. Maggie still has us, the readers, in part to blame for the imperative to make her life writable. Plot meets psychology at the crossroads called destiny, where character is undone by circumstance. And this is just where—for a modern subject like Hardy’s Tess Durbeyfield, even more than for Maggie Tulliver—all paths, spiritual and otherwise, seem like dead ends. But while Philip’s appreciation of Maggie’s story in our stead is arranged to seem partly compensatory in The Mill on the Floss, nothing like this comes to the generic rescue in Tess. The only epic totality that remains for the descendent genre of the novel in Hardy’s unflinching experiment is its totally arbitrary waste of human possibility. With the continuously blistering sense that it ought to have been otherwise. (174)

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And with this waste cosmologically figured as such from early on in the plot. “Happy are those ages,” begins Lukács’s Theory of the Novel— in an already faintly archaized inversion of epithet and its predicated epoch—“Happy are those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths—ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars” (29). This is an imagined world of total coherence, “for the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars; the world and the self, the light and the fire, are sharply distinct, yet they never become permanent strangers to one another.” Here is the ancient myth of an unestranged life. Millennia later in social time, what the present epigraph would be quick to identify as the “outlawed” heroine of Tess of the d’Urbervilles lives in the midst of her astrological pessimism, where the dream of reading the stars is both reversed and obviated. So little is her mortal way illuminated by the heavens that the planet she inhabits is the very negation of light and fire both, not a “splendid” star, but “a blighted one” as she famously calls it (4:54), where her fate is only sporadically legible in moments of despair. In contrast, falling upon fallen (post-epic) ears, Lukács’s stylized rhetoric can seem couched in deliberately mixed metaphors. For the epic consciousness, stars give paths but also the “illumination” that guides one along them. The Hegelian dialectic of the critic’s entire method is latently glimpsed in that first retrospective gesture, with cosmic pattern once having offered up, for Greek culture, both the form and the content, reversibly, of an immanent, luminous, and synthesized meaning. It is by just this indissoluble fusion between inner and outer, psyche and metaphysics—a fusion posited of the epic moment and reenacted here by lapsarian critical prose—that fi rst invokes “totality,” even before defining it, at the level of grandiloquent style alone. Lukács’s heuristic gust of rhetoric is self-illustrating through and through in these opening lines. For the brilliance of this staged cultural nostalgia lies in the fact that its astrological harmonics are so foreign to us that we need a moment even to parse their intervals, to sort out their implied ratio and proportion. Let’s see: metaphoric fire stands with respect to the literal if distant light of the prophetic sky as does self to the outer world at its most comprehensive limit: in short, at home there, at one. This isn’t our way of thinking—or writing. The extent to which this mystic conception is also foreign to the Greeks themselves—at least in respect to the founding sacrificial violence for which their transcendentalism is a cover story—will emerge on no less an occasion than the plotted autopsy of Tess’s desire. On the quenched star of earth, blight is for Tess the terrestrial

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form—and chilling force—of doomed ripeness. Lent temporal form in its decay of hope, blighting is the very action of plot—under the rule, we are invited to believe, of an impersonal (however unremitting) design that only reading brings out. What reading itself performs is a different question—and will be linked shortly with a nineteenth-century debunking of those very etherealizations of Greek mythography in which Lukács indulges: mostly for strategic contrast, of course, with the post-epic world of the novel. If the Greek epic owed less to the “personification” of a cosmically rounded essence in human heroes and more to the “sublimation” of ritual violence in their deeds (to anticipate Catherine Gallagher’s terms for the researches of Victorian anthropologists like Frazer whom Hardy had been reading), then prose fiction’s broad generic derivation from the epic takes us rather inevitably to Hardy’s exacerbated late-Victorian case of archaeologically tinged violence, where, despite vestiges of sacrificial purgation in the form of story, the language of “blight” indicates as well the stillborn travesty of all ancient fertility cults.

Character Flaw / Narrative Law The templates first of frustration and ill-luck, then of violence and retributive murder, are imposed upon Tess’s story in two overlain schemes of formal order. These involve not just a division into clearly demarcated books—or “phases”—of an incremental abjection and defeat but a pivotal reconfiguration of their intractable logic. It is the latter that can easily elude the notice of psychological investment across the continuous assaults of plot. One is likely to remember, when thinking back on Tess’s story, mostly one long ordeal of punctuated setback and decline, a serial crushing out not only of promise but of desire itself—with a single late remission, the lovers’ truncated sexual idyll, arriving mostly to season the grief and salt its wounds. The reader tends to remember Hardy’s plot, in this sense, as a continuous punitive bludgeon on the way to a final violent arrest. Fair (if inexact) enough. The downward curve of the heroine’s fateful anguish, however, has an unexpected loop near the end, a peripety and reversal in the subsystem of the novel’s eventual crime plot. It is at this turn that perhaps the novel’s deepest irony comes clear. In the violated love story of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and by an intolerable double bind, passion—her very life force—is itself the true and irreducible flaw of the heroine’s temperament, as well as of her fatal temper. Yet for Tess to respond in kind, and by instinct, to the violating ironies of her fate with a violence all her own is for her to accept the very terms of the world that ruins her.

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What may at first appear as just one more cruel trick of fate is in fact the retroactive model of them all in the binding grip of cause and effect. Arbitrary and undeserved until then, gratuitous in its cruelty, the punishment of Tess by story (and by its allusive, editorializing discourse) must suddenly be earned by the plotted events of Lukácsian “biographic form” itself—and then rounded off by the totalizing force of plot at a higher level of structural abstraction (called, for want of a better term, meaning). No sooner does Tess rise in passionate, blind defiance against Alec, that is, than a different order of reversed fortune sets in: the emergent symmetry of social retribution itself. The exemplary place of such retribution in that abstracted principle of force taken up by Hegel, and hence implied in a Lukácsian dialectic of narrative form, comes to view in the pressure of attempted totalization upon the very linkages of plotting both large and small, from divided sequential volumes (sent to print as “phases”) to the syllabic differentials of wording itself. Timing is everything, and for Tess it is always bad—phrase by phrase, phase by phase. In the Victorian manifestations of nineteenth-century disenchantment, the novelistic genre exists by definition as a release and repeal of desire at once, an arena of broken hope. In this respect, the organizing irony of The Mill on the Floss brings the evidence of the last chapter into direct alignment with the logic of Hardy’s novel. When the “force” of the “depths” in The Mill on the Floss, the “depths in life,” is conveyed by just that dead metaphor of plumbed meaning—and yielded up even to the belligerently insensitive Tom Tulliver, of all people—what this can only mean is that the novel’s own strained totality is glimpsed from within by a kind of metalepsis, that device whereby the artificer’s role becomes part of the plot. Tom’s is a “revelation,” as we’ve seen, so wordless and fleeting that nothing but the inclusive tenor of plotting itself—nothing but the novel’s whole ironic shape—could offer content to the form of such a climactic transformation. At a moment like this in Eliot, with her protagonists drowning together in the very river of life, spiritual disclosure amounts to a radical baring of the device: the rendering immanent not of transient profundities but of the novelistic “deep structure” itself. In the process, the inextricable bond of force and form may well seem to take on, as noticed, a self-consciously dialectical cast. More so yet in Hardy. A full and coursing river isn’t Hegel’s instance, as we know, of the unity-in-diversity whose force is indistinguishable from its form. It might have been, though. For what is that channeled rushing we see and feel, that material confluence of separate particles, but another description of such a river? Instead of this example, though, and after considering

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such natural forces as that of electricity and gravity, Hegel looks to the realm of human behavior for his most extended illustration: namely, to the abstract circuit of transgression and punishment within the selfcorrective forms of the legal order. Here is where power can be exerted as a counterforce rather than a formal manifestation: not essence realized but rather its violent abrogation. Outside of Dostoevsky, Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles may be the nineteenth-century novel’s chief exemplar of the so-called force of law when conceived in this way, as a formal reversal of activity and passivity within the field of potential: event and its neutralization by consequence. But Hardy’s novel is—and does—something else at the same time, couched in more directly narrative terms as story’s own self-inverting operation. Certainly plot (or call it the ad hoc law of plot) in Hardy takes its every turn for the worse by turning upon the structuring antithesis of a given episode and its negative eventuality. Violated once by Alec, Tess is really for the first time genuinely seduced by the tempter the second time around. Her legal husband Angel is coming back to her, the reader has learned, yet Alec cajoles her, tortures her, into believing that he never will. The once-lost chance might thus have connected to the future in this longawaited manner, but instead Alec relinks Tess to her past shame rather than her residual—and continuing—desire. In the upshot, and this is Hardy’s cruelest dialectic twist, Tess murders Alec not out of calculated revenge—not as his punishment—but as the instigation of her own: anticipating a second death reciprocally inherent in the first. The stab of the knife, following immediately in silence upon “more and sharper words from the man” (56:369; emphasis added, as overheard by the landlady) after Tess’s burst of accusation—with that edged adjective offering the first narratographic turn in this phase of the plot’s homicidal inversions—has the ultimate counterforce, that is, of a subsequent inevitability. So that, in this sense, the heroine’s passionate violence, directed against this murderer of her own marital passion in the very death throes of its hope, does more than merely repeat a death of possibility already suffered. It suffers another to come unto her, another death: her own, and from the point of view of the absolute other—the law. In terms brought to unusually stark clarity as indeed a de Manian “rhetoric of temporality,” Hardy’s logic engages what Hegel initially sees schematized by received definition as the abstract force of law. In question is an unchecked violence of will given over to its social and ethical counter-reaction in a deferred—but always inferred—justice. Even as Hardy engages this force of law, it is up to his heroine to internal-

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ize it. Certainly the implacable dramatic irony of this narrative logic is borne in upon Tess’s whole mental frame. For, after the murder, she lives out her few remaining days in a state of consciousness permeated by her own looming end. Alec’s death will have thus served its deepest purpose in putting her out of her own lifelong misery even at the peak of her last-minute bliss with the returned Angel. After all the bitter coincidences and cruel missed chances, with their crippling mix of pessimism and throttled promise, everything unfolds in the last chapters as flatly inevitable. But this is, of course, only the rhetoric of plotted time in the labor of its own exculpation. The demeaning events of story are lifted in the end to bleak meaning, however nugatory—to ironic more than therapeutic symmetry—at least for the reader. According to novelistic protocols, though, it is the story itself still, rather than any external order of justification—the force of plot rather than the force of law—that must deliver up this meaning. It must do so in the very process of bringing the heroine to her unseen, her offstage, scaffold. After that, it is only a vestigial language of story, an inert eking out of a final static scene, that survives her in the novel’s final paragraphs. What narratography comes upon in that brief last chapter, and in the last section of this one, is the inscription of cancelled possibility itself: narrative under arrest by every device of its former momentum in diction, syntax, figure, and allusion. On the way to this foreclosing prose, the homologous relation between a literary text of the law—a narrative, for instance, of crime and its inversion (or negation) as punishment—and the formal laws of literature, including those of genre, is all too painfully clear in Hardy’s case. And the inexorability of plot reflects back in turn on the social assumption that justifies it, exposing the subordination of deviance or transgression—or call it disequilibrium, the very prompting of plot—to the stasis of formal symmetry. Once law’s force comes to exemplification in the narrowly legal sense, that is, a paradox is crystallized. Criminal transgression would appear to constitute the unresolvable opposite of the rule of law, of order, of totality, only when the force of law, content of its own forms, is not recognized as a “universal medium.”  Otherwise, when properly seen, crime in the Enlightened sense is at one with punishment—rather than chased down by it. Their shared medium: the rationalized social element or ethos of human community. We are concerned, however, not with this Hegelian sense of “medium” alone (very close to Eliot’s sense of it as a synonym for cultural precondition at the end of Middlemarch), but with the more specific mediality of its narrative representation. And yet the latter is, within the immanent

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effects of a given fiction, not merely a subset of the former but its sole manifestation. This point can be put more broadly. The dialectical striving to define unity without suppressing diversity, to see the form/content dyad as in fact a dynamism rather than a hierarchy, to install “medium” as the mediating term in this redefinition, to specify force as at once an energy of conveyance and the structuring function of the conveyed, and above all, to locate an intermediary position for consciousness (and thus ultimately for “character”) amid these alternating perspectives—crucial as these efforts are to a post-Cartesian philosophy, they are just as crucial to another walk of thought altogether. As we know from Lukács’s transposition of Hegel into genre theory, they lie at the core of a poetics of fiction. And this is where, beyond the typical precincts of narratology, one looks for a more volatilized model of the imbrication of substance and form. Content is inscribed and (in the etymological sense) contained, of course, by the linguistic work of unfolding episodes, one at a time. Yet form also prevails (“supersensibly,” as Hegel would have it) as the abstract structure of plot—closer in this sense to the formalist syuzhet as sheer structuring function. This is the form of plotting’s process, the shape assumed by its procedural content, even as that content, called narrative, is a formative procedure—a force—in its own right. Plot dictates action. Plotting is narrative in action. Or say that action is the very medium of plot, its force. Graphing the progress of an inscribed narrative along the phrasings routed and warped by its own force, rather than charting their schemata on a stable grid of its inactivated formal structure: this is reading when given over to the moment-by-moment force of form and its constitutive solicitation (another Hegelian term) of response. Any novel may invite this narratography, especially any complex novel, Victorian or otherwise. What Tess adds, however, in its further thematization of human as well as natural law, is a sense of logical (rather than merely biographical or even destinal) inevitability. In Hardy’s novel, this works to enunciate an underlying dialectics of fiction comparable to that template in Eliot of character + circumstance = plotted destiny (which ends up meaning, for both authors, subjectivity v. contingency = exemplary defeat). Putting it only a little differently, major characters in Victorian fiction are, in every sense, charged with deviance. Tess’s criminality simply gives this phenomenon a bad—and a legal—name. In Hegel’s effort to articulate the Enlightenment relation of immanence to the invisible realm of law in the case of action and reaction, a double dialectic sets in. On the destabilizing side of the equation, trans-

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gression as crime is the manifestation, at some level, of will. But when the virtual crime—or, in other words, its sponsoring impulse—becomes actual event, that event stands to mere will as its structural opposite, its immediate inversion. On the restorative side, and thus “negating” or inverting the criminal act through the manifestation of its inevitable consequence, is punishment. To get past the density of abstraction in Hegel’s account of these established cultural protocols, one must paraphrase rather freely. As he sums up juridical logic’s static field of impulse and prohibition, deviance and reprisal, the virtuality of transgression in the realm of desire is matched by the virtuality, in the moment of that same transgression, of its regulative consequences. Intention of whatever sort, suddenly unrepressed and manifested as a will to act, nonetheless disappears in its realization as act, as crime, and then disappears again, negated or inverted once more, in the counter-intention of reprisal as a kind of ex post facto repression: an acquiescence again to the passivity of order, of ethical form, of law’s force. Say this, then: that by isomorphic relation with a “universal medium” (83) like gravity, every crime is mediated by the order of order itself—and its retributions. Yet this happens not by direct phenomenological apperception, for the most part, but rather, one goes on to notice, mostly within a panoptic and interpellatory conception of the social ethic. Then, too, in Hardy, unlike in Hegel, any third term between form and its immanence as force—any rooting of this dyadic “law” in consciousness—tends to be usurped in advance by the coercions of plot itself. Here again is a violence to exactly that individuation on which the novel pretends to thrive. Its only further violence comes when a character like Tess seems so completely to internalize the force of law—and the law of force—that she helps visit upon herself her own annihilation by social norms. This irony permeates Hardy’s novel. As the author well knew, the knot of crime and punishment—as the special and most wrenching case of desire, act, and reaction—rises to generalization as a parable of novelistic time. You can’t continue intending, consciously or not, what you already remember doing. Nor can you undo the portended consequences into which the act itself vanishes in progress. Plotted time, we may say, is the very record of this continuous negation of the virtual by the actual, the inversion of desire in consequence—rather than generating any spectrum of continuity between them. What Tess exposes is the unifying force that binds transgression to the reflex action of its setting right. Deviance fulfi lls the ultimate formal equilibrium of its disruptive content in a return to quiescent stability. Active enforcement lapses to the inert law that has

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called it forth. In the case of an extreme novelistic deviance, the whole violently skewed system—animated in a given instance by the force of event—returns to the unity of its own rule under the totalized figure of narrative coherence. It is in this way that Enlightenment “criminology” under the force of law leads us round to the dialectical force of narrative more generally. The damage done by plotting is assuaged not by but as plot. The formative is asked to recontain its own content through the force of order. In the case of Tess’s death, the general rhetoric of temporality around which melodrama pivots is something like a specific rhetoric of the chiastic figure itself. I continue paraphrasing Hegel as closely as I can, even while bringing this section of the Phenomenology under the shadow of de Man’s terms from the last chapter. Almost without premeditation in Tess’s case, the law of force induces to murder. But, by dialectical contrast, it is the force of law that rounds out the significance of this murder. It does so in an ultimately equalized violence that gives over the expressive gesture of the crime to the statutory letter of the law, that lapses from event to its eventuality in a foregone conclusion, that submerges disruptive instance in the synthesis of disciplinary principle. Or to cast the matter in the implied and quite straitening terms of Hardy’s storytelling, narrative is a force whose manifestation is inscribed event and whose law is the temporal structure of plot itself. The immanence of crime suspends both past intention, now potentiated, and future punishment, still virtual, in a limbo of the now. Paradoxically enough, the result in progress is a narrated lifeline still unfolding and entirely foreknown. The violent event has already transpired, whereas the totalizing system that gives it significance remains suppressed, passive, latent, but wholly pervasive and informing. And of course equally violent—just not willed in the way a crime is willed, but instead inevitable. Where a striving for novelistic catharsis is concerned, plot has to be cruel to be kind. Yet the gradual activation of a story’s totalizing significance can entail along the way a more immediate investment in the sensuous force of its form, an investment that in the case of Tess, as we are to see, verges on prurience. So far, then, a narratology of Hardy’s metatext—and its rhetoric of the inevitable. So forward now, with this paradigm of violence and its equilibration in mind, to a more verbally cued narratography of Hardy’s actual text. Where words are always “sharper” than they seem. And cut deeper.

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“Driven Well Home to the Reader’s Heart” The most controversial major novelist of the Victorian period, Thomas Hardy regularly stood in an embattled relation to the “too genteel reader” whom he dismisses in his preface to the first single-volume edition of Tess of the d’Urbervilles (following its illustrated weekly serialization, to whose pages and illustration we will return). This is the reader dramatically squeamish and morally fastidious. Yet that preface also sketches another relation to what later criticism would call “reader response” or “response aesthetics,” a compact by which the audience collaborates with and completes a text. Hardy puts it modestly when he mentions those receptive readers who “have only too largely repaired my defects of narration by their own imaginative intuition” (25). The larger ramifications are clear: not just bridging over the gaps in continuity by their construction of a credible story space, readers round out the narrative by sympathetic participation. But Hardy’s deliberate modesty may also be a cover for his acknowledgment that such an “imaginative intuition” drifts toward voyeuristic titillation—and is calculated to do so. It is at such a point that the aesthetics of response shifts over into its ethics. Wolfgang Iser’s influential subject in The Implied Reader is the inferred deciphering agency necessary to the generation of a text as cogent narrative representation. Hardy’s narrative reminds us that the enlisted reading of a novel may embroil this work ethic with a pleasure principle by no means always calculated to flatter the reader’s motives in helping to motor the plot. By speaking instead of the implicated rather than merely implied reader, I mean to highlight the enacted energies of reading not only called upon but also called out by a text like Hardy’s—including the darker shading of the term, as when one is implicated by being suspected of a transgression. Few nineteenth-century novels are in fact so often commented on in regard to the guilty pleasures of their reading as is Tess of the D’Urbervilles, where a combination of the lurid and, again, the prurient locates much of the text’s emotional charge in the steady draining of the heroine’s erotic vitality. Catharsis becomes almost vampiric. But this is not enough to notice. The suspect pleasures of narrative reading in Tess involve a more pointed guilt by association—an association not just with the manipulative sexual urges of the characters within the plot but with the mechanisms of narrative itself, its underlying schema for the graduated staging of a life story. In Iser, the implicit work of the reader is, in general, to aid continuity by fi lling in discursive gaps. In Hardy, by contrast, we are enlisted to aid and abet the merciless discontinuities of

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plot, the irreversible abrupt stages of Tess’s ordeal, by plummeting from one “phase” of her degradation to the next. Implicated, then, rather than merely implied, tactically cornered rather than merely tacit, we readers of Tess find our own function repeatedly doubled or undone by narrative event. Ours is a stance either performed by proxy in a scene of reading or turned inside out when denied to a character of deficient literacy. In one way or another, by enactment or evacuation, the reader function is displaced but also replayed. Th is involves far more than a reflexive stressing of textual encounter, where the experience of fiction can be debated by a text through its delegation to the character psychology of readers within the plot. Instead, what emerges more broadly is a systemics rather than a thematics of reading, one in which every level of textual processing, from turns of figurative phrase to the turning points of plot, is intermeshed in a manifold circuit of directed energy and subjected attention. In ways that cannot avoid calling into question the narrative’s own design, the novel becomes one long reading lesson—and not wholly an improving one. You may even come to share the heroine’s explicit view, from the midst of her tragic diminishment, that reading lessens. This is why it is not enough to say of Hardy’s novel that form infi ltrates content—not even when the symmetries and escalations of plot seem internalized by characters as a chafing fate; not even when omniscient purview invades their world with a voyeuristic and coercive force. Your narrative reading has even more to answer for, especially the more closely and knowingly you do it. To begin with, from its Shakespearean epigraph forward, the novel is itself a reading of other texts. The allusive field is by turns internal and external, with books either mentioned by characters or recruited by the narrator on behalf not of themselves but of their often degrading story. The novel’s first two embedded texts (or at least titles) are A Counterblast to Agnosticism, read offstage by the Clare brothers (2:40), and The Compleat Fortune-Teller, scanned just before we meet her by Tess’s mother (2:45) after hearing about the family’s d’Urberville lineage. With the latter grimy book soon returned by Tess herself to its usual resting place in the outhouse, this is hardly a propitious site for the novel’s fi rst stand-in as prophetic volume. Together, then, these fi rst two infratexts collide to tell a larger tale. For Hardy’s novel is nothing if not an agnostic blast that repeatedly drops omens in the form of anti-providential exempla. From there on in the unfolding plot, reading tends to be the narrator’s own, plastered over event by discursive irony rather than pasted into it by reported dialogue. As we read on, and with recognition, allusion becomes

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a form of collusion. It is part of the same violence that orchestrates the destined besting of Tess’s hopes. The novel further mocks the providential, even while restaging it, in the very texture of its figurative, turned prefigurative, language. Diction becomes prediction. In this way, such phrasing takes its obvious place in a rhetoric of temporality. It seeks to compensate for the harshest of dramatic ironies with the educed totality that shapes them. In this way too, and more even than in The Mill on the Floss, do the most nuanced satisfactions of reading derive from ironies operating at the expense of the heroine’s own vulnerability. No dead metaphor, for instance, could be more abortively revived than when news of the Durbeyfields’ aristocratic ancestry, whose last issue will be Tess’s doomed child, “seemed to have impregnated the whole family” (4:54). But Tess herself is denied the right to that superstitious overreading which is an important interpretive credential of Hardy’s reader, the tendency to sense foreboding in the least detail. After she has lost her walking boots in a failed visit to Angel’s parents, she upbraids herself about the “baseless impressionability” that “had caused her to read the scene as her own condemnation” (44:297). We know better, know that some things in fiction are indeed omens. And this is also a way of knowing that the tax on the hermeneutic pleasure we take from structural as well as figurative anticipation is charged in the long run against the novel’s own heroine, even against the paranoia on her part it would otherwise justify. Just as the far horizon of Tess’s plot lies with the reader in the impure security of reception, so does its other vanishing point reach back behind story to those textual prototypes from which it—along with much of the reader’s intellectual invigoration, and none of the heroine’s—derives. This is why both the precedents for narrative action generated by textual allusion and the premonitory dramatic ironies “read” by characters or audience are two halves of the same fateful, ensnaring tale: Hardy’s novel not just as processed in reading but as a parable of reading—and at key moments, its scene. Early on, there is Tess’s sudden confrontation with the sign-painter’s blood-red inscription from Peter: “THY, DAMNATION, SLUMBERETH, NOT” (12:99). As if by nails pounding the accusation in place, its words are separated by commas in order to be “driven well home to the reader’s heart” (12:100). Again, the dead metaphor (of sleep) in this message seems itself proleptic, for it is just when a physically exhausted and spiritually somnolent Tess nods off in the predawn forest with Alec that the tireless vigilance of damnation catches up with her by way of sexual violation.

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Compounding this seeded dramatic irony, the sign-painter’s second inscription breaks off at a moment of fundamental undecidability, requiring the participatory energies of its reader, here Tess in our place (whose thoughts go unrecorded), to fi ll in the admonitory blank: “THOU, SHALT, NOT, COMMIT——.” In general idiomatic terms, there are of course two cardinal sins that take the verb “commit,” and the bulk of Hardy’s plot lies latent in that ominously choked-off grammar. Between any unchaste behavior in a broad theological understanding of “adultery” (in Tess’s case more like rape) and a renewal of the liaison with Alec in the stricter form of marital adultery (Tess by then wed to Angel) is a space virtually coterminous with the collapsed distance between sexual transgression and that other sin of “commission” for which the punishment is instead (or differently) mortal: namely, murder. Thus does the sign-painter’s scrawl offer an inlaid and counter-set text fitted closely with the surface of Hardy’s own narrative. Both as read by Tess and in its own right, the sign’s citational status does not defuse its phrasal irony. Given the painter’s arrested clause as plot matrix, the heroine’s foundational scene of reading brackets the whole arc of narrative across the divided grammatical objects of a single accusative case. To triple the lexical irony, we come to realize that it all could have been avoided if Tess had succumbed to the letter of the law—a governing idiom behind the methodical sign-painting scene—and made no emotional or marital “commitment” whatever. In Hegelian terms, refusing to commit the passive will to some further action is to shelter the self from its cruelest potentialities. But this is, of course, humanly impossible. In Lukácsian terms, the “biographic form” of the novel, in all its beleaguered vitalism, makes this clear. The system must be dynamized by desire. And in narratographic terms, what might have been just a tandem stylistic ambiguity in citation and truncation—commit what? or to what, or whom?—becomes a yawning ellipsis subsuming in advance whole phases of the plot to come. Well within the precincts of narratology as plot prefiguration, Hardy’s effect—with its dialectical double bind—overlaps in this case (our appeal to set theory again) with a stylistics of what amounts to a compacted forking syllepsis. Narratographically read, that is, Tess’s imperative is, in effect, to commit neither herself nor crimes. Identity is at one with desire, though only under the rule of negation. It is scarcely an accident that Tess’s later scene of reading in the novel is again the decipherment of a public inscription—when, that is, she manages to decode the Church Latin on the door of the d’Urberville tomb. Classical languages are not otherwise Tess’s strength, to say nothing of

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modern literatures. Even as Hardy’s reader is at once flattered and edified by the book’s range of allusions, the dead language of Western high culture remains unavailable as solace for its half-literate heroine—and undesirable as precedent. Yet she is besieged from all sides. Allusions even appear by negation in her own reported consciousness, the phantom other of her half-formed intuitions, as when Tess “might have ironically said to God with Saint Augustine: ‘Thou has counselled a better course than Thou has permitted’ ” (15:116). Or: “She had Jeremy Taylor’s thought that some time in the future those who had known her would say: ‘It is the —th, the day that poor Tess Durbeyfield died’ ” (15:117). Whereas Angel is hedged round by self-consciously received opinion, Tess has the thoughts of others without knowing it. What is more, she wants it this way. She resents allusions for two good reasons: fi rst because they escape her, but also because they would efface her, rob her of her coveted originality. When offering Tess some high-toned reading lessons at one point, Angel is met with her overt fears of belatedness. She resists the idea of “learning that I am one of a long row only—finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part” (19:142). At this point she seems to have forgotten the cautionary function of fictional narrative, whose absence from her life she has earlier regretted in connection with Alec’s seduction: “Ladies know what to fend hands against, because they read novels that tell them of those tricks; but I never had the chance o’ learning in that way . . .” (12:102). Yet this is to say that novels, like history, would only expose the derivative nature of her predicament. Once again, and this time as admonitory fable rather than eroticized spectacle, the novel promotes its very reception at the expense of its heroine. For Tess might well object not only to finding herself a statistical deduction from antecedent patterns of human behavior but, just as pitiably, to being offered up as narrative object lesson—and aesthetic scapegoat—for generations of readers to come. Scapegoat is indeed the word, at least provisionally. On this point, and about one among the many allusions Tess resists, we have important recent commentary. Angel “called her Artemis, Demeter, and other fanciful names half teasingly, which she did not like because she did not understand them” (20:146) They are skewed to her world, and she responds in kind: “Call me Tess, she would say askance” (146). Catherine Gallagher’s work on the discovered priority of fertility ritual to extraterrestrial mythography in the writings of late-Victorian anthropology has shown us that Artemis is associated not first of all with the sublimed

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chastity of Diana the huntress but with erotic rituals of “The Hanged One”—perennial effigy of human sacrifice and vegetal regeneration. Beyond prolepsis of course, any association of such a cultic figure with Tess as the One to be Hanged gives further poignancy to a pivotal scene whose prototype is clearly a death and regeneration myth, though manifest here in satiric downgrade. I refer to the terrible three nights of Tess’s first cohabitation with Angel, when she is forced, in fact, into thoughts of death-by-hanging at her own hands. If Gallagher is right, and Hardy is concerned not only with “comparative anthropology in the novel” but with “an anthropology of the novel” (430), how do we read the irony of that agonized passage? Of course Hardy’s plot, let alone his prose, is irreducible to a primitive blood rite—as Gallagher well knows. Hence her stress on the mismatch of these anthropological features with the course of story. The mythic elements are no sooner unearthed in the nontranscendental earthiness of their orgiastic violence than shoved underground again. Realist fiction could not abide them, nor could they sustain it. Yet what analysis must thereby track is exactly how Hardy’s plot moves to “activate” rather than merely “excavate” (Gallagher’s distinction, as well as her claim)—and do so on its own genre-oriented terms—this archaeology of scapegoating in its own “phased” segments, at clausal as well as chapter level. And how it thus sequentially replaces, in Lukács’s founding dichotomy, the localized “organic” totality of any such death-and-regeneration myth with the “regulative” system of Victorian mores over the represented duration of social time. No question about the immanence by allusion of sacrificial prototypes and the sexual dimension of their violence. This dynamic is so internal to the novel that it is unwittingly internalized by its heroine in the scene before us, who is momentarily willing to annihilate herself so as to revive Angel’s desire elsewhere, to free him of her. The sequence invites a unique condensation for Victorian fiction of adjacent theories of novelistic rivalry and sacrificial violence in René Girard’s work. In taking her life on behalf of another, of course, Tess would only be completing that other’s own violence toward her, since Angel’s fierce enactment of the double standard (with his own premarital escapade never for an unblinded moment to be weighed in the balance with Tess’s assault by Alec) is a kind of symbolic murder in the first place. Not because she had understood the Artemis allusion (still less its deeper anthropological archetype), but because she can’t bear any longer the entirely secular tortures to which she has been submitted, Tess thinks to take charge of plot’s recurrent,

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unritualized humiliation by visiting its violence upon herself. Instead she is forced to endure yet more allusive mythographic brutality. Rather than hanging herself, as contemplated, “with the cord of my box” (36:241) under the nuptial mistletoe of their honeymoon room, she falls victim to another eroticized regeneration rite. For she is presumed “Dead, Dead, Dead” (37:248) just before being lifted with “words of endearment” (249) from an open tomb, a mock ceremony of rebirth, by her sleepwalking husband. With Tess at this midnight hour after “the third day of the estrangement” (36:246) positioned as a kind of travesty Lazarus, even the ritual violence of fertility myth gets a further symptomatic twist. For we have recently squirmed to watch Angel’s effort at palming off his sexual repulsion over used goods onto feelings the next generation might be likely to bear toward their tarnished mother if the couple made the mistake of propagating (36:241). The risks of fertility—here unwanted births under the icily clinical term “vitalizations” (36:246)—rise to consciousness not in mythic valorization but almost as a veiled Malthusian anxiety: a panic later unmasked and literalized grotesquely in Jude the Obscure (1896) by little Father Time’s mass hanging of the overpopulated family. In any case, by Angel’s recoil from desire, all promise of fecundity is nipped in the bud—rather than ritually induced—by the refusal of lust, let alone orgiastic bloodlust, in the name of the latter’s sexless connubial equivalent: righteous frigidity and abandonment.

The Self Phased Out With Artemis in mind (but our mind, not hers), we realize that Tess doesn’t have to live by allusion—in its remove from the real—in order to be destroyed by it. Until this brutal and nonconjugal turning point, however, her most relentless burden lies not in the books she hasn’t read, the omen-reading she is prey to, or the textual parallels she superstitiously resists, but, above all, in the self-serving banality with which she herself is read by others—which is to say narrativized. And which is to say by us as well. Angel’s view of her existence as “actualized poetry” (25:175) is a superficially benign form of the syndrome, but even there one senses trouble coming. Within a “poetics” of tragic melodrama, the novel’s advancing of its own narrative agenda ultimately takes a correlative toll on the sacrificed heroine, with all the negative ramifications one might imagine for the implicated—and now openly complicit—reader. We think we are appalled by what our acquiescence has actually paved

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the way for. In this respect, that bitter honeymoon marks the crisis: a crisis both of plot and of plotting. Such is the moment of scalding human rejection in Tess that must be the most shocking and at the same time predictable turn of its story, activating as it does not only the figurative cliché of the two-faced woman but the novel’s own template for character transformation. It is only once we have seen this whole graded process through to its last gasp of perverse seventh-phase “fulfi llment” that we can return to Gallagher’s claims for Hardy’s novel as enacted or “activated” ritual with a fuller sense of how this might be so—and precisely by its failure as such. “Her narrative ended,” begins “Phase the Fifth—The Woman Pays,” with the term “narrative” referring back to her sexual confession, by means of which Angel has been briefly moved into alignment with the reader by becoming the recipient of the very story we have all along been reading. The alignment grows contaminating. As he is elevated to our degree of knowledge, we may at last realize how we have long ago been lowered to his level of schematic response. Or at least have been encouraged in this reductiveness by the schemata of plot. To her bridal admission, Angel reacts with the mutilating cruelty of “you were one person; now you are another” (35:232). Even our immediate contempt for his self-delusive repudiation cannot shake a sense that he is only mobilizing with perverse and defensive venom the narrative’s own view of character development, as shared en route with its readers—character not as multifaceted but as schismatic, ruptural, discontinuous, self-alienating. As far as possible from Romanticism’s organic continuum of the self—that myth of temporal plenitude no less potent for being so often dismantled in the period’s own verse sequencing—Hardy’s novel has all along tracked psychological transformation as a series of defaults and fractures. Th is, again, is exactly that rhetoric of temporality whose “allegorical” cast de Man finds derived from Romanticism as the negative complement of the period’s privileged “symbol.” In this sense Tess’s plot has narrativized development not as unfolding maturation but as the wrenchingly undergone gaps—barely overcome—of emotional dislocation, not just separate “phases” (the part headings) but punishingly disjunct stages in life’s aggravated, broken plotline. As it happens, and it doesn’t always, a specialized academic turn in the contemporary field of narrative theory offers itself in clarification: clarification—rather than simplification—of Tess’s staggered progress and serial deadlock. Though without summoning particular Victorian novels to the bar for cross-questioning on the matter—the kinds of nov-

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els, in fact, through which many a paradigm of identity-formation has been solidified for modern culture—a debate has recently flared up that helps bring out in yet sharper outline the hammering implacability of Hardy’s narrative structure. In recent pages of the journal Narrative, rival models hinge on the term “narrative identity”: not the identity of characters in a narrative, but rather a living subject’s self-construal as plotted self. Opposing camps on this matter are identified as the episodic versus the diachronic school, holding out respectively for disjuncture and noncontinuity, on the one side, versus a supposedly linear life-story, on the other. Critiquing the essay “Against Narrativity” by British philosopher Galen Strawson, of the episodic persuasion, and its seconding by the journal’s editor, James Phelan, Paul John Eakin wants to answer directly Strawson’s fears of the straitjacketing that results from the biographic formulas of identity politics. Eakin’s article would stress, by contrast, the ethical stakes in letting someone else script your life story for you, in prejudgment or stereotype. For this danger, too, one can well return to Victorian novelistic authority as prototype. To put it only somewhat reductively: If you’re not careful, you’ll end up being narrated by someone like Thomas Hardy— according, let’s say, to the fallen woman script. Tess would be as appalled to know her ill-luck in this regard, to know that she was only a sacrificial character in somebody’s else’s novel of violation, as she is unnerved to learn that other life stories precede, anticipate, and model the exact shape of her own. But that shape, that narrative sequence—and here is the main point—begs rather than settles the central question up for debate in the episodic versus diachronic stand-off. For Hardy gives us, unfl inchingly, both models interlocked. Such is the form of his heroine’s chronic liability to successive stages of decline. Th is is to say that the novelist, scripter supreme, punishes the chronological self with the disjunct phases of her own externally characterized being—until she herself doesn’t know whether she is coming or going, still here or somebody else, a diachronic or a strictly episodic agency. Given the way such architectonic savagery is capacitated by local phrasing, narratography needs to intercede at exactly such imploding moments of narrative’s categorical contradictions. In fact, the “phasing” of Tess’s darkening prospects, like the gradual eclipse of some doomed moon, is a late development in Hardy’s recasting of the novel’s reach for a quasi-biographic totality. There were only subdivisions by “Books” in the original weekly installments of the story in The Graphic magazine. In that form, the plot’s serialization had a doledout momentum all its own. But when the novel was bound for separate

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publication, the unmarked textual separations into volumes, previously invisible to plot, were now internalized by it as psychic ruptures for the heroine herself. And even this process was a matter of revision and second thought. Hardy had originally struck through the whole title of the first book as it went into its solo printing, “Her Education—the Maiden,” with the first two-word phrase an irony linked to the unprotected ignorance of her virginity in the second. Only later did he restore the second half of his title, prefi xed by “Phase the First”—anticipating in this way the coming direct antithesis in “Phase the Second—Maiden No More.” In this and every other way, the rhetoric as well as the grammar of temporality lays deep traps in this novel. Another change in the transition from manuscript to print is, we note, a further gloss on the sign-painter’s self-righteous defacement of the material world by prophetic script, his texts offered as an instance (on the novelist’s second thought) of “the last grotesque phase of a creed which had served mankind well in its time” (12:99; emphasis added on this newly interpolated structural keynote). Here the macrosphere of historical transformation is related back, via the term phase, not only to the moral evolution of the heroine, book by book, but to her more primal biological development, her very person introduced as a sedimented ledger or palimpsest of her own prepubescence. On the heroine’s fi rst sighting in the novel, that is, “Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still” (2:39; emphasis added), and “you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes.” Completing this anatomy of her charms under a fetishism only faintly displaced by biographical chronology, “even her fifth would fl it over the curves of her mouth now and then”—in that signature pout. If her maiden shape is already a narrative, the rest of the narrative is equally inclined to inscribe its violence on her subsequent fallen body. And in the “phasing” of this victimage, plot’s irreversible negations couldn’t be more explicit or harder hitting than in that fi rst transition after sexual violation—“Phase the Second—Maiden No More”—a “phase” that follows on from no transition at all, in fact, but only from defloration’s famously elided gap. If the next phase involves a so-called “Rally,” it must yield in turn to its own negation in the severity of “The Consequence.” And like night follows day, “The Woman Pays.” With inexorability booked like clockwork in this way, a further irony intercedes. According to the least optimistic sense of genuine reversal or inversion— and by a false teleological lead at that, since it refers this time not to the heroine at all, or at least in no immediately apparent way—“Phase the Sixth—The Convert” names the reemergence of Alec as hypocritical

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man of the cloth, bringing about for Tess only a reversion to shame, followed in close succession by the final violent turn of plot. But what we sense at this pass, from the broken referential parallelism of the volume title alone—identifying more the pose of her nemesis than her own overthrow by his lies—harbors in fact a deeper paradox yet. By his invasive power over Tess, Alec in his converted person does constitute another dark phase of Tess’s own life after all—and a cyclical one. This recurrent pattern of violation can be resisted only by a violence internalized as a kind of “conversionary” lurch—and brutal redirection—of the heroine’s own will and its fatality. So that the homicide unfolds, as noted earlier by way of the Hegelian dialectics of force, in the virtual form of a suicide. So it goes—all the way down through to “Fulfi llment,” which ratchets up in closure from the bitter Liebestod of eroticism’s last gasp into the metatextual sense of an achieved formal totality. So it goes, as well, in the least linkages of this enchained discontinuity from phase to phase. Listen, for example, to the language that topples over into the yawning gulf, typographic and psychological both, between “Phase the First—the Maiden” and its wholesale negation in “Phase the Second—Maiden No More.” Here the boldest and mostly openly brandished terms of a plot’s autonarratology find a more immediate, and even crueler, manifestation in the narratographic register. For the preceding section has pitched the heroine forward on a note of psychic closure and traumatic rebirth, so that mere recap becomes epitaphic: “An immeasurable social chasm was to divide our heroine’s personality thereafter from that previous self of hers who stepped from her mother’s door to try her fortune at Tantridge poultry-farm” (11:95). It’s hard to miss the cavingin of hope around the collapse of narrative past into projective preterite (“stepped from”/”was to divide”). In the process, verbal pace is snagged by the almost onomatopoetic choppiness of a paradoxically disjunct continuum in “previous self of hers who”—rather than the more objectively neutered “previous self of hers that” or the more psychically equivalent “previous self of her who.” As the intension of the prose alone makes nervously felt, selfhood is reified outside of identity long enough to fall from it into irrevocable difference. Even that overstressed metricalized phrasing thus suggests the strained fragility—and (especially in its stuttered alliteration at “previous self of ”) the frictive drag—of so-called self-possession. Only once before, near the end of the preceding chapter, has Tess been referred to as “our heroine” (10:88), as she will later be when the tragic plot thickens. The earliest such tag has been used to mark the almost

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mock-epic confrontation between her and the jealous working-girls after the local dance. A chapter later, though—in this distancing overview of her life made instrumental for storytelling—the renewed inclusion of the reader within the scope of the editorial plural (“our”) may seem suddenly insidious. If we accept this proffered rhetorical claim on Tess as “ours,” we concede that she is performing for us, that the “chasm” demarcating a new phase of her tragedy gives shape to our own ready comprehension and so to our dubious pleasure. Death by hanging will arrive as only one more fissure of psychic incommensurability and narrative fit under the rubric of “Phase the Seventh—Fulfi llment,” so-called in an unnerving blend of bitter irony for Tess the woman and, for “our heroine,” the narrative self-congratulation of a ringing tragic finale. What’s more, as prematurely glimpsed, the whole possibility of the character split from her desires has been there in that first phasal—and phrasal—transition. For “that previous self of hers”—short for that previous self of herself—divides identity from within the increments and differentials of its own pronominal designation. In this, as we know, lies the primal disenchanting of the novelistic genre according to Lukács, where the empirical self is presented to intellection as the image of itself as object. It is just this inevitable post-epic turn in fiction that swivels yet again on an “extreme violence” whose negativity comes straight out of Hegel—in the reciprocal positing (and thus alternating obliteration) of the cognized and the self-conscious. To apprehend the irreversible in the life of “our” character is thus, bringing Lukács together with de Man again, to note the rhetorical—the strictly figural—operation of narrative timing that displaces the objectified past self forever, almost as corpse, from the onward burden of sentience and desire. Victorian narratives regularly give teeth as well as voice to this kind of violence. In the special case of Hardy’s Tess as “ours” more than “herself,” however, we have watched how—in the immediate denial of any integral being even from within the heavy efforts of its own referencing—the text has exposed its whole logic of serial scapegoating in the narratographic preview of a single lexical succession. And a single narrative transition. That’s the methodological emphasis: that in response to such writing, anything one might think to fi le under stylistics is in fact, with prose friction of this sort, narratively engraved in the very sequences it designates. And temporally detonated there. Yet the novel’s ultimate irony scores less, in the long run, against its own structural machinations than against the more widespread tendency toward overplotting in any sense of a life story. When Angel Clare, upon

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meeting Tess, decides that, rather than closet himself with lifeless texts, he “preferred to read human nature” (18:134), the eros of such study, such worldly reading, does not preclude its schematic bias. Tess’s “actualized poetry” scarcely escapes his social conservatism, his hardened view of the human subject as sequentially redefined by its cultural subjections. In this, we do unto others what we tend to do unto ourselves. Th is seems the far edge of Hardy’s point. As soon as we convert our life to a story, our duration to a plot, as of course we so often do, that story runs exactly those risks brought to the forefront in Tess. In parsing one’s life into chapters, we become multiple, staggered, and irreversible. (To recur to recent narratological debate, the diarchronic is no defense against the episodic.) No one wants to be reminded of this, least of all Tess. Since you the reader have already subscribed to—or been conscripted by—such formats for characterization in the early “phases” of Hardy’s account, you stand to be doubly shocked when the potentially sadistic reductiveness of these models shows up so implacably in Angel’s view of Tess. Narrative psychology does not produce in her the simultaneously “split subject” of postmodern theory. Rather, Hardy’s heroine instances—and comes almost paradoxically to embody—the sequentially rent subject of one Tess then, another now. Worse yet, Tess also, under duress, ends up thinking this way for and of herself. The process begins for Tess in a state of shock and gets converted only later into an amorous desperation. In the immediate aftermath of Angel’s rejection, indirect discourse in the next chapter—hovering ambivalently between authorial commentary and Tess’s own internal monologue— explicitly recalls Angel’s exaggerated sense of her two selves: “The figurative phrase was true: she was another woman than the one who had excited his desire” (36:246). Here it is Tess herself who seems to internalize his hyperbole as proof of her own difference in his eyes. She succumbs in this way, even though, just a chapter before, she has tried to insist on a nondisjunctive selfhood as the real excitement to desire: “I love you for ever—in all changes, in all disgraces, because you are yourself ” (35:232; emphasis added). By contrast with Tess as the temporary champion of irrevocable continuity, then, is the book’s more encompassing irony. Th is involves a running sardonic undertone that can surface in the rendering “true” (quoting again that passage of capitulation on Tess’s part) of a “figurative phrase” even more dormant, as when, after Clare’s desertion of Tess, his mother senses his self-division in strictly dead metaphor: “I am quite sure you are not yourself,” with Angel borrowing her adverb in response for a perhaps yet more disruptive, rather than melioriative,

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admission: “I am not, quite, mother” (39:264). Th is from the man who will have the effrontery to whine, of his expatriation to Brazil in the next chapter, that “it snaps the continuity of existence” (40:266). Apart from local satire, however, it is the disquieting force of the novel’s own disjunctive structural “phases” that marks most sharply the encompassing spread of this irony. For the text itself lays the ethical traps into which its own form is at risk of falling. Th is, again, is the way readers stand to be implicated in the cruel degradations of Tess’s overpartitioned story—even when those same readers think they are distancing themselves in every way possible from the unfeeling self-interest of the male characters, Angel most explicit among them in his rejection of Tess’s fallen “phase.” Poetic justice cannot entirely mitigate such an ironic ricochet. Neither when, as we’re about to notice, a desperate Tess manipulates this model of riven personality to woo Angel back; nor when, once returned, he is confronted with the narrative materialization of his own blunt and brutal logic. Blindsided by her sexual confession on their wedding night, and of course unmanned by it, he has insisted, in effect, that a former Tess has come out of hiding to usurp the place of his virginal bride. In order to meet his mystified sense of transfigured identity on its own terms, Tess’s final letter to him marks her complete internalization of a nonsynchronous rather than integrated sense of identity. Only the externalization of herself in transcribed prose seems to permit for Tess this forlorn clarity. Pleading for his return, she writes: “I am the same woman, Angel, as you fell in love with; yes, the very same!—not the one you disliked but never saw” (48:329; emphasis added). Here, then, was a “phase” of Tess’s postpubescent history not in fact visible in or on her person to the eyes of love. All that precedes their meeting is personified as a corpse: “What was the past to me as soon as I met you? It was a dead thing altogether,” and this because “I became another woman”—as if born by impregnation from his chaste love, “fi lled full of new life from you” (329). In her view, if still on this transformative model, the point is as much logical as sensual: “How could I be the early one? Why do you not see this? ” (329; emphasis added on the dead metaphor of optics). Yet to highlight the narratographic skid between literal and figural sight in the rhetoric of temporal irony at this retroactive point, the question amounts to this: Why do you not see that it was never her whom you laid eyes and lips on? Here again is Hardy’s “immeasurable chasm” in his heroine’s own words, words meant for other eyes than the reader’s. Sent to Angel’s parents as he had instructed, and forwarded unopened by them to South

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America, the letter is never portrayed in receipt by Angel. Instead, the novel reader has interceded at the point of its composition, and your privileged view of its contents is insinuated in the next chapter by an elaborate circumlocution: “The eyes for which Tess’s letter was intended were gazing at this time on a limitless expanse of country from the back of a mule which was bearing him from the interior of the South-American Continent towards the coast” (49:331; emphasis added). From a Lukácsian “bad infinity” of the “limitless,” Angel tries to regain focus on a narratable desire. With the long-lost protagonist already homeward bound, however, the only eyes that by this point have seen the letter, your own as novel reader, serve of course to bear the plot, rather than speed the characters, toward conclusion—still under the sign of the self as a post-Romantic figure of serial deaths and rebirths. But Angel’s not receiving this letter either, any more than the one slipped by accident under his rug before their wedding, doesn’t mean that his overseas distance from Tess hasn’t, exactly as predicted, turned her into something more like a written figure worth reading about than like a blemished being in painful living proximity. Just as the Brazil plan emerges, that is, the narrator has stepped in to mention how an imperfect being “afar off ” can benefit from the romance of vagueness “in that their distance makes artistic virtues of their stains.” So much is this a tacit comment on novel readers’ own remove from Tess’s wholly embodied trouble, and the “artistic virtue” we are asked in this way to make of plot’s cruel necessity, that narratographic reading is closely engaged at this node of reflection as well—though more, in this case, as it prefigures rather than actually drives a plot development. Across the lexical friction of the clause’s two bracketing nouns, the internal tension of the prose—its uniquely Hardyesque intension—stops just short of being alphabetically spelled out. For Hardy’s thematized off-echo (and its syntactic chasm) enact the very “distance” between the initial syllabic “—stance” and the causal “stains” from which, by phonetic attenuation, that external vantage comes about through softening displacement. Here even silent reading negotiates not just the long versus short a from the phonemic paradigm but, again, the displaced and separately activated s/z (or ce/z) dyad from our opening example of Dickensian “clos/ze” reading. In this way verbal deviance in Hardy’s typically fl inty, clipped phrasing, and the by no means strictly linguistic violence it inscribes, occurs by “projection” (in Jacobson’s sense) from the diction of style onto the syntax of irony. In such a collapsed microdialectics of response, there is no third term to resolve the literal passive “distance” and the antithetical metaphor

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“stains” that precipitates it—unless it is the ever so slightly euphemized disdain of this weak-spirited Angel, and the narrator’s for him, in taking up (and out on Tess) this role of telescopic empathy. When, chapters later, absence does indeed make the heart grow fonder, and the absconded husband attempts at last to close the gap between his fever-weakened body and his postponed marital consummation, there is, as a result, far more than dramatic irony in the novel’s second undelivered text. There’s a structural epitome that chastens the novel’s own metatrope of a “distance . . . artistic.” For in returning to his alienated wife this time, Angel must at last try actually seeing her, as she has insisted, rather than merely reading—or misreading—her embodied “poetry” at the comfortable and forgiving remove of interpretation. And yet, in a last turn of identity’s screw, it is too late for such “recognition” of the other as herself. Having delayed his return for too long, Angel realizes from Tess’s second confession (about yet a second liaison with Alec) that “his original Tess had spiritually ceased to recognize the body before him as hers” (55:367; emphasis added). Once again Hardy appears as the syntactician of the cleft subject. In this further ironic grammar of possession, unwanted carnal knowledge with Alec results in carnal nonrecognition when Tess’s body does not even seem hers, let alone herself. By a final knife-twist of dramatic irony, just such a detachment of spiritual and bodily determinants will derail Angel’s own comprehension in the next chapter. After Tess has three times declared that she has “killed” Alec, and then reiterated again under direct questioning that she means what she says, Angel still needs to ask, “What, bodily? Is he dead? ” (56:372). This is, of course, a novel where selves are metaphorically (because metamorphically) expendable. This is certainly the case for Angel, the honeymoon sleepwalker, who has once, and seven times over, called Tess “Dead!” (37:248–49) while placing her in the symbolic coffin of her virginity. In such a novel, and for such a character, the difference between metaphorical and bodily murder, figurative and literal extermination, must indeed be laboriously spelled out. (You see, Angel, Alec was one person, now he is another—a dead person.) It might well seem too easy to say of this whole pattern that the revolving door of selfhood in Hardy’s novel works to “deconstruct” any sense of stable identity. What it does do is expose the vulnerable dependence of identity on the language one uses for it, a language in this case relational and wholly relative. It is just here that de Man’s model of temporal irony can shed a quite pointed light on the literary-historical register of Hardy’s novel. For de Man, as we know from the last chapter, narrative in the

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wake of Romanticism owes its ironic structure to the nature of figurative language itself, the more than ordinary space opened between signifier and signified. In returning to this emphasis, we might turn for illustration to a heavily marked example in Hardy, another early and ominous dead metaphor like “impregnated”: namely, the sign-painter’s warnings (with their hint of murder as well as the sexual license of adultery). These hectoring words, we remember, are “driven well home to the reader’s heart”—as, just for instance, Tess’s knife will later be driven well home to the heart of the novel’s most culpable adulterer. Highlighted by such loaded phrasing is the affi liation discussed by de Man between irony and allegory, trope and its exfoliation into plot. Ironic disjunction in Tess is frequently mapped as a vector of narrative discontinuity: de Man’s rhetorically inflected temporality by any other name, where the allegory of sequential self-alienation is the novelistic form of irony’s tensed double vantage. The signifier that says one thing and means another becomes the narrative logic that repeats event with a signifying difference—the accidental stabbing to death, say, of a beast named Prince (the family horse) followed much later by the stabbing of a beastly false aristocrat, the “stains” mitigated by distance become the corpse of a blood-stained villain. Tess suffers in other words—but often in almost the same words— from the pangs of ironic rhetoric when stretched on the rack of duration. Her true lapse is the primal fall into plot.

“Symbols of Reflectiveness”: From Legibility to Delectation For the reader garnering narrative gratification or “aesthetic distance” from Hardy’s plot, the ethical balancing act is delicate indeed. And you are by no means let off the hook simply by recognizing this. Why you care at all about Tess is under suspicion in the first place, or in other words from the first chapter forward. As with Maggie Tulliver, the prolonged torture of Tess services the reader’s sense of drastic reversal and violent transformation. Throughout, she is taunted by proleptic hints and drubbed by the patterns of narrative’s own phased demarcations, at once burdened by plot and spurned by Angel as a serial self: a personality fallen through irreversible stages of decline. All this makes for a pervading irony that extends the novel’s initial image of her as our heavily invested construction: an image of rural girlhood for which the text gives only the slightest excuse (and the slimmest clues). Criticism, as mentioned, has not failed to note the reader’s more than ordinary tendency to imagine Tess, and luxuriate over her, as the carnal embodiment of all she means,

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the vessel but also the ripe flesh of suffering. What has been insufficiently stressed is the way this visualization of her charms depends upon a detour around writing whose very willfulness, on the reader’s part, Hardy’s text renders unevadably ironic. Here is how the novel finds words for Tess that deliberately keep her from coming to view—or tease us with the need to incarnate our own version of her. By a redundantly emphatic phrasing that says less rather than more, Tess is first sketched as “fine and handsome” (2:38). As if to specify this effect, “her mobile peony mouth and large innocent eyes added eloquence to color and shape” (38; emphasis added). To what? Dislodged even slightly from its immediate context, this phrasing arrives like nothing so much as a description of figurative rhetoric itself, where all three key terms are bywords for the shapeliness of a colorful passage, an eloquent piece of verbal evocation. Against all the dictates of realism, then, the novel would seem to be setting its own rhetorical standards in the conjuring of its title figure as sheer figuration. Yet it does so only to saddle its frustrated readers with a further burden: the queasy acknowledgment of your own desire to find Tess fleshed in her essence in order to sustain your fascination with her destiny. All this comes in that paragraph immediately preceding a sense of biological—before even biographical—“phases” that “lurked” within her nubile person still, including, again, those traces of her “fifth” year that alliteratively “would fl it over the curves of her mouth now and then.” If there is “eloquence” to be had from this flower-like mouth (a displaced site of her eventual defloration), it is only through the reader’s bodily contribution as silent enunciator. In the circuit of reader investment through the force of wording itself, the phonic performance elicited here is, in short, recognition at somatic ground zero. To voice even subvocally the “mobile peony” shape of her “pouted-up deep red mouth” is to amass labials in a burst of silently pursed lips. For Tess the scapegoat, this is our most tangible locus of identification—and our kiss of death. So, too, with the “characteristic intonation” of the “dialect for this district” that was so palpably “on her tongue”—namely, the “voicing approximately rendered by the syllable UR, probably as rich an utterance as any to be found in human speech” (2:39). A mere five words away from that off hand phonetic analysis, the pivotal syllable of “utterance” opens out to an overarching irony of plot: the supposed enriching of Tess Durbeyfield by the reverbed UR of “d’Urberville”—a name already available to us, not just in her father’s get-rich-quick fantasies, but by totalizing design in the novel’s title.

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Once again, and still within the narrowest syllabic compass, we trace the slide from minor phonemic echo to the further ironic resonance of narratography. Present from here out in the villain’s fateful (and it turns out false) surname (he’s really a Stoke, not a d’Urberville) is the one truly striking instance, by rapid doubling, of the “UR” sound that we ever hear in connection with Tess or her voice—and then only by producing it ourselves as we read. The phonetic microdrama of this opening passage is thus a microcosm of positioned reading in the overall experience—or execution—of the novel. Such is its “actualized” prose rather than poetry, where it is up to us to perform the seductive lushness that by projective investment we seek to find in a heroine like Tess. And there is more narratographic modeling yet—in this early passage—of the plot that will come to pass, crystallizing as it does the irony of the title itself atop every page. When spelled out as “UR,” rather than simply heard in “er,” that Saxo-Germanic prefi x of origination, here embedded in an attenuated and fatal Norman lineage, is also associated in the title not just with belatedness but with a founding redundancy. Etymologically originating in some Norman ville somewhere, then pluralized as a collective family noun, the genitive derivation of the possessive is already implied by the elided “d’ ” without needing what amounts to an anglicized pleonasm for “Tess of those of Urberville.” The awkward superfluity of her claims on this waned greatness is almost black comic on the face of it. In pronouncing this irony, however, we are invited by the very somatics of reading to participate in its sensuous feedback as induced by text. If this is the implicated readerly position fostered by the mere verbal texture of Tess’s first scene, then it might seem inevitably undercut by the visual overdetermination of any specific pictorial image. Yet in the ensuing first illustration for the original serial publication of the novel in The Graphic (fig. 1), the reader is given to see Tess in a way that does not in fact eliminate the irony of libidinal projection but instead tampers with the stage directions of the novel just enough to enforce it in an unexpected fashion. In so doing, even this illustration confi rms what the ironized narrative structure of sequential selfhood in the plot has implied: that fictional characters regularly stand arrested before the reader for analytic scrutiny at major turning points of the plot, often victimized unknowingly by the schemata through which their life stories get partitioned and paced off. As we turn the large format page of The Graphic from chapter 2 into chapter 3, Tess’s sketchy but tantalizing physical description in the prose is followed suddenly by her emergence into visual image for us—as for others within the scene. Yet the lines of sight are reversed from the

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Fig. 1. Illustration from original serial publication of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 1891. “There stood her mother, amid the group of children, hanging over the washing tub,” by Hubert von Herkomer, RA. Th is plate, the fi rst in the illustrated serialization of Tess of the Durbervilles, appeared in the July 4, 1891 issue of the London Graphic. Image scanned by Philip V. Allingham, http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/herkomer/1.html.

novel’s. In Hardy’s version, Tess has torn herself away from the evening dance for a too familiar setting and its “unspeakable dreariness” (3:43). These are her domestic confines impinging once again upon her, a realm whose threshold she crosses like a self-caged animal. In the illustration, however, her glance is abstracted rather than concentrated to a careworn knot—the proverbial faraway look. No longer the optical anchor of assaulting impressions, she is gazed upon rather than gazing, the entered doorway becoming the proscenium arch for the costumed theater of her vernal apotheosis: the farmhand as Mayday goddess. She is the cynosure of the familial space, its denizens arrayed before her, backs to the reader, now viewer, like a second, mediating audience. The serial form of the novel has in this way further deferred our identification with the heroine’s subjectivity, giving us a second exterior view of Tess even from within her own domestic interior. What Tess has been for the idle onlooker at the dance she is now for her own family as spectatorial tribe. Just where the prose moves into the constraints of her interior landscape in collision with the reduced scope of her domestic drudgery, the illustration sustains a glamorized view of the heroine as performing self, a body on display—

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and holding on the threshold, as on the very brink of plot, in this pictorial narrato-graphic of suspense itself. Everything follows from this opening tension between her physical person and her social enclosure. Moreover, this backlit display of the heroine arrives across the turn of the page to an outsized illustration whose very mechanics of page-turned disclosure enhances the largest composite suggestion of the plate: the visual hint that Tess’s advent on the domestic threshold tacitly reduplicates the very scene of reading. On the right half of the wide-format text, the half on which the eye falls first in fl ipping the page, there is an immediate association between the reader’s—suddenly turned viewer’s—line of sight and that of the young boy at the right margin (Tess’s brother Abraham, named in this scene but undescribed in his actions or position by Hardy), leaning into the frame to stare at his sister. Other details from the illustration are there in the prose: the rocked cradle, the washbasin in which Tess’s white gown had yesterday been scrubbed clean. But Abraham’s place as stand-in for the viewer is an illustrator’s invention, a canny interpretive act in its own right, especially as regards the unidentifiable, lectern-like stand on which he rests, its surface glowing as if from the reflected light of the opened door—or as if it held an illuminated page from which he has just looked up. As the first thing we see when we turn our page, then, the male spectator leaning forward to stare at a radiant feminine presence brings focus to the entire interior space as the scene not just of Tess’s social entrapment but of her prolonged objectification as a fine and handsome “shape.” Reversing, if only by deferring briefly, all emphasis on Tess’s own narrowed field of vision and action, the precinematic “reverse shot” offered by this illustration (reversing her own point of view by 180 degrees) thus captures and holds our attention as an image of just that attention. It transfigures the squalor of Tess’s home—transvalues the space of her most intimate and wearying relations—into the zone of surrogate spectacle routinely occasioned by the domestic scene of reading, at least in households having more access than Tess’s to the compensatory excitement of novels. A critical debate that has sprung up around this illustration is enlightening here for precisely the way it skirts the issue of erotic investment while nonetheless stressing the importance of the picture in transfi xing readerly participation. On one account, Arlene M. Jackson understands the richly rendered domestic scene as an instance of tactical false advertising, meant to entice the Victorian family reader before the unseemliness of the plot has tipped its hand. From a different perspective associated with a Marxist or materialist analysis, and yet coming to much the

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same point, this solicitation of the reader is seen to depend not on the inviting pictorial surface but on the stare of the baby out into the field of the reader, a reader who is thereby “interpellated” (Althusser’s term) into the “class” ideology of the popular commodity text. My own sense is that the reader’s invoked interest rests at least as much with the deflected stare of the heroine, missing your gaze but entirely available to it. It is this very availability that inscribes—or conscribes—your visualized reading, right from the start, within the complex literary ideology of character as embodiment, selfhood as carnal localization, and hence spiritual change as serial reincarnation. One astute reader of this early image even finds in its ironic “figuration” another prophetic clue to the plot’s tragic close, a kind of visual dead metaphor. Later to emerge, on execution day, as “a tall budding creature—half girl, half woman—a spiritualized image of Tess” (59:383), ’Liza-Lu here faces the bloom of young womanhood in the decked-out person of her older sister with a no doubt unconscious instinct of threat; she seems to reach for her own neck not only in a relieving stretch after the strain of her chores, as they contrast with Tess’s holiday, but in a tacit anticipation of the gallows’s noose to which all her sister’s expectant freshness will eventually lead. (This suspected pictorial prolepsis would only be confirmed by ’Liza-Lu’s presence at the end of the novel as implicit connubial surrogate for the executed Tess.) To notice any such pictorial irony in glancing back over the illustrations with the plot in mind—to decode this graphic configuration, that is to say, according to the rhetoric of temporality—would only be to superimpose a later Tess upon the early one. This later figure would be that very Tess who, just in time for the ultimate abjection of her physical being in violent death, “had spiritually ceased to recognize the body before her as hers.” Like Tess herself, we too, though always imagining that body even when no illustration does our work for us, are nonetheless spared this final execution scene. In that first and typifying illustration, then, Tess’s abstracted look is averted from the very gaze that her good looks provoke: looks that, nevertheless, everything in the staging of the allegorical tableau reminds you that your usual reading works to produce rather than strains to glimpse. As with ordinary narrative effects, what you see is what you beget. For Tess is never more than, in the rhetorical sense, a “fine figure” of a woman. To read this graphic magazine illustration of Hardy’s narrative point of departure, to enter novelistic depiction through its heroine’s explicit picturing, is thus to read even the static tableau of the first published plate narratographically. For as with her inscribed person, so with her plot. It is

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in the nature of the scapegoat heroine’s fame and, within the story, of her infamy that Tess the woman, like Tess the book, exists to be read, now by omen and prolepsis, now by prototype and intertext, now by abrupt but steadily measurable transformations of her social and psychological status. To understand the process as well as the product, there is no way for the implicated reader to stand outside. You stand, instead, sutured into and skewered by that process—nailed by the very fascination through which the novel’s appeal to sympathy has both drawn, and taken, you in. Appearances to the contrary, it is not an altogether pretty picture. Whatever thematic or ideological work that first illustration may intend or accomplish, it has certainly brought out a moment in the plot (and in the friction of its prose) not just visually descriptive but narratively predictive—and this in the contrasting light and foreshadow of its own verbal composition. For well before Herkomer’s plate, Hardy’s writing has transacted an equally marked narratographic instigation at just this same moment. It has done so by translating the implied crossing of a threshold into an emblematic transit—after first prolonging it syntactically with a clipped, almost metrical overexplicitness. Th is happens in the prose “when Tess opened the door, and paused upon the mat within it surveying the scene” (3:43; emphasis added on the oddly particularized threshold moment). From this hyperspecified vantage, the interior of her home “struck upon the girl’s senses” with its full bleakness—the fi rst of many such blows she is to receive in the novel (here torturing into literalization an idiom like “struck her imagination” ). This is to say that the sight drove home the “unspeakable dreariness” of that home (43)—and most of all by dawning contrast with the sunshine and the white dresses and the sexual frisson outdoors. The workaday domestic setting is an inverse and negative “spectacle” (the word carefully chosen by Hardy’s coming sentence) whose immediate contrast is rotated around two quite different assonant clusters, the first associated with her fateful first glimpse of Angel. Here’s the arc of Hardy’s syntax, spurred into initial motion by the breathless phonetic whorl of ritual and then abandoned to its rapid dying fall, or thump: “From the holiday gaieties of the field—the white gowns, the nosegays, the willow-wands, the whirling movements on the green, the flash of gentle sentiment towards the stranger—to the yellow melancholy of this one-candled spectacle, what a step!” (43) And what a set-up in the let-down—especially if we remember this moment in the later passage about the “chasm” dividing the pregnant Tess from the girl who “stepped from her mother’s door to try her fortune at Tantridge poultry farm” (11:95; emphasis added), seeking more

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her mother’s “fortune” in fact, by grammatical antecedence and plot motivation, than her own. Associated with the unsaid idiom of the “fallen woman” in all these tropes of gulfs and declivities, chasms and lapses, and by a reversal of her own lamented “step” back into routine domesticity after that first May fl ing, what a later “misstep” was there! The way forward is always for Tess a setback—and, for the reader, a slowing over the prose friction of its report. From sunlit “gentle sentiment” to the suff used “yellow melancholy” thrown by transferred epithet and a single candle: such, then, right from the start, is the quietest prose manifestation of those whiplash contrasts that define Hardy’s scenography—and the narratography of our response—as we follow out their collisions and aftershocks. Enforced phonetically by the way that second nest of echo is more dispersed and pervasive, the whole narrative model of sensuous promise and its dissipation—or, in more pointedly diachronic terms, of progress as regress—is firmly installed, in sum, by this early collaboration between prose tableau and its illustration. Each dreadful transition in the plot to come, repeatedly bringing Tess before the delectating gaze of an inhabited setting she regretfully surveys, will be a sharply marked “step” of contrast and comedown—in society’s etymological sense of things, of de-gradation. That regretted “step” into and then “from” her mother’s door has soon become a more figurative plummet. In “Phase the Second—Maiden no More,” the word “leap” has arrived to figure by approximation the precipitousness of her unsaid “fall.” For “Almost at a leap,” we hear, “Tess thus changed from simple girl to complex woman” (15:27). To note in turn that all such plot momentum has been manifested in the heroine’s bodily as well as emotional changes, as Hardy makes clear, is to realize how her violated innocence is an intensified version of a pervasive novelistic mandate. Lukács’s principal dictum once again: “The need for reflection is the deepest melancholy of every great and genuine novel. Through it, the writer’s naïveté suffers extreme violence and is changed into its opposite” (85). Heroes and heroines are the frequent vessels, of course, by which the “violence” of such opposition is apprehended. But with unusual aggressiveness in Eliot and especially Hardy, novelistic form takes out this wising-up on the very person of its characters, sacrificing their bodies as well as their spirit to it, violating them in service to the book’s own distanced, exiled innocence. And if Lukácsian “reflection” is the saddened grandeur of the novelistic epic, we get very close here to a revelation about how and why Tess’s body must bear the brunt of fiction’s own both sensuous and disillusioned form—all its phases incarnate together as a

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fleshed pentimento of her life’s story. From her first description forward, that is, Tess personifies the formal irony of the novelist’s own bitter prose poetry. So that when Tess, as we’re invited to see by sheer physical evocation, “changed from simple girl to complex woman” after the disaster with Alec, the telltale result is that “Symbols of reflectiveness”—Lukács’s central term—“passed into her face” (15:117). Leaving innocence behind, stumbling on “step” by misstep, her precipitous forward passage in the plot is matched from the other direction by the influx of knowingness, its compensatory effect wholly somatic so far as we are concerned. The result is that Tess’s body is again textualized, made rhetorical, when—as the result of her “leap”—her “eyes grew larger and more eloquent” (15:117). But no less eroticized and objectified: “She became what would have been called a fine creature” (117). The conditional passive verb associated with this cliché cuts two ways at once: would have been called, if you had come upon her unawares; would have been called, if she had been stationed differently in class rank, her worldly refinement valorized. Instead, her body’s latent power of utterance—of “eloquence,” and certainly of social outrage in the process—is subsumed to the world’s erotic (but neutralizing) cliché. And worse is to come, for the rhetorizing of Tess’s body persists across and even, in a sense, beyond plot time. In her drudgery after desertion by Angel, she appears before us—in a break into a textual present from the historical past tense—caught up in the metanarrative perpetuity of a depersonified essence (and requiring in its grammar even a neuter rather than feminine pronoun for her antecedent figuration): “Thus Tess walks on; a figure which is part of the landscape” (52:278; emphasis added). A strategic anachrony of tense, which in narratological terms might suggest the iterative and even essentializing mode of continuous action, makes its keener appeal to narratography across the ironic grammatical implosion of gender for a history still in dreary progress.

“Outside of Now”: Plot’s Outer Limit Even before any beautifying humiliation of the “fine creature” in that earlier and blatant aestheticizing of her pain, all eyes have been on the “figure” of Tess even in Herkomer opening illustration of her threshold moment after the dance. At the other end of the novel, after its launching and sustained scopophilia, Tess’s last scene—her offstage hanging—is, by ironic contrast, fittingly invisible to us. Just before its last chapter, however, the novel has grown so narratively self-conscious that the heroine

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recurs to a moment in her novel’s own plot—to which only she and the reader were privy fi rst time through—to lodge one of its fiercest dramatic ironies. In his sleep, which is to say in the unchecked depths of a libido freed momentarily from hypocrisy and repression, Angel had loved Tess, even at the moment of her demystifying sexual admission—and had taken her up in his sleepwalking arms. And this fact about his initial reaction, narrated at last, is equally sexual, however depressing as well, at time’s long remove. Angel’s unconscious release of affection—his elegiac somnambulism—rounds out the “whole story” that she for the first time “whispered to him” now (58:376), just before the end. Narrative’s keenest power—its ultimately erotic power in fact—has until this moment been rendered impotent by silence. Whereas Angel writhes to think how much “misunderstanding and woe” his knowing this—about his sleeping affection—might have prevented, Tess suddenly refuses to look back any longer. For her, the “whole” tale is over in having been told. No more “phases” of frustration and defeat; no more plotted retrospect and regret. And of course no more looking forward. “I am not going to think outside of now” (376). One definition of plot as structuring function, over against (which means induced upon in order to produce) the sheer time of event, would be that—by marking the switchpoint from pure retention to pure protention—it is everything that motivates a “now” as the sequential and causal “now, then.” So here, instead, is the refusal of plot itself by its chief victim. In rejecting plotted time and its cruel reversals, Tess may be seen to raise the earliest and most explicit banner for that episodic school of psychosocial narratology now under debate in theoretical circles. But to do so with Hardy’s typical irony. For in his heroine’s case a formerly and woefully diachronic subject tries becoming an episodic “self ” only by being entirely “now-oriented.”  By this abstention from time past and to come, Tess would thereby flee those “chasms” of identity that have so punctuated the ironic topology of the novel that a reminder of them can be sprung by a trivial punning in the flagged entrance of a minor character: “Izz it was” (43:287). For the novel as a whole, however, in its scathing evanescence, nothing is ever for long what it was. Tess is no more rooted and fulfi lled in esse (to be) than is Izz. In Hardy’s prose, something in the very predication of the human subject throws time out of joint. And to disavow such time, in its extension beyond the “now,” is to refuse the novel’s turn to “reflection” itself in Lukács’s sense, including the “extreme violence” that necessitates and constitutes it. This is why “now” is the only consolation for Tess. When she weak-

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ens a moment later in her temporal renunciation, when she looks briefly past her immediate doomed future toward a lingering hope of heaven, she is again punished. Hundreds of critical pages have been devoted to the great white lie at the close of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: Marlow’s sparing of Kurtz’s Intended by euphemizing the truth about her fiancé’s end in the jungle. What, by contrast, about the failure to provide such a lie near the close of Tess? The wavering agnostic Angel is no minister of Christian mercy when Tess, on their last night together before her capture, asks point blank, “do you think we shall meet again after we are dead? ” (58:381). His temporizing is couched in the stinging irony of a flatfooted temporal idiom: “He kissed her to avoid a reply at such a time” (emphasis added). But Tess immediately understands that silence gives dissent. Right here, the novel’s penultimate overt allusion—biblical this time (with only Aeschylus to come, and a transitional Shakespearean overtone)—seals his silence with a lethal comparison that may or may not (and at this point who cares?) be passing through the indirect discourse of Angel’s own self-justification: “Like a greater [being] than himself, to the critical question at the critical time he did not answer” (381). Refusing Christian consolation, he is paradoxically imagined to impersonate Christ’s own silence in an utterly different context. In so doing, his muteness infl icts upon the heroine, both as secular subject and as unpenanced murderess, the final stroke of her plot-long double jeopardy. As for relying on supernatural belief: damned if you do and damned if you don’t. For Tess, there remains only the vanishing space claimed between felt presence and the “bad infinity” (Lukács) that lies, and lays waste, “outside of now.” When the law closes in from this dreary distance—literally, from all points of the compass at Stonehenge—Tess, while accepting it as some force of inherent reprisal, also seems to clutch at this fate as a personal relief. “It is as it should be” (58:382). She doesn’t deserve death, that’s not her point. She never gets what she deserves. But her “happiness could not have lasted” (382). She can say, at least, that this way “I shall not live for you to despise me” (382)—not an unlikely scenario, given Angel’s character, if plot had continued. Instead, she ratifies the fitness of closure in the grammar of the “should be.” Whether or not she has embraced, with any sense of social fitness, the forms of law, she has in a different way internalized its force, tried making it her own, willing it as a private optative. Here our chapter’s epigraph comes bearing down on Hardy’s eleventhhour reversal. Three times on one page in The Theory of the Novel, as if

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wielding the bludgeon of post-epic disenchantment, Lukács slams home—in the most melodramatic of terms—modernity’s sense of the widening abyss between desire and fulfi llment: “The ‘should be’ kills life” (150–51). And again, and again. Hardy’s further irony is that here in Tess, under the cruel rubric of “Fulfi llment,” death has become the “should be” of a finalized life. Indeed, Tess herself seems almost to be speaking of the serial ordeal she has suffered en route—as much as about her recent happiness with Angel—when articulating a freestanding and bluntly decisive grammar that puts the finis to plot itself. This phrasing of her endgame comes to us compact of verbal content (the predicate of past possession, “had”) and verbal form (the past-tense verbal aspect of retrospect itself, “have”) in the defeated double past tense of “I have had enough” (58:382). Enough of sudden bliss. Enough of despair and abuse. In responding to the stairstepped poignancy—conjugational more than conjugal—of this lone clause, narratography reads the very grammar of narrative writ small. After which, Tess’s own last words escape from her with no internalized sense of a Shakespearean resonance: “I am ready.” Hamlet may be Hardy’s model, but not his heroine’s. All she knows is that from within the moment, the immitigable “now,” she awaits an “outside”—a future, a still virtual fate—that she is finally willing, in closure, to see potentiated. In the inexorable arc of Tess’s “phasing” out, the only pitiless uncertainty left, at the level of novelistic suspense, is whether the heroine will, in terms of explicit plot, be left hanging—or actually hanged. The fate itself seems a fait accompli, needing no rhetorical accomplices. And in her seeing of it through, we never see her again. All, from here out, is aftermath. The break now between chapters is as great as the fissures between previous “phases” of Tess’s endurance. The scene shifts suddenly to a panoramic longshot of the numbly trumpeted “city of Wintoncester, that fine old city, aforetime capital of Wessex” (59:383), where it only slowly dawns on us that Tess’s execution is to take place momentarily—but unmomentously, and out of sight—beyond the “West Gateway.” Distance is kept by prose alone through the reflexive temporality of archaism itself in “aforetime”—and then by its stiffening echo at the start of the next paragraph: “From the western gate aforesaid the highway . . . ascends.” Historical time has narrowed on the spot (from “aforetime” through “aforesaid”) to the sardonically discursive space of a virtual “see above,” even as we are still caught up in a described sighting of the landscape. Upon it, two persons—not recognized by us at first in the textualized distance—walk bowed but quickly in the joyless wordplay of their “gait of grief.” By homophonic overdetermination, both gates and

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gaits lead nowhere fast—into death’s closure. In the process, the thingness of language, the medial matter, seems throttled and denaturalized. All the organicist lyricism that lent ironic hue and flush to Tess’s slow doom has stiffened here, in the recognized aftermath, to stale referentiality and alphabetic materialism. With no more story, there is no more rhetoric, just the gasps of language dragged behind it. In this way, lethal event is subsumed in a quite visual sense to perspective, but of a non-perspectival kind soon stressed as flattening the view like an “isometric drawing” (59:383). From the fully rounded bodice and bloom of Tess in that first illustration, plot has carried us—beyond picture—to an architectural draftsman’s metaphor of planarity. Across this last lifeless passage, prose is continually negotiating, by reiterating, its own point of vantage in the residual now and here. The unknown couple’s rapid way is upon “this” rather than “that” road, as seen from “this summit” on “this day”—from which the distant scene was “visible enough up here” (59:384), with that last deixis (or grammatical pointing) carrying a kind of antiseptic chill. Visible enough—and also, given the occasion, all too visible. It is from this neutral viewpoint, with Tess’s story functionally over and done with, that the echoic “black flag” of death can be seen raised after the unnarrated hanging. And it appears above the most isometrically rendered of all the city’s architecture, that “ugly flat-topped octagonal tower” (384)—as if seen from two vantages at once—that is the one looming flaw in the sketched setting. What results, in the stark friction of this closing prose, is the very writing out of the heroine’s life by the marks of its removal. This effacement takes place not just by metonymy in the risen flag’s fatal insignia but by an ocular fi xation on the previous metonymic focal point of the carceral tower. The result is a kind of telescoped lexical compression, as awkward in its alliterative dichotomy as it is powerful, so that “viewed from this spot,” the tower “seemed the one blot on the city’s beauty. Yet it was with this blot, and not with the beauty, that the two gazers were concerned” (59:384). Their concern, more precisely, less antithetically, is with this blot as it signifies, arbitrarily, another beauty just now dead within the prison walls. For supported here, from the tower’s cornice, is the executioner’s “black flag” as signal or semaphore in the codes of justice rather than image of the hanged body. Hardy the eventual modernist poet of dissonant iterations takes over at a moment like this from the late-Victorian Hardy as architectural engineer of human souls. In the graded alphabetic skid from “this s/pot” through “one blot” to the reiterated “this blot,” one doesn’t have to hear the synonymous “splot,” or the

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inference of authorial inkblot in this textualized obliteration, or even an active override (by ironic deflection) of “this plot,” to sense that all narrative development is being put under final erasure by this offstage death. Fatality is occluded almost mercifully, at the last, by a wordplay on the sheer lifeless materiality of the signifier, the telltale tower and then the flag it hoists, rather than on the signified sacrifice. Given the contours of Hardy’s professional biography, it may seem less than surprising that the devices alike of draftsman and poet collaborate here against, and in valediction to, the novelistic. But rounding out a broader lexical dialectic across adjacent passages, that “blot” has its precedent in the first spotted “dot” of Tess’s capture, a process “fulfi lled” now (that is, dialectically negated) in her fatal release. By contrast with the “isometric” abstraction of her displaced death scene—equivalent to a flattening telephoto lens in a fi lmic treatment (the cinematographic as narratographic)—the plot’s penultimate scene has offered instead English fiction’s most viscerally charged study of ocular perspective. Tess and Angel have slept through the night among the prehistoric forms of Stonehenge, but dawn has broken in: “The eastward pillars and their architraves stood up blackly against the light, and the great flame-shaped sun-stone beyond them; and the Stone of Sacrifice midway” (58:382). A threefold recession has thereby oriented us in deep space. From the resulting vanishing point—though in a Lukácsian “second nature” rather than first—fate comes into excruciatingly slow focus for Angel: “At the same time something seemed to move on the verge of the dip eastward— a mere dot” (382). But the anonymous speck gradually emerges as the specter of reprisal, as the “dot” grew into a human figure advancing, one among many, until “Clare could discern from this that he was tall, and walked as if trained” (382). Other recognized deputies close in now from all sides. Apprehension, we may say, has been rendered reciprocal. For what follows, hinged around a wavering adverb, is one of the most withering thuds of free indirect discourse in English writing: “Her story then was true!” (58:382). Until now, as we realize at last, it wasn’t that his faith in her was stronger than his imagination. He had neither. Contrast Philip’s “I believe in you” in The Mill on the Floss. In Tess, rather, and ex post facto instead of prophetically, it was her “story then” that he can now therefore, now and only now, believe. Delayed verification has replaced novelistic reflection. Like the constabulary edging round and closing in, an entire narratology of crime and punishment has come homing in on a single turn of subjectivized phrasing. In the process, a whole genre-founding

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dialectic of epistemology and ethics reduces to a single narratographic irony of verisimilitude in this heroine’s true story, her homicidal “true history” (documentary vaunt of so much early fiction). The effect only compounds the earlier metanarrative irony associated with Tess fi lling in for Angel the “whole story” (58:376) of his somnambulism. Indeed, he has been sleepwalking through Tess’s narrative as well as his own. Within a chapter, Angel is at her sister’s side instead of Tess’s, ’LizaLu having in effect been willed to him as Tess’s only legacy: “She has all the best of me without the bad of me” (58:381; emphasis added). It is finally as if the cursed “phases” of Tess’s decline could be segregated, the unfallen early self retrieved and reintegrated, the genetic promise protected against its temporal ruin—and displaced, if not quite reembodied, outside of its original desperate vessel. But all we are in fact left with after her execution is that the sister is a “spiritualized image of Tess” (59:383): yet another abstracted arrest of plot by figuration. To match this, there is only the external image of spirituality: “The two speechless gazers bent themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer” (384), their suspected purpose likely enough but wholly unconfirmed. Prayer in this novel—or the brutal rumination that replaces it—is of course altogether inward, private, inoperable, with its external posture functioning as sole but unreliable index of its spiritual intent. It is only in the novel’s last sentence that a hint of subjectivity is bestowed—but still in almost a somatic rather than a spiritual key—on the surviving pair. This last description gives us, for the fi rst time, more than a distant onlooker could know or even surmise about their condition. It thus returns us in closing to the normal condition of novelistic prose. Normal, but only as normed to death, flattened, trivialized. Here a subordinate clause has in fact subsumed objectivity again to the more familiar case of subjectivized narrative, but at a lower limit of empathy: “As soon as they had strength they arose, joined hands again, and went on” (my emphasis on the recovered fortitude thus imputed rather than observed). That recouped energy aside, the novel’s last monosyllabic downbeats in the final verb phrase are unmistakable in their grim stress on a geographic traverse that is no progress at all but only a temporal endurance beyond the limit of plotted interest. In their life together, as in their present trudging motion, they simply “went on”—as if in time and space together—angled straight off the page. Until then, the air of this last paragraph has been unusually heavy with citation. Yet there has been room only for one set of scare quotes—and this around the ironic first words. No sooner has the black flag crawled

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up the mast than the narrator steps in with his archest marker of allusion: “ ‘Justice’ was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess” (emphasis added). The glancing Greek reference may mask—and if so, only barely—a second subsidiary allusion to Shakespeare (as anticipated by Hardy in the preface to the fifth edition). With respect to the immortals, as to their president, we are as fl ies—to speak in King Lear’s own version of Aeschylus—to those wanton boys who kill us precisely for their sport. Angel has never been conventionally wanton, to say the least, but his cruelty has been killing. Yet so has Hardy’s, and in padding the allusion to King Lear with its own Greek source, he may have revealed the novel’s deepest intertextual anxiety— even, in semiotic terms, its avoided because overexplicit matrix. Tess may speak like Hamlet without knowing it: “I am ready.” But Hardy dares not speak out like Edgar elsewhere in Lear. A phrase like “ripeness is all” (rather than the abstracted article plus noun of Hamlet’s “the readiness”) would go too quickly to the nipped bloom of Tess’s sensuous prime—for which Hardy, long before Angel, must take full responsibility.

Dialectics, Isometrics, Ethics But how is that responsibility involved in our response all told? In the novel’s dialectics of form and force, structure and its content, violence is visited upon Tess from without and within alike, as if it were a generative (rather than genetic) inevitability: integral without being organic, a shape more than a fate, a manifested schema. Or say, on reflection, an isometric rendering that entails a rectilinear blocking-out not only of space but of time—indeed, of temporality reconceived as phased traverse, distilled in that listless last action of the new couple who simply “went on.” Isometrics levels a dialectics of force and form to an exposed design. Ethics responds to the plotting of these coordinates as such. The “reflection” Tess’s grief has along the way necessitated for us, even when refused by her, has been written, as we know, in “symbols” upon her own body. This rounded visualization of the signified, however, is prevented in the end by a removal of her body: and the removal again of the genre’s “extreme violence” from plot to interpretive distance, flattened to pattern by a nonperspectival design that emerges as openly and entirely formal. Given Hardy’s final shift from perspectival to isometric schemata, we can again take up the suggestions of Bersani and Dutoit. For in The Forms of Violence they pick out just the kind of graphic treatments— deformational more than mimetic—that resist the “masochistic” regime

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(Harold Bloom’s word, too, for Tess in particular) of portrayed violence, with all the programmed identifications of sacrificial surrogacy. A subsequent book by Bersani and Dutoit links modernist writing more fully to the techniques at work, to their eyes, in the deflection of violence by abstraction in Assyrian sculpture, itself a matter of incised isometric parallels and diffractions rather than of perspectival vanishing points and their funnels of identification. In Arts of Impoverishment, then, these critics see the estranging genius of Beckett, Rothko, and Resnais as operating, in effect, to rob identification in order to fund the work of formal cognition. In chapters on the retreat from realism across the separate media of prose, paint, and fi lm, the straitened circumstances of such impoverished representation appear respectively (to cite their three chapter titles) as “inhibited,” “blocked,” and “stalled.” Checked, deflected, deferred: that’s modernism’s mimetic hesitancy and its ethical resistance at once. However differently targeted, its ingredients are already there—many of them—in Hardy’s last chapter, including even his prose’s allusive diff usion, and especially the general inoculation of his closing lexicon against all rhetorical affect. Whether or not intending to aggravate the sting of the tragedy or simply to take some delayed aesthetic distance from it, certainly that distance is achieved. The systemic warping of perspectival intensity by an objectivist grid, of spatial theatrics by graphic isometrics, one might say of realist immediacy by naturalism’s clinical precisions—though all the more potent in its understatement—has surrendered the fetish altogether. It had no choice but to do so, of course, given the way plot has already put its heroine to death. As figured by a terminology of the drafting table, we are returned—after her sacrifice—to the Lukácsian “architectonics” of a diminished and flattened social totality. Reading Tess Durbeyfield’s destruction back to back with Maggie Tulliver’s reveals the difference between social ostracism followed by accidental “natural” death in Eliot and criminalization leading to public slaughter in Hardy. That difference in less than we might wish to think. And in genre terms closer to negligible. In the derivation of both plots, with their relentless deathward trajectories, from the dual aspect of ritual identification and exclusion in the paradigm of the scapegoat, their textual effects converge on the vanishing point of a heroine’s erasure from the social fold. And in each case, the ironized communal values for which the life of the heroine is symbolically exchanged are displaced unspoken, at least as the only credible destination for such effects, from any sense of depicted communitarian renewal in the body politic—which simply

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and meanly closes ranks against its victim—to the sphere of the novel’s collective readership instead. In The Mill as well as Tess, the logic of plot of course goes to suggest that the life it conjures “should have been otherwise.” And this is a sentiment easy to count on in the reader as a sombre and bracing afterglow, maybe even a mobilizing and corrective one. But that ripple effect of desolation and infused empathy is not bluntly expected to justify the violence in the first place, quid pro quo, as a communal rite of literary exorcism and renewal. So what does offer such justification? Or could? Or, alternately, how is this very possibility of ritual efficacy strategically ruled out? While Eliot nowhere alludes to the anthropology of blood sacrifice, of course, Hardy repeatedly does. If his novel performs the scapegoat logic, as Gallagher argues, rather than just evoking it by allusion, what does this function of narrative fiction mean more precisely, in turn, for the cultural anthropology of the Victorian novel audience? Which leads to another and anterior question. In what mode do prehistoric blood cults surface intermittently across the narrative progress of Hardy’s plot, ghosting it, bloodying its own hands on the way to the altar of Stonehenge and the final “arrest” (in every sense) of Tess’s “biographic form”? How may “activation” (rather than just “excavation”) in this sense also mean exposing or de-fusing? Is the violence of plot in Hardy a novelistic ritual or, rather, its searing parody? Or ask: In what way does an anthropological demotion of Lukács’s epic Greek cosmology to a violent fertility cult, laying bare the origins of the transcendental in the sacrificial—and this well before any historical descent into the punishing contingencies of the secular—come to operate as a narrative model or template in Hardy? Or, alternately, find itself mocked by overkill in the prolonged agonies of Tess’s plot? After all, no cleansing vegetative ritual of expunged and resuscitated fecundity would persist for years on end, like Tess’s story, at a sustained pitch of deprivation and violence. Nor could its symbolic burden be paced by novelistic plotting. De Man, again, might help us phrase a set of questions raised in fact by the incremental and prolonged attentions of narratography. Isn’t the putative archetypal matrix of Hardy’s plot in cultic surrogacy and slaughter exposed precisely as a governing irony by the way the sacrificial rite is distended over narrative time, and thus transacted by the rhetoric of its temporality? And doesn’t this amount to dispersing the ancient symbolic function effected by the scapegoat—its substitution ritual—and turning it instead into an “allegory” (de Man’s ironic contrast to the supposed epiphanic synchrony of symbolism)? As such, Tess’s battering by circumstance would emerge as more a fable than a rep-

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resentation, say, as with Maggie’s before her, of civilization’s constraints on the female life lived in time. For isn’t the idea that Tess suffers and finally dies for anyone’s good, as the symbol of anything fructifying, indeed for any purpose at all except the whims of social contingency—isn’t the expunging of this very possibility, phase by phase, the novel’s real savagery? And doesn’t the book’s final implied convergence, cruelly manipulated at every turn, between generic totality and private fate—and abetted in this by the cultural imposition of the form and force of legal retribution—only offer in turn a demoralized allegory of time’s work across the wearying extent of life and plot alike? If so, then something more than Tess drops to a bottomless death from the tightening noose of Hardy’s narration. For any prose melodrama, the false safety net of aesthetic recuperation is here exposed. Which is to say that the “extreme violence” of Lukácsian irony, toward the end of the century whose European landmarks guided his commentary, is turned here in British fiction—in a wholesale metageneric backlash—even against the novel form’s own epic precursor in the idealizations (and exposed underside) of Greek transcendence. Any archetypal justification for either realism or naturalism—as they collaborate in the narrative phasing out of life from Tess’s body—can only be anchored in a false symbolization and an aesthetic subterfuge, entirely vacated of value on any serious reflection. So with the arbitrary suffering of many a hero and heroine. If we thought otherwise about the enforced torment of any previous Victorian novel, as for instance The Mill on the Floss, then at last we have Tess of the d’Urbervilles to chasten any acquiescence in this aspect of the genre, a novel where things go so wrong for so long as to set certain passive expectations right. Tess’s story spells out what the wait for redemptive meaning through violence—origin of our very civilization, and mainstay of Victorian melodrama and its death scenes—now looks like in a more unfl inching light. If this “activates” symbolic ritual, it does so only to decimate and outmode it. Call Hardy’s format instead the bitter allegory of scapegoating itself—rather than its experimental reinstitution—in the overplotting of human duration. When nature comes up against culture, against Lukácsian “second nature”—confronts it in as raw a form as Hardy has arranged—there is no generative recuperation, only defeat and indifference and the trail of blood it leaves. Art must now satisfy itself with saying so: with ironizing any “regulative” totality it can struggle to formulate. The “ache of modernism” (19:140) from which Angel is surprised to find Tess suffering, is, among other things, a trauma for the novelistic genre itself.

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I’ve suggested that as readers we’re made complicit, through cultural competence, with Tess’s swamping by literary prototypes. But only to see the absurdity of them in convergence upon her lot. And made complicit with the lushness of her physical description. But only so as to be stung, even mortified, by her removal from our hypertrophically evoked, retroactively suspect, and all but haptic gaze. And made complicit in the episodic construction of her subjectivity. But only to feel its distortion and monstrosity. To this should we really add: made complicit in her purifying surrogacy as ritual victim? Purifying what? And in the name of what? Could summoned violent rites from those of Artemis to those of Stonehenge, in their ties to death-and-regeneration cults, be recycled here as anything but dead to modern use? As the mandate of an unblinking fiction, the truth of human desperation may need still to be plotted out for recognition, but such narrative content cannot be rescued by its exemplarity or made serviceable by symbolism. At the very interface of reading, the friction of Hardy’s prose would all on its own prevent this, exorcising ritual lucidity and plenitude by its own strained exactions. When stylistics overlaps with narratology in Hardy, the shared zone is a gray area indeed, blurred by complexity and contradiction. So again we return to the question of prose deviance—or in other words “linguistic violence”—and once more with Bersani and Dutoit in mind, including their sense of a modernism that breaks the identificatory binds of a brutally transpicuous realism. In this sense, too, it may further and finally be right to say that in reading Tess we are complicit in a rendered squalor at times tortuously gorgeous. But only so as to see the failure of this in releasing us to any real beauty. With Hardy’s novel narratographically engaged in the reading, its prose is found operating as a texturing device, and at times a retarding or hindering one, often syllabically congested against the momentum of plot. Remembering “the unfettered plasticity of prose” in Lukács’s genre-authorizing phrase, one finds instead in Tess a prose tied up in the knots of its own phonic and ironic bindings, the lilt of any calculated lyricism soon enough turned jagged and fraught. In the thick of all this, its phrasal density, what is thereby deflected or even occluded by the frictional sparks of Hardy’s edged prose—far more than by the rhythmic periods of Eliot’s—appears ultimately to call out, by negation, the very transparency needed either for realism or for ritual. Spoiling descriptive with phrasal vividness—yet not so often as to remove the affective threat, if not the efficacy, of a quasi-sacrificial (now secular and entirely unholy) identification—what Hardy’s writing is capable of yielding up in its deliberated rigor may in the long run be prose’s

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only way of keeping such fiction from seeming anything other than that ferociously wrought imagination of life that it is. Keeping it, in other words, from holding out any other service in its violence beside that of exposing human contradictions implacably narrativized by the mordant poetry of prose. To put it most simply, and on the eve of more extreme modernist distortions in the flow of plot as prose, what is saving in Hardy is the difficulty of skimming, of “getting into it” that easily, or on with it for that matter: the need, so often, to reread his very sentences to get either their exact picture or their point. For Hardy’s is a prose terrain in which, let us say, every other “gentle sentiment” finds its covert phonetic sounding board in “yellow melancholy.” You can’t see your way into that candlelit evening room of the Durbeyfields without hearing the alphabetic infrastructure, in other words, of its verbal architecture. To borrow again from Hardy’s sardonic reflection about absence hazing flaws with virtue in the fastidious mind, and to extrapolate it instead to the readerly imagination, we realize how the level at which narrative can begin to remedy by mediation, can achieve some “distance” on the “stains” of time, can even think to alleviate the violence of plot, is fi rst of all from within its own resistant wording: the intension of phrase itself, impeding immediacy with whatever degree of thickness or opacity, as in that last case with the unavailing lexical dialectic of the sibilant slant rhyme on stance/ stains. Such translexical displacements and syllabic commutes are never enough to alchemize narrative trauma. But in their own grip and bite they are sometimes enough to defeat any unmediated theater of cruelty in fictional representation. While aggrieved people suffer in Hardy, his prose offers a different kind of endurance test for the reader, staving off the instant gratifications of access. Here and elsewhere, narratography waits upon these hurdles and delays, stands watch over the deferrals that keep plots before us while still in the act of production. Looking over reading’s shoulder, it works in this way to intercept consumption at its point of entry.

Epilogue / Dialogue nov e l c r i t ic i s m a s m e di a s t u dy

Criticism is an act of keeping conversant. One stays in touch with a text’s structuring operations in part by keeping them in touch with the text’s own moment. And this involves holding them open for close attention as well as up for ideological debate. With Victorian fiction or any other literary form, it should follow that the never-stabilized zone of textual contact between book and audience begins in the paced language of a given storyline. But wide agreement on the former point may well stall, just there, over methodological inclination. New historicism and cultural studies both, even in the different scale of their commitments, are everywhere alert to the discursivities of a given historical moment. But when matching such instances of the sociolect against Victorian novelistic writing, these approaches may well tend to minimize the discourse of narrative itself, the very course of its mediating prose. Thinking of Victorian novels (as with narrative fi lms elsewhere) as occasions instead for media study has been the venture of these pages. In this light, narratographic perception is elicited by a thematically freighted wording harnessed to the duration of syntactic time. Despite the short list of subscribers to any such close-grained analysis of prose as medium, the inscribed evidence remains. And one trusts, too, that the disciplinary conversation is not entirely closed. I began this book by letting the backlog of my narrative analyses in previous studies open out as prologue to these further investigations. After a certain amount of intervening debate with methodologies that may be said to look straight past narrative writing to its governing structures—and hence to miss the force of the medium itself as the unconscious of plotted event—the point of this epilogue is to widen the matter out to potential further dialogue. And matter it is: the scriptive matter of narrative writing. At issue is a “grammar of narrative” not in Todorov’s metalinguistic sense alone, but in the everyday terms of syntactic crafting (or accident), word by word. Language in these pages has been not a (220)

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structuralist model only (reducible to the “linguistic turn”) but the structuring thing itself. Prose fiction is first of all prose. And don’t be surprised, even on exit, if I take heart from how obvious this sounds—given how often it is forgotten elsewhere in critical practice. Genre theory reads novels for form, but at a scope greater than sentence or page. Stylistics reads novels for recurrent habits, rather than local exactions, of phrase or image. New historicism reads for discourses not necessarily phrased at all. Psychoanalysis, for the structuring unsaid of story. Psychology, for characterization. Phenomenology, for reading’s access to the imagined world of such characters—but all told, rather than page by page. Semiotics, for the systemic sign, whatever the scale or duration of its signaling unit. Narratology, whether tracing a novel’s largest arcs or its epicycles, reads mostly for the plot or the point of view. Inflected by all of the above, what narratography reads for, instead, is the microplot of narrative language itself, tracked at times syllable by syllable across a building sequence. So let there be no mistake, this late in the game, about the graphic suffi x of narratography in pointing up the term’s implications, “theoretical” to be sure, for what used to be called “practical criticism.” The coinage points to a writing effect in process. As with narrative cinema, for instance, prose fiction is a mode whose medium is at base temporal as well as material. To approach it by way of narratographic response is the farthest thing from a return to the metaphorics (or ideology) of so-called spatial form, at whatever scale of inscription. Such attention has no interest in delimiting some glyph or pictogram of structural shape, some circumscribed graphic node as isomorph of the whole. Instead, reading for prose—rather than, one level up, reading for the plot (or, in Jamesonian terms, for plot’s manipulation of cognitive horizons)—works to imagine something more like a continuous graphing of fiction’s incremental and differential (its frictional) force. Narratography is concerned not so much with stylistic epitomes as with linguistic increments. Nor is the graphic dimension at stake in these deliberations fractal exactly. Recursions there are (phrasal, narratival, historical, and political, as we’ll see with Conrad in a moment) but only manifest along the unfolding track of the linear and vectoral drive of plotted language—or in other words, of phrasally activated plot. Few novelistic sentences—when slowing their own progress by internal echo, let alone by lexical and syntactical ambivalence—are less likely to escape the perceptual meshes of narratographic attention than the metonymic incursions and lurches of Conrad’ s end-of-the century prose. So the work of immanent analysis can bring out a last and epito-

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mizing case in point—in the ongoing distinction between stylistics and narratography—from within two linked pieces of material evidence from this late moment of Victorian narrative writing. Conrad’s prose, we may say, carries its secret sharers within it as the glancing shadowplay of assonance and double valence, his phrasal surfaces likely to submit at any moment to a turbid wash of enhancement and uncertainty both. Diction and grammar oscillate everywhere in Conrad with a marginal stylistic unease, whether in passages of description, dialogue, or narration per se—and indeed even as both scene-setting and its punctuating dialogue are quickly enough assimilated to the pulse of narrative flow. Especially under the weight of irony as a structuring rhetoric of temporality (Lukács by way of de Man), the more localized rhetorics of either description or quotation in Conrad readily become, as we can remind ourselves with one last sample each, the ingredient of a narratographic apprehension: serial, incremental, cumulative, even as the forward drive of the prose is ultimately, as in Heart of Darkness for instance, embroiled in a thematics of historical, moral, and even ocular regression. Description first, then dialogue: each of them subsumed immediately to that third thing as well—narrational force. Via a brief digression in chapter 3, I’ve already recalled one classroom experience with Conrad’s descriptive prose in Heart of Darkness, where so-called “sight reading” is upended by productive narratographic slips of the eye and inner ear. That effect emerged from the story’s second paragraph, where the lexical “haze” of first impressions leads to a quasi-anagrammatic reading of “varnished sprits” as “vanished spirits,” turning—right from the fi rst—the realist narrative into what it also is: a geopolitical ghost story. Under incipient tonal pressure in this adjective/noun dyad, that is, lexical modification grows immediately self-modifying: transformative, deliquescent, spectral. All the more so with the adverbial slippages that result from setting described things and evoked characters into narrative motion. If, in classroom encounters with Victorian prose, one thinks to identify these as teachable moments, it is only because, in the texts themselves, they are tutoring ones: not so much summary turns as sequential nudges. And if narratography is a response to the momentum of story at its verbal baseline, where predication both posits and activates, we can think of all narratographic perception as more or less adverbial: an inflection of agents and actions in their linked process as storyline. When, in the format of Venn diagrams again, grammatical stylistics overlaps with narratology, the result is that plot stands to narratographic response as does action to its recognized textural qualification.

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So let me now highlight, from those same opening moments of Heart of Darkness, two slippery adverbial rather than adjectival modifiers whose ironies of instability—immediately available to stylistics as well, in their crystallization of double-faceted indeterminancy and contradiction— operate, as such, somewhat differently within a set theory of the novelistic field. For a stylistics of ambiguity, intersected by an ironist narratology of Conrad’s plot as a negative quest romance, can once again, in diagrammatic terms, delimit and shade in the contact zone of narratography. The first of these adverbial vacillations is prepared for when the literal rather than just figurative atmospherics of plot’s setting out (both senses: sketching and launching) is manifest as a “haze” that “rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness.” A vanishing into flatness? A flatness losing even its own definition in distance? In any case, in a comparable and equally ambivalent recession, the “air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth” (65; emphasis added). Both big and great: not only a metropolis but the capital of a commonwealth, urban concentration and colonial tentacles at once. That much is quickly established, but not without the triggering of a narratographic irony at the hinging of the adverbial grammar itself. For whatever the stretch of its dominion, there is, as captured as well in the double vocalic extension of “gloom, brooding,” a diff usive breadth of obscuration at empire’s heart. This is where the very medium of visibility, already dark in the near distance, “farther back [,] still [,] seemed condensed” into desolate and tenebrous murk. A looming spiritual gloom (afterwards reiterated in precisely its brooding quality) thus concentrates itself as metaphoric effect to the causal absence of luminosity. In the process, the third incremental adverb in that impacted phrase, “still,” can only arrive with an equivocal (and itself hazy and fading) hesitation. Setting itself off ambiguously from “back” or “seemed,” it either amplifies and extends the preceding two adverbs in the sense of “farther back yet” or gets absorbed forward into “even yet seemed condensed.” Th is kind of Empsonian double grammar, with a gestalt effect dear to New Critical stylistics, is further deployed here, however, in surveying a more pointedly narrative lay of the land. For the withdrawn vanishing point of clarity, epistemological and ethical both, makes lugubriousness the natural medium of plot’s whole ensuing quest. So rather than a gestalt dualism, such slippage in signification appears again in the mode of a phrasal dialectics resolved, even as pressed and toppled forward, only by narratographic irony. And part of its exemplary interest has to do with the way

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the microplot of this grammatical and spatial recession, as even more in the example following, escapes from anything like the signature effects of stylistics to remain quite purely narratival—rather than otherwise “rhetorical” (phonetic, metrical, figurative)—in its operative force. The plot to come is so much about the spreading horizons of this gloom, in fact, that when Marlow finally takes faltering charge of the narrative in a moment or two, scrambling to explain what he has blurted out incoherently in his first words— “ ‘And this also,’ said Marlow suddenly, ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth’ ”—even his recovery is at first a bit of a stumble, almost a slip of the tongue. Within the global circuit of Conrad’s irony, the adverbial deviance has become all the more violent in its shift, now, from spatial to temporal regression. From “farther back still” in ancient history, that is, violence has returned from repressed memory into the incoherence of an incriminating imperial continuum. For in explanation of his outburst in medias res, there is, show-stoppingly, this: “I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago—the other day. . . .” Whenever he first indulged this kind of thinking, today he has the same thought too. But it has come to expression now, violating all logic, so as to telescope not just the history of his recent reflections but a millennial perspective on the depredations of imperial plunder. That frail punctuating hyphen, in other words, can’t even begin to keep order in such a collapse of the diachronic into the synchronic, where, in the deep scheme of things, the epoch of Roman barbarity is indeed just “the other day.” Across this lexically discrepant and wholly ironized node in a compacted rhetoric of temporality, such a logical discrepancy in Conrad’s adverbial grammar throws dialogue, and the narration that embeds it, for a momentary loss. And an abrupt thematic gain. Enforcing our first sharp recognition in Heart of Darkness that past and present will be related more or less allegorically to each other, this fleeting jolt arrives, as we’ve seen, amid a concerted onset of other narratographic signals and instigations in the same frictive vein. In this, as in so many ways, the phrasal deviance of Victorian melodrama comes home to dubious roost in the tortuous ironic precisions—or slips—even of Conrad’s dialogue. Outside of all quotation marks as well, the indirections of prose in this and previous Victorian narratives are legion, swift, and often charged to their maximum at a normal syntactic clip. This bears further clarification. For closest in scale, it might seem, to the spirit of this book’s exercise in narratography, Roland Barthes’s “slow-motion” reading for S/Z amounts, in another way, to its virtual opposite. Barthes has to downshift or actu-

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ally brake the forward progress of the Balzac sentence in order to break loose its masked “lexias,” the secret building blocks of its ideological construction. In the mode of narratography, by contrast, close-reading of long Victorian fiction—approximating in mental pace, perhaps, to its theater of orality in domestic consumption—is not “slow” at all in the exaggerated and counterintuitive sense practiced by Barthes. Most of the effects called out in the preceding chapters fi rst throw their switches only at a certain reasonable speed, where words catch at each other’s heels; where syllables, say, might evoke the flow of fate only as an undercurrent of narration’s forward rush; where (to repeat) lexical adhesion yields narrative traction only on the subvocal run. Only at that pace, as well as at that scale, do words get the jump on or jostle each other fast enough for verbal intension to emerge as immanent narrative friction. Slow this motion too much, as Barthes so brilliantly does, and whatever the revelations, they are no longer in themselves part of the immediate narratival enunciation. On analytic reflection, one may pause over such hitchings and glitches in fascination or bafflement, for however long, but our progress is not necessarily arrested or even very much retarded by them in their original context, where they remain legible enough as storytelling. And why should this matter? Only if it is important that one’s reading of Balzac, for instance, even in translation, should still insist upon its difference from reading Barthes’s analysis thereof. Narratography’s concerns are important, that is, only if narrative is found to do its work at the level of syntax, say, as well as of interpretive stance, of phraseology in action as much as epistemological reaction—or, as Joyce, after Conrad, will arrive to put it, at the level of the “phonemanon” as well as phenomenology. Important only, to put it yet more polemically, if we want to agree that there is no style in fiction apart from narrative style—at least until proven otherwise. Hence the overlap, via set theory, of narratology with stylistics in a given novel. But why, then, our many returns to Georg Lukács, who quotes less than almost any other critic, even theorist, and for whom style exists only at the level of his own lambent ventriloquizing of cultural anxieties, not by citation from the novels themselves? Is it possible that only so complete an indifference to the enchained sequences of verbal duration and to the linguistic features that forge their links, to the technicalities of emplotment and of prose alike, could see so clearly the larger shape of the genre? I suspect so—but admit this without methodological trepidation. The case for narratography needn’t quail in the face of such productive indifference. That’s the point of this book, as called out in part by

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the epigraphs. The stringencies of Lukácsian categorical thinking offer, in their own right, essential and generative (de)limitations. What more, though, does his work actually help us see within and across the terrain it demarcates? And see, moreover, in the grain of effect its distanced formulations cannot fail to leave unfocused—even with their premise in the “unfettered plasticity of prose” (58)? It is in just this sense, finally, that the narrativity of “style” can remain constitutive even when passing without remark. That’s what these five chapters have really been about: genre theory as narrative analysis as a novelistic reading practice in prose. And why there still could have been room for them—for a book indebted to Lukács, that is, though aimed at the verbal transactions of genre form in the English fiction he ignores—even if he himself had written about these same novels in his own categorical terms. The coalition my chapters seek is thus between the period-blind (narratological theory) and the period-bound (historicized genre study), confident that these divided considerations do indeed converge, with reciprocal determination, in the phrasal sequence of storytelling. And can be talked about productively at that scale. Even systematically—despite the definitively ad hoc quality of the effects at issue in their passing verbal work. Narratography involves no mere strategic retreading of stylistics for either new or well-worn paths of narratology. It names an attention instead to the inherent narrativity of fictional style. Which, as prose fiction, is not just a matter, but rather a continual transaction, of genre demands. The overlapping (rather than tangent or coincident) spheres of stylistics and narratology these chapters have often adduced in diagrammatic form, so as to isolate the mediumspecific common field, can therefore be invoked to mark out at the same time—in the very same verbal time, in fact—the structural and thus textual overlap of narrativity at large and a consideration of literary genre. Under such description, narratography becomes the reading of exactly this textual manifestation of novelistic form in the surface features of a given plot of the genre: the genre of post-epic narrative, that is, when defined after Lukács as regulative, dialectical, ironic, self-corrective; plot when conceived not in abstract patterns of actantial sequence and closure but when found manifest in lexical and syntactic motions and their marked linguistic violations, in tropes and their further deviant turnings. To the immanent, one often opposes the underlying. Try it here. Indeed, our provisional set theory has been in a sense three-dimensional all along, or say topographic. The lateral overlaps have in fact been overlays—involving a decisive permeation from beneath. Th ink of the

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previously disciplinary (and now structural) diagrammatics broached in these chapters, then, as superimposing a broader and more abstract category upon a specific literary function, so that the latter emerges— permeates upward into view—mostly through the grids and sieves of the former’s larger-scale templates. The surface and depth model of parole and langue comes readily to mind by analogy. And its psychoanalytic equivalent. In this sense, the genre of the novel is spoken only by a given fictional instance of narrativity, just as the features logged by stylistics rise to local notice only in their immediate—and hence mediated—narrative context and inflection. That is why, having been able to say that narrative sequence, when manifested in the medium of prose fiction, has a linguistic unconscious, we are also able to say—not just by homology but by a demonstrable coincidence in reception—that narrativity in the novel has an unconscious sense of its own genre constraints. And when the limits of the novel as genre, in all the dialectical ironies of its structure, are obtruded into plot—as most virulently perhaps in the savage sacrificial evocations and cancellations of Hardy’s novel—they return from repression (at the most obvious juncture in our paired conceptual overlays) in the self-gauged warpage of deviant language itself. Inherent to the melodramatic affect of Victorian fiction, so we’ve been led to generalize, and whether identified as the work of “romantic disillusionment” or not, violence incites to style—and even vice versa. What, finally, does that mean for reading? For the intimate encounter with narrative wording? And hence for literary criticism as media study? What does it put us on guard for—or against, perhaps? Or what, following Bersani and Dutoit, might it install—beneath the norms of realist response—as an oblique formalist corrective? By the fourth of these chapters, examples had propelled us to a certain pitch of generalization. Narratography was seen to debrief the whole transferential system of textuality known as reading. By that point, the evidence was clear enough. Later examples have, I assume, only extended and confirmed this sense of reading’s feedback loop. Transference and countertransference—the very relay system of affect—follows the shocks of event along the faultlines of prose. What more can now be said in review? Time and again, plots are thickened toward the end with the weight of the suppression or expulsion they have deliberately indulged in. Longing itself seems prolonged by narrative in order to probe its energies and their curtailments. Submitted to the exclusions of an achieved marriage plot, the hero’s nameless mother seems almost to die a second unbaptized death even at the moment of her final disclosure. The misogynist drunk-

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ard suffers a protracted terminal delirium in releasing his widow to the embedded narrator’s own closural desire in marriage. The rejected sister suffocates without hope of maturing beyond a brotherly affection that has itself been withheld until the last asphyxiating instant. The ill-fated, willful milkmaid is hounded to death by a desire other than the one she longs to elicit and finally kills to permit. Violating the very possibilities it lingers long enough to round off in an ironic key, Victorian plotting entails sins of omission and transmission as well as of sheer narrative commission. Beyond the suppression and exchange of story exemplified by Dickens and Brontë respectively (with the mystery of narrative transmission turned to supernal lunacy in Poe), there is the raw succession of event in Eliot and Hardy—and hence a more rigorous isolation of plotting itself as in its own right a gauntlet and a molestation. Any rhetoric of temporality is, in the process, executed in considerable part by style: the phrasings of fatality along the underside of desire, with every verbal intensity nerved toward this end. At its lower limit, such ironic temporality can find its disjunctive logic wholly in play, for instance, at the level of blurred lexical borders and grammatical enjambments. Every fl icker and skid of lettering may, in the slurred rain of syllables, shed immediate grammatical expectation and, in the opposite understanding of the verb, some new and skewed light. Higher up the scale of narrative configuration, and inscribed there with broader strokes, the phrasing of fatality is also palpably realized in the blocked-out and irreversible episodes of plotting per se. Plotting rather than plot: where life, bent to formal meaning, takes in process both its time and its tolls. This is where the very institution of the Victorian novel as genre (on Lukács’s model) is secured by the “reflective” or analytic violence of reversed terms, its whole adjusting wrench to perspective. This also, then, is where the evanescence of desire (not in a narrowly erotic sense, but as Peter Brooks would chart it across the very libido of narrative drive itself) must be given play until it plays itself out. Narratographically registered, it is this energetics of fictional desire, its pulse and burst and inevitable waning, that must be so remorselessly borne home. Reading is that destination, that place of unrest. When we come to Conrad’s flashback narratives, what the torquing of prose responds to from the outset is only the way the disillusioning reversal of ironic “reflection” has already invaded the very possibility of re-telling. With the result, more even than in Dickens, that every other sentence seems haunted by its own stylistic backstory. Reading in this sense for the distortions of plot by prose, the immanent analysis termed narratography confronts the vicarious impulses of

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realist violence with a psycholinguistics of its decipherment—and its reverberant evasions phrase by phrase. And if the deviltry’s in the details, so also may lurk certain energies of its exorcism, not perfuming the represented violence but exposing the strain of its representation, the excess, the textual as well as human extremity. Slips of gender and agreement are tucked away in Little Dorrit, for instance, in an ambitious closing armature of assonance, parallelism, and modest apotheosis. Dead metaphors of debt and acquittal in Brontë are activated, indeed overheated, by the local vocabularies of vicarious identification in a supposedly normalizing tropology of family feeling as social cohesion. In Brontë’s case, one result is that the kind of enunciating subjectivity swamped in Poe by the impish and goading play of the signifier finds its Victorian contrast, through the words of an epistolary narrator, in a final erotic moment of exultant syllabification. In The Mill on the Floss, an intervalic medium of prose is made to channel the phonetic wellings, the legato transitions and overlaps, of a writing so fraught with its own conveyed violence that the “flood of feeling,” once materialized as a doom, could only be ameliorated—which is to say rendered meaningful—from within the rescuing undertow of that prose. But then never quite. In Hardy, with a totalizing irony—and an unmasked rhetoric of temporality—imposed mostly from beyond the heroine’s recognition, a sense of inevitability invades every uncanny chink and cranny of “phased” catastrophe, with life died (as much as lived) under the sign of prototype and preemption. And processed throughout in a prose so tensed by idiomatic and phonetic obliquity that even rereading, sentence by sentence, as we’re often impelled to do, seems more like rubbing in the irony than sorting it out. Such are just some of the frictions induced in these novels by the discerned and reverberant tensility of narrative prose in every turn of its onrushing differential signification. To all this Conrad’s syntactic chiaroscuro is the natural and denaturalizing heir. I spoke of reading as a place of unrest. Criticism may well try inhabiting it. If The Theory of the Novel is, as it sounds, our definitive early book on the novel, my late and more specialized book on the genre’s Victorian moment has tried adjusting the fi lters of Lukács’s consideration. It has attempted to screen his dialectical abstractions less through the centuries-long evolution of the novel as genre than through the postRomantic prose of that genre’s fictional plotting in Victorian narrative. Once disposed to do so, one suddenly starts reading the syllabic cadences and syntactic delays, the figural congestion and contradictory tropes, all the tread and tremor of prose itself that contours the duration of Vic-

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torian story—starts reading it, that is, as a micronarrative of its own, syncopated with plot rather than subsumed to it. The violation of lives thus played out in a given text by prose’s frictive intension—when read through the same novel’s potentially deviant treatment of received genre formats—moves beyond interpretation (not around it, but through it) to a transferential theory not only of novelistic form but also of narrative writing. Interpretation becomes in this way the reading of mediation for its own content—often involving what has seemed best described as fiction’s linguistic unconscious. One widespread academic trend is thereby called into question in the exclusivities of its contextual emphasis. For there are, it must be insisted, more historical contexts than the sociocultural—and ones equally pertinent to the execution of literary narrative. In the case of Victorian novels among others, and beyond cultural study’s interest in their tacit forms of historicity, the actual grain of a novel’s language can help to elucidate the very historicity of forms—and the programmed tenor of their reception. To put it at its simplest and most obvious, genre is a discourse too, a thoroughly historical one. And each text its legible citation. Isn’t that part of what we inevitably read—and can more deliberately read for? The question is anything but rhetorical because tacit objections to such a method come from many quarters—often in the form of untested assumptions that can only be talked down by example. What this continued talking—keeping in provisional circulation, as it does, the instinct for intensive textual analysis—has asked most obviously in these chapters might be this: Why shouldn’t genre study and narrative theory meet on the shared turf of a novel rather than just the novel? Okay, but how exactly? It is to heal the marked and widening gap in novel studies between genre theory and narratology, between cultural formations and structural forms, that the narrow—but not narrowing—measures of narratography have been specified, and in fact named as such. Named—and mapped out—in precisely their narratival remotivation of stylistics. To render the historical and evolutionary claims of genre theory conversant in this way with the architectonics of structural analysis, to keep alive some refreshed paradigms of exchange between novelistic content and narrative form, there are plenty of words at hand. They lie there, waiting in line on the plotted page of many a prose fiction: en masse but also in serial action, reversing expectations at will, regularly doing their part to infl ict a novel violence upon the course of story—and often inflecting a new shade of meaning from within the unmistakable shadows of disenchantment.

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Criticism is, or can be, the reading of this inscribed pace and waver of phrase: a reading driven home, once again, to its meditated destiny in unrest. This is something a little different from what Barthes famously meant by the “pensive text,” with the reader suspended after the fact in magnetized reflection upon it. For there are other suspended moments in the tensility of reading, moments more locally arresting, that escape Barthes’s “coding”—his version of medial preconditioning. They are let loose, instead, into the vehicular thick of inscription. There is thus, to borrow his own vocabulary for a different level of attention, more “jamming” in novelistic writing than just that of the codes that dispose it. As its prominence in Victorian fiction makes clear, this verbal impaction remains decidedly—though never firmly—within the realm of the readerly. Or put it in reverse by saying that a narratographic response to prose motion approaches to the writerly moment within the readerly: to speak etymologically, the disconcerting within the orchestrated. Confronting such unrest in the densely inscribed and entirely selfincited melodrama of novels like those of Dickens, Eliot, or Hardy, most generalization rightly falters. As does much methodological consensus. Narratology tends to flee the immediate—that is, the specifically mediated—scene. Genre theory keeps its different distance. Culturalist historicism averts its gaze to impinging discourse. The only unfl inching approach—and in fact the one most likely to broker a collaboration among the other methods—is one more tightly gripped by the language of execution in the first place. If narratography, then, can be understood by psychoanalytic paradigm as an invested reading of narrative’s linguistic repressions and their distorted verbal manifestations, this is only because the affect of novel reading is itself the transferred site of the text’s own endemic restlessness. Critical reading may still curl up with a Victorian novel, but it never settles in. In particular, narratography responds to the articulated linearity of narrative prose by following out its modular, sometimes even molecular, progression, however many regressions—and structural regresses—may be caught up with this enunciated sequencing en route. That’s why this book’s companion volume on photogrammatic (yielding to postfi lmic) cinema proposed the “narratogram” as, by definition, the smallest unit of screen effect capable of taking a narrative charge. In moving from the fi lmic or digital minim to the prose of fiction, narratography is drawn to the sentence, phrase, or syllable, even the ambivalent word border. But it is held by such effects—held only briefly, caught up en route—not mostly for the occasional mise en abyme of broader narrative conjunctures they

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may install but, more intrinsically, for the junctural energy of the narrative chain itself. Where certain tensions and repressions return in the very form of the turned or turning phrase. Where material intension can, as such, outplay all concern for authorial intent. And where—calculated or not at the level of narrative persuasion, often contingent on the waver of attention and affect in any one reader’s reading, and thus always aleatory and elusive—the weight of theme may be deferred in its effect, or partly neutralized, across the sheer play of form. Theme, and the violence that often drives it. According to Bersani and Dutoit, once again, it is through just such uneasiness of form, its sprung rhythms and untoward repeats, the sensuous density of its own inscriptive weft, that one might sense what modernism (as, long before it, the abstractions of ancient sculpture) will eventually do, from within the same fund of prose resources, to divert readerly affect altogether from the endemic violence of realism. Arthur’s mother is driven away and mad, Helen brutalized, Maggie drowned, Tess hanged. The emplotment that calibrates these tortures, if only by sometimes leaving them untold, gets ensnared by the tantalizing polymorphous transgressions of a fully narrativized prose, in all the surface distress of its flexed advance, its pulse and repulse. In this very way, however, writing itself opens the latent possibility of an aesthetic distance achieved even from within the mimesis: not ornamental or ameliorative, but a contrapuntal field of force all its own. Thus, invoking Jakobson, may the grievousness of Victorian plotting find quasi-libidinal relief in a violence strictly linguistic. When this happens, realism divides from itself, sheering off from its mainstay in masochistic identification—along the rupture and schism of wording—toward (if only distantly) a modernist psychoaesthetics of the signifier. Building on Hardy’s stylistic opacities and oblique repeats, Conrad further leads the way out of the Victorian moment of realism toward this international experiment. But not without his prose reminding us at every other turn of its protomodernist forebears in the most thickly worked passages of Dickens, Eliot, and others. It is of course a fine line between the slightest blurring of represented violence by the sensualized, vacillating cast of grammar and figure, on the one hand, and the disintegration of that same plotted material, on the other, into a distracting formal static working directly against its power as involving tale. In part, it is the line between mimetic effects of mostly thematized style and the eruptive pressures of a different energy altogether: between sublimation and a more radical formal estrangement, scattered and narratively deactivating. Keyed to plot but vulnerable to

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inscriptive effects that may exceed even while attempting to supplement that plot, narratography patrols this very dividing line, not categorically but edgily. The provocations of such reading—at their far limit—are dispersed to effects intermittent, syncopated, and askew: eroticized in their own way, maybe, but no longer fetishistic. This is where one might say that writing gets in the way of reading, rather than simply paving the way of plot; in other words, where what one falls back on in reading is the writing itself, a writing variously—rather than monolithically— translucent to the narrated lives it conjures, clocks, and forecloses. In this respect, modernist style is indeed a long-nineteenth-century phenomenon. Though gravitating to examples more lyrical and overtly “impressionist” in Conrad than the ones cited here, Fredric Jameson’s analysis of Conrad’s “will to style,” in full view of Lukács’s critique of modernist reification, offers a suggestive parallel to the argument of Bersani and Dutoit. As anticipated at times in our own discussion, especially by the encysted lyric nodes of Hardy’s narrative prose, in The Political Unconscious Jameson finds the isolation of “perception as a semi-autonomous activity”—in prose like that of Conrad’s or Proust’s novels—used to mark a defining modernist effect of “fragmented senses” derived from capitalist alienation. In Jameson’s dialectics of style, however, what escapes immediate recirculation within the commodified exchange system of marketed sensory satisfaction—in other words the incidental “waste products of capitalist rationalisation” (437)—may indeed harbor, unquantified, a utopian charge, one that reinstates a certain disinterested “vocation of the perceptual” (438) against its routine segmentation, “a compensation for everything reification brings with it” (437). Calling up the specific psychoanalytic implications of his abiding political focus, Jameson’s reference at this point to the erotics of “unconscious” desire seems readily correlated with Bersani and Dutoit on the sensuality of the signifier as a primal drive. For Jameson, that is, such a stylistic localization of sensory flows, in a “unique sensorium of its own” (438), may actually retain, and even renew, “a libidinal resonance no doubt historically determinate, yet whose ultimate ambiguity lies in its attempt to stand beyond history” (438). Looking back on our sampled chapters in the literary history of Victorian melodramatic plotting, we see how style’s close overlap with narrative has worked indirectly to remind us of at least this: that some part of that “ache of modernism” coming to such a bluntly designated head in Hardy is in fact the Keatsian “feel of not to feel it.” Enervation is the nightmare obverse, in a paining numbness as well as a numbing pain, of Romantic visionary sensuality. Heatedly debated as it

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has been, impressionism may be the wrong stylistic term, academically speaking, for certain pockets of modernist recuperation. But what is at risk in modernity is certainly the stray impression itself, somatically felt rather than compartmentalized, the nonproductive excess that only style can tune to or reinject. And in this respect as in so many others, modernism finds its place in a long Romanticism for and within which the Victorian novel is an important conduit. Then, too, for George Eliot’s post-Wordsworthian ironies of the pastoral, and its decline into the social tragedies of “second nature,” the verbal “medium” is not only crucial but explicitly so. We’ve seen the word’s use as closing marker in Middlemarch for a lost epic ambience, whether in Christian hagiography (St. Theresa) or Greek theater (Antigone). So, too, is a different kind of historical irrelevance cleared out at the start of The Mill on the Floss. Just as we are getting our fi rst footing in Eliot’s prose, we are tweaked as readers for our previously high-toned taste, with the narrative voice adducing certain rural delicacies of produce and commerce “which my refined readers have doubtless become acquainted with through the medium of the best classic pastorals” (1.12:115; emphasis added). Here genre is itself a medium, a conveyance, a transmissive system. Prose fiction is Eliot’s. Such writing addresses not the “refined” taste of the gourmand, literary or otherwise. Even in a teasingly assonant mention of “the well-crushed cheese and the soft fleeces” of pastoral renown, such echoic prose operates on the tongue and palate of silent narrative ingestion in a way that will sharpen to keener recognition (later in Eliot’s plot) the bitter taste of lethargy and defeat. In our readings of the post-Romantic novel, narratography has stayed alert to the vestiges of perceptual intensity left by the track of realist plotting—or, in other words, to the “vocation” of sensory heightening at both descriptive and linguistic levels, from the figurative to the phonetic. Such reading has served to anticipate the oblique currents of sensation in modernist style by locating comparable moments of audiovisual overload and residue in Dickens, Brontë, Eliot, and Hardy as much as in Conrad. These are moments where the densities of evocation itself, however ironic—in resisting or at least unsettling the grim lucidities of violence—put reading at a needed distance from the straightforward report either of pain or of perceptual deprivation. Style in this sense has its own ethics, even before Conrad or Proust are seen deploying it to reattach, fleetingly in reading, the rationalized body to its own field of cognitive affect. When in previous fiction it is the represented rather than receptive body that is found scourged by the violence of plot, what we

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have recognized is that, even there, style—though by no means bent on emancipating narrative from its inherent menace—can nonetheless be found inhibiting any unreserved submission to it on the reader’s part. The prose of fiction often works as “artfully” as possible to impede simple identification by the deferrals and distortions of phrase. Nervous in every sense, it operates discontinuously on the crosswired senses of sight and sound. Glimpsed or lisped glancingly at best, catching the eye only on the slant or caught silently in the throat, in this way alone could style’s inherent energy become a counterforce: not a full subversion or revision, but a subnarrative version of the told, thickening or decelerating the texture of plot’s prescribed violence. The medium, one might say, is not so much the message as its assuagement in perception. At the very least, prose can rethink in process the fictional violence it propels. Mounting examples have by now lifted us, I trust, to a theoretical plateau where a lurking contradiction, there from the start, can be balanced off on narratographic common ground. We’ve been concerned with two separately posed relations of violence to style that are not, in retrospect, as incommensurate as they may at times have seemed. Given the downplayed energies of emplotment and rhetoric in Lukács’s theory of the novel as genre—indeed of emplotment as its own mode of rhetoric in a genre that only comes of age in an “extreme violence” of authorial irony visited traumatically upon its characters—we have tried occupying that rhetorical gap in the Lukácsian account from opposite directions, each in its different way stylistic. Which has led to a potential discrepancy in emphasis that should by now show forth as complementary instead. With no particular interest in plot or narrative writing, a structuralist poetics like Jakobson’s thrills to the rhetorical or stylistic violence of modernism in the form of shocks to a linguistic system whose normative working is elucidated and confirmed by just these bracing deviances. Alternately, with no tolerance on its part for the vicarious violence of plot, a modernist aesthetics like that advanced by Bersani and Dutoit submits to the sensuous abstractions of form as a stylistic defense against the more seductive and perverse extremes of realist storytelling. Two directions of approach, then, to the pronounced verbal cast of literary language: inner versus outer, linguistic versus aesthetic, here preoccupied with salient breaks from a paradigm, there with the broken circuits of transparent fictional investment. Narratography locates their point of convergence. Style in realist narrative is found coming to the rescue of the same representational violence its own phrasing may also, in the other sense, represent. Narrative language can at times deflect in

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progress the immediacies of feeling it serves all the while to effect. In this way the prose of fiction may disperse the very coercions it exerts, refract its own exactions, override what it underwrites. Say, if you will, that it exercises both sways at once in mitigating the affect it also instigates. Divergent even from its own linear prosecution, such is the unruly and deregulating force of form. It is reading, and reading alone, that can sense this difference between the pull of plot and the draw of form, especially when the latter draws off the reader’s solicited identification into the registered frictive shifts and dissonances of verbal mediation instead. Whose destiny is not just a modernist verbal practice loosely rooted in the experiments of Victorian prose but a preoccupation with the materiality of language itself, objectified, that leads Barthes (as much as Jakobson, to whom he so often owes a secret allegiance) to a sense of “words adorned with all the violence of their irruption” as “absolute object” in writerly prose. Here begins, for Barthes, the arc of a “violence” whose “vibration,” though “wholly mechanical” (51), still in the reading act “strangely affects the next word, only to die out immediately” (51). Deviance, violated norms of representation, the “violence” of language as object when reduced to its own nonreferential “vibration,” then its vitiation in the continuing medial flux: in sum, the variable surge of prose temporality when isolated from—or sometimes, as in certain Victorian fictions, set in counterpoint to—the onrush of plot. Again, the medial emphasis. And so another question for further uptake, rhetorical to the core this time. And then a few more to which it rapidly leads—in leading back, inevitably, to the question of writing. What descriptive or analytic energy would be wasted in recognizing, in the timeworn and twofold category of “prose fiction,” the designation of a genre in precisely its medial terms? If to advocate for such prose as a narrative medium—and thus as an indispensable factor in any historicized account of the Victorian dawn of mass media—is to proselytize the obvious, you wouldn’t know it from recent critical practice. No emphasis on style in the study of Victorian fiction can now, or ever could, be counted on, let alone count as preaching to the converted, whether in league with the study of accelerated transmissive networks of the period—including bio-cognitive systems themselves—or otherwise. Why the disconnect, even now? Given that the most robust fronts of investigation in current Victorian studies include numerous links between literature and the other apparatuses of communication (first the somatic circuit joining eye, ear, and brain; then at greater distances in the prosthetic networks of transmission), the gathering silence on writing as such could

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hardly seem opportune. Why should the frequent material evidence for such interdisciplinary media study—photograph and stereopticon, telegraph and phonograph, stenography through cinematography, in their differentiated inscriptive bases—be isolated as contemporary paradigms taking exclusively thematic form in fiction (where communication technologies are often allegorized as preternatural and telepathic)? Why this, rather than being aligned more directly with the mass-print systems of prose inscription that, especially in novels, help among other things to “communicate” the mystery and power of such cousin techniques of longdistance transfer? I’m asking why, that is, a contemporaneous media discourse—and, more to the point, the very culture of mediation in Victorian experience, with its ever-expanding communications models—shouldn’t be found to have an effect on (as well as in) the systems of fictional mediation itself in Victorian writing, so that there would be an undeniable yield from attending to prose in its pace and signifying force, its lexical and syntactic materials operating in and as transmission? Why, in short, do Victorian brain science and media theory need to be so wholly divorced from the technicity of narrative writing itself in order to be isolated as a topic in (or out) of fiction? Put more positively, since the answer is that they needn’t be, ask instead what might be gained, given the inscriptive basis and remote-control rhetoricity of Victorian fictional technique, from a study, call it a narratography if you will by now, of its specific mediations as such? Since this epilogue is trying to imagine how an interest in this, all this, might spark to further dialogue among students of narrative, it has seemed up to me to make the first moves in that direction. In this spirit, building upon the opening chapter’s enacted sense that sentences, not just plots, have their backstories (triggering in part the linguistic as well as the narrative unconscious of their own emplotted succession), I’ll put forth a broader question yet, if not a call. A talking point, as they say: one large one, I think, though it may look like two—half structural, half historical. Is there nothing to be gained from conceiving (or in other words reading) the prose of Victorian prose fiction, including its imposed “poetic” yet still structuring violations (Jakobson), as the very gearbox of fictional time—including the genre bearings of such narrative temporality and its ingrained, sometimes harrowing, “rhetoric” (Lukács via de Man)? By locating prose motion as time’s own medium, nothing to be gained for the structural functions dear to narrative study at large? Nor even, more specifically, for the novel’s self-orienting place as genre in the

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Victorian culture of a long nineteenth century: prose the social interface of realism’s institutional fi xture on the slow historical road toward modernism? What would counsel against any such speculative reinvention of novel criticism as media study? Of course, part of my largest and now final point in these chapters lies right there: in the fact that such questions immediately breed others like and beyond them. Is there no theoretical profit, that is, from submitting the frequent cruel rigors of Victorian plotting to the kind of rhetorical attention, always linguistically mediated—and thus often angled away from psychological trauma to performative verbal drama—which the very execution of these plots seems maneuvered to invite? Is there nothing uniquely Victorian (as well as formal) about this? Historical as well as textual? And no cultural benefit from monitoring the way these quintessential plots of the genre not only hold fast the reader’s cognitive energies but sometimes try holding off, in the very friction of their prose, a too passive (or passive-aggressive) identification? No sense that in this pulling (because pushing) back there might be opened the micromanaged space of meaning itself, which can mean a certain resistance as well— or, in medial terms, a certain interference in the system? And if not, why not?

Notes

b a ck l o g \ prol o g u e 1. Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947), x, where, to restore the elided wording, the more specific stranglehold identified by Brooks (novels never being thought of as standing to benefit from his corrective) was “reading a poem in terms of its historical context” (emphasis added). Th is moment in Brooks is given a full hearing in the opening pages of Susan J. Wolfson’s Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 8ff., where attacks on a culturally narrow and arid cast to the formalist analysis of Romantic poetry are defi nitively fended off. 2. As New Critical touchstone, this is a structuring sense of irony, when approached in fiction, that is inseparable for the most part from the working of time itself in the plotting of narrative, as Paul de Man will help us specify when we turn to his “rhetoric of temporality” in chapter 4. For now, it is worth noting how another writer about the novel as genre, without reference to Lukács or de Man, begins from a similar dissatisfaction with narratology. In an essay in Reading for Form, ed. Susan J. Wolfson and Marshall Brown (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2006), Catherine Gallagher’s title “Formalism and Time” is meant to bracket a parting of the ways in previous novel theory. She finds the analytic terrain split between studies of structure versus discourse, where in either case emplotted temporality falls through the cracks of formalism’s spatial bias (306–7). Impatient with the supposed frozen duration not only of schematic narratology (with its graphs and charts) but of stylistics as well, Gallagher sees each approach, encompassing on the one hand, molecular on the other, as missing the ingredient of length per se, the novel’s stock-intrade of duration. In my chapters, the attempted correlation between narratology and verbal analysis—under the sign of narratography—attempts returning the temporal flow of prose into the field of structural consideration without letting linguistic analysis crystallize into the kind of stop-action formalism Gallagher resists, modeled as it seems to her on “a picture or a fractal” (306). 3. Garrett Stewart, Dickens and the Trials of Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974); Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984); Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990); and Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 4. Still, with two books on cinema’s moving image since those literary studies, and one on painting (if only on images of reading, and a good deal of it nineteenth-century reading at that), I itched for an extended return to the textures of Victorian fictional prose rather than

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of photograms, pixels, or pigment. (Th is was, as it happens, the very itch for wording that I had found many a painted book in a painted lap staged both to awaken and otherwise to placate than with readable script.) See Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) and Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), as well as The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 5. It is thus to be distinguished from Tom Conley’s visualist approach to the play of typographic forms, to rebuses and ocular patterning, in The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Himself a fi lm as well as literary scholar, Conley tends to cross between the image of letters and other graphic figures alike on screen and page. My narratographic emphasis in this book, however, falling on the ordinary alphabetic and phrasal build-up of fictional prose (as a lexical mobilization of the engram) detects—across the graphic surface of semiotic inscription—certain traces of what I will be calling, instead, prose fiction’s linguistic rather than graphic unconscious. 6. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1966), 183. 7. See Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 106–7, on the irony of “onomastics” in the spelling of Balzac’s hero Sarrasine with an s rather than a z. 8. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, ed. Susan J. Wolfson and Barry V. Qualls (Acton, Mass.: Copley, 2000), 63, in “Dr. Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case.”

i n t r o d u c t io n 1. A deliberate resistance to this generalizing impulse, from a stringently verbalist camp, for instance, will indeed tend to couch formal narratology in just these terms. Attempting to break past the method’s typically diegetic emphasis on telling rather than showing with a much more rigorous linguistic sense of what can be “demonstrated” by tense structure, grammar, and “aspectology,” How to Show Things with Words: A Study on Logic, Language and Literature by Rui Linhares-Dias, in the “Trends in Linguistics” series (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2006), begins its glossary entry on narratology by identifying it, by contrast with the book’s own linguistic methods, as “the structuralist-inspired term to designate a general theory of narrative irrespective of medium: whether verbal or non-verbal and, if verbal, literary or non-literary” (405). By contrast, in turn, both with this identified persuasion as well as with the microlinguistics of Linhares-Dias’s own book (in its title’s deliberate spin on J. L. Austin), narratography is interested more in the work done than in the world shown by words. 2. David Herman, ed., Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999). 3. Medium specific, yes: but not privileging literary forms of narrative—just registering, with less rush to generalization, their linguistic basis when, in fact, wording is the material form in question. Elsewhere, and in exactly the same spirit for my 2007 book Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema, I have attempted a comparable charting of cinematographic effects as narrative carriers. The only previous use of the term “narratography” I have seen, though, comes from the realm of musicology (musicography?)—and is deployed there in a quite different (or complementary) sense. For Lawrence Kramer, the term doesn’t have a double valence pitched between fact of and study of—a sense carried, for instance, by the term geography. Nor does the suffi x invite, as here, the strictly analytic denotation of a term like cartography. Rather, Kramer’s musical “narratography” gravitates more toward the

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material rather than epistemological sense associated with a noun form like photography or phonography: the inscribed thing itself rather than the assessment of it, by which Kramer has in mind the notations in music that develop across the staves as a kind of narrative line. See Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 186–89. 4. Vladimir Propp, The Morphology of the Folk Tale, trans. Laurence Scott, 2d ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970). 5. A. J. Greimas, Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method, trans. Daniele Mc Dowell, Ronald Schleifer, and Alan Velie (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). Th is linguistic turn is economically summarized, with Greimas as example, in the title chapter of Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 16–17. 6. See Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980) and Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols., trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–88). 7. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, with the determining force of closure as narrative telos being widely appreciated ever since Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967). 8. See Todorov’s untranslated Grammaire du Décaméron (The Hague: Mouton, 1969), as well as The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977) and, in a related vein, David Herman, Universal Grammar and Narrative Form (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995). 9. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Donald L. Lawler (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 3:38. 10. Sean Purchase, Key Concepts in Victorian Literature (London: Palgrave, 2006). 11. Roman Jakobson, “The New Russian Poetry,” in Questions de Poétique, ed. Tzvetan Todorov (Paris: du Seuil, 1977), 43 (my translation); see also the appearance of the term “violence,” with or without quotes, and with reference at times to the verse theorist Paul Verrier, at 53–54 and 55, where the chief exhibit is a Futurist style driven to the limit of syntactic tolerance. 12. Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Essays on the Language of Literature, ed. Seymour Chatman and Samuel R. Levin (Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1967), 303. 13. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, The Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art and Modern Culture (New York: Schocken, 1983). 14. In the process, Bersani and Dutoit mince no words. In a passing diatribe (far harsher than anything intended in these pages) against the “industry of narratology” over “the past twenty years or so” (51), and this published before twenty further years of increasingly generalized or neuroscientific paradigms, the authors of Forms of Violence see the “not very enlivening” results as proving mostly that lots of people, especially researchers, agree about narrative’s cultural centrality. For Bersani and Dutoit narrative theory of this sort tends to rest content with deviant means—and the meaningful deviance—by which “equilibrium” is summoned and upset only to be restored in the end. As they see it, only a more concerted and theorized resistance to the pervasive structural violence of such narrative can bring aesthetic news. Narratology isn’t the real culprit for these critics. Narrative is. Whereas my chapters work to supplement and at times syncopate the exactions of realist narratology, Bersani and Dutoit would indeed throw the baby out with the scholarship that launders and then swaddles it. 15. Though Bersani and Dutoit never put it this way exactly, a psychoanalytic formal-

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ism of response and its displacements supplants a psychology of sacrificial characterization (of the sort that becomes most blatant in Hardy). It does so at just the point where desire is angled away from the tether of identification to the fractured schismatic surface of signification itself. Arriving—though too soon for engagement with it—just after Peter Brooks’s study of Desire and Intention in Narrative (subtitle to his 1984 Reading for the Plot, n. 5 above), the 1985 Forms of Violence argues for the freeform release of a kind of desire less wholly mobilized by the dialectic of Eros and Thanatos, the energetics of story and the telos of closure, than it would be under Brooks’s late-Freudian paradigm. For Bersani and Dutoit, such is a desire that can be urged loose—if never purged entirely—from the incremental lockstep of plot only by formal device, formal deviance. 16. Th is is where the Assyrian tableaux of hunt or battle, with their lacerating pictures of human cruelty, offer a better model, according to Bersani and Dutoit, than the idealizations of Greek sculpture or the psychologizations of its Roman equivalent. From the unremitting violence of its pictorial topics, such Assyrian art fi nds relief, as it were, only in the sculptural sense: in the unmotivated and hence depoliticized patterns of incised mark, line, and formal difference, where human figures come before us varied without individuation, inviting no psychological lines of recognition or transference. Form is scattered into the unbound multiplicity of line and plane. 17. Here is where Poe will offer a nineteenth-century counterexample and an infl amed libidinal test case: generating a fictive prose that outstrips and undermines narrativity altogether with the (barely desexualized) abandon of sensuous phonetics and its free play of textual desire. In many of Poe’s so-called stories, the barest hint of secondary processing is all that begins to channel the primary drives of erogenous evocation and dispersion, all that even begins to hint at the rattling skeleton of a plot. 18. That such an effect is dispatched by the vehicle of plot’s own prose: this is where narratography hews more closely to narrative effect per se than either the approach of Bersani and Dutoit or the explicit narratological revisionism of Andrew Gibson in chapter 4, with his stress on the skittish force of form rather than the stabilized form of plot. 19. See Bill Brown, “The Secret Life of Th ings (Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism),” Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (1999): 1–28, where he exemplifies the thing/object difference—a cluster of attributes versus a concept—as, for instance, “grayness and thinnness and length” over against “the apperception of a knife” (6). The insight takes us further into literary language than Brown pursues it. In a disciplinary effort to clear the air after both the crisscrossed referential densities of “discourse analysis” and a broader preoccupation with the “social text,” or in Brown’s words the twofold disciplinary struggle by which criticism now “wrestles itself out of the homogenizing habits of new historicism and the heterogenizing habits of cultural studies” (5), what is to rule out a return to the medial specifi city of the prose of fiction, let alone of poetry? 20. If stylistic deviation gravitates toward plotted violence as one testing ground of the prose medium in Victorian fiction, there is a comparable bond between aberrant visuals and temporal violence on the cinema screen. Th is latter is the topic of my companion study in “narratography,” Framed Time. In an increasingly postfi lmic cinema, time per se is a narrative motif likely to bear the most immediate brunt of epochal shifts in the temporal basis of the screen medium, the gradual move from photomechanical succession to binary differentiation, from serial rhythm to gridded algorithm. One detects a similar conjunction of analytic method and fictional material, of method and theme, in turning back to the origins of cinematic storytelling in Victorian fiction, where in fact time will be seen in its own right, via Lukács and de Man, to be entailed in questions of violent impasse or reversal.

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21. Basing his sweeping history of tragic modalities, in part, on a subtle grasp of Lukács’s Theory of the Novel, with its sense of declension (after the epic moment) from formal stage tragedy into novelistic prose, Terry Eagleton’s Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2003) singles out, among Victorian novels before Hardy, only a rare book like Wuthering Heights—“or arguable near-misses (The Mill on the Floss, some later Dickens novels)” (179)—as aspiring to the tragic, whereas for the most part the auratic charge of tragedy, with its aloof “codes of honor,” has devolved instead into the backdrop of “social conventions.” The result is “a shift from the martial to the marital—the former being part of a problem, the latter of a solution” (179). 22. And more than this, too. For it is through and around Lukács that we will ultimately be drawn back, in connection with Eliot and Hardy, and at micro and macro levels both, to a distinction, famously worried by Hegel, between “form” and its “force.” Th is is a differentiation, activated as a rhetorical and often linguistic tension across both the long arc of plot and its shifting increments alike, that will end up helping to test the limits and defaults of traditional narratology. 23. Lukács’s recurrent term “soul” for the novelistic hero cannot summarily be “updated” and replaced by “character” or “actant,” therefore, or even by “protagonist,” without noting its internal agon to begin with: the way selfhood is twinned, by defi nition, into the dramatic persona who changes and endures, the reflective ego who remembers and pines; and, more unsettling yet, the way the latter is founded—and floated–strictly upon the schisms and repressions of the former, even without an overt fissuring grammar like that of Hyde awakening Jekyll.

chap ter one 1. I allude to D. A. Miller’s argument in The Novel and the Police (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), whereby the carceral structure of Victorian sociality is internalized by characters (Arthur Clennam unmentioned but exemplary) as a self-administered rein on desire. 2. By definition, of course, the discipline of stylistics is comparably engaged with a single medium at a time. Narratography, however, does more than specify a mode within this field of attention, does more than single out narrative (and its generic signposts) from other textual (and hence stylistic) manifestations. Differences run deeper. Stylistics is tabular, narratography linear. Stylistics sorts and quantifies, whereas narratography reads along. Its detected loops and setbacks, its braidings and slipknots, have their own narratival tension– and sometimes an equally telling release. Th is is why narratography, as distinguished from a general stylistics, can be thought to calibrate the very plot of style itself—and sometimes its counterplot. A fuller distinction between narratology and the present method, dispersed here across several chapters of exemplification, appeared in my article “Dickens and the Narratography of Closure,” Critical Inquiry 34 (Spring 2008): 509–42, from which this chapter is excerpted; I’m happy to record again my debt in the preparation of that essay to the careful reading and fi ne advice of my colleague Judith Pascoe and to the keen editorial suggestions of Bill Brown. 3. Th is part of the backplot, unloaded in the thirtieth chapter of book 2, “Closing In,” is so complicated that it takes a full-scale appendix by John Holloway (“The Denouement of Little Dorrit,” reprinted from the original Penguin edition, in Dickens, Little Dorrit, ed. Stephen Wall and Helen Small [Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1987], 789–90) to paraphrase it: not exactly to decrypt its intricacies (his version is as complicated as the original) but rather to confi rm that such plot devices were actually as ornate and improbable as they seemed when eked out, in the heat of Rigaud’s defiance, by the dialogue with Mrs. Clennam.

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4. Th is and subsequent future reviews are cited here unsigned to protect the anonymity of their as yet unassigned authors. 5. The text whose title is under tacit copyright question at this temporary impasse is Catherine Gallagher’s Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994). In relation to the novelistic “nobody” not just as a fictive (hence invadable) but as a social (hence structurally minoritized) character—as both would apply to Arthur’s banished mother—see Alex Woloch, The One vs. The Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 6. Reprinted in Appendix B, “The Number Plans,” in Little Dorrit (Penguin ed.), 831. 7. Clennam is a man haunted by his idiomatic doppelganger in the pronominal “Nobody,” a self-cancelling ghost sprung from the vernacular substrate of the hero’s own equivocated desire. The phantasmal negation fi rst sneaks up on him in an unobtrusive fold of indirect discourse. Whose weakness could it possibly be to cloak a hopeless infatuation for a pretty younger woman like Pet Meagles? As Clennam protests too much in an extruded internal monologue, it is “nobody’s, nobody’s within his knowledge”—and this in the capping paragraph of the namesake chapter “Nobody’s Weakness” (1.16:200). In nonentity’s name, rather than his own, he is often identified from this point on. 8. In a further phonetic play suggested to me by Hilary Schor after a lecture that inevitably sounded out the phonetic texture of this passage, there is also the wedding of noun and pronoun in “door . . . it done”—as it spells out the scene’s marital assimilation of the Dorrit to the Clennam name. 9. George Bernard Shaw, Shaw on Dickens (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1985). 10. The chapter “Nobody’s Weakness” closes with Arthur ruminating gloomily (and rather opaquely) about how “it might be better to flow away monotonously, like the river, and to compound for its insensibility to happiness with its insensibility to pain” (1.16: 200). Though “flow away” seems at fi rst only a metaphor, so abstract and disembodied is the reverie that there is a kind of phantasmal grammatical alternative trickling into the melancholic drift of the prose. Th is happens when that second infi nitive of compensation or complementation may also faintly evoke a sense that Arthur indeed wishes to mix materially with the lethal waters, literally (and more idiomatically) to “compound . . . with” them. 11. If this is a case of Barthesian narratology in which the “character” of the hero is intersected by the semiotic “figure” of maternity (see S/Z, 67–68 ), such subtextual evidence of the “linguistic turn” in narrative analysis remains a verbal turn whose full textual irony can only be graphed along the slippery slope of grammatical number itself in the very immanence (rather than abstract model) of the linguistic operation. 12. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 11. 13. Narratography thus intercepts even the subtlest narratologies of closure. Where a critic like D. A. Miller might distinguish between the “nonnarratable” future of the new Clennam marriage (beyond the needs and scope of story) and the more explicit bar at the end to its “unnarratable” predecessor in the disbanded love match (beyond story’s tolerance), narratography would detect the strain of that renewed exclusion of the mother. See Miller, Narrative and its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). 14. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). 15. Certainly this passage offers an example, at least as much as does the novel’s last

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paragraph, of Dickens’s typical effort at focalizing the approach to closure around the self set aside from—and individuated anew against—the social overview. In The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), Amanda Anderson compares this inward turn to the shift in Foucault’s thinking from a panoptics of power relations to more localized “practices of the self,” the latter paradigm recalling those “modest Dickensian endings” in which “the glare of omniscience is relinquished and the perspective descends to meld with the participant’s view” (142; emphasis added). 16. Michael Riffaterre, Fictional Truth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). 17. Even Riffaterre’s approach to the structuring unsaid of textual writing can be seen to represent on its own terms a shift from the ontology of narrative toward its epistemology at the level of form rather than content. By the deliberate provocation of his title, his semiotic narratology is interested not just in the structural essence of fiction as art but in its specific truth: a story’s immanent signifying patterns in their subtextual disclosure.

c h a p t e r t wo 1. With the distinctions among his separate and eccentric modes of arabesque, grotesque, and detective or cryptoanalytic narrative, much previous scholarship has been concerned. See for instance Daniel Hoff man’s chapter “Grotesques and Arabesques: Poe’s Theory of Fiction,” in Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (New York: Doubleday, 1972), 205–32. With her own heightened sense of the shifting verbal ground shared by each of Poe’s main narrative modes, Patrizia Lombardo, in Cites, Words, and Images: From Poe to Scorsese (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), is particularly alert to the way in which separate emphases may overlap: “In Poe’s oeuvre, then, the highly rich, vague and elusive, and the extremely precise, are two complementary sides of the same temptation,” now “suggestive,” now “ratiocinative” (14)—and always a spur to obsessive attention: “He was fascinated with various alphabets, alliterations, anagrams, rebuses, secret codes, and the peculiar mixture of sound and meaning” in not only word forms but “sometimes a single letter” (13). Where for Rosenheim (below, n. 4) this enters Poe into a proleptic dialogue with modernism and cybernetic modernity, for Lombardo it raises his materialist voice in resistance to the organicist language theory of his day. 2. The closeness between the interpretive urge solicited by fantasy (is this event “marvelous,” or just “uncanny”) and the hermeneutic rigors of detection shows up in Todorov’s influential study The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), where detective fiction is seen to have succeeded and eclipsed the former popularity of the fantastic (49) with a modern literary taste no longer as inclined to supernatural speculation as were nineteenth-century readers. A synchronous alternation of modes in Poe is thus stretched out sequentially, one might say, over the course of literary-historical evolution. 3. For this and subsequent quotations from his stories, see The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Vintage, 1975), 191. 4. Shawn James Rosenheim, The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Poe to the Internet (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Illuminating as it is on the extraliterary interplay of “hieroglyph, cipher, enigma, and conundrum” (22), Rosenheim’s book doesn’t follow through on these perspectives with any closely noticed verbal readings, despite his early call for rhetorical as well as contextual analysis. 5. Th is means that there is less analysis by Rosenheim than one might expect of Poe’s own covert or at least subterranean wordplay: and more—instead—on explicit plots of

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cryptanalysis like “The Gold Bug,” as well on the later decodings of Poe’s own work by supposed preternatural adepts. In examining the cultural heritage of cryptography descendent from Poe, Rosenheim charts a variegated history whose early stages involve the posthumous “corporeal reading” (131)—that is, mesmeric transmission—of Poe’s writing carried on (as an occult version of encoded telegraphy) by such a later poet/spiritualist as Lizzie Doten, who “found in reading Poe a model of an invisible, mesmeric communication that translates thought directly from mind to mind, free from the hindrance of any signifying medium” (14). As such, this view of encrypted supratextual force—in surreptitious bodily transference to the reader—can be aligned, as Rosenheim notes, with Poe’s own views of reading. Rosenheim’s book enters into no dialogue on this score with Nicholas Royle’s Telepathy and Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), in whose argument via Derrida (elsewhere discussed by Rosenheim, and in connection as well with Avital Ronell’s Derridean approach to the spectrality of such textual “telecommunication” [120]), similar effects are the preeminent target of a deconstructed textual transmission. 6. Poe’s review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales and Mosses from an Old Manse, under the title “Tale-Telling,” appeared in the Philadelphia-based Godey’s Lady’s Book, vol. 35 (November 1847), 252, where he sees Hawthorne falling just short of this standard of “intrinsic and extrinsic” originality, in which the reader takes an “egoistic delight” in seeing his own intuitions phrased back to him in print, whereby the transferential “bond of sympathy” between reader and writer may well be thought verge on telepathy. 7. Georges Poulet, “Phenomenology of Reading,” New Literary History 1 (October 1969): 56. 8. Quoted in Rosenheim, The Cryptographic Imagination, 24. 9. Where I have logged in many such lexical domino-effects (across various phrasal homophones in verse and prose) via what I called in Reading Voices (cf. Backlog\Prologue, n. 3) the “transegmental drift,” popular linguistics has specified this particular kind of wordplay, burrowing beneath the topography of inscription, as an “oronym.” See the coinage in Gyles Daubney Brandreth, The Joy of Lex: How to Have fun with 860,341,500 Words (New York: William Morrow, 1980), 58. 10. D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). With Persuasion—the title itself tipping the hand, perhaps, of a certain rhetorical forcing—pure impersonal style, Absolute Style, falls into personation and its marked voice, and further into (or toward) mere stylishness, struggling to cover for the lapses of the lost Absolute. Without seeming to recognize the damage it thereby incurs, Persuasion—whose touted charm Miller quite successfully resists—attempts giving flesh to Style in the form of an authorial persona too human by half, judgmental and overinvested—in other words, to an unmarried narrator projecting her own fantasies onto plot rather than being content to install, as before, the transcendental focal point, wry and impersonal, of the marriage novel as genre. 11. Such a dumb pun, as Miller sees and hears it, occurs in the collective voice of the neighbors late in Pride and Prejudice in their eagerness to vilify Wickham “as the wickedest young man in the world” (87). Nomen est omen in the riddling nonsense of syllabic reverb. Insisting that “the novel has had three hundred pages to keep the association at bay,” Miller sees the social chorus “all the more unconsciously enslaved to alliteration” (87) in this extreme and echoic form. Absolute Style in Austen would ordinarily repress such effects more successively, erase “any evidence of this irrational dreamwork of the signifier” (87) But the nagging irrationality that disappoints Miller, whenever unleashed, is merely the fl ip side of a structuralist semiotics of novelistic production. In the theory of Michael Riffaterre,

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for instance, literature often works by deferring the lexically unsaid to which its every (or every other) word is nonetheless a clue. See Riffaterre, The Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978). 12. Gratuitous and contradictory here, no doubt, such effects may elsewhere seem more genuinely narratival. Miller’s objection to putting the “wicked” back in “Wickham” is in this sense the opposite of my own argument (Dear Reader, 100–12) about a plot-long deferral of such wordplay that ultimately inflects the last paragraph of Persuasion in a pun on the hero’s surname. There, a tacit emotional economy of conjugal payback marks the rhetorical disappearance of the once-guarded and wary heroine into the abstract personification of marital readiness per se, having retrieved her squandered fortunes in a reclamation of the man-who-got-away. For “Anne was tenderness itself, and had the full worth of it in Captain Wentworth’s affections” (Persuasion [Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2003], 24:253; emphasis added). That’s just the trouble with Persuasion, Miller might add. It’s also the narratographic baring of its narratological device in reconvergent lines of desire. So that one reader’s regret over a lexical crutch can be another’s sense of a deep structural hook. Same, I suspect, with an obstreperous surfacing of the signifier not mentioned by Miller in Persuasion, though one that his argument might well construe as a further symptom in the brilliantly dim view he takes of the novel’s new tone. If the fallen Stylothete is now trying to embody her own suddenly personalized desires inside the plot, the proof of this adulteration might include her desire to incarnate in the very person of her heroine’s object of desire the paltry finesse of a now lower-case style. Th is happens when Anne’s earliest reminiscences of Wentworth, once he is about to return into the novel as the captivating raconteur of his own naval adventures, are of his early proleptic confidence in such high-seas triumphs, a former optimism “bewitching in the wit which often expressed it” (4:56; emphasis added)—like “health-breathing hill,” another and almost punning i-string of high-strung and tongue-twisting self-signification. 13. Again in Miller’s own imitative phonemic squeeze play: “The granite of the Sentence crumbles before our incredulous eyes into a grit of sound, sense, letters, that scatter themselves across the text into patterns that seem neither entirely intentional, nor entirely random” (91–92; emphasis mine—as if on the roughened sandy tones of Sanditon’s pulverized style). In any case, the “grit” is gratuitous. 14. The relevant passage in Lukács, as he moves through “the history of forms” toward the birth of the novel, pits “the intelligible ‘I’ of man” in tragic drama against the “empirical ‘I’ ” of the epic soul (47): the scrutinized self versus the unproblematic character. With the arrival of the novel as cultural form, the latter or empirical self, as also a cognitive or subjective agent, may be seen to turn upon the former’s very intelligibility and call its bluff. What comes of this is that the whole dialectical contrast is now redeployed around the emplotted ironic reversals by which a hero searches for self-recognition, for the meaning of being, in the setbacks of his own always incomplete becoming. In the grips of a hero’s resulting “reflection,” the previous genre distinction (drama versus epic) between the intelligible and the empirical subject is translated into prose fiction as the “violent” tension of intellective versus objective aspects of the same self: the cognitive versus the empirical agent of consciousness (a distinction useful to us from here out and refused in its overtones of characterization for as long as possible by Absolute Style in Austen). 15. Stanley Cavell, “Being Odd, Getting Even (Descartes, Emerson, Poe),” in In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), with Cavell’s own impish etymological wordplay on the per-versity of verse itself “through and through” (125). Where I have suggested Poe’s style as the annihilation of the novelistic, Cavell sees it as a parody of philosophic ratiocination, so that “a natural effect of

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reading such writing is to be unsure whether the writer is perfectly serious” (121). But Cavell himself takes seriously the reflexive inferences of this tale, in connection with the “penning” (or self-jailing) equivalent in “The Black Cat” (126), when noting that “both the fiction of the writer’s arresting himself and wearing fetters and tenanting the cell of the condemned and the fiction of providing a poisonous wax light for reading are descriptions or fantasies of writing, modeled by the writing before us” (123). Given the closeness of tragedy and skepticism in Cavell, it’s of note here that for Terry Eagleton, in Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (cf. introduction, n. 21), the tragic mode is more compatible with the sudden ruptural moment of the short story than with the duration of a realist novel. In this sense, Poe’s short stories are not only the rejection of the novelistic and the lampoon of the philosophic but the reductio ad absurdum of the tragic. For a fine reading of Cavell’s reading of “The Imp of the Perverse” in light of its confessional structure and the contradictory shadows it throws on verbal intention as well as intentional action, see David Rudrum, “What Did Cavell Want of Poe? ” Angelaki 10, no. 3 (2005): 91–99. 16. In its fourth chapter, on “The Ethics of the Voice,” Mladen Dolar’s A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006) moves from the voice as the link between body and language to its role as the link between self and other. Though not singling out the Voice of Conscience for discussion in a subsection, the notion seems to partake both of the “Voice of the Daimon” (83–88) in Socrates and the “Voice of the Superego” in Freud and Lacan (98–103), where in the former section he quotes Rousseau on conscience as an “immortal and celestial voice” (86). In any case, voice is an imagined link between self and otherness that belongs strictly to neither and that in fact, as Poe’s doubling would suggest, undoes the difference between—collapsing it to a difference within. 17. Christopher Ricks, in “Shakespeare and the Anagram,” Proceedings of the British Academy 121 (2003): 111–46, fi nds relevant on the page of the sonnets almost exclusively those recombinations based on a lexigraphic shuffle rather than its phonetic corollary or counterpart. 18. Tzvetan Todorov’s basic distinction between “the uncanny” and “the marvelous” recurs throughout The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975). 19. So that even the succulent echoism of Bedloe’s hyperbole does more than strictly discursive work. As if making good on the state of Virginia’s own association with virgin soil, he admits believing that “the sods and the grey rocks on which I trod had been trodden never by the foot of a human being” (23). The phonemic device familiar from the “quothings” of the “rave(n n)evermore,” in Poe’s own most quoted work, takes the form here of a potential revisionary slide from “trodden never” to “trodden(n) ever.” Not just a denegation of indirect discourse in the drug-associated tread of prose, the wording of reherded phonemes in “trodden ever”—recognized as a temporal as well as a verbal elision—offers a further clue to the geographically displaced ironies of eternal return: including the specter of the walking ghost itself, following in the retraced footsteps of a former death. Retrospective disclosure will bear this out. 20. I refer again to Todorov’s explanatory options for the fantastic: the hovering indecision on a reader’s—and usually (though not always in Poe) on a character’s—part about whether events are genuinely supernatural or merely uncanny. 21. Which is why I find so much more at stake and at play in this episode than is suggested, in a context otherwise close to the emphasis of this chapter on the death-dealing (or at least life-stealing) “violence” of Poe’s linguistic barrage, by J. Gerald Kennedy, in his partly deconstructive study Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing (New Haven: Yale University

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Press, 1987). He gives the story one half paragraph’s attention, absorbing its inscriptive parable to “the suggestion of telepathy” in stressing further (in line with his central argument) that “the tale teases us with the suggestion of spiritual survival while furnishing another example of death’s insistent relationship to writing” (201). In the written signifier, as one might sum up this response, the signified is always living and dying (again) at once. An emphasis closer to mine, though briefly dispatched, can be seen more recently in Patrizia Lombardo, Cites, Words, and Images (above, n. 1), who finds in the anagram of Bedloe, and the mockery of any kind of Transcendentalist “natural language,” both a critique of Emerson and his other contemporaries and a model—in the “phonemic” breakdown of linguistics itself—for Poe’s whole narrative logistics, not as the author of “a detailed story” but “rather, the story of a detail” (25). In her discussion of the arbitrary sign in “The Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (19–20), Lombardo’s broader claims about Poe’s insistent materialism (rather than Transcendentalism) may go to suggest what she leaves unmentioned: that the return of a subcontinental landscape into an “Indian summer” is not just a pun but a send-up of the East Indian influence on American philosophical writing of the period. Though not stressed in this discussion, her emphasis elsewhere, as well as in the closing point of her chapter, on an “attentive” faculty shared not just by madmen and detectives but by readers (45), helps highlight the mediated textual encounter “detailed” by this story’s telepathic reception of Templeton’s prose, thus closing a circle with the notice given the story in Kennedy’s book. It is by contrast with all such pertinent emphasis on the uncanny itineraries of the signifier in this tale that to label it concerned only with the “transubstantiation of souls” (Daniel Hoff man, “Grotesques and Arabesques,” 165; cf. n. 1 above) typifies a recurrent former blind spot in the commentary (always brief and passing) on the story’s (however parodic) complexity. 22. Implicit here is another way in which, for Cavell, Poe’s prose is “the parody of philosophy’s” (“Being Odd, Getting Even,” 121; cf. n. 15), for the earlier pages of Cavell’s essay have touched on the way in which the philosophical valence of rhetoric in Thoreau and Emerson defeats a certain skepticism about the interpersonal when their writing gives back to us our own rejected or latent thoughts with the “alienated majesty” (Emerson quoted by Cavell, 119–20) of enhanced objectivity and comprehension. The parable is fairly exhaustive in Poe, even via parody. Bedloe may have died once already as Oldeb, but his death returns to him this time from without, from its prose version, underwritten by empathy—or overtaken by it in recognition. 23. The capping detail in question could well be imagined as the source for a climactic moment in Pale Fire, registering a debt more hidden and engrained than that of Nabokov’s Lolita to Poe’s “Annabel Lee.” Th is is the moment when the poet Shade senses a ratification of the afterlife in the fact that two nearly dying people have seen, just over the threshold of life, a “fountain”: the very wellsprings of eternity. Seeking out more details at the newspaper office that produced the second and confi rming account, Nabokov’s hero discovers that “fountain” was a misprint for “mountain” in the other party’s near-death vision: “Life everlasting—based on a misprint!” See Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), p. 62, l. 803. In Poe, by contrast, the typo strikes the narrator as something like final proof of reincarnation, thus elevating the comic to the cosmic after all. 24. Ian Reid, Narrative Exchanges (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). 25. By the term “conscription,” I mean that virtual writing in of response accomplished by various means of vocative interpolation and narrative extrapolation. See Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (cf. Backlog\Prologue, n. 3 above), where the last chapter on “The Gothic of Reading” would come closest to accounting for

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the melodrama of transmission—everything from vicarious to vampiric—in Poe’s rhetorical stance toward reception. 26. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer (New York: New American Library, 1983), 65. 27. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 23 (cf. Introduction, n. 5).

chap ter three 1. Such a notion has previously informed the entire course of my argument in Dear Reader (cf. Backlog\Prologue, n. 3), anticipated in particular by the scene of storytelling around the parafamilial hearth of Master Humphrey’s Clock in its multi-novel frame structure. Familyless bachelors in Dickens, for instance, tell stories (the book-length Old Curiosity Shop among them) to induce surrogate intimacy and prosthetic empathy, incidentally endearing—and domesticating—the reader by proxy. 2. On the application of this cybernetic concept to the systemics of narrative, see Marie-Laure Ryan, “Cyberage Narratology: Computers, Metaphor and Narrative,” in Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, ed. David Herman (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 113–41, as discussed at greater length in my Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema (cf. Backlog\Prologue, n. 4), 141–44, 286. 3. In the tendency long ago spotted by Marshall McLuhan, here again is a case of a new medium recapitulating the conditions of a precursor as the content of its own succeeding (and remediating) form—and not just in the dead metaphors of “paging” and “scrolling” as scanning operations. The computer graphics of word processing in the Windows format invoke, beyond that, the stacking of two-dimensional pages from an earlier textual dispensation, sometimes even in the codex form of side-by-side screens. At the same time such graphic design may call into question our previous sense of nested discourse in print modes. At least for the recurrent structural device of frame(d) tales in narrative fiction, user-friendly electronic templates can operate to rethink the way words have previously been processed—quoted and then fi led away again—at the reversible seam of text and hypotext, master narrative and its subordinate discourse. What often ensues requires a reconception of the whole paradigm of literary embedding. The supposedly clear delineation of that seam between sequence and inset ends up vanishing in the new screen-based topography of subordination without borders. The electronic shuffle of “pages” is now multifold, coextensive, and—except for the uppermost fi le—mostly invisible. 4. Ian Reid, Narrative Exchanges (see chap. 2, n. 24 ), quoting Derrida’s The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 39, where the dictum is translated: “There is frame. But the frame does not exist.” 5. Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1996), 1:10; subsequent citations by chapter and page. 6. For a fuller survey of critical response to Anne Brontë’s novel, from formalist through feminist perspectives, see my essay “Narrative Economies in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” in New Approaches to the Literary Art of Anne Brontë, ed. Julie Nash and Barbara Ann Suess (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001). 7. George Moore, Conversations in Ebury Street (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969), 216 (originally published in 1924). His complaint’s anonymous gist is in fact ventriloquized here as if it were Moore’s own direct reproof to Brontë, which of course it is. For the “man of letters” would have put it in hectoring second–person as follows: “The presence of your heroine, her voice, her gestures, the questions that would arise and the answers that would be given . . . would preserve the atmosphere of a passionate and original love story” (196). Instead, for Moore, “The diary broke the story in halves” (196).

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8. Operating in tandem with interpolated attention through direct address, this is the mode of extrapolated inference which organizes many a scene of reading in the examples called out in my Dear Reader (cf. Backlog\Prologue, n. 3 ), where space did not permit more than a passing mention of Wildfell Hall in my chapter on Charlotte and Emily Brontë. 9. Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1988), 20. 10. See Barthes, “Contract Narratives,” in S/Z: An Essay, 88–89 (cf. Backlog\Prologue, n. 7). 11. In the case of “Sarrasine,” as Barthes reads it, “the sculptor is not the hero and the narrator is not a mere protactic character” (“Contract Narratives,” 90). Rather, the one holds the structural place of the other, reversibly. Th is happens when, in its status as “contract” (88), Balzac’s twice-told tale is seen to have “represented, en abyme, in the narrative,” exactly the “exchange,” even the “haggling,” that make up the “barter” (89) of narrative, its whole economy of desire and incurred return. In Balzac’s case, this reciprocal take-and-give becomes the presumption of a real erotic opportunity as fair trade for a vicarious sexual narrative (“a night of love for a good story” [89]). With less mention of Roland Barthes than seems in order, Ian Reid, in Narrative Exchanges (cf. chap. 2, n. 24) gives full credit to Ross Chambers’s Story and Situation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) for the situating of story within a circuit of reciprocated desire (to tell and to be told). Reid’s acknowledged debt is to a book subtitled Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction that discerns narrative’s signals of its own circulation as “indices of contractual and transactional understandings” (Chambers, 10; cited in Reid, 30). 12. In “Sarrasine,” the implied bargain—I’ll spin it out until you put out—is spoiled by the content of its own delivery. The Marquise, hearing the tale from the manipulative narrator, rather than inflamed to desire in the boudoir of its recitation, vows to take the veil instead. And the narratographic trace of this overarching narratological irony operates along the subterranean channels of predication itself. When, within the story, the castrato is discomfited by his enamorato’s naïve advances, his “heavenly voice” for the fi rst time “faltered” (250). It is as if the upper octaves of surgical femininity had dropped back into the truth of mutilation. As Barthes demonstrates across the larger narrative exchange, castration cannot be contained or quarantined; it bleeds between levels, penetrating the story that slowly discloses it. So, too, at the ground level, and along the grain, of idiom. The contagion is conveyed by diction itself. The hero wants the truth, the truth of gender, and on the next page “pleaded” for it “in a low, altered voice” (252). He is himself unmanned (his voice changed) by the need to ask. In turn, the narrator of this tale fi nds its voluptuous recipient also castrated in her erotic curiosity, as we’ve seen, neutered by the sadness and depravity of it all. In the end she lays at the story’s door, and its narrator’s, a “disgust for life and for passions” announced to its teller in, yet again, “an altered voice” (253). Th is is all captured glancingly but still potently, without strain on English idiom, via the assonance of Richard Miller’s ingenious translation, in the slide from “faltered” (rendering the French reflexive s’altéra, for “changes [itself]”) to the repeated passive participles of altérée. Narratography is nothing if not primed for a stylistics of bilingual comparison. In this microeconomy of utterance and inscriptive interchange, from revoiced stage diva and her recoiling lover to the later divan of retelling, the irony of that lexical chain runs—and cuts—deep. Which is to say cuts across the coextensive and nonsubordinated layers of textual discourse. 13. Leah Price, “Reader’s Block,” Victorian Studies 46, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 23–42, where her argument about the material bulk of a volume usurping its textual function amounts (in Bill Brown’s vocabulary in “The Secret Life of Th ings” [see Introduction, n. 19]) to the distinction, respectively, between the book as thing and as intentional object: mass rather than reading matter, pulp rather than fiction.

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14. The effect harks back to some of the fence-sitting citational strategies of eighteenthcentury writers (down through the intermittent appearance of such quotational effects in Austen), where reported dialogue has not been fully codified in its grammatical status—and where, in commentary on that earlier period, its equivalent usages might seem to mark the perfect razor’s-edge balance, within the broad arena of “free indirect discourse,” between skepticism about other minds and their co-optation, between representation and penetration, description and imaginative inhabitation. For the rhetoric and ethics of such invaded privacy in the realm of indirect discourse, and this in (unspoken) contrast with invulnerable transgressions upon the interior life of Nobody, see the claims of Dorrit Cohn, Ann Banfield, and others, as summarized in Michael McKeon, ed., The Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 485–87. Moreover, in the peculiar case of Helen’s slide from an indirect to a direct discourse of interrogation (“Had the servants vexed her? . . . Have you been reading novels? ”), we come upon the narrational equivalent of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, as if the normative novelistic mode of citation is found coming into its maturity as we read. 15. Thoughts in this vein implicit in McKeon’s synoptic study, The Origin of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (cf. chap. 1, n. 14) are fleshed out in excerpted pages of his own from the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism (“Prose Fiction: Great Britain”) included in his subsequent anthology, Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach, 600–612, where the dialectical relation between didacticism and sentiment, instruction and felt example—ultimately between epistemology and aesthetics—is most richly historicized. 16. I summarize here one strand of Gallagher’s argument in Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (cf. chap. 1, n. 5). The “Nobody” fully characterized as a fictional someone is thus very different from the “No One” incarnated by the Stylothete in D. A. Miller’s account of Austen in the previous chapter, who stands over against her own ironized nobodies within the plot as the disinterested touchstone for our impressions thereof. 17. In the suggestive word “chronicle,” with its full weight of historicity, but even more obviously in the variably inscribed dialogue about novel reading itself just discussed, we fi nd a pointed local overlap between the complementary emphases of McKeon’s two major studies, one focused on the history of an emergent genre, as so far discussed, one on the history of an emergent culture of domesticity (The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005]). The overlap is manifest in a specific stylistic feature whose subtle notice by the novel’s audience McKeon would by no means fi nd alien to novelistic reading practices of the period. At one point in his later book, stressing a contemporaneous reader’s potentially keen-edged response to the double-edged work of free indirect discourse in Austen, with its shifting but not ethically equivocal play between interiority and exteriority, he admits to fi nding much of the theoretical work on this benchmark rhetorical feature dependent on “an external and largely untested theory about the sociology of literary response” (707). Seeing free indirect discourse as a blanket ideology rather than an apprehended nuance “attributes to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel readers an inattention to narrative process that is not borne out by their recorded commentary” (707). My way of saying this, for Victorian readers as well: narratographic response is a function of fully attentive reading in any period. In connection with the empathy induced by such free indirect discourse, as it overlaps with Gallagher’s claim (n. 16 above) about the available interior life of the fictional Nobody, McKeon’s fullest encounter with her argument comes on 746, n. 159, whereas a similar recourse to Adam Smith is sounded in his last paragraph: “Like Adam Smith, Austen would have us under-

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stand that both self-knowledge and ethical sociability require the sympathetic internalization of the other’s point of view as if it were one’s own” (717). 18. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (cf. Introduction, n. 7). 19. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 272. 20. Th is remark targets no shortcoming, only a self-imposed focus, in the influential book on represented sound in Victorian writing by John M. Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 21. In a recent study of gendered violence in Victorian fiction—in Brontë’s novel among others (but without the frequent feminist animus against Gilbert Markham as Victorian gentleman and keeper of the story)—Lisa Surridge’s chapter “From Regency Violence to Victorian Feminism: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” from her book Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 72–102, stresses the flashback structure facilitated by Helen’s diary (from the retrospective 1840s vantage of Helen’s second marriage back to the 1820s scene of her fi rst) as highlighting a previous mode of aristocratic and privileged brutality in the “gentleman” classes, as contrasted with the evolving new model of Victorian masculinity. Th is is a strictly historicist case made without reference to the arguably domesticating function of the transcribed diary as such—in its role as family heirloom, and as bridging this same arc of retrospect—or to the bond of deferential admiration for women the very transmission of this text seals between men in the new Victorian fraternity of middle-class mores. 22. If Rose is as forgettable as characters get in Victorian fiction, we immediately encounter her equal in this disregard: a mere cipher in a fl attering analogy. The scene grows as crowded as it is vaporous, for no sooner has Rose’s name been mentioned than we hear tell of an as yet unnamed second sibling of the narrator’s, shortly identified as Fergus. A story is thus underway whose plot is still not being revealed. If analysis can only seem to labor the passage, it is because Brontë got there fi rst in her own laboriousness: “Nothing told me then”—as the narrator is windily telling us—“that she [Rose], a few years hence, would be the wife of one—unknown to me as yet, but destined, hereafter, to become a closer friend than even herself, more intimate than that unmannerly lad of seventeen, by whom I was collared in the passage . . .” (1:12). If we guess (since there is nothing more to go on) that the addressee’s putative respect for Rose’s comeliness has not gone unrequited, then we realize—through the spume of third-person circumlocution—that this mute narratee (with words of praise and desire so recently put in his mouth with regard to Rose) is more intimate with the writer, despite the stiff and coercive tone of everything that has preceded in the establishing letter, than is either the writer’s real sister or his real brother (that impudent lad not half as “mannered” as this homosocial prose). Again: “intimate” is the operative word, a touchstone for Victorian reading as well as for its social relations.

chap ter four 1. In this respect, the method is descriptive before evaluative. It fi rst follows out the sequential work by which style abets narrative rather than, as with the approach of Bersani and Dutoit in Forms of Violence (see Introduction, n. 13), being drawn strictly toward antirealist effects whose independent libidinal appeal breaks the lines of realist identification between audience and narrated suffering. Yet to this latter effect, whether local or cumulative, narratography is also ideally poised to respond, here and especially in the next chapter on the more aggressive densities of Hardy’s language. 2. Th is and all subsequent citations from the novel are to book, chapter, and page in

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George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, ed. Gordon S. Haight (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 3. The source in Montesquieu via Carlyle from Haight’s ed., n. 2 above, 528. 4. In regard to the Romantic overtones of such phrasing, Shelley can write in “The Triumph of Life,” for instance, concerning the celestial arc of a visionary chariot, that “underneath etherial glory clad / The wilderness” (lines 442–43). In Eliot’s account of a quite defeated and untriumphant life—by phonetic comparison and tonal contrast—the metaphoric “strung” overlaps with “hungry” (before the chiastic completion of the bracketing r sound—and without Shelley’s breath-catching caesura in that implied comma after “underneath”) to choke back the heroine’s cravings in their own throaty enunciation. 5. Ian Watt, in The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957), fully appreciates the lag time of human consciousness as defi nitive for the new novelistic character: the subject who looks back. Lukács, before him, identifies the profound negativity of this lag or gap between action and reflection. Eliot, before Lukács, exploits just this negativity in The Mill on the Floss as the crux of plot itself—on the way to an attempted last-minute conversion of retrospect to epiphany. 6. It is in this sense that the novel as rising genre is seen even more broadly by Watt as conforming to coeval shifts in epistemology over the course of the scientific revolution, from the philosophical skepticism of Descartes forward. Under the aegis of empiricism, detailed and individuated observation has replaced abstract idealism. The novelistic self arises coterminously with the middle-class subject as the focalizer of such new epistemological particularities. In a historically grounded binary not unlike Lukács’s more dialectical formulation, this is the self as localized observational subject—but also object—of the new empirical paradigms. What Watt calls “formal realism” is concerned not primarily with the content of depicted reality, whether in regard to its existence or its essence. As a method, realism denominates its mode of representation as a form of seeing—even if only with the mind’s eye of fictive presence. Axiomatic to the realist modality is its verisimilar point of view. For this, as its technique would suggest, is the way real people are most authentically seen, whether they exist or not in a given case. 7. Likewise, and though following in the wake of epic, tragedy mobilizes no real time either, according to Lukács. Its reliance on the unities serves to relativize time as simply one aspect of tragic action in a space entirely subjective and essentialized, a space indifferent—even impervious—to any contingencies outside of a tragic fate itself. Hence, in Eliot, Hamlet’s chances of survival, according to an alternate set of contingencies, would depend entirely on genre—or, in other words, on the potential novelization of his story. 8. “Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him,” in E. M. Forster, Howards End, ed. Paul B. Armstrong (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 27:171. 9. Though it seems facile to put it this way, it would seem disingenuous not to: Lukácsian time is, for de Man, insufficiently deconstructed. Though Lukács is quick to recognize the formal disjunctures and psychological ruptures of plotting in a novelist like Flaubert, for instance, nonetheless in the end, so de Man laments, “ironic discontinuities vanish” (58). And though time batters the characters with the plot reversals of dramatic irony, the “treatment of time in Flaubert is no longer ironic” (emphasis added). 10. Th is thrusting upon biology of a signifying form is in fact a stab at totality, even if only radically truncated and partial. It is the bestowal of form on what Lukács elsewhere calls “organic” life (217), with its inherent resistance to time, change, and shaping. The biographic template in fiction (derived from the birth/death frame, but often only as model) is manifested in a varying temporal subset within an entire lifeline: a significant duration

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or rounded excerpt—before and beyond which existence has no shape. In this sense, Maggie Tulliver’s dying in early youth—just because the signifying phase of her biography is concluded—is the exception to novelization’s own broader rule. It brings the normative interval of maturation and courtship to an end-stopped point of conceptual (if bitterly ironic) rest. In this way, only, does it bring meaning—and of course, in anticipation, keep us reading. 11. The launching passage is thus a narrative framework that emerges openly from the precincts of authorial qua narratorial “reflection”—evidenced in this case even before any narrational energy whatever is released as plot. In Eliot’s meditative Wordsworthian gambit as a veritable “spot of time,” to be examined in more narratographic detail below, a bemused fi rst person narrator “remembers” what seems to be her own girlhood at riverside. Once it turns out this is all a dream, however, the narrator awakes to continue her rumination as a narrative reverie about a fictional young girl embodying this past at one remove— including its full range of “naïve” biographical longing—in the onset of a plot all her own. Th is prologue or proem is thereby seen to dissipate in the very moment—which it also precipitates—when the biographic form of the Bildungsroman takes over in third person. 12. It happens that Neil Hertz, in George Eliot’s Pulse (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), without mentioning Philip’s role at all in this regard, sees Mr. Tulliver instead as taking up the narratorial position when found “resting his elbows on the arm-chair . . . striving after vanishing images like a man struggling against a doze” (66). Where Hertz links the debt-ridden man to Eliot’s own sense of writing as “the acquittal of a debt” (63), my emphasis on Philip’s doubling of the narratorial “doze” falls instead on the projective identifications of the unconscious as a trope for reading more than for writing. 13. See Andrew H. Miller, The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in NineteenthCentury British Literature (Cornell University Press, 2008). 14. Although this particular Eliot novel goes undiscussed by Miller in The Burdens of Perfection (n. 13 above), its logic of empathy as sublimation—extended implicitly from character to reader, and cleansed as far as possible (at least so its rhetoric would have it) of both voyeurism and fetishism—bears out one extreme version of what Miller quotes as motto from Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi,” that “Art was given for that . . . lending our minds out” (lines 304–6). The psychoaesthetic act is not just figured by Browning here as a lending of these minds—or a bestowing of them in words—but as a lending of them out, as “at interest”: an idiom tinged with usury in this supposedly disinterested bargain, signaling (as in Eliot’s extended example) the accrued emotional interest of narrative investment and its psychic rather than sexual returns. 15. On Christopher Ricks’s concept of the “anti-pun,” see my Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (cf. Prologue, n. 3) where I separately mention such other soundplay in The Mill on the Floss as “strains of music affect me strangely” (212). 16. Andrew Gibson, Toward a Postmodern Theory of Narrative (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996). 17. Gibson, however, is looking entirely ahead, both for his literary examples and for their theoretical checkpoints. He surveys a shared resistance to structuralism’s form/content dichotomy on a spectrum running from late Joyce through Derrida’s différance to Lyotard’s differend, or in other terms along the slippery slope from sliding signifiers to Deleuze’s bodies without organs. Even when narrative structure is imagined more dynamically in criticism as a network of narrative “drives,” this psychoanalytic paradigm seems too coherent and hierarchical for Gibson’s sense of story’s primal energies. Indeed, with Derrida’s critique of structuralism in “Force and Signification” as a signal point of departure, Gibson is hard to satisfy. He judges even Peter Brooks’s Freudian theory of narrative “drives” and its

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“bindings”—otherwise one of the least rigid and geometrized of narratologies—as nonetheless too entrenched in and committed to the structuralist topography of Freud, including the contrapuntal teleologies of Eros and Thanatos. For different possibilities in the application of a more Hegelian sense of force to the oscillations of the form/content dichotomy in literary writing, I’ve benefitted from many a conversation with Joshua Gooch. 18. What Gibson’s book thus amounts to is an essay in postmodern prose, rather than a postmodern theory of narrative at large. Otherwise, there would be no need for such prominent emphasis, for instance, on the typomanic fragmentations of a writer like Henry Green, whom Gibson offers as a chief exemplar in the disruptive line of Joyce and Beckett. No such narrowly experimental and rarefied instance would be required for us to feel the sabotage of narration by its own inertial charge. If plotlines are inevitably warped by the free flow—and freefall—of phrase, so that no structuralism can compass them, examples should come as readily to hand from the Brontës as from Michel Butor. 19. We may thus be seen edging in this way toward the far horizon of Gibson’s energetics (above n. 17), where the systole and diastole of plot’s pulsional force break with their own rhythm and generate spasmodic but liberatory lexical and scriptive effects. Seeing this process not in its programmatic form, as with extended examples from the experimental work of Green or Joyce, but as a literary axiom more broadly applied: this might well get us closer to the real paradox of force as more than rush and surcharge, more than just a self-conscious postmodern breakout into new and insurgent energies. Within a similar vocabulary, the effort at narratographic registration in the present chapter falls, one might say, somewhere between the dictional pulsations (“minimal difference”) in Neil Hertz’s study of Eliot (n. 12 above) and Gibson’s polymorphous oscillations of the unconstrained signifier. 20. In Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), Hegel draws his evidence initially from the natural rather than the human sciences, more from physics than linguistics. Under the “laws” of static electricity, for instance, lightning is both an event and a categorical phenomenon, a force and a form: yet a form whose only existence, whose only immanence, is that of its force (94). Gravity, too, Hegel implies on this same page, can be thought of in these terms as both the force of a fall, for example, and the pull of the force field itself, at once a given manifestation and its defi ning law. In the more restricted human sense, law—having emerged as example as if by power of association—is then singled out in its ethical rather than scientific sense from there out in Hegel’s chapter (as taken up in our next). In Hardy’s irony as much as in the thinking surveyed by Hegel, law often declares itself to understanding as a closed system: a force whose reciprocal form, like that of pull and counterpull, is exhausted in the circuit of transgression and punishment. 21. For an initial account of the dialectical inversions by which a “universal medium” comes to be indistinguishable from the momentary “force” that manifests, and is manifested by, it—under the principle of a unity in diversity—see Hegel (above n. 20), 81–85. 22. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingston (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), 203. 23. Here is a local syntactic instance of that governing figural logic of chiasmus that Jules Law sees articulating the punishing symmetries of the novel even when not given actual grammatical manifestation. See Law, “Water Rights and the ‘Crossing of Breeds’: Chiastic Exchange in The Mill on the Floss,” in Rewriting the Victorians: Theory History and the Poetics of Gender, ed. Linda M. Shires (New York: Routledge, 1992). In a reading not explicitly drawn from de Man but paralleling “The Rhetoric of Temporality” in striking ways, given Law’s emphasis on plotted structures of reprisal as covert rhetorical figurations, his associated close attention to the river and its drowning as scene and metaphor both, including its place in

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Philip’s premonitory dream (64), rightly gives no quarter to Leavis’s baffl ing dismissal (53: “The flooded river has no symbolic or metaphorical value”). 24. See Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic, 121 (cf. Introduction, n. 21). 25. Early in the Phenomenology, and as proof, prima facie, that further discriminations are necessary in order to understand how consciousness might engage, or intervene, more reciprocally with the world, rather than simply comprehending it as a series of rational notions, Hegel sets aside the supposedly paradoxical question of how difference can “issue forth” from an abstract and transcendental unity as neither unanswerable nor particularly philosophical (100). Insisting on the logic he has previously worked through, he reminds us that the self-same is constituted by its difference from all else to begin with, so that the principle of difference is inherent to the identical, with the very idea of unity making no sense (and having no sensible dimension) apart from the intrinsic diversity it organizes. The universal is by defi nition the unified. Difference is the very force of unity’s form—and vice versa. But this is all a “tautological movement” (95) when understood as a closed system. To inaugurate full consciousness, a mediating apprehension must insert itself into the slot of the otherwise mutually vanishing third term between the “universal element” (96) and its recognition in the particular. 26. George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Bert G. Hornback (New York: Norton, 1977), Norton Critical ed., “Finale,” 577. 27. Much of the “moral psychology” at issue in the cued reception of Victorian fiction, as discussed by Andrew H. Miller (above, n. 14), can be seen coming to a head in this passage. Miller makes a compelling case for the optative mood of literary form as predicating a certain trajectory in Victorian perfectionist thought as well in the reader’s relation to fictional characters: delimiting the alternate universe of the might-have-been, sometimes looming as a telos of the still socially possible. What Lukács saw as the lethal “should-be” that “kills life” in the literature of Romantic irony (see the epigraph to the coming chapter) thus fi nds its obverse valence in the incrementalism of Victorian psychology and social theory. Th is seems confi rmed, even within the evoked gradualism of historical betterment at the end of Middlemarch, by the double-negative form of the might-have-been lodged in the clausal insistence “that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been” if it were not for those “insignificant” people “living” in good faith their “life.” Th ings might have been worse; and under such continuing influences, things might eventually be bettered. Reading about the “Dorothea whose story we know”—or in other words coming to know Dorothea through reading—seems a good part of the epistemological turned social operation (a major emphasis of Miller’s argument) at stake in this tacitly metatextual passage, where narrative process itself conduces to social progression. In light of Victorian “perfectionism,” for a fuller narratographic reading of the close of Middlemarch, including the double-vectored phrase “growing good” and its Tennysonian overtones, and capping a more fully theorized account of subvocalization in Eliot’s prose in that novel and especially The Mill on the Floss, see my “Phonemanography: Romantic to Victorian,” in the “Soundings of Th ings Done,” special issue of the Romantic Circles Praxis Series (April 2008), ed. Susan J. Wolfson, www.rc.umd .edu/praxis/sounds/iindex.html.

chapter five 1. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ed. John Paul Riquelme (Boston, Mass.: Bedford, 1998). Citations are to chapter and page. Some preliminary sections of this chapter appeared as casebook back matter in this edition. 2. Gallagher’s essay, “Tess of the d’Urbervilles: Hardy’s Anthropology of the Novel,” appears in Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ed. John Paul Riquelme, 422–40, her argu-

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ment launched by the distinction between an older view that myths were “personifications of prior ideas” and the corrective retrofitting of them as “sublimations of ritual practices” (423)—the latter so entailed with fertility rites and orgiastic violence that they amount, in her phrase, to “sexing the archē” (422). 3. Hypertrophic versions of this device in modernism—closer to effects in Sterne than in Thackeray, for instance—are the subject of Debra Malina’s Breaking the Frame: Metalepsis and the Construction of the Subject (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002). 4. In his book on early modern literature, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 8–9, Gorden Teskey considers the Greek word bia in reference to a “violence” associated more with physics than with politics or psychology. The Aristotelian noun refers to the “violation” of a material tendency that interrupts either the stasis or the momentum, in either case the inertial condition, of an inanimate object—an object whose betrayed essence is all but personified by this very violation. Though without reference to Hegelian “force” and its materialist prototypes from the laws of physical science, Teskey notes “the direction of scientific thought in the West toward the moral neutralization of violence as impersonal force” (9). 5. It is in this sense that the rules of genre, like those of statutory law, have no necessary “justice” about them outside of their own constitutive terms—as Derrida has influentially shown in departing from Hegel in his own essay “The Force of Law,” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfield, and David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3–67. 6. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), trans. A. V. Miller, 83, 84 (cf. chap. 4, n. 20). 7. Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). 8. Writes Harold Bloom in Thomas Hardy’s “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” (New York: Chelsea House, 1987): “Hardy’s pragmatic version of the aesthetic vision in this novel is essentially sado-masochistic, and the sufferings of poor Tess give an equivocal pleasure of repetition to the reader” (7). The point is made even more strongly by James Kincaid in “ ‘You Did Not Come: Absence, Death, and Eroticism in Tess,” in Sex and Death in Victorian Literature, ed. Regina Barreca (London: Macmillan, 1990), for whom “Tess becomes . . . a titillating snuff movie we run in our own minds” (29). From a different angle, and without the sense of authorial sadism, Terry Eagleton, in Sweet Violence (cf. Introduction, n. 21), stresses the rather bitter irony of D. H. Lawrence blaming Hardy, rather than the circumstances Hardy credibly imagines, for Tess’s fate. With his tongue in his own cheek, Eagleton puts words in Lawrence’s mouth: “Tess Durbeyfield, who is up against nothing more imposingly ontological than rape and poverty, predatory patriarchs and economic exploiters, should, one assumes, have exultantly carried all before her” (89). For Eagleton, Lawrence’s celebration of the life force entirely blinds him, that is, to the social parameters of tragedy in fiction. 9. In this sense, too, as in so many others, Tess seems the proxy and scapegoat of her class as well as of the novel’s own formal disenchantment. In the fi rst of the literary rather than biblical allusions in the book, just after Hardy has described the Malthusian deadlock of Tess’s overpopulated and impoverished home life, Wordsworth is roped in—as if above the heads of his own most likely satirists: “Some people would like to know whence the poet whose philosophy is in these days deemed as profound and trustworthy as his song is breezy and pure, gets his authority for speaking of ‘Nature’s holy plan’ ” (3:47). No reader of “Lines Written in Early Spring” is being polled here; the poet of wise passiveness is instead hung out to dry as a straw man for pessimistic discontent. Though worded otherwise, it is not even likely that Hardy’s heroine is meant to be numbered among several million lower-class

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Wordsworth readers when, much later, we hear that “to Tess, as to not a few millions of others, there was ghastly satire in the poet’s lines”—should they have ever have reached their ears (we seem meant to assume)—about “trailing clouds of glory” into this world (51:438). In any case, whether or not fi ltered into popular consciousness by an extractable snippet or two, poetry of this sort, Hardy implies, is as profoundly irrelevant to suffering circumstance as is the leisured high culture with which it is associated. In instances of this sort, allusion thus summons, whether in metaphysical content or cultural form, a whole world of exclusionary and inapposite discourse into the field of narrative action, where it is systemically rejected as well as emotionally repulsed. Narratography tracks in such cases mostly the frayed dead spots in plot left by the ironic marginality of these aesthetic glosses. 10. Gallagher, “Tess of the d’Urbervilles: Hardy’s Anthropology of the Novel” (cf. note 2 above). 11. Though unmentioned by Gallagher, the two major stages, and abiding aspects, of René Girard’s thought converge in Hardy’s erotic violations and their ensuing state violence. As psycho-structural theorist of narrative in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), Girard is concerned with mimetic desire in European fiction; as cultural anthropologist in Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1977), with the surrogate victim in the primitive rituals of sacred violence—and with the new premium on the “innocent” sacrifice in Judeo-Christian ritual. The two issues are anticipated inextricably in a novel like Tess, where all violence begins in deviated passion. Angel’s “triangular desire” for the heroine as object is confl icted by precisely the two main strata of “mediation” in Girard’s novelistic system: the personal “rival” in Alec, “internal” to the plot, and, via “external mediation” as well (I’m here collecting terms that pervade Girard’s study of the novel), the “mimetic” paradigm not of the male lover but, in this case, of the virginal bride as object: a zealously preserved Victorian stereotype that precedes and programs desire. From contradictory directions in this one plot—since the rival, only discovered after the fact, is the deflowerer who prevents any pristine embodiment in Tess of the “model” for marriageability—this double mediation confounds the would-be primacy of Angel’s access to Tess’s body. And to this twofold triangulation of imitative desire, plot adds injury to insult when turning Tess into a sacrificial victim of legal accountability—plus the scapegoat, as well, to an abstract sexual idealism whose acquiescent death frees up Angel’s desire for an untainted wife and willingly transfers his love to the sister who is only a fainter, spiritually purified “image”—or mimesis—of Tess. 12. It is part of Hardy’s airless irony in this scene that the capstone flourish of Angel’s speech is an allusion to Hamlet, one which, naturally, Tess misses and Angel seems to have misremembered the context for. Rather than you bearing more children who would be shamed by you if they lived, let’s leave bad enough alone: that’s the gist. “Don’t you think we had better endure the ills we have than fly to others? ” (36:245)—“bear” changed to “endure” to protect, as it were, the unborn innocents. But this paraphrase is of course lifted not from Hamlet’s worry about alternate life choices, whether in the fathering of children or otherwise, but about whether “not to be” in his own person. It is only in fact the sacrificial violence to come in his plot—the king is dead, long live the king!—that reconstitutes Danish royal succession. By contrast, in the post-tragic as well as post-epic world of Tess Durbeyfield, death by law will eventually not just seem, but be, the only escape—–and only that, without redemption—from enduring ills. 13. Paul John Eakin, “Narrative Identity and Narrative Imperialism: A Response to Galen Strawson and James Phelan,” Narrative 14, no. 2 (May 2006): 180–87. Th is essay follows the more extended critique of Strawson in the journal’s preceding issue by James L.

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Battersby, “Narrativity, Self, and Self-Representation,” Narrative 14, no. 1 (January 2006), where he persuasively undoes the model Strawson educes from Henry James’s looking back on “quite another person than myself ” (28), on the basis of which the episodic thesis would substitute multiple “selves” for a continuous “being.” 14. See J. T. Laird, The Shape of Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 6. 15. Facsimile page printed as frontispiece, without textual commentary, by Laird, Shape of Tess. 16. On this insert to the manuscript when sent to the printer, see Laird, Shape of Tess, 168. 17. Arlene M. Jackson, in Illustration and the Novels of Thomas Hardy (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981), singles out the engraving by Hubert Herkomer for its place in the “domestic theme” as well as its hospitality to domestic readers, “a calculated appeal to an audience looking for a ‘family’ novel” (106). 18. See N. N. Feltes, Modes of Production of Victorian Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 70–71. 19. I am indebted to Hilary Schor for this observation, in response to an earlier version of this essay delivered at an annual conference of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature. 20. See Battersby, “Narrativity, Self, and Self-Representation,” 29 (cf. n. 13 above). 21. Biblical source in Matthew given in the editor’s note. 22. In the pallid normativity of their societal perpetuation, this new residual couple—a sheer progenitive aftermath—offers a marked example of the “nonnarratable” in D. A. Miller’s Narrative and its Discontents (cf. chap. 1, n. 13). In other terms, here is the double negation of discontent and of content (whatever its contentment) at once, subsumed to a social norm whose faceless maintenance goes without saying. 23. As if defending himself against the charge of blasphemy, Hardy takes Gloucester in Lear as precedent, thus quoting Shakespeare’s version of the Aeschylean diatribe: “As fl ies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport” (“Preface,” 16). That these lines are in fact quoted whole in the book’s preface, in anticipation of their Greek prototype later, is just one more of the ways in which the novel stages its end as an (intertextually) foregone conclusion. 24. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). For their book Forms of Violence, see Introduction n. 13. 25. As author of Nobody’s Story (cf. chap. 1, n. 5), Gallagher herself is one of the last critics likely to ignore this question, which she approaches via Walter Pater’s comparison, in Marius the Epicurean, of the bloody amusements of the Roman amphitheaters, which he called in passing “the novel-reading of that age” (438), to earlier human sacrifices. But Gallagher leaves the issue behind with the thought that, for the audience, “Tess’s life, never having been actual, is a very cheap price to pay for sacrificial satisfactions” (437). My sense is that Hardy devastates the logic of ritual rather than sardonically reinstituting it.

e p i l o g u e / di a l o g u e 1. Barthes, S/Z, 12 (cf. Backlog\Prologue, n. 7). 2. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Penguin, 2000), 258:22 3. See Barthes, “The Pensive Text,” in S/Z (n. 1), 216–17, with the subsequently mentioned issues of “jamming” and the difference between the writerly and the readerly taken up earlier in his study (75–76 and 3–4 respectively)

not es to pages 231– 237

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4. My Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema (cf. Backlog\Prologue, n. 4) ends with a chapter called, via an implied dialectic, “Media Archaeology, Hermeneutics, Narratography.” The arriving emphasis of that third term is indeed meant to resolve the standoff of the fi rst two. The potentially integrating work of narrative form seems to me too often marginalized in cinema studies by more generalized historicist efforts (however materialist their agenda) to extricate fi lm history from a strictly photomechanical genealogy, for instance, and resituate it within a sedimented history of visuality. My effort is instead to watch the “optical allusion” of certain fi lms, often at moments of narrative or even ontological crisis, help situate their own sense of this medial prehistory—and its fantastic mutations. 5. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 437. 6. Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 51. 7. Of all the interesting new work along these multiple lines over the last decade, it is the categorical conjunction in the subtitle of Richard Menke’s Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008) that might seem to bring his investigations closest to the scriptive emphasis necessary for literary narratography. Among many other cognitive mediations, aural and optical, his stress does fall “chiefly on transmission systems that directly incorporate or adapt writing—the post, electric telegraph, and wireless telegraphy” (3; his emphasis), and this in order to “highlight relationships between these new methods of transcoding and transmitting the data of real life and Victorian fiction’s modes of mimesis” (3). My own media theory of Victorian writing argues, I suppose, for a further emphasis on the “codes” rather than just the “modes” of mimesis—on the telegraphesis of prose itself, one might say, rather than its data transmission: less literary informatics than literary technics.

Index

Aeschylus, 209, 214 allusion: to Antigone in Middlemarch, 172; as key to Brontë’s frame structure, 123; to Montesquieu via Carlyle in The Mill on the Floss, 133, 134; in Poe, 65, 66; optical, 261n4 —in Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 177, 179; to Aeschylus, 216; by Angel to Christ, 209; by Angel to Hamlet, 259n121; to Artemis, 189; closural, 214– 16; as form of collusion, 184–85, 187–88; to King Lear, 214; to Wordsworth, 258n9 Anderson, Amanda, 244n15 Antigone, 170, 172, 234 Austen, Jane, 132; and evolution of the novel, 23, 62, 88, 128, 150, 252n14; late style of, 67–69; Persuasion, 68, 69, 246n10, 247n12; Sanditon, 68 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 14, 114, 117 Balzac, Honoré de, 15, 103, 104, 225, 240n7, 251n11 Barthes, Roland, 7, 15, 251n12; and character vs. figure, 244n11; and narrative exchange as “contract,” 83, 85, 102–4, 251n11; and pensive text, 59, 231; and “slow-motion” reading, 224–25; and “violence” of linguistic materiality, 236 Battersy, James W., 259n13, 260n20 Baudelaire, Charles, 65 Beckett, Samuel, 162, 256n18, 215 Bersani, Leo, and Ulysse Dutoit: and “extreme violence” in Lukács, 169, 235; and isometric flattening in Hardy, 215, 218, 227; and Lukács on modernist reification, 233; on modernist abstraction, 215;

on narrative violence vs. formal deflections, 19–22, 25, 28, 216, 218, 232, 241n15, 242n16, 253n1; against narratology, 241n14; and Peter Brooks, 20–22 Bloom, Harold, 215, 258n8 Brandreth, Gyles Daubney, 246n9 Brontë, Anne, Agnes Grey, 99, 102 Brontë, Anne, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, 62, 83, 87, 88, 89, chap. 3, 228, 229, 234, 250n6, 250n7, 253n21, 253n22; feminist critique of, 95; metaphors of narrative “credit” and monetary transaction in, 94, 100–101, 102, 104, 109; storytelling as violence in, 105–6 Brontë, Emily, 351n8; Wuthering Heights, 96, 97, 121, 243n21 Brontës, the, 24, 60, 256n18 Brooks, Cleanth: on historicism, 2 Brooks, Peter, 14, 22, 84, 86, 228, 242n5, 242n25, 255n17; and transference, 21 Brown, Bill, 24–25, 242n19 Carlyle, Thomas, 133, 134 catharsis, 21, 82, 107, 168, 174, 182, 183 Cavell, Stanley: on Poe, 72, 80, 249n19; on “acknowledgment,” 258 Chambers, Ross, 251n11 cinema: narratographic approach to, 6, 9, 221, 231, 240n3, 242n20; and precinematic effects in Victorian prose, 54, 203 closure: and apocalypse, 113; as “fulfi llment” in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 193, 210; as inevitable in The Mill on the Floss, 159; in Little Dorrit, 32, 54–55, 88; marital, 32, 37, 52, 53, 110, 117, 144; mortal, 211, 242n15; as narrative telos, 15, 241n7;

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index

closure (continued) prominence in narratology, 14–15, 20, 24, 33, 127, 131; resistance to as registered by narratography, 51, 53–55, 226, 244n13 Collins, Wilkie, 24 Conley, Tom, 240n5 Conrad, Joseph, 4, 24, 225, 228, 229, 222, 223, 224; Heart of Darkness, 84–85, 209, 221–24; modernist “will to style” (Jameson) in, 233, 234 conscription (rhetorical), 83, 116, 118, 136, 143, 195, 249n25 cultural studies, 2, 17, 115, 118, 220, 242n19 dead metaphor: in Dickens, 48; in Poe, 73, 74, 78; in Anne Brontë, 95, 106, 115, 229; in George Eliot, 147, 152, 166, 167; in Hardy, 177, 185, 195, 196, 199, 204 Deleuze, Gilles, 162, 255n17 De Man, Paul: and allegory, 161, 190, 199, 216, 217; critique of Lukács, 119, 140–47; and Hegel, 182; and rhetoric of temporality, 132, 140, 178, 190, 194, 198–99, 216, 222, 237, 239n2, 254n9, 256n23 Derrida, Jacques, 94, 245n5, 250n4, 255n17, 258n5 Descartes, René, 254n6 dialectics, 118, 144, 152, 157, 168–69, 170, 186, 193, 219, 226, 227; failed dialectical resolution in Little Dorrit, 53, 58; and force, 177, 179–82, 212–14; lexical, 29, 176, 212, 223, 227; and Lukács, 26–27, 40, 58–59, 42, 175, 177, 229; and McKeon, 51–53; and medium, 180, 264n21; of narrative subject and object, 142; of style, in Jameson, 233; and transcendence, in George Eliot, 168–69 Dickens, Charles, 4, 5, 13, 17; Dombey and Son, 6–7; Master Humphrey’s Clock, 250n1; Oliver Twist, 23–24; Our Mutual Friend, 4; Pickwick Papers, 23 Dickens, Charles, Little Dorrit, chap. 1, 88, 120, 139, 229; dampening of revolutionary spirit in, 47; ironies of closure, 48–59; maternal subsumption in, 45, 48–49, 54; “Nobody” in, 50, 58; original

title of, 31; rhetoric of last paragraph in, 31–32, 48–49, 51, 53 discourse analysis, 9, 242n19 Dolar, Mladen, 248n16 Doten, Lizzie, 245–46n5 Eagleton, Terry: and George Eliot, 169; and Hardy, 258n8; and narrative violence, 27, 243n21, 248n15 Eakin, Paul John, 259n13 Edgeworth, Maria, 108 Eliot, George, 19, 24, 59, 83, 118; Daniel Deronda, 142, 158; Middlemarch, 137, 165, 170, 172, 234, 257n27 Eliot, George, The Mill on the Floss, chap. 4, 174, 177, 185, 212, 215–16, 217, 229, 234; character vs. circumstance in, 136–38, 180; characterized reception in, 131, 150, 153–56, 158–59, 173; dream prologue in, 149, 150–52, 153; “force” of revelation in, 167, 177; “medium” in, 170–71; reader complicity in, 132–34; scene of drowning in, 165–69; “transferred life” in, 149, 158–59 Eliot, T. S., 65 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 249n22 Empson, William, 6, 223 epistolary narrative, 8, 23; in The Mill on the Floss, 113, 229; in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, chap. 3 Feltes, N. N., 260n18 Fielding, Henry: Jonathan Wild, 23; Joseph Andrews, 23 Flaubert, Gustave, 141, 254n9 Forster, E. M: Howards End, 254n8 frame(d) narrative: in Barthes, 103–4; in Brontë, 83, 86, chap. 3; in Dickens, 250n1; in Frankenstein, 23; and narrative exchange, 82–84; open-ended in The Mill on the Floss, 130; in Poe, 80; untheorized in Lukács, 90 Freud, Sigmund, 14, 19, 50, 54, 56, 242n15, 248n16, 255n17 Frye, Northrop, 13 Gallagher, Catherine, 28, 239n2; on the fictional Nobody, 107–9, 252n17; on

index Victorian anthropology in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 177, 178, 180, 216, 259n11, 260n25 Genette, Girard, 14 genre, 194, 236, 237; as cultural form, 2; and deconstruction, 131; and evolution of, 27; and “extreme violence,” 214, 235; minimized in Victorian novel criticism, 3; plot’s recuperation by, 119–20; in Poe, 65, 87; post-organic phase of, 91; related to narrative temporality, 11; social function of, 92; theory of, 3, 28, 52, 70, 108, 119, 131, 146–47, 180, 221, 226, 230–31; theory of, as related to narratology, 52, 92, 140; Victorian turn of, 116–17 Gibson, Andrew, 159, 161–63, 242n18, 255n17, 256n18, 256n19 Girard, René, 188. See also scapegoating Gooch, Joshua, 255n17 gothic, 63, 64, 66, 75, 87, 97, 98. See also Stewart: and gothic of reading Greimas, A. J., 14, 103 Hardy, Thomas, 22, 24, 29, 118, 132, 231, 232–34, 241n15, 342n22, 253n1, 256n29; “ache of modernism,” 173, 217, 233; Jude the Obscure, 189 Hardy, Thomas, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 72–73, chap. 5, 227, 228; illustrated in The Graphic, 201–4, 202 fig. 1; and ironies of the law in, 178–82; irony of allusion in, 184–85, 187–89; isometric imagery in, 211–12, 229, 243n21; “phasing” of the self in, 189–96, 206–7, 210, 299, 213; reader complicity in, 218, 203; sacrificial prototypes in, 188, 187–89, 215–17; scene of reading in, 184–86; “stories” recognized belatedly in, 208, 212–13. See also scapegoating Hawthorne, Nathaniel, Twice-Told Tales and Mosses from the Old Manse, reviewed by Poe, 246n6 Hegel, Georg Friedrich Willhelm, 161, 162; dialectic in, related to Lukács, 28, 58, 162–64, 171, 175, 194; and force, 159, 177–78, 180, 193, 243n22, 255n17, 256n21, 257n25, 258nn4–5; and law, 178–80, 186; and medium, 170, 179–81

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Heraclitus, 164 Herkomer, Hubert von, 202 fig. 1, 205, 207, 260n17 Herman, David, 240n2 Hertz, Neil, 255n12, 256n19 Hoff man, Daniel, 245n1 Holloway, John, 243n3 Iser, Wolfgang, 183 Jackson, Arlene M., 203 Jakobson, Roman, 22, 83; on “poetic function,” 7, 237; on “violence purely linguistic,” 17–19, 28, 63, 70–72, 69, 232, 235, 236, 237, 241n11 James, Henry, 19, 259–60n13 James, William, 24–25 Jameson, Fredric, 11, 28, 221, 233, 242 Joyce, James, 71, 162, 225, 255n17, 256nn18–19 Kennedy, J. Gerald, 248n21 Kermode, Frank, 241n7 Kincaid, James, 258n8 Kramer, Lawrence, 240n3 Kristeva, Julia, 49–50 Lacan, Jacques, 28, 88, 248n16 Laird, J. T., 260n14 Law, Jules, 256n23 Lawrence, D. H., 258n8 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 91 linguistic unconscious, 128, 132, 159, 227, 230 Linhares-Dias, Rui, 240n1 Locke, John, 138, 144 Lombardo, Patrizia, 245n1 Lukács, Georg, 28; on “architectonic” form, 90, 91, 94, 117–18, 121, 126, 215, 230; on “bad infi nity,” 161, 197, 209; on “biographic form,” 58, 133, 139, 142, 143, 171, 177, 186, 191, 216, 255n11; and critique of modernism, 71, 87; critiqued by de Man, 131, 140–47; and dialectic of subjective vs. objectified self, 69, 119, 142, 151, 194, 247n14; and epic world, 174–76; on “extreme violence,” 27, 58, 59, 117, 140, 143, 161, 172, 194, 206, 208, 214, 217, 235; on the fatality of “should be,” 174, 210, 257n27; on “gratuitous violence,” 68; and

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index

Lukács, Georg (continued) Greek transcendence, 141, 171, 175–76, 217; and Hegel, 180; on life vs. essence (existence vs. meaning), 51, 67, 118, 126, 141; and lyric self, 127, 166, 172; on “metaformal grace,” 149–50; on “mood” in short story, 61, 82; on novel of disillusionment, 27, 127, 132; and novelistic time, 141–42, 143–47, 254n7, 254n9; and reflection, 143, 173, 206–7, 228, 254n5; on “regulative” vs. “constitutive” form, 51, 91, 124, 126, 188; river as trope of time in, 164, 165; on “second nature,” 31, 152, 212, 217; on “unfettered plasticity of prose,” 63, 128, 218. See also dialectics Lyotard, Jean-François, 162, 255n17

ratology, 13–15, 32, 49, 51, 55–58, 167, 182, 221, 240n1; defined, 9; in relation to stylistics, 223–24, 243n2 narratology, 3, 19–20, 24–26, 32–34; cognitive, 14, 93, 95; computer modeled, 91–94; defined, 8; “episodic” versus “diachronic,” 191, 195, 208; gone “beyond,” 82–83; overlapped with stylistics, 9, 62, 222, 225; “postmodern” version, 161–63, 170; structuralist, 5, 24, 52, 103; as transmedial, 16, 19. See also narratography new historicism, 9, 220, 221, 242n19 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 161–62 Novalis, 134, 137, 146, 147, 162, 164, 169 Oedipus, 50–51

Malina, Debra, 258n3 matrix (semiotic), 58, 71, 74, 78, 147, 152, 167, 186, 214, 216 Mauss, Marcel, 91 McKeon, Michael: on didacticism and identification, 108; on domesticity and secrecy, 119, 125, 252n17; on epistemology and ethics, 53, 109; on indirect discourse, 252n14; on rise of the novel, 3, 10, 11, 28, 139; on “worth” vs. “birth,” 51–52, 121, 157 McLuhan, Marshall, 250n3 melodrama: of death scenes, 217; of narrative, 5, 17, 24, 26; of reception, 77, 249n25; rhetorical, 88 Menke, Richard, 261n7 Miller, Andrew H., 158, 255n14, 257n27 Miller, D. A.: and Austen’s style, 67–69, 252n16; on the “nonnarratable,” 244n13, 260n22; on the social as prison, 243n1 mise en abyme, 75, 231 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, 133 Moore, George, 250n7 Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson, 253n19 Nabokov, 71; Lolita, 249n23; Pale Fire, 249n23 narratography, 5–8; in contrast to Barthes’s method, 224–25; in contrast to nar-

Phelan, James, 259n13 phenomenology, 139, 161, 162, 181, 182, 225, 257n25; of reading, 24, 66, 75, 93, 170, 221 phonetic (or phonemic) effects, 1, 2, 3, 7, 14, 17, 18, 25, 26, 224, 229, 234; in Brontë, 115–16; in Dickens, 46–47; in George Eliot, chap. 3; in Hardy, 197, 200, 205–6, 218, 219; homophony, 64, 76, 210, 246n9; phonetic anagram, 46, 75; phonetic chiasm, 66; phonetic matrix, 71; “phonemanon” (Joyce), 225; in Poe, 66–69, 70, 72, 75, 78, 81 Picker, John M., 253n20 Poe, Edgar Allan, chap. 2, 82–89, 228, “Annabel Lee,” 249n23; as “anti-novelistic,” 59–60, 242n17; “Berenice,” 69–71: “The Black Cat,” 247n15; categorization of tales, 63, 65; contrasted with Austen, 67–69; and cryptography, 66; and empathy, transference, telepathy, 91, 125, 150, 154; “The Fall of the House of Usher,” 75–76, 86; “A Few Words on Secret Writing,” 67; “The Gold Bug,” 245n5; “Imp of the Perverse,” 71–72, 73, “Ligeia,” 64; and narrative “I,” 128; “Rationale of Verse,” 64; and Romantic sonority, 135; “The Sleeper,” 66; stylistic violence in, 26–27, 61–62, 64; “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” 75, 77–81; “William Wilson,” 68, 72–74

index Poulet, Georges, 66 Price, Leah, 251n13 Propp, Vladimir, 14 prose friction, 29, 60, 115, 148, 194, 206 Proust, Marcel, 233, 234 psychoformalism, 15, 19, 22, 25, 28. See also Bersani and Dutoit; Brooks, Peter Purchase, Sean, 241n10 Reid, Ian: on narrative exchange, 82–86, 91, 94, 95, 108, 251n11 Resnais, Alain, 215 Richardson, Samuel, 23 Ricks, Christopher: and anagrams, 248n17; on “anti-pun,” 255n15 Riffaterre, Michael: Fictional Truth, 56; and semiotics, 73, 147, 245n17, 246n11; on subtext, 73. See also matrix Romantic sonority, 4, 127, 132, 135, 160 Romanticism, 63, 135, 190, 199, 234; disillusioned (Lukács), 140–42, 146, 152, 227; and post-Romantic novel, 134 Ronell, Avital, 245–46n5 Rosenheim, Shawn James, 65–66, 245n1, 245–46n5, 246n8 Rothko, Mark, 215 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 248n16 Royle, Nicholas, 245–46n5 Ryan, Marie-Laure, 250n2 scapegoating, 28; in George Eliot, 109, 132; in Hardy, 169, 187, 188, 194, 200, 205, 215–17, 258n9, 259n11 Schor, Hilary, 244n8 semiotic square, 168 set theory, 9, 186, 223, 225, 226 Shakespeare, William, 184, 209, 248n17; Hamlet, 137, 138, 210, 214, 254n7, 259n12; King Lear, 214, 260n23 Shaw, George Bernard, 47 Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein, 23 Shelley, Percy Bysshe: “The Triumph of Life,” 254n4 Socrates, 248n16 Stevenson, Robert Louis, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 7, 243n23 Stewart, Garrett: cognitive paradigms for fi lmic narrative, 250n2; Dear Reader,

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247n12; and gothic of reading, 80, 249n15; and phonotext, 9, 255n15. See also conscription (rhetorical) style, 8, 20, 22–23, 27, 32; adverbial, 113, 151, 154, 193, 212, 222–24; alliterative, 48, 64, 70, 116, 160, 193, 245n1, 246n11; and anagram (phonetic), 46, 65, 70, 76, 85, 154, 160, 168, 222, 245n1, 249; and anti-pun, 168, 255n15; and assonance, 45, 48, 64, 70, 77, 78; and chiasmus, 66, 81, 165; and circumlocution, 77, 100, 103, 197, 253; and cognate object, 45, 171; and dangling modifier, 54; and direct address, 101, 133, 136, 251n8; and ellipsis, 186; erotics of, 20; and genitive metaphor, 165; and homophony, 64, 76, 210, 246n9; and hyperbole, 73; and idiom, 102, 205– 6, 244n7; and metonymy, 65, 162, 167, 211; and onomatopoeia, 69, 74, 76, 193; and parallelism, 49; and paronomasia, 64, 78; and passive voice, 112, 157, 207, 251n12; and prepositional grammar, 73, 116, 165; and pun, 78, 80, 88, 114, 128, 154, 246n1, 247n12; read for its own plot, 34; and sibilance, 47; and simile, 161; and syllepsis, 186; and synesthesia, 78, 156; and transegmental drift as “oronym,” 246n9; and verb tense, 45, 116, 124–25, 167, 207, 210, 240n1; violence inciting to, 24. See also allusion, dead metaphor, linguistic unconscious, phonetic effects, Romantic sonority, stylistics, syllabic action, verbal “intension” stylistics, 2, 8, 9, 15, 18, 20, 25, 194, 221–27, 230, 239n2; bilingual, 252n12; as distinguished from narratography, 243n2; overlapping into narratology, 62, 218, 222, 223, 225 Surridge, Lisa, 253n21 syllabic action, 1, 15, 70–74; and echoism, 67, 113; and monosyllabism, 7, 45, 81, 168, 213; and syllabic anagram, 76. See also phonetic effects Teskey, Gordon, 258n4 Todorov, Tzvetan: and basis of the fantastic in metaphor or pun, 78; on the fantastic, 73, 77, 81, 245n2, 248n18, 248n20; on

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Todorov, Tzvetan (continued) “grammar of narrative,” 15, 33, 125, 133, 220 transference, 66, 70, 92, 100, 104, 115, 125, 230, 232, 246n6; as blocked by form, 242n16; and countertransference, 83, 86–87, 128, 129, 227; as defi nition of reading, 129, 245n5; narratographic manifestation of, 61; in Peter Brooks, 21; in Poe’s view of Hawthorne’s writing, 21; as twofold in psychoanalysis, 79, 84 Venn diagrams, overlap of stylistics and narratology, 9, 62, 222. See also set theory

verbal “intension,” 27, 62, 66, 81, 115, 148, 169, 193, 225; as coinage, 24–25; Hardyesque form of, 197, 219; as resistance, 215, 219, 238 Watt, Ian, 11, 28; and “formal realism,” 254n6; and time in fiction, 138–39, 144 Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 16 Wolfson, Susan J., 239n1 Woloch, Alex, 243n5 Wordsworth, William, 5, 10, 131, 139, 146, 151, 164, 234; “Intimations Ode,” 45; The Prelude, 45; and “spot of time,” 153, 255n11, 258n9; “Tintern Abbey,” 153