Really, universally, human relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.

—Henry James1

[C]artography is not the solution, but rather the problem.

—Fredric Jameson2

George Eliot’s Middlemarch, published serially from 1871 to 1872, appeared at the end of the most important years of industrial-capitalist development in Britain, in the wake of the Second Reform Act of 1867, and in the midst of a transition from a national laissez-faire economy to one increasingly of monopoly on a world-scale—from what Eric Hobsbawm calls the Age of Capital to the Age of Empire. Yet Eliot’s novel takes as its historical content and setting the period of the so-called industrial revolution and the clamorous political landscape leading up to the First Reform Act of 1832 (the English half of Hobsbawm’s Age of Revolution). Between these two periods lies a gulf.

When Henry James wrote in 1876 that “[r]eally, universally, human relations stop nowhere,” he expressed it as an eternal truth; but really this had only been felt to be the case for the previous twenty-five years or so.3 One hundred years earlier it would have sounded metaphysical, not axiomatic. “When we write the ‘world history’ of earlier periods,” writes Hobsbawm, “we are in fact making an addition of the histories of the various parts of the globe, but which, in so far as they had knowledge of one another, had only marginal and superficial contact.”4 For Hobsbawm, “the great boom of the 1850s” is what actually “marks the foundation of a global industrial economy and single world history.”5 The novelist’s effort to “draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which [human relations] shall happily appear” to end somewhere had thus only really become a problem for those novelists of the latter half of the nineteenth century, who, like Eliot and James, set for themselves the special task of representing the totality of those relations (however narrow and limited each author’s grasp of that totality might prove to be in the end). As Georg Lukács observes,

economic reality as a totality is itself subject to historical change. But these changes consist largely in the way in which all the various aspects of the economy are expanded and intensified, so that the “totality” becomes ever more closely-knit and substantial. After all, according to Marx, the decisive progressive role of the bourgeoisie in history is to develop the world market, thanks to which the economy of the whole world becomes an objectively unified totality.6

The challenge Eliot encountered in her effort to draw the totality of these new relations into “a geometry” of her own fictional making was then not only one of recording and representing a historical phenomenon, but of making sense of its totality as a world process as well.

By and large Marxist literary critics have gauged the accuracy or “realism” of a novel’s world-picture on the degree to which it both includes and foregrounds labor. However, as Carolyn Lesjak argues, one shortcoming of hinging a mimetic theory of capitalism’s representation solely on the inclusion of labor is that it greatly reduces the number of places and aesthetic forms to which we may look to see capitalism’s shaping and determining influence.7 To this we might add also that the transformative power of the capitalist process of production lies not only in its radical reorganization and expropriation of labor, but in the fact that it is “at the same time the production of capital and the production and reproduction of the entire capitalist relation on a steadily increasing (expanding) scale.”8 This logic of “expanded reproduction,” I will argue, finds its figurative mirror not in the direct representation of actions and characters, or even labor per se, but in the production of sentences, which, over the development of the realist novel, reach a higher level of complexity, as authors seek out more nuanced ways of drawing their characters together and representing them simultaneously as a social organism, obeying laws and logics beyond the aims or intentions of any of their characters.9 In Eliot’s Middlemarch, this becomes a search for different metaphors of simultaneous, but largely invisible interrelationship. These metaphors are not so much stated as they are enacted in the production of what Jameson would call “dialectical sentences,” which pull together disparate materials under the command of a single syntactical logic, which itself drives both hypotactically and sublimely towards ever larger expansions of meaning and interrelationality.10 Such sentences mirror, in a purely formal way, the dialectical logic of capitalism’s own inner workings and expansion. Eliot’s metaphors, however, point towards the revelation of the social organism itself, allowing us to fill in the contours of her dialectically expanding sentences with a sense of the subsuming logic of capitalism, which, in pulling ever more materials and people into its grasp, begins transforming society as a whole. Eliot’s contribution to literary history, then, is thus nothing less than a new epic syntax with which to convey the particularities of this new secularized life world reproduced by capitalism on a larger and larger scale.

I propose epicness as a way to describe Eliot’s syntax to suggest, first, the sheer force and breadth of her sentences, which, especially in her narratorial asides, seem to eclipse the rest of the novel’s drama, making her prose into a kind of heroic subject in its own right. However, I also have in mind Lukács’s claim in The Theory of the Novel (1920) that the classical epic of antiquity was able to the take the unity of subjective and objective worlds for granted and was thus in-formed by the presupposition of an “organic” and “concrete totality”; whereas, “The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality.”11 For Jameson, in his Lukácsian-inflected examination of totality in Marx’s Capital, “the conclusion to draw here is not that, since it is unrepresentable, capitalism is ineffable and a kind of mystery beyond language or thought; but rather that one must redouble one’s efforts to express the inexpressible in this respect.”12 For both Lukács and Jameson, the vocation of the novel (and the realist novel in particular) is thus, “by giving form, to uncover and construct the concealed totality of life.”13 Eliot’s epic syntax is in its own way an attempt (with varying degrees of success) to give form and feeling to the transformative power and scale of capitalism at the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, there will be reason later to comment on how Eliot’s syntactically encoded worldview also re-naturalizes this process of capitalist transformation, making it part of a steady, ineluctable “middlemarch,” in which the possibility of revolution, no less than reform, must face inevitable disappointment when viewed through the “mature” lens of her omniscient narrator, who stands outside the history she represents.

History and Hypotaxis

The most sustained investigation of syntax’s role in the representation of history and everyday life, as well as its evolution from epic to novel, is not to be found in Lukács’s work, but in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1953). Auerbach famously opens his book with a juxtaposition of two epic styles, that of antiquity, originating in Homer, and that of the Bible, encompassing both Old and New Testaments. The style of the first, he says, is elevated and hypotactic, subordinating numerous clauses and assimilating various adverbial and adjectival materials into large syntactic formations, in which—despite their length—meaning is well rounded and self-illuminating: everything, he says, is “brought to light in perfect fullness; so that a continuous rhythmic procession of phenomena passes by, and never is there a form left fragmentary or half-illuminated, never a lacuna, never a gap, never a glimpse of unplumbed depths.”14

A peculiar tic of the Homeric style, however, is the flattening of time. The bard’s syntax, while constantly expanding through hypotactic additions (the lusty elaborations, for example, associated with the epic simile), does not move steadily into the future, but at various points moves retrogressively into the past, recovering anecdotal histories and interpolating them into the present tense of the epic drama. Auerbach’s key example is the anecdote of Odysseus’s scar, in which the narrator switches from the present to the past to recount, in similar detail and also in the present tense, the manner in which Odysseus acquired his scar. As Auerbach observes, “this procession of phenomena takes place in the foreground that is, in a local and temporal present which is absolute.”15 Thus, while the syntax is dynamic and propulsive, the action is temporally static, subject to alternating progressions and retrogressions that happen as if in a vacuum.

Parataxis, for Auerbach, has the opposite effect, piling up content, which remains only minimally connected, lacking syntactical subordination. The result is a sharp sense of “background,” of gaps and fissures, which create confusion, yes, but also in the case of the Bible a place for mystery and therefore revelation. In the Old Testament, he says, we get “the externalization of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity.” The result is that “the whole [is] permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal,” which nonetheless “remains mysterious and ‘fraught with background.’”16 It is through such gaps that History gradually enters. Turning to the representation of Peter’s denial of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark, Auerbach notes how Peter’s motivations are never divulged and yet implicit in this paratactic elision is a sense of the “enormous ‘pendulation’” that “is going on in him,” as he swings back and forth in his fidelity to Jesus. However, at stake in the “pendulations” of Peter’s heart is not just the fate of the interpersonal relationship between Jesus and his disciple, but also “the birth of a spiritual movement in the depths of the common people, from within the everyday occurrences of contemporary life.” Thus, for Auerbach, “[w]hat considerable portions of the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles describe … is unmistakably the beginning of a deep subsurface movement, the unfolding of historical forces” (emphasis mine).17

For Auerbach, this “subsurface movement”represents a sharp break with the surface-oriented description of the classic epic and even the histories of Tacitus and Thucydides, which, because of the strict rules of the separation of styles, are confined to treating only lofty subjects appropriate to the high style of narration and therefore prevented from developing a layered socio-economic approach to history.18 The subject of Auerbach’s book is thus the historical dialectic of the separation of styles in the classical period and their gradual intermingling over many centuries, in which the “low” themes appropriate to the modern historiography of daily life gradually enter into Western representation and are at last treated with the high-seriousness of epic or tragedy in the French realist novels of the nineteenth century. As Jameson puts it, “‘realism,’ or mimesis in [Auerbach’s] sense, is a syntactic conquest, the slow appropriation of syntactic forms capable of holding together multiple levels of a complex reality and a secular daily life.”19 Auerbach’s theory of representation, if it is appropriate to call it a theory, is clearly mimetic—in that, a work’s representational impulse is indexed to the degree that it seriously replicates everyday life and the historical forces shaping it. His understanding of how mimesis is achieved, however, is far from vulgar or naive. For him mimesis is inseparable from the formal evolutions of style that accompany it. What matters is not so much the content, but rather the stylistic form with which the author is able to discover and, at the same time, render daily life as a dynamic and evolving, multilayered totality.

Middlemarch’s dialectical sentences are just such “syntactic forms,” seeking a style “capable of holding together multiple levels of a complex reality” all at once, oscillating not merely at the anecdotal level between the past and the present (as was the case in the Homer), but now also between “foreground” and “background,” brought together often in a single syntactic formation—not just the mingling of references to the country gentry and “belts of thicker life below,”20 but also repeated references to those deeper and more abstract historical forces, or “subsurface movement[s],” producing what Jameson calls a new “secular daily life.”

Eliot’s experiments in both form and syntax all clearly distinguish Middlemarch from other novels of its period as a landmark achievement—a “mature” or even proto-modernist work of art.21 The decisive shift that I want to pinpoint here is Eliot’s turn away from the atomized, but also the necessarily central, individual of the classic European Bildungsroman to what is now a kind of social group, or Gestalt, in Middlemarch, in which we encounter a plurality of characters, each operating on the basis of her or his own imagined centrality, and in pursuit of her or his own individual aims, but locked in a kind of unconscious entanglement and competition by virtue of the “web” of their sometimes hidden, sometimes open, relationships to one another in the social totality. While Middlemarch preserves the individual, that all-significant category of bourgeois philosophy and political economy, that same individual is now perpetually displaced by the omniscient narrator’s invocation of a system of relations so vast and dynamic as to reveal any one character’s imagined centrality as a delusion bordering on the pathological: “Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world,” asks the narrator, “and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.”22 Eliot’s syntactical experiments, codified in her narrative asides, are attempts to transcend the limitations imposed by such specks of ego, and grapple with the larger process of transformation operating behind the backs of her characters.

As Elaine Freedgood observes, it seems “around 1870, the representation of the object matter of reality began to require greater authorial intervention.”23 At stake in Eliot’s interventions is not just the re-orientation of the individual within this newly categorized social group, but now also that of the social group within the larger totality of the world-historical process that forms it: the “subtle movement” and “less marked vicissitudes” of “Old provincial society” as it was being transformed by capitalism.24 Here, her representational challenge is twofold: to grasp the totality at work and, at one and the same time, create a new novelistic idiom, or syntax, capable of sustaining the expression of that totality as it threatens to evade her representation and slip from view. This twofold representational challenge, however, becomes doubly problematic, as the more concretely the totality of this process is grasped and represented by her narrator, the more it seems to undermine the coherence of the social group itself, liquidating it and dissolving it in the flow of an on-going social-evolutionary process in which its momentary appearance must now be understood as a temporary stage which only has the appearance of internal, organic coherence. Such temporariness is identified as early as the opening paragraph of the Prelude when the narrator identifies the topic of her introductory remarks as nothing less than a meditation on “the history of man, and how that mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time.”25

Representation in Middlemarch thus resolves itself into antinomies, pulling its raison d’être in contradictory directions: on the one hand, a nationalistic and romantic representation of the British social group or “imagined community”—its organic continuity with a historical and traditional past; its budding modern sensibility; and its gradual, evolutionary maturation towards democratic inclusiveness and tolerance —and, on the other hand, the realist’s “cognitive mapping” of the process of industrial-capitalist transformation, which was actually dislocating community from its rural past, atomizing it into a myriad of isolated and competing individuals, and making the “imagined community” of the former a kind of necessary fiction or even fantasy.

Thinking the Nation, Mapping Totality

For Benedict Anderson, any nation is an “imagined community.” “It is imagined,” he says, “because members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the mind of each lives the image of their communion.”26 The nation is an ideological construct, but necessarily so. There is no possibility of thinking the nation without some form of mediation since the modern conjuncture in which the nation form becomes the most frequent “imagined community” was one in which the historical process was driving ever more people together so that their totality—an increasingly finer and more intricate web of interrelations—was now also harder to grasp. To imagine this totality in the projected image of a community, however, was to imagine this totality as something holistic and, in so doing, ideologically erase the various conflicts and tensions of the new class society that dictated how most often strangers in this larger society actually confronted one another. The nation, Anderson writes, “is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.”27

Anderson gives both language and literary representation an enormous role in the crafting of this national imaginary of “horizontal comradeship.” In particular, he argues that the rise of the novel is directly connected to its ability to grapple with and mediate the new temporality of modern social space within the nation, which has to do now with the coincidence of simultaneity rather than the teleological, unitary time of pre-secular societies: a distinction he draws via Walter Benjamin’s concepts of “homogenous, empty time” and “messianic time.” In the former, which it is his primary concern to elaborate, he says, “simultaneity is, as it were, transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfillment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar.”28

The characters of this new national literature are thus depicted as acting in ignorance of each other’s acts, which leads them, usually by turns, to grave and unfortunate misunderstandings and accidents, and then to happy coincidences, until, at last, resolution can be achieved with some sense of realistic plausibility. However, their connection to one another, outside of these fateful encounters—which, by the time of Victorian realism, are even fewer and farther between—is largely imagined: they exist together by virtue of the fact the author has brought them together in her book and made the reader think them simultaneously; their lived-connection to one another is as tenuous as it is obvious, the product of an arbitrary confluence of time and space. Their simultaneous existence, however, becomes an adequate way of thinking the nation. The reader imagines their simultaneity as an allegorical vehicle for her or his own simultaneity with a national population far vaster than the repertoire of characters represented.

Thus, if on the one hand imagining the nation as community means excising its conflicts and tensions to imagine “a deep, horizontal comradeship,” on the other hand, the representational machinery that a novel like Eliot’s deploys in order to mediate these “horizontal” relationships in “homogenous, empty time” often means treating totality as something impersonal, bringing people together regardless of their private wills and intentions. There is therefore an internal contradiction, both ideological and, at the same time, representationally productive, in trying to imagine the nation as a community, since imagining a society of strangers as a holistic “organic community”—what Terry Eagleton defines as “the supposedly spontaneous unity of natural life-forms” and their “harmonious interdependence”29—means also, by necessity, figuring some cognate placeholder of the system of their alienation since that is the only thing that actually connects them in the new society of the modern nation. This is the famous difference and rupture between community and society, or Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, theorized by Ferdinand Tönnies. Where the “theory of Gemeinschaft starts from the assumption of perfect unity of human wills as an original or natural condition,” “Gesellschaft,” he says, “is to be understood as a multitude of natural and artificial individuals, the wills and spheres of whom are in many relations with and to one another, and remain nevertheless independent of one another and devoid of mutual familiar relationships.”30

What confronts us in Middlemarch then—in the sheer magnitude of its pages, the complexity of its multi-plot narrative and metaphors, and, above all, in its sprawling hypotactic sentence constructions—is an attempt to “square the circle” of the new problem of the waning centrality of the individual in the everyday experience of selfhood, which attempts to preserve the individual at the cost of repositioning it within the ever-widening context of a totality that now threatens to take its place. Middlemarch thus constitutes a transitional stage in what Jameson has called “the construction of the bourgeois subject in emergent capitalism and its schizophrenic disintegration in our own time.”31 It is in this sense that Eliot’s metaphors of the “web” of social relationships—although they eclipse and mortify the imagined centrality of any of her characters—are themselves a willed attempt to give a kind of form and content, or “cognitive mapping,” to the vast network of relations that threatens to displace them.

The scale of this new capitalist totality, however, is highly resistant to direct, unmediated representation. An exact replica of contemporary capital’s peregrinations, for example, could only fit on a map as large as the planet itself (especially now, given the fatal tethering of the earth-system to the social-system caused by anthropogenic climate change). Such a map would have to be viewed from outer space if it were to be viewed at all, and even then, because of its enormous size, the fine grain of its detail would be lost to the human eye. We would need state-of-the-art telescopes to zoom in on the cell of the commodity-form and its genesis in the production process. But such telescopic focusing would carry with it the unfortunate corollary of obliterating the very image of the whole for which the colossal map had been constructed in the first place. As Jameson argues, “This means that every attempt to construct a model of capitalism—for this is now what representation means in this context—will be a mixture of success and failure: some features will be foregrounded, others neglected or even misrepresented. Every representation is partial.”32 For Jameson, as for Marx and, to a certain degree, Eliot, it is only dialectics that can bring together these desperate elements and points of view to create a theoretical representation of the whole, much in the same way that actually functional maps can never be purely mimetic, but instead require a certain quotient of cognitive distillation in their presentation.

This is what Jameson calls “cognitive mapping,” a process which, he says, “enable[s] a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole.” Cognitive mapping is thus for Jameson neither representational nor ideological in the way that we conventionally understand those terms, since although it is both inaccurate (i.e. non-mimetic) and, in that sense, also false or “ideological,” cognitive mapping is nonetheless functional—“involves the practical reconquest of a sense of place”—and, in so being, bears a certain relation to the reality that it negotiates. To this end, he compares it to “the great Althusserian (and Lacanian) redefinition of ideology as ‘the representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence.’”33 Cognitive mapping, for example, is how we are able not to lose our bearings in a large metropolitan city, where often knowing that an extremely visible landmark is south, and not north, will be enough to help us navigate a vast unfamiliar urban space. For Jameson, however, cognitive mapping “becomes extraordinarily suggestive when projected outward onto … larger national and global spaces”—“in terms of the way in which we all necessarily also cognitively map our individual social relationship to local, national, and international class realities.”34

What this cognitive impulse maps (as the other side of any attempt to think the nation in all its arbitrary simultaneity) is thus predominately an impersonal system of relationships and historical processes—tinged, as I will show, in Eliot’s idiom with telling economic metaphors—that actually breach the imaginary boundaries of the nation and undermine the romantic content of its group identity, or “organic community,” pointing instead to a different socio-economic reality (that of increasingly globalized capitalist social relations), which is other than the “holistic” totality claimed by romantic nationalism and, more often than not, associated with a now always-already receding rural past, or Gemeinschaft.

Narrating Gesellschaft

For Eliot to begin Middlemarch as a meditation on Gesellschaft, however, requires her to abandon her older project of representing “the history of unfashionable families,” which had necessarily begun by taking for granted the fact of holistic community.35 A society of unrecognizable individuals is after all something much different than the “knowable community”—or Gemienschaft—that Raymond Williams famously identified as the romantic content of Eliot’s early fiction.36 Society cannot be “knowable” in the way that community can. What connects the seemingly arbitrary cluster of individuals that comprise Gesellschaft must be imagined for the same reasons Anderson says the modern nation must be imagined. Where Gemeinschaft is easily condensed in romanticizing fictions of a receding Golden Age, any representation of Gesellschaft must begin with the ever-evolving here-and-now of a society that increasingly, and necessarily, understands itself also in abstract terms. It is the task of Eliot’s syntax to track down this elusive referent and body it forth in some way that will capture its totality, not in some static way, but as the convulsive motion of capitalism as an endlessly repurposing world process—shaping and, in so doing, changing human natures and society as a whole.

Eliot’s ingenious solution to the problem of representing the new capitalist Gesellschaft is to frame her representation from the beginning as a meditation on the very problem of representation itself, dramatizing the internal tension between the novel’s chosen form and content:

Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul.37

This parabolic encapsulation of the modern subject’s struggle “to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement” is repeatedly characterized in this passage as a problem of matching appropriate literary form and content. For the reader, this quest for form occurs at the level of Eliot’s sentences. The content of heroic longing—that desire to do right and effect change—is present and also palpable for “the ardently willing soul,” but neither the form of realizing such actions nor, as the narrator confesses, the medium for representing them are given in advance. Eliot’s long hypotactic detours thus inaugurate a prosaic search for new stylistic containers adequate to the expression of a diffuse, modern daily life that is highly resistant to literary codification. Here, the would-be hero’s fruitless search for “a constant unfolding of far-resonant action” is dramatized in the very syntactic unfolding and enumeration of asymptotic approaches to the ideal of heroic action set by the Catholic reformer. These failures, however, are in themselves neither given nor certain (“perhaps only a life of mistakes…”; “perhaps a tragic failure….”). The sheer number of expanding and qualifying clauses produces in the reader a feeling already for the “tangled circumstance” and “mere inconsistency and formlessness” that beleaguers the novel’s would-be Theresas from the start.

For Eliot, this new secular reality lacks a genre; its literary form is absent and must be sought instead in digressive circumlocutions—a prosaic questing after totality. As Lukács observes, it is as if “the epic had to disappear” in order to “yield its place to an entirely new form: the novel.”38 Like the epic, the modern novel is oriented towards a representation of totality, but a totality that can no longer be taken for granted: “All the fissures and rents which are inherent in the historical situation must be drawn into the form-giving process and cannot nor should be disguised by compositional means.”39 Although Eliot’s ability as a writer is obviously accomplished and intentional, her hypotactic digressions suggest instead a mode of narration without stylistic precedent, scouring the unorganized materials of daily life for its own ambiguous raison d’être. Here, what is discovered is a lack of available means—“a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity”—which is then correlated, in turn, to the lack of a “coherent social faith and order” that could communicate and pinpoint the appropriate outlets for realizing such “far-resonant action”—in other words, the Gemeinschaft, or “organic community,” of the pre-secular past, which could prescribe, a priori, meaningful and rewarding ways for her characters to contribute to the commonweal.

The narrator’s metaphors associate this existential problem of vocation with the literary problem of expression produced by the vanishing of literary precedents: “Many Theresas have been born who found … no epic life … perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion.” As Hans Ulrich Seeber observes in his analysis of the novel’s Prelude, “The epic is used as a metaphor to designate individuals for whom action was in fact still possible. The demise of the epic signals the transformation of society from a feudal and intensely religious to a bourgeois and partially secularized order,” in which there is “a crippling lack of generally accepted models which prevents epic action.”40 Eliot’s Middlemarch frames the problem of action—ethical and political—within the same existential coordinates of the romantic critique of modernity with which Lukács opens The Theory of the Novel.41 There was once a time when fiction and reality formed an unity and were mutually illuminating, but now there has been a fatal dissevering of the two so that all the inherited stories of the past, even the most recent past, can only be collected as so many ancient myths to which any Casaubon-like effort to restore their meaning, and, in so doing, re-illuminate them, must inevitably fail. The remnants of the cultural past now confront us, as the ruins of Rome confront Dorothea, as “gigantic broken revelations.”42 It is the prose writer’s task to sort through this miscellany and find adequate reflectors of its hidden unity or totality. Hence the directionality of Eliot’s hypotaxis, which seeks to assimilate and enlarge our sense of the enormous motion of History occurring in the background of the novel at any given time, impinging on both the characters’ lives and the realist author herself, who must now reconcile an imperfect art form and representational vehicle with the totality of a new life world in the process of its own emergence.

Eliot’s Prose of the World

According to the narrator what impinges most on her ability to represent Gesellschaft are the newly felt exigencies of an increasingly complex modern spatiotemporal order: particularly the new borderless “homogenous, empty time” of industrial-capitalist modernity. Distinguishing herself from her predecessor Henry Fielding, she writes,

A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his place among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is observed to walk under, glories in his copious remarks and digressions as the least imitable part of his work, and especially in those initial chapters to the successive books in his history, where he seems to bring his arm-chair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty ease of his fine English. But Fielding lived when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by our needs) when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings.43

Here, the narrator describes Fielding’s style in a manner similar to Auerbach’s description of Homer’s lusty hypotaxis, with its meandering progressions and retrogressions, moving alternately backwards and forwards within the diegetic space-time of the epic storyworld. For Auerbach all these oscillations occur in the classic epic without producing narrative suspense or impatience. The same is true for Fielding’s reader, who is imagined in Eliot’s characterization as a rapt and patient listener, taking in the “lusty easy” of the chatty author’s “fine English.” The first sentence in the above passage, with its exponentiating clauses, produces in the reader a sense of the self-fashioned historian’s capacious style, resembling a “colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is observed to walk under.” The next sentence, however, abruptly shifts gears. The historical conditions under which the present author produces her narrative have changed irrevocably from those of “a hundred and twenty years ago.” No longer is there time, as now “time, like money, is measured by our needs,” for the chronicler of the past (novelist and historian forming an unproblematic unity for Fielding) to “bring his arm-chair to the proscenium and chat with us.” And, in any case, the narrator asserts, the totality of what must be captured by the chronicler is now too vast and complicated for such a meandering approach to succeed: “We belated historians must not linger after his example…. I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.”44

The historically sensitive novelist must focus her attention instead on a “particular web,” or cross-section, within the larger pattern of cosmic “relevancies,” which are now too large for full description and “lusty ease” of narration. Instead the narrator is forced to jump back and forth dialectically from one center of consciousness to another and thus across different narrative threads, often in a single sentence “zooming” in and out, as it were, on the various webs of connection that would seem to connect these different centers of consciousness, but which cannot, because of a kind of cognitive parallax, be seen when we focus only on one character at a time.

The literary artist’s compromise, though, is not just one between syntactical experimentation and conformity, but also between the ends and means of her representation whose object—the process of historical transformation itself—now needs more time to elaborate than the social history to which her literary predecessor had confined himself, for once again “time, like money is measured by our needs.” Here, as always, Eliot’s reference to money is a pointed one, which gives the comparative analogy a whole new index of meaning, whereby the enlargement of monetary needs brought about by the Enclosure Acts and the subsequent dissolution and subsumption of the old self-subsisting agrarian communities into the ranks of the proletariat (which her novel prophesies with the coming of the railroad) is therefore concomitant, if not in some way actually identical, with the formation of the hourly wage which erodes the leisure time that Fielding’s narrator could enjoy “when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings.” This comment is made bitterly ironic when we note that that once slow-ticking clock, which will now be used to calculate the periods of necessary and surplus labor time in the working day, not to mention Benjamin’s and Anderson’s “homogenous, empty time” of the modern nation, was manufactured early on in Eliot’s native Coventry, which she took as the basis for her representation of provincial life in Middlemarch.45

What should be concluded from all this then is that, far from being a more economical method of representation than Fielding’s, as this passage would seem to suggest on first glance, Eliot’s dense comparative analogies and complicated syntax actually forestall and delay the very object they are put in the service of conveying—historical transformation—so as to multiply indexes of meaning that dramatize on an ever larger scale a more total depiction of that historical process in motion, which any one cross-section in the web of her narrative events can be made into an opportunity for her sentences to elaborate. The period between the switch in narrative requirements and protocols described by the narrator is thus also the period in which the historical transformations of Middlemarch-society are slowly, as the narrator says in a passage to be analyzed later, “presenting new aspects in spite of solidity.”46

Third-Space, or, The World in a Water Drop

The social totality it seems can only be reached in this roundabout way, by constant recourse to such closed examples and comparisons (such as the one between her method of representation and Fielding’s), which provide the narrator with convenient models for discussing the hypothesized characteristics of the larger social transformation that she wants to take as the primary object of her novel’s representation, but which she cannot access directly. These narrative asides seek out metaphors that project a kind of third-space between the narrator and the object of her representation—an abstract, or virtual plane, sustained by the author’s hypotactially expanding syntax, whose exponentiating clauses gesture to multiple levels of meaning and significance all within a few sprawling sentences. However, as the invocation of this comparative third-space starts to slip from the narrator’s view, the narrator relates it back to the absent-present force of History, allowing the reader to associate the shape and feel of the sentence itself with those abstract, multilayered forces (social, political, and economic) bearing down on both her characters and her own narrative strategies. Such third-spaces provide a placeholder for the more properly collective drama of the historical narrative Eliot wants to tell, but which the novel, as an inherited form with a strong predilection for individual over collective drama, is ill equipped to represent even when it adds more characters to the mix. Instead the random materials of everyday life, which, as Anderson argued, had once adequately allegorized the nation, must now—if they are to continue reflecting back to the reader an image of his or her own spatiotemporal reality—cognitively map, or somehow metaphorically vehiculate, a spatial, temporal, and economic relationship to a larger totality, which, already by the time of the novel’s composition and what will soon become the imperialist “scramble for Africa,” must now extend beyond the metropolis to unobserved regions of the globe.

For Jameson, it is the discovery of “modernist or proto-modernist language”—for example that of a Henry James or Virginia Woolf, whose circumlocutions trace the body of some vague abstraction bearing down on their characters and frustrating linguistic expression—that at last affords the literary artist “some space, some third term, between the subject and the object alike” that can mediate the lost part of the metropolis’s life world: that whole segment of the process of production now located elsewhere. Eliot’s sentences are precisely those, then, of a prefigurative proto-modernism, mapping, by hypotactic additions and metaphoric redoubling, the totality of a social body already on the verge of impenetrable global diffuseness.47

In her effort to capture this totality, Eliot turns even the most obscure actions or chance events in the plot into renewed opportunities for her syntactic inventions to project images of interrelationship, which have the accumulative effect of attributing more and more agency to the system of relationships itself than to any of the parties involved. Middlemarch is not then, as Williams would have it in The Country and the City, “a novel of a single community.”48 It is rather “a novel of a single community” set against the backdrop of some vast “web” of social relationships, extending far beyond the lives of any one of the novel’s cast of characters, who are nonetheless at times made to “stand in” inadequately for this larger social process in formation, which we only glimpse here and there in the narrator’s omniscient asides.

This is especially the case whenever the topic is that of historical transformation itself, as in the famous passage about “the double change in self and beholder”:

Old provincial society had its share of this subtle movement: had not only its striking downfalls, its brilliant young professional dandies who ended by living up an entry with a drab and six children for their establishment, but also those less marked vicissitudes which are constantly shifting the boundaries of social intercourse, and begetting new consciousness of interdependence. Some slipped a little downward, some got higher footing: people denied aspirates, gained wealth, and fastidious gentlemen stood for boroughs; some were caught in political currents, some in ecclesiastical, and perhaps found themselves surprisingly grouped in consequence; while a few personages or families that stood with rock firmness amid all this fluctuation, were slowly presenting new aspects in spite of solidity, and altering with the double change of self and beholder.49

Omniscient asides, like this one, force into view an image of the flow of History as it goes on behind the backs of the novel’s characters, shaping them and the horizon of their choices without their knowing. The artist’s struggle is to find an appropriate method of telling this dual narrative, of dramatizing at the level of the sentence the egoism of any one character and at the same time the flow of history to which their egoism blinds them. The recurring method is to turn “old provincial society”—in other words, Middlemarch and its surrounding neighborhoods—into an impersonal organism with its own “subtle movements” and “less marked vicissitudes,” which can then be foregrounded for lengthy descriptions and analyses put in motion by Eliot’s dialectically expanding hypotaxis. These small but significant changes are apprehended, as I will show in a moment, by a metaphorical switching back and forth between “weaker” and “stronger” lenses of microscopic inspection, the first focusing, we could say, on the level of character and plot—the ethical domain of choice and action—and the second on spatiotemporal setting, which, when magnified to such a degree by the narrator, is revealed, as if in the flash of some new scientific discovery, as the very process of History itself.

The fabric of this totality is thus one, as the above passage already makes clear, of perpetual weaving and unweaving, of various rises and falls in economic fortunes, some happy and others tragic, which are perpetually shaping and reshaping “the boundaries of the social intercourse.” Eliot’s sentences, however, add to these images of the simultaneous rise and fall shades of the dialectic whereby the quantity of changes enumerated begin to suggest a qualitative transformation in the social fabric as a whole, which marks, at least figuratively speaking, the advancement of History in the novel, “begetting new consciousness of interdependence”:

Municipal town and rural parish gradually made fresh threads of connection—gradually, as the old stocking gave way to the savings-bank, and the worship of the solar guinea became extinct, while squires and baronets, and even lords who had once lived blamelessly afar from the civic mind, gather the faultiness of closer acquaintanceship. Settlers, too, came from distant counties, some with an alarming novelty of skill, others with an offensive advantage in cunning.50

What is especially poignant about this passage is that it demonstrates that the problem of representing the totality of capitalist relations—capitalism here being the absent-present force driving down the esteem of the aristocracy in the eyes of the rising bourgeoisie, transforming individual savings into finance capital, leading to the extinction of the “solar guinea” with the introduction of the sovereign, and driving more and more people into urban centers—is not a representational problem that is freely chosen, but one that asserts itself at the very level of the sentence itself, particularly in the artist’s attempt marshal all this material towards the development a realist aesthetic capable of managing (and, to a certain degree, resolving by way of some form of ideological closure) the paradoxical nature of capitalism, which, by creating an ever more tightly knit fabric of social relationships, makes relation itself ever more subtle and therefore harder to detect.

These projected images of Gestalt-being that flicker in Eliot’s hypotactically expanding syntax, frequently mix metaphors borrowed from the laboratory experiments of the sciences, which encourage us to think of the transformations of Middlemarch society as part of a larger (and, for Eliot, gradual) social evolutionary process embedded in nature. When, for example, the rector’s wife and town gossip Mrs. Cadwallader surprises Sir James Chettam with the news of Dorothea’s engagement to Casaubon, instead of merely interjecting to tell us that Mrs. Cadwallader intended no malice beyond her customary pursuit of gossip, the narrator digresses in what becomes one of the novel’s most potent metaphors of Gestalt-being that points as much towards an implied natural history of human relations as, by way of a dialectical cancellation and elevation of the original metaphor, to a social and economic history of the same:

Even with a microscope directed on a water-drop we find ourselves making interpretations which turn out to be rather coarse; for whereas under a weak lens you may seem to see a creature exhibiting an active voracity into which other smaller creatures actively play as if they were so many animated tax-pennies, a stronger lens reveals to you certain tiniest hairlets which make vortices for these victims while the swallower waits passively at his receipt of custom. In this way, metaphorically speaking, a strong lens applied to Mrs Cadwallader’s matchmaking will show a ply of minute causes producing what may be called thought and speech vortices to bring her the sort of food she needed.51

Here, the narrator’s allusion to the mini-world of the water drop and the living organisms it contains—while on the surface a metaphorical way of explaining Mrs Cadwallader’s relative innocence within the larger machinations of the novel’s plot which she nonetheless puts in motion—deploys a repertoire of dialectical maneuvers, which herald ever more extraneous content into the structure of one mammoth sentence, pointing, as this material accrues, well beyond the closed world of the water drop. The initial metaphor of this microscopic world—which originally linked the social sphere of the gossip to that of a predatory organism passively contributing to the kill-or-be-killed law of nature by the simple virtue of its inherited traits—is then expanded and re-grounded by the narrator’s reference to “so many animated tax-pennies” and the “receipt of custom,” which point now to both economic and historical indexes of meaning whereby the circulation of gossip that the organisms’ interrelationship was meant to convey is likened also to the circulation of tax money (and therefore also that other side of taxation: the flow of capital) as well as the passing down of custom, by which any system, natural or economic, also comes to be “naturalized” and thought of, however mistakenly, as just the kind of closed natural organism being metaphorically examined here.

Such a metaphor operates dialectically then, turning the initial tenor—gossip—first into an opportunity for a meditation on the natural world and then, in due course, into an opportunity for the narrator to discuss the secret machinations of the natural organism under “a stronger lens” as if they might vehiculate—or animate like so many “animated tax-pennies”—the social and economic totality as well. For a moment, the contained, and particular, world of the water drop is elevated to the categorical position of the universal—the totality itself—only for that register of meaning to pass from view as the sentence dialectically reverses back to its original “motivation of the device,” which was Sir Chettam’s discovery of Dorothea’s engagement to Casaubon through Mrs. Cadwallader.

The metaphor’s momentary reflection of the social totality thus dramatizes its own impossibility. First with the warning against “coarse” interpretations—of which Eliot’s own metaphor, by the force of its sheer expansiveness and totalizing nature, is surely one—and then again, this time more pointedly, by the narrator’s deployment of an “as if” qualification, which deprives the metaphor of its would-be copular yoking of vehicle to tenor, transforming it instead into a mere similitude that can only allude to the thing to which it is compared by establishing this “third-space” between the subject and the object of its definition by way of a third term, which it is neither/nor. This third term—the contained world of the water drop—thus offers neither a wholly accurate nor necessarily imprecise representation of either the social world of gossip or money, but, in both instances, something somewhere in between, which hovers into view only for the duration it takes to read the sentence. For although we are confident that Middlemarch’s characters remain living parts of Eliot’s storyworld even when the narrator forgets them, analogies to water drops and later to pier-glasses are references to objects outside of the diegetic space of the novel and therefore survive only for the length of time that the author chooses to entertain them, vanishing all at once if not picked up again in the next sentence or even phrase.

As Catherine Gallagher notes, “The subtlety of such movements among referential levels, together with their frequency and seeming candor, the softening and hardening from instances to generalities and back again, reassures the reader that thisfiction is always connected to the stuff of the real.”52 Gallagher, however, goes on to make a muddle of Eliot’s representational strategies and dialectical syntax, insisting that, because the relationship between the real and the fictive in Middlemarch is always asymptotic (i.e., never converging), Eliot only uses such comparisons to highlight the fictive singularity of her text, as it once again “slides” giddily away from the real.53 It is a mistake, however, to attribute to Eliot, as a result of the description of her own representational strategies as provisional (at best approximate and at worst inadequate), some kind of poststructuralist skepticism or giddy freeplay, which would evacuate the text’s conceptual machinery of any cognitive purchase on reality.54 Eliot’s dialectical tropes are better thought of instead as closed models meant, if not to convey the ever elusive thing-in-itself (the totality), then at least the condensation of its characteristics, which here is the very movement of the dialectic in both its natural and historical manifestations, represented as much by those “certain tiniest hairlets which make vortices for [their] victims” as by the very shape and feel of the sentence itself, which its own metaphorical terminology seems as apt to describe as anything else.55

Circulation and Sublime Labor

It is worth recalling here Marx’s comments in the Grundrisse about the important role that conceptual models of circulation play in mapping totality from a trans-individual perspective: “Circulation, because a totality of the social process,” he says, “is also the first form in which the social relation appears as something independent of the individuals, but not only as, say, in a coin or in exchange value [“so many animated tax-pennies”!], but extending to the whole of the social movement itself.”56 Middlemarch’s deployment of such metaphorical models of circulation thus achieves for Eliot the properly non-individual plane of the sociological system in which she wants to place the drama of Middlemarch, to which she significantly adds the more sociological subtitle, A Study of Provincial Life.

The unfettered movement of Eliot’s metaphoric “hairlets which make vortices for [their] victims,” which furnish the novel with its first conceptual model of a trans-individual circulation system, acquires even greater specificity, when echoed later in the novel’s figuration of the encroaching railroad (that strong signifier of capitalist development and harbinger of technological modernity) as the very force and pull of History itself:

As [Caleb Garth] said, “Business breeds.” And one form of business which was beginning to breed just then was the construction of railways. A projected line was to run through Lowick parish where the cattle had hitherto grazed in a peace unbroken by astonishment; and thus it happened that the infant struggles of the railway system entered into the affairs of Caleb Garth, and determined the course of this history with regard to two persons who were dear to him.57

What business breeds, it is hoped of course, is more business, that is, more surplus value or capital, which must then be reinvested in technological innovations like the railway that will expand and support the circulatory system Marx calls Money-Commodity-Money’, or M-C-M’—“where M’ = M + ∆M, i.e. the original sum advanced plus an increment,” such that “[m]ore money is finally withdrawn from circulation than was thrown into it at the beginning.”58

Although Eliot’s narrator limits the determining-force of the railway here to “two persons who were dear to him,” Caleb Garth later invokes the technological expansion of the circulatory system as a process ineluctably pulling the entire collective being, including those not so “dear,” into the force field of capital’s expanded scale of reproduction. When he and Fred Vincy surprise some enraged agricultural workers, who have set about destroying the railroad tracks that signify a threat to their way of life, he is exasperated by what he can only interpret as their backwardness: “Now, my lads,” he says, “you can’t hinder the railroad: it will be made whether you like it or not. And if you go fighting against it, you’ll get yourselves into trouble.”59 The contradiction in Garth’s naturalization of development, however, is inescapable: technological expansion is both ineluctable—“you can’t hinder the railroad”—but also protected by law, and so not really in the end inevitable, but simply the logic of a certain mode of production legally protected from external impediments, be it the current division of land, machine-breaking, or rick-burning.These, coincidently, are all legal protections close to the heart of the self-fashioned “progressive” and would-be liberal parliamentarian Mr. Brooke, who proclaims on the hustings (with the dramatic irony of one who exaggerates for rhetorical effect not knowing that history will prove his exaggerations right, but not necessarily in the way imagined): “It won’t do, you know, breaking machines, everything must go on—trade, manufactures, commerce, interchange of staples—that kind of thing—since Adam Smith, that must go on. We must look all over the globe.”60

The railway—as both a concrete thing and also the marker of some larger system—is a properly “sublime object” insofar as for Immanuel Kant, Nicholas Brown reminds us, “The sublime … requires the capacity to recognize that the sublime object is conceptually totalizable—in fact, it positively requires that we do so totalize it—at the same time as we fail to totalize it aesthetically,” since what is ostensibly condensed in that object must also surpass it in order to produce that emotion called the sublime.61 The railroad thus serves as a local and concrete manifestation of industrialization and capitalist development within the closed world of Middlemarch, but also conveys the global march of capital’s circulation prophesied by Mr. Brooke with more prescience then he would have guessed. It is in this sense, as with the microscopic world of the water drop previously discussed, that the title Middlemarch names, at one and the same time, a specific site and location in the “web,” or totality, of those relationships that Eliot wants to represent and a closed laboratory experiment in which the characteristics of the totality as a whole will be hypothesized, examined, and then, by the permutations of Eliot’s dialectical sentences, sublimed.62

The sublime for Eliot, however, is no longer as it was for Kant merely the mind’s self-satisfaction with its ability to grapple with totality through the concept of infinity.63 That self-satisfaction, where it can be found, no longer pertains to the apprehension of one’s own mental capacity to think the totality, but instead must now also involve the apprehension of the “social body” that has created totality as the concrete product of its own embodied labor. The aesthetic qualities of the sublime thus become for Eliot a way of evoking the totality of relationships behind whatever object serves momentarily as their temporary placeholder; it is this same “social body” that is the elusive referent allegorized by the novel’s the various figures of circulation, which, often working in tandem with Eliot’s sublime objects, are deployed and then put in motion by Eliot’s dialectical and hypotactically expanding syntax.

In Caleb Garth’s “mental associations,” this becomes the circulation of labor itself—what Marx calls “human labour in the abstract”:64

Caleb Garth often shook his head in meditation on the value, the indispensable might of that myriad-headed, myriad-handed labour by which the social body is fed, clothed, and housed. It had laid hold of his imagination in boyhood. The echoes of the great hammer where roof or keel were a-making, the signal-shouts of the workmen, the roar of the furnace, the thunder and plash of the engine, were a sublime music to him; the felling and lading of timber, and the huge trunk vibrating star-like in the distance along the highway, the crane at work on the wharf, the piled-up produce in warehouses, the precision and variety of muscular effort wherever exact work had to be turned out—all these sights of his youth had acted on him as poetry without the aid of the poet, had made a philosophy for him without the aid of philosophers, a religion without the aid of theology. His early ambition had been to have as effective a share as possible in this sublime labour, which was peculiarly dignified by him with the name of “business.”65

Sublime labour: what is grasped here is not just individual labor, but a continuous, abstract labor, which circulates throughout these various scenes of work-a-day existence assimilated and arranged in the large middle sentence. Here, each instance of labor is connected to the next, forming an equal part of one sublime totality put on par by Caleb’s musings with the category of the Absolute in Romantic poetry, the Ideal in philosophy, and God in Christianity. But at a more practical level, what is being observed and assimilated here is merely labor in the process of being “congealed,” to use Marx’s metaphor, in the development of the various machinery of the increasingly cooperative production of industrial capitalism and the “piled-up produce in warehouses” that is its ultimate result. “Let us now look at the residue of the products of labour,” says Marx: “There is nothing left of them in each case but the same phantom-like objectivity.”66 The commodity, for those who are willing to contemplate its “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties,” raises the specter of a sublimely abstracted labor, bestowing upon its commodities a “phantom-like objectivity,” as so many “merely congealed quantities of homogenous human labour, i.e. of human labour-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure.”67 What is lacking from Garth’s romantic vision of this “sublime labour,” however, is precisely the image of those “hairlets which make vortices for [their] victims,” deployed in the earlier passage, which here would have had to vehiculate the force of capital itself as “the swallower [who now] waits passively at his receipt of custom”—the surplus value generated by the worker—when all that congealed labor is incorporated back into the circulation of MCM’ via exchange value. Such exploitation is glimpsed only briefly in Mrs. Cadwallader’s implicit comparison of Mr. Vincy to a vampire (“one of those who suck the life out of the wretched handloom weavers in Tipton and Freshitt. That is how his family look so fair and sleek” [M 327]) and in Caleb’s final bathetic reduction of this whole sublime process of production to the name of “business,” which, as Alan Mintz reminds us, means simply “the replacement of labour value by money value.”68

So, while Eliot’s dialectical sentences mirror rather perfectly the voracious appetite of capital as it was pulling ever more raw material and people within its grasp and repurposing them—“axiomizing” them as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would say—and in the process transforming the social fabric of “old provincial society,” Eliot’s syntactical mediation of the socially and globally transformative power of capitalist accumulation does not give any representation of the actual class antagonisms driving that process, especially in her native Coventry which, as already noted, she took as the basis for her representation in Middlemarch. On the side of labor, we glimpse these class conflicts only briefly in the shadowy figures of the agricultural workers protesting their assimilation (such as those caught by Caleb and Fred Vincy sabotaging the railway) and in the angry cottager Dagley, who drunkenly tells his landlord Mr. Brooke, “look to yoursen, afore the Rinform has got upo’ your back,” when the latter comes to tell Dagley that he has locked up his son for poaching a leveret on his land.69 These, however, are figures caught in the crosshairs of the transformative process which Eliot’s syntax seeks to give shape and feeling. They would not have particular relevance to the Coventry that the industrial revolution was producing. As social historian John M. Prest writes,

In 1830 Coventry still epitomized the old order, in which there were many ranks and conditions of men within a single, homogeneous society. But Coventry could not stand still while England moved, in the end Coventry succumbed to the standards of the nineteenth century all the more painfully for her long resistance to them. By 1865 the old, compact, ordered society of 1830 had broken up: in its place were the pieces, labelled capital and labour. There was an increased awareness of class, less deference to birth, and business was conducted on the principle of individual interest without reference to the feelings of the community.70

What we get instead is the syntactical image of the evolving totality, both microcosmic and macrocosmic, but there are no longer in Middlemarch any “ideal types,” or “world-historical” figures representing the major forces and movements of their historical period, which Lukács had famously identified with European realism prior to 1848; this is because Eliot has found a new language in which she is able to express these movements and forces, albeit metaphorically, in all their non-humanness, which after all is how capitalism was most often coming to be felt.

Low Expectations

“The irony of Middlemarch,” writes Eagleton, “is that it is a triumph of aesthetic totalisation deeply suspicious of ideological totalities,” particularly those propagated by her characters.71 The inevitable failure of their endeavors to grapple cognitively with totality is most explicitly dramatized by Casaubon’s doomed search for “the key to all mythologies”—“he had undertaken to show … that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally revealed”—and Lydgate’s unrealized scientific quest for “the primitive tissue” of all organic beings.72 The problem as Eliot’s omniscient narrator carefully puts it is that, while “[s]igns are small measurable things, … interpretations [of those signs] are illimitable”; “all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors and act fatally on the strength of them”.73

For Eliot this cognitive failure is “part and parcel” with what becomes the novel’s coded prohibition against its characters’ reformist ambitions. For if the social totality cannot be comprehended, even in some partial, mediated way (ironically the very method adopted by the narrator), then it is equally impossible, the novel suggests, to intervene in that totality and reform or revolutionize it according to a conscious plan or project. This is a lesson that the novel’s idealistic characters—its would-be Theresas—can only learn through their own trial and error. Dorothea, for example, toys with the idea of setting up a worker’s colony that will improve the living conditions of the working poor. Lydgate and Casaubon, for their part, seek reforms in the respective fields of medical science and mythography. Even Mr. Brooke, with the help of Ladislaw, stands for parliament as a reformer. Each of them, however, comes to discover that their ambitions are impractical. The totality of the issues they seek to address with their pet projects prove beyond their mastery, due as much to a lack of skill as to what the narrator suggests over and over again is the complex historical intractability of the social-evolutionary arc itself, which will move at its own chosen pace. As Seeber notes, a “shadow of melancholy failure looms large over Utopian attitudes and projects” in the novel once the latter are “exposed to the complexities of ‘real’ life.”74 For this reason, he says, “In the course of his or her life the hero or heroine acquires maturity and satisfaction by an act of renunciation, by partly making peace with society,” rather than trying to transform it.75

For the younger characters, Dorothea, Lydgate, and Ladislaw, this is a decision reinforced by pecuniary necessity. It is significant that the only character who turns out better that he had seemed to promise (“no such failure” in the narrator’s words) is Fred Vincy, who drops his pseudo-aristocratic pretensions to become “a theoretic and practical farmer,” producing “a work on the ‘Cultivation of Green Crops and the Economy of Cattle-Feeding’ which won him high congratulations at agricultural meetings.”76 Vincy presciently, even if somewhat pathetically, bends his skills and intelligence to the rationalizing economic spirit governing the very process of capitalist transformation in which the whole of Middlemarch society is caught up and in so doing creates a modicum of stability for himself.

What we are made to feel, then, in Eliot’s syntactical flashes of this social totality is that the organization of society is such that revolutionary or even reformist goals are implausible and out of sync with the reality that confronts them. As Williams observes in The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence, Eliot’s characters by the time we get to Middlemarch no longer exist in tidy “networked” communities like Hayslope, but find themselves instead enmeshed in a conflicting web, or social tangle, that expresses not so much community as its very point of crisis:

The network, we might say, connects; the web, the tangle, disturbs and obscures. To discover a network, to feel human connection in what is essentially a knowable community, is to assert … a particular social value: a necessary interdependence. But to discover a web or a tangle is to see human relationships as not only involving but compromising, limiting, mutually frustrating. And this is of course a radically different consciousness: what is … a modern consciousness; in fact the first phase of a post-liberal world: a period between cultures, in which the old confidence of individual liberation has gone and the commitment to social liberation has not yet been made.77

Eliot’s manages this historical feeling of disappointment in the individual’s ability to affect social change with the invention of an omniscient, controlling narrator, who intrudes to eke didactic—“mature”—lessons out of the failure and shortsightedness of such utopian longing. In so doing, Eliot reconciles the contradictory poles of her representation, arguing that a romantic national continuity with the past and the natural evolution of the group to a mature democratic inclusiveness and tolerance must be won largely by submitting to the impersonal movement of the social totality, and making small preparatory modifications to one’s behavior: “the growing good of the world,” as the narrator concludes, “is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”78 No sooner is the march of History conjured, than its image is transformed from a sublime one into a bathetic one, as the narrator intrudes again to caution against anything that seeks to go beyond a dutiful submission to History’s will and telos (which, it is worth remembering, was also Eliot’s excuse for not supporting female suffrage: the time had not come).

It is thus in the space between the historical past and her own present that the narrator’s “maturity”—as a “structure of feeling”—begins to take shape, often in the form of a kind of “saying” or sententious expression of wisdom, syntactically expressed in such a way that bars refusal. “[L]ife must be taken up on a lower stage of expectation, as it is by men who have lost their limbs,” says the narrator. The specific context is Lydgate’s realization that if his marriage to Rosamond is going to survive its various tensions and disappointments, then “the tender devotedness and docile adoration of the ideal wife must be renounced.”79 But the “saying,” the wisdom proffered by the narrator, comes at the end of the sentence and is therefore both detached and detachable, aspiring to a level of generality that seeks to surpass and transcend the context that had seemingly inspired it, but which now appears as a mere “motivation of the device.” Not just marriage, but life in general “must be taken up on a lower stage of expectation.”

For Isobel Armstrong, Eliot’s “sayings,” which “emerge from the narrative with a delicate, oracular dogmatism,” create so many “bridges, not between our world and the world of the novel”—which, she says, would typically be the purposes of such omniscient asides in the Victorian novel—“but between the world of the novel and our world, for … George Eliot’s procedure depends upon the constant corroboration and assent of the reader to her sayings.”80 To this, it should be added that the bridge she creates is also between our past (real or imagined) and our present, a bridge which is then effectively collapsed. For if what was true in the past holds also for the present, there are no longer any new lessons to be learned. Such a “structure of feeling,” captured and condensed in these “sayings,” can best be summarized as the elevation of the fact of a historical disappointment, of desire delayed, into an eternalized ontological present.81 The end result is the chastening of any revolutionary or reformist enthusiasm in her characters or reader.

The novel’s utopian impulse seeks its gratification not within the field of representation, in plot and action, but over them, in the mastering of the materials of representation and in the representation itself, in that sententious omniscience, at once stylish and precise in its description of both objective and subjective worlds—“a control, precisely, based on sad resignation,” Williams says, “a maturity constructed as that exact feeling”82—with which the narrator can tell us that “all of us are born in moral stupidity” and make us feel that individual enlightenment, if it ever comes, will only be for those already too world-weary to act.83 As Franco Moretti argues:

in Eliot’s novels the representative of humour and maturity is—the narrator. … [M]aturity is no longer within the story, but only in the disembodied universe of discourse. And the relationship between the two levels of the text is inversely proportional: the more devastating the characters’ failure, the more impressive the narrator’s self-mastery. It is the discontinuity between maturity and life that is stressed here, not their amalgam. … [M]aturity is no longer entrusted to “actions”….84

The imagined community in Middlemarchis one that by 1871, in order to be believable, has to project a certain proneness to error onto the field of action, which the novel’s metaphoric and syntactical codification of the social totality suggests has been usurped by a seemingly ineluctable process of production that is beginning to circumscribe the globe. Influenced by the gradualism of Darwinian evolutionary theory, with its emphasis on the slow process of variation through the “natural selection” of accidental traits over time, Eliot turns her realism into both an aesthetic and ethic: for the narrator, there are no grand narratives of progress and thus also no realistic utopian projects; all that matters is that we embrace our limited options and weigh our decisions thoughtfully, all while accepting that whatever success we do achieve will always be partial. The pragmatism of such pessimism is as admirable as it is without illusions; but it is also symptomatic of a bourgeois culture and liberal ideology of progress that no longer has any confidence in its own superiority. There are no longer any “great expectations,” or for that matter “lost illusions.” The more the fabric of the totality that binds these disparate actors together in their isolation is glimpsed and given some form of stylistic and syntactical mediation, the more closed and suffocating it seems, the more such hopes for large-scale reconciliation or transformation are expressed now from the beginning with low expectations: “Many Theresas have been born who found no epic life.” In lieu of such a life, Eliot gives us not just a new kind of novel, but a new kind of prose.

Notes

1. Henry James, Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Editions (New York: The Library of America, 1984) 1041.
2. Fredric Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism,” The Modernist Papers (London: Verso, 2007) 158.
3. James, Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers 1041.
4. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 (London: Abacus, 1975) 64.
5. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 88.
6. Georg Lukács, “Realism in the Balance,” Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1977) 31.
7. Carolyn Lesjak, Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian Novel (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006) 2-3. To be clear, a non-mimetictheory of representation is not the same thing as a non-referentialtheory of representation (latter of which would be an oxymoron).
8. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin—New Left Review, 1976) 1058-59.
9. Despite accusations of “vulgar” Marxism, it is important to preserve the metaphor of the mirror (i.e. reflection), as more so than other metaphors it firmly establishes the idea of a confluence between objective and subjective “worlds,” social-historical reality and the artwork—a confluence which, far from being abstract, is rooted in everyday experience and the natural phenomenon of human perception. For a productive (if somewhat speculative) attempt to preserve and complicate the metaphor of the mirror, see Pierre Macherey, “Lenin, Critic of Tolstoy,” A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffery Wall (London: Routledge, 2006) 117-51.
10. I am inspired here by Fredric Jameson’s analysis of Theodor W. Adorno’s sentences, “in which the actual machinery of sentence structure is itself pressed into service, in all its endless variety, and mobilized to convey meaning far beyond its immediate content as mere communication and denotation.” Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic(London: Verso, 1990) 64.
11. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1971) 67, 56.
12. Fredric Jameson, Representing Capital: A Commentary on Volume One (London: Verso, 2011) 7.
13. Lukács, The Theory of the Novel 60.
14. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation or Reality in Western Literature, fiftieth-anniversary edition, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2003) 6-7.
15. Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation or Reality7.
16. Mimesis: The Representation or Reality 11-12.
17. Mimesis: The Representation or Reality 42-43.
18. Mimesis: The Representation or Reality 44.
19. Fredric Jameson, Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2013) 3-4.
20. George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Rosemary Ashton (London: Penguin, 1994) 326.
21. Franco Moretti goes so far as to proclaim in his influential study of the European Bildungsroman: “George Eliot...and everything changes”— “so far, in fact, as to bring this genre to its natural conclusion.” Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: TheBildungsroman in European Culture, new ed., trans. Albert Sbragia (London: Verso, 2000) 214.
22. Eliot, Middlemarch 418-419
23. Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 2006) 115.
24. Middlemarch 96
25. Middlemarch 3
26. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised ed. (London: Verso, 2006) 6.
27. Anderson, Imagined Communities 7.
28. Imagined Communities 24.
29. Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London: Verso, 2006) 103.
30. Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Society, trans. Charles P. Loomis, ed. Charles P. Loomis (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2002) 37, 76.
31. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981) 12.
32. Jameson, Representing Capital 6. I am thus unable to agree with Louis Althusser’s sentiment that a “theory of models” is alien to Marxist epistemology, and merely an empiricist fetish, what he calls an “ideology of knowledge.” Louis Althusser et al., Reading Capital: The Complete Edition, trans. Ben Brewster and David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2015) 39, 39n14.
33. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke UP, 1991) 51.
34. Jameson, Postmodernism 51-52. Here, Jameson specifically invokes his concept of “cognitive mapping” to describe a whole “new (and hypothetical) cultural form” yet to be seen. However, looking over Jameson’s work as a whole, it is clear that he also associates the impulse to map cognitively with the “ideal of realism (traditionally in one form or another the central model of Marxist aesthetics as a narrative discourse which unites the experience of daily life with a properly cognitive, mapping, or well-nigh ‘scientific’ perspective).” Jameson, The Political Unconscious104. His call in Postmodernismis thus, in some respects, merely for a realism appropriate for the new era of global, multi-national capitalism, which will preserve and evolve the cognitive impulse of the older realist tradition.
35. George Eliot, Mill on the Floss, ed. A. S. Byatt (London: Penguin, 1979) 305.
36. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973) 65.
37. Middlemarch 3
38. The Theory of the Novel 41.
39. The Theory of the Novel 60.
40. Hans Ulrich Seeber, “Utopian Mentality in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871/72) and in D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915),” Utopian Studies 6.1 (1995): 33.
41. “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. Everything in such ages is new and yet familiar, full of adventure and yet their own.” However, “Kant’s starry firmament now shines only in the dark night of pure cognition, it no longer lights any solitary wanderer’s path…No light radiates any longer from within into the world of events, into its vast complexity to which the soul is a stranger. And who can tell…the fitness of the action to the nature of the subject.” The Theory of the Novel 29, 36.
42. Middlemarch 193
43. Middlemarch 141
44. Middlemarch 141
45. For a discussion of Coventry’s early watchmakers and the importance of the clock to industrial work-discipline, see E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present 38 (1967): 66 and passim.
46. Middlemarch 96
47. Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism” 159-60.
48. Williams, The Country and the City 174.
49. Middlemarch 96
50. Middlemarch 96
51. Middlemarch 59-60
52. Catherine Gallagher, “George Eliot: Immanent Victorian,” Representations 90.1 (2005): 63.
53. Gallagher, “George Eliot: Immanent Victorian” 65. Having bracketed the real by reducing it to a straw-man typicality from which the fictive text swerves away in its fictive particularity, Gallagher can only reinvest the work with meaning by making it about of the process of reading itself: “Eliot uses the gap between type and instance to create a momentum, an impulse toward the prosaic that is indistinguishable from the desire to read a fiction.” “George Eliot: Immanent Victorian” 68.
54. For an interpretation in this vein, see J. Hillis Miller’s influential “Narrative and History,” ELH 41.3 (1973): 455-73.
55. Freedgood for her part compares this alienation of objects from their extra-diegetic (non-fictional) existence and their subsequent elevation into metaphors with non-literal meanings to what Marx calls “commodity fetishism,” whereby exchange-value (i.e. fungibility of commoditized objects with other monetized objects) occludes their multifaceted connection to both production and the natural environment from which their raw materials are drawn. Freedgood, The Ideas in Things 111-138. I am willing to agree with Freedgood up to the point of her association of metaphor with “commodity fetishism.” Eliot’s narrator undoubtedly picks up and puts down objects stripped of their natural and social relationships, and this is no doubt a symptom of the increasingly reified space of Victorian consumer society. However, the metaphorization of these objects works with varying success to retrieve for reflection some image, or cognitive mapping, of the social whole from which the objects had been abstracted in the first place.
56. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin—New Left Review, 1973) 196-97.
57. Middlemarch 553
58. Karl Marx, Capital 251.
59. Middlemarch 559
60. Middlemarch 504
61. Nicholas Brown, Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth-Century Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2005) 17.
62. For a much different analysis of Eliot’s syntactical construction of the sublime, see Neil Hertz, George Eliot’s Pulse (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003), which eschews the Kantian moment of cognitive totalization, emphasizing instead the experience of engulfment and subjective dissolution that defines the Romantic sublime.
63. For Kant’s discussion of the conceptualization of totality through infinity, see Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987) 106.
64. Capital 128.
65. Middlemarch 250-251
66. Capital 128.
67. Capital 163, 128.
68. Alan Mintz, George Eliot and the Novel of Vocation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1978) 136.
69. Middlemarch 397
70. John M. Prest, The Industrial Revolution in Coventry (London: Oxford UP, 1960) xi.
71. Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology 119.
72. Middlemarch 24, 148
73. Middlemarch 25, 84-85
74. Seeber “Utopian Mentality in George Eliot’s Middlemarch” 35, 31.
75. “Utopian Mentality in George Eliot’s Middlemarch” 36.
76. Middlemarch 832
77. Raymond Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (London: The Hogarth P, 1970), 88.
78. Middlemarch 838, emphasis mine
79. Middlemarch 652
80. Isobel Armstrong, “‘Middlemarch’: A Note on George Eliot’s ‘Wisdom,’” Critical Essays on George Eliot, ed. Barbara Hardy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970) 116, 118.
81. The tendency of the developmental arc of the realist novel to dissolve itself into an eternalized ontology of the present is examined exhaustively in Fredric Jameson’s The Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2013), which contains a chapter on Eliot.
82. The Country and the City 173.
83. Middlemarch 194
84. Moretti, The Way of the World 222.