Changing My Mind (6 page)

In her intellectual and personal life, Eliot demanded continuous and varied food—and she conceived of many things. One of these things was Fred Vincy, a commonplace young man who would seem more suited to a penny-farthing romance. But it’s worth looking again at the facts, which means, in the world of
Middlemarch,
the emotional facts. Fred is in love with a good girl, a girl who does not love him because he is not worthy; Fred agrees with her. Maybe the point is this: of all the people striving in
Middlemarch, only Fred is striving for a thing worth striving for.
Dorothea mistakes Causabon terribly, as Lydgate mistakes Rosamund, but Fred thinks Mary is worth having, that she is probably a good in the world, or at least, good for him (“She is the best girl I know!”)—and he’s right. Of all of them Fred has neither chosen a chimerical good nor radically mistaken his own nature. He’s not as dim as he seems. He doesn’t idealize his good as Dorothea does when she imagines Causabon a second Milton, and he doesn’t settle on a good a priori, like Lydgate, who has long believed that a doting, mindless girl is just what a man of science needs. What Fred surmises of the good he stumbles upon almost by accident, and only as a consequence of being fully in life and around life, by being open to its vagaries simply because he is in possession of no theory to impose upon it. In many ways bumbling Fred is Eliot’s ideal Spinozian subject. Here is Gilles Deleuze on Spinoza’s wise man; he could just as well be speaking of Fred:

Fred has no idea what he is capable of. His moral luck is all encounter, arrangement, combination. Mary Garth
is
that encounter; she is Fred’s reason to be good. It is through her, and for her, that he is able to change:

Simply put, if Fred didn’t love Mary, he’d be half the man he is (and Fred is also the occasion to soften some of Mary’s hard dogmatic edges, for it surprises her, too, that she could love someone like Fred). And the rigors of love combine with other duties and redouble themselves. Because Fred loves Mary, when he recklessly borrows money from her family and is unable to pay it back, he finds the weight of his misdeed surprisingly heavy upon him. This is not biblical morality but practical morality: Fred has done something wrong in the world, and his true punishment lies not in the next world but in this one. It’s in the pain he has caused:

In
Middlemarch
love enables knowledge. Love
is
a kind of knowledge. If Fred didn’t love Mary, he would have no reason to exercise his imagination on her family. It’s love that makes him realize that two women without their savings are a real thing in the world and not merely incidental to his own sense of dishonor. It’s love that enables him to feel another’s pain as if it were his own. For Eliot, in the absence of God, all our moral tests must take place on this earth and have their rewards and punishments here. We are one another’s lesson, one another’s duty. This turns out to be a doctrine peculiarly suited to a certain kind of novel writing.
Middlemarch
is a dazzling dramatization of earthly human striving, of
conatus
in combination. Eliot’s complex structure allows for so many examples—each reader will have his or her favorite—but there is one in particular, dropped deep into the middle of the novel like a pebble in a great pond, that seems to me the most beautiful, for its ripples fan outward and outward and reveal the unity in Eliot’s diffusion. When the vicar Farebrother decides, for the sake of his good friend Fred, to give up the hope of ever marrying Mary Garth (for he loves her, too), a sage little aperçu occurs to him: “To think of the part one little woman can play in the life of a man, so that to renounce her may be a very good imitation of heroism, and to win her may be a discipline!” Farebrother’s satisfaction here, like all the satisfactions
Middlemarch
offers, is not transcendental, but of the earth. Eliot has replaced metaphysics with human relationships. In doing this she took from Spinoza—whose metaphysics are, in fact, extensive—what she wanted and left what she couldn’t use. To make it work, she utilized a cast of saints and princes but also fools and criminals, and every shade of human in between. She needed Fred quite as much as Dorothea.

These must be the most famous lines in
Middlemarch:

Why do we like them so much? Because they seem so humane. We are moved that it should pain Eliot so to draw a border around her attention, that she is so alive to the mass of existence lying unnarrated on the other side of silence. She seems to care for people, indiscriminately and in their entirety, as it was once said God did. She finds it a sin to write always of Dorothea! As literary atonement, Eliot fills her novel with more objects of attention than a novel can comfortably hold. Because we must give Henry his due:
Middlemarch is
messy, decentered, unnerving. It seems to hint at those doubts of the efficacy of narrative that were to follow in the next century. Why always Dorothea, why heroes, why the centrality of a certain character in a narrative, why narrative at all? Eliot, being a Victorian, did not go all the way down that road. For Eliot, in 1870, people are still all that people really have; our knowledge of, and feelings for, one another. A hopeful creed that has bonded readers to Eliot for over a century. Doesn’t she seem to solve the head/heart schism of our literature? Neither as sentimental as our popular novelists, nor as dryly cerebral as our experimentalists. Under the influence of Spinoza, via an understanding of Fred, she thought with her heart and felt with her head. It’s a fictional procedure perfectly described by one of her creations, Will Ladislaw:

Any writer of the classic nineteenth-century English novel had to be able to access this organic relation between what one felt one knew of human behavior and what one knew one felt. That nineteenth-century English novels continue to be written today with troubling frequency is a tribute to the strength of Eliot’s example and to the nostalgia we feel for that noble form. Eliot would be proud. But should we be? For where is
our
fiction, our twenty-first-century fiction? We glimpse it here and there. Certainly not as often as you might expect, given the times we live in. As writers and readers and critics, we English remain terribly proud of our conservative tastes. Every year the polls tell us
Middlemarch
is the country’s favorite novel, followed by
Pride and Prejudice,
followed by
Jane Eyre
(sometimes this order is reversed). Oh, the universality of the themes. Oh, the timelessness of the prose. But there is a misunderstanding, in England, about the words
universality
and
timelessness
as they relate to our canon. What is universal and timeless in literature is
need
—we continue to
need
novelists who seem to know and feel, and who move between these two modes of operation with wondrous fluidity. What is not universal or timeless, though, is form. Forms, styles, structures—whatever word you prefer—should change like skirt lengths. They have to; otherwise we make a rule, a religion, of one form; we say, “This form here,
this
is what reality is like,” and it pleases us to say that (especially if we’re English) because it means we don’t have to read anymore, or think, or feel. Eventually we become like Mr. Brooke, and Literature something we “went into a great deal, at one time. . . .” George Eliot: now,
there
was a writer. Why don’t they write ’em like that anymore? Except the George Eliot of today—so alive to every shade of human feeling, so serious about our dependence on one another—she won’t be like the George Eliot of yesterday. Her form will be quite different. She won’t be writing the classic nineteenth-century novel. She might not even be English. She might be like Mary Gaitskill, say, or Laura Hird, or A. L. Kennedy. George Eliot may look cozy and conservative from a century’s distance, but she was on the border of the New—so will her descendants be. In her essay “Silly Novels By Lady Novelists,” Eliot laid out her radical program for great fiction, radical because it was no program at all: “Like crystalline masses, it may take any form, and yet be beautiful.”

What twenty-first-century novelists inherit from Eliot is the radical freedom to push the novel’s form to its limits, wherever they may be. It’s a mistake to hate
Middlemarch
because the Ichabods love it. That would be to denude oneself of one of those good things of the world that Spinoza advised we cling to.
Feeling into knowledge, knowledge into feeling
. . . When we say Eliot was the greatest of Victorian novelists, we mean this process worked more fluidly in her than anyone else.

REREADING BARTHES AND NABOKOV

—ROLAND BARTHES, “The Death of the Author”

—VLADIMIR NABOKOV,
Strong Opinions

The novels we know best have an architecture. Not only a door going in and another leading out, but rooms, hallways, stairs, little gardens front and back, trapdoors, hidden passageways, et cetera. It’s a fortunate rereader who knows half a dozen novels this way in their lifetime. I know one,
Pnin,
having read it half a dozen times. When you enter a beloved novel many times, you can come to feel that you possess it, that nobody else has ever lived there. You try not to notice the party of impatient tourists trooping through the kitchen (
Pnin
a minor scenic attraction en route to the canyon
Lolita
), or that shuffling academic army, moving in perfect phalanx, as they stalk a squirrel around the backyard (or a series of squirrels, depending on their methodology). Even the architect’s claim on his creation seems secondary to your wonderful way of living in it.

To a rereader of this type, Roland Barthes’s authorial death sentence will not seem especially polemical. Long before Barthes told them they could, rereaders had been squatting in the houses of beloved novels, each with their own ideas of the floor plan. “A text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.” Well, yes! And, apart from anything else, we’re already living here! On first reading Barthes, in college, the essay struck me as the confirmation of an old desire, to possess a novel entirely. Now when I teach the essay to writing students, the room splits evenly between those who take it in their stride as a perfectly obvious experiential truth and those who take it as an affront. For the first type, the kind of reader I have tried to describe above, Barthes’s apparently radical transaction of power is an exchange they have always already assumed. They have always walked into books boldly, without knocking or bothering too much about the owner. But to those students who have the tendency to feel humbled before the act of writing, “The Death of the Author” is a perverse assault on the privileges of authorship, on the possibility of fixed meaning, even upon “Truth” itself. For a polemic a mere seven pages long, it has a great power to disturb, seeming to take from a delicate student her sense of the text as an intelligible thing, as well as her sense of herself as a significant individual capable of receiving meaning:

Meanwhile, on the other side of the room, those bold readers remain unruffled and unsurprised to find themselves described as “destinations”—on the contrary, the impersonality suits them. They were never likely to say, in a college class, “I guess, for me, as a lapsed Catholic feminist from Iowa this book didn’t really work.” All texts are grist to their mill: personal sensibilities have never come into it. They are excited to add to the
text’s
sudden indeterminacy, their
own
indeterminacy as well. To observe these two natural, unschooled reactions is fascinating: they reveal within the famous ideological debate a more intimate and important question of character, into which a teacher should not necessarily intrude. Why not allow each student to find out for himself what kind of rereader he is? No bad blood need be spilled over it (as it was when I was in college). After all, you can storm the house of a novel like Barthes, rearranging the furniture as you choose, or you can enter on your knees, like the pilgrim Nabokov thought you were, and try to figure out the cunning design of the place—the house will stand either way.