Human Tissue in the Realist Novel, 1850-1895 3031266390, 9783031266393

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Human Tissue in the Realist Novel, 1850–1895

Ben Moore

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine Series Editors

Sharon Ruston Department of English and Creative Writing Lancaster University Lancaster, UK Alice Jenkins School of Critical Studies University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK Jessica Howell Department of English Texas A&M University College Station, TX, USA

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting series that focuses on one of the most vibrant and interdisciplinary areas in literary studies: the intersection of literature, science and medicine. Comprised of academic monographs, essay collections, and Palgrave Pivot books, the series will emphasize a historical approach to its subjects, in conjunction with a range of other theoretical approaches. The series will cover all aspects of this rich and varied field and is open to new and emerging topics as well as established ones. Editorial board: Andrew M. Beresford, Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University, UK Steven Connor, Professor of English, University of Cambridge, UK Lisa Diedrich, Associate Professor in Women's and Gender Studies, Stony Brook University, USA Kate Hayles, Professor of English, Duke University, USA Peter Middleton, Professor of English, University of Southampton, UK Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Professor of English and Theatre Studies, University of Oxford, UK Sally Shuttleworth, Professorial Fellow in English, St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, UK Susan Squier, Professor of Women’s Studies and English, Pennsylvania State University, USA Martin Willis, Professor of English, University of Westminster, UK Karen A. Winstead, Professor of English, The Ohio State University, USA

Ben Moore

Human Tissue in the Realist Novel, 1850–1895

Ben Moore University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands

ISSN 2634-6435     ISSN 2634-6443 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine ISBN 978-3-031-26639-3    ISBN 978-3-031-26640-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26640-9 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © John Rawsterne/patternhead.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

Although most of this book was written quite recently, parts of it have been in gestation for a long time. The earliest elements of the material on Le Ventre de Paris that appears in Chap. 4 derive from a 2013 paper at the conference ‘In the jungle of cities’: Mobs, Murders, Crowds, Riots and Crises in the Modern City, at Chetham’s Library, Manchester. I remain very grateful to the organisers and attendees of this event. Chapter 2 originated in a paper at the Becoming Animal with the Victorians conference, at the University of Paris VII in 2016. An earlier version was published as ‘Becoming-evolutionary?: Animal Transformations in Kingsley’s Alton Locke’ in Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens, 85 (2017). My sincere thanks go to Fabienne Moine for helping to shape the article during the editorial process. It is reproduced here by kind permission of the journal. Chapter 3 began life as a conference paper at NEMLA 50 in Washington DC in 2019. I am especially indebted to the organisers and fellow speakers of the ‘George Eliot at 200’ panels, whose comments and suggestions have in several places influenced the resulting chapter. Chapter 3 also benefitted enormously from the attentive and insightful reading of my colleague, Nicholas Carr. Thanks are also due to the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam for an award of sabbatical hours in 2022 that enabled me to complete this manuscript. I am grateful as well to the anonymous manuscript reviewer, whose advice was instrumental in my final revisions, and to the editors of Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, to which this book is honoured to belong. Finally, I thank my family and above all Ellie, without whose support this book would not have happened. It is dedicated, with unstinting love, to Stanley and Arthur. v

Contents

1 Introduction: Human Tissue 1 2 Becoming-evolutionary?:  Animal Transformations in Alton Locke17 3 Allegorical  Realism and the Figure of the Human in The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch39 4 Zola, Moore, Lee and the Vivisectional Novel67 5 Conclusion: The Primitive Tissue of Realism91 Index95

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About the Author

Ben Moore  is Assistant Professor in English Literature at the University of Amsterdam, having previously studied at the University of Manchester and taught at Cardiff University. He works mainly on nineteenth-­century novels, with interests in architecture, cities, money, childhood and modernity, as well as biology and science. He is the author of the forthcoming book Invisible Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Rethinking Urban Modernity (Edinburgh University Press), along with various journal articles and book chapters. He is Co-Editor of the Gaskell Journal.

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Human Tissue

Abstract  This chapter introduces the concept of ‘human tissue’ as a way of approaching the realist novel in the nineteenth century. Engaging with theoretical discussions of the human from Amitav Ghosh, Sylvia Wynter, Georg Lukács, Michel Foucault and others, as well as discourses of material ecocriticism and the Anthropocene, this introductory chapter argues that the novels to be discussed in this book simultaneously construct or stabilise the figure of the human and break down or destabilise it. The chapter also engages with Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1834) in order to argue that ‘human tissue’ is a particularly appropriate concept for reading literature from the Victorian period. Keywords  Human tissue • Man • Material ecocriticism • Anthropocene • Victorian literature • Realism • Thomas Carlyle Society stands before us like that wonderful piece of life, the human body, with all its various parts depending on one another, and with a terrible liability to get wrong because of that delicate dependence. George Eliot, ‘Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt’, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 627 (Jan 1868), 1–11 (p. 4).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Moore, Human Tissue in the Realist Novel, 1850–1895, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26640-9_1

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In a world that is being dramatically reshaped by anthropogenic climate change, often in devastating ways, it makes sense to regard the realist novel with suspicion. If individualism and anthropocentrism have a literary year zero, the realist novel that came to fruition in nineteenth-century Europe and America would seem to be it. Literary scholars from Ian Watt to Nancy Armstrong have read the development of the modern novel as bound up with the development of the individualised human subject, even if by the second half of the nineteenth century we can identify ‘a radical reformulation of the individual as a subject layered by successive displacements’.1 The realist novel, we tend to assume, puts the human at the centre, even or especially when these humans are layered, complex characters who demand our sympathy and understanding. If the realist novel’s interest in human individuality is the aesthetic face of a political, social and environmental problem, an expression of a narcissistic concern with a narrowly conceived (Eurocentric, white, usually male, usually middle-class) sense of humanity as the master of the world and the hero of its own stories, then different forms of reading would seem to be in order. This is the route taken by many eco-minded critics in recent years, such as Jesse Oak Taylor’s ‘atmospheric reading’, which ‘revises the common notion that the novel is a genre predicated on (and formative of) the human individual as the key locus of agency, ethics and subjectivity’, or Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s work on allegorical ways of thinking the Anthropocene, in which she explores texts that challenge ‘the telos of individuation so favored by the social realist novel’.2 Similarly, Emily Steinlight’s reading of ‘mass life’ rather than the individual as the subject of the nineteenth-century novel ‘recharacterizes the genre’s essential human material and its narrative project’.3 Perhaps the best known of these challenges is Amitav Ghosh’s contention that the realist novel is fundamentally incapable of representing climate crisis. For Ghosh, the dominant form of the novel has been built on 1  Nancy Armstrong, How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719–1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p.  8. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957). 2  Jesse Oak Taylor, The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2016), p.  14. Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Allegories of the Anthropocene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), p. 48. 3  Emily Steinlight, Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2018), p. 15.

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assumptions about what a normal, probable world looks like, in ways which relegate the supposedly extreme and fantastical to the margins, or exclude them entirely. Ghosh’s argument is less about individualism than it is about the construction of a certain model of ‘Man’ as species-being (although he does suggest that individuality became heightened in novels produced in industrialised countries in the later twentieth century).4 This figure of Man puts itself at the centre of the universe, confidently overseeing an apparently controllable and knowable nature. Both literary practices and patterns of colonial settlement, says Ghosh, had by the nineteenth century ‘come to reflect the uniformitarian expectations that are rooted in “the regularity of bourgeois life”’, so that it is ‘in exactly the period in which human activity was changing the earth’s atmosphere that the literary imagination became radically centred on the human’.5 This form of the human is established at the cost of both non-human nature and the ability to anticipate or comprehend ‘uncanny and improbable events’.6 There are two stories here, then, which are by turns complementary and in tension with one another. On the one hand, the realist novel produces and interrogates individual human subjectivity, and on the other hand, it produces and explores a concept of human species-being, the figure of ‘Man’. An individual character might crystallise what it means to be human, and so reinforce a sense of human species-being, or alternatively the individual might give a false or incomplete impression of the human, and so need to be supplemented by the mass, community, culture, politics or society in order for a novelist to reach a truer representation of humanity as a whole. The idea that even a careful, dialectical balancing of these dimensions of the human—individual being and species-being—could lead to an accurate picture of the human within realism is, however, highly questionable. As Sylvia Wynter has argued, in a similar way to Ghosh, the central problem of modernity, what she calls ‘the coloniality of being/power/truth/ freedom’ is traceable to the overrepresentation of the figure of Man ‘as if it were the human itself’.7 Emerging out of Latin-Christian Europe in the Renaissance to replace the theocentric division of humanity (and nature) 4  Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), pp. 78–79. 5  Ghosh, p. 35, p. 66. 6  Ghosh, p. 30. 7  Sylvia Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument’, CR: The New Centennial Review, 3.3 (2003), 257–337 (p. 260).

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into the pure and the profane, the new biocentric model of Man displaces the divine and regrounds itself on a ‘newly projected human/subhuman distinction’, supported by emerging physical and (from the nineteenth century onwards) biological sciences.8 Wynter’s account, which builds on Foucault, locates a fundamental problem in this ‘descriptive statement of the human on the biocentric model of a natural organism’. This is because it defines Man through the positioning of non-Europeans as its subhuman Others, with ‘the peoples of Black African descent […] constructed as the ultimate reference of the “racially inferior” Human Other’.9 The implication of this line of argument is that the figure of the human which European novelists explore in ever richer and more complex ways during the nineteenth century is fatally limited, developed on the basis of an exclusion of ‘all other models of being human’.10 Is it then possible for a critique of this ‘purely biocentric’ model of Man to emerge from the realist novel itself?11 To escape the problem of the overrepresentation of Man, Wynter argues, it is necessary to instead explore ‘the ontogeny/sociogeny, nature-culture mode of being human’, as thinkers such as Frantz Fanon do.12 This involves seeing the human not as the centre of a stable biological order of being, but rather as what—to anticipate the below—I want to call a sociobiological tissue. In this version of the human, it is understood as a combination of biological and social factors, so that it is not naturalised in biology, but neither is it wholly separable from the biological. As the following sections will show, it is my contention in this book that we can identify within the nineteenth-century realist novel elements of this enmeshed, unstable, ‘ontogeny/sociogeny’ form of the human, even while these always exist in tension with forces that seek to build and maintain a narrower, more exclusionary figure of Man.

Human Nature, Fragility and Belatedness Of course, the question of how the human is formed in relation to nature, and how this comes through in literature and culture, has a long tradition. For Georg Lukács, Robinson Crusoe (1719), arguably the first English  Wynter, p. 264.  Wynter, p. 267, p. 266. 10  Wynter, p. 281. 11  Wynter, p. 310. 12  Wynter, p. 280. 8 9

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novel, is an emblem of ‘the individual, egoistic bourgeois isolated artificially by capitalism’.13 The novel as a form begins at the point when the individual is separated from his community to become an independent actor. Proceeding from an analysis of this artificially produced bourgeois individualism, Lukács offers a reflection on nature that eventually leads us back to a version of Ghosh’s arguments from a different angle. According to Lukács, during the period of its ascension the bourgeoisie sees itself less as conquering nature than as an extension of nature, since ‘the “ordered”, calculable, formal and abstract character of the approaching bourgeois society appears natural by the side of the artifice, the caprice and the disorder of feudalism and absolutism’. From this perspective, nature is not in opposition to the human, but rather incorporated within the human as the basis of the bourgeoisie’s right to rule. ‘Nature’ comes to refer to ‘authentic humanity, the true essence of man liberated from the false, mechanising forms of society’.14 If nature is understood as ordered and calculable, and as embodied in bourgeois values that counter the arbitrary and unnatural rule of aristocracy (we might think of appeals to ‘common sense’ or ‘human nature’ here), then the aesthetic dimension of the bourgeois ascendancy—above all the novel—will tend to reject representations of nature as chaotic or unruly. A chaotic nature will be seen as a departure from nature’s proper state, and indeed as a political threat. Darwin, for instance, recuperates the disorder of evolving nature in his well-known image of the ‘entangled bank’, in which many ‘elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us’.15 The appearance of chaos is resolved by the recognition of fundamental underlying laws, such that the natural world implicitly validates the combination of rule-based order and laissez-faire freedom inaugurated by bourgeois dominance. Michel Foucault also sees the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries as a turning point, but for him it is not just that the bourgeoisie creates a new conception of the human. Instead, he famously claims that ‘man is an

13  Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1971), p. 135. 14  History, p. 136. 15  Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray, 1859), p. 489.

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invention of recent date’.16 ‘Before the end of the eighteenth century’, he argues, ‘man did not exist’.17 Man comes into being as the dominant form of what it means to be human when he takes himself to be the sole origin and principle of his own existence: ‘Modern culture can conceive of man because it conceives of the finite on the basis of itself’.18 Man takes himself as his own sole law, as both subject and object of all systems of knowledge, not on the basis of having an eternal soul, or as the expression of a higher power, but precisely through his position as a limited, finite, restricted being. When George Eliot, writing as Felix Holt, speaks of both society and the human body as being a ‘piece of life’ with a ‘terrible liability to get wrong’, it is, from a Foucauldian perspective ultimately derived from Nietzsche, this very vulnerability that reinforces the centrality of the human as both individual subject and species.19 The human is ‘wonderful’ not despite its weakness, but because of its weakness, which must be studied, treasured and safeguarded. Lukács and Foucault’s analyses of the human as I have described them are in a sense opposites. For Lukács, the human is secured on the ground of nature, which becomes the basis for the bourgeoisie to speak in the name of human nature. For Foucault, Man is grounded only on himself. These positions can be reconciled, though, if we take the internalisation of nature within Man as part of the process of humanity turning itself into its own sole principle. If the truest form of nature is within the human, then humanity can turn away from external nature while claiming still to represent it. This narcissistic sleight of hand empowers Man as the spokesman for and guardian of a nature in which he sees himself always reflected. Yet this production of both the human subject and humanity as universal subject on the basis of finitude and vulnerability means that the human is always fragile. It is my argument in this book that the realist novel often reflects in and partakes in this dialectic, such that the production of the human we find in it simultaneously involves the breakdown, dispersal or disintegration of the human. To make this case, I explore three case studies, covering the years 1850–1895, in which the realist novel is shown to indeed be anthropocentric, but ambiguously so. The figure of the human in these 16  Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 422. 17  Foucault, p. 336. 18  Foucault, p. 346. 19  See especially Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. by Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

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texts is at once constructed and pulled apart, and indeed it is constructed through being pulled apart, and vice versa. In making this case I agree with Claire Colebrook’s suggestion that there is an ‘incredibly ambivalent and ungraspable notion of human agency and intentionality that you get in Victorian literature’, which is at times lost in contemporary conversations around the Anthropocene. In much Victorian writing, there is a sense of life beyond the human that is not reducible to us, and which is ‘not Darwin’s notion of life creating ever more diverse and wonderful forms, it’s entropic’.20 In my readings, this disruption of the human exists alongside, and is intermeshed with, a drive to conceptualise the human in a positive form. While I conceive of realist fiction broadly, following Fredric Jameson, as encompassing the naturalist writing of Zola, the period covered in Human Tissue in the Realist Novel can also be speculatively read as representing the emergence, peak and decay of the realist novel, all within a few decades.21 Madame Bovary, perhaps the classic example of realism, was published in 1856, the same year the OED gives for the first citation of realism as a term of aesthetics in English, in Ruskin’s Modern Painters Volume III.22 Meanwhile, Jule-Français Champfleury’s Le Réalisme, the first theoretical discussion of the idea, emerged in 1857. By 1879, however, Zola seemed to have either opened a new phase of realism or announced its end with The Experimental Novel. George Moore declares that after reading L’Assommoir in 1877, he felt (though he later revised this opinion) that not only were Victor Hugo’s ideas decisively disproven, but that ‘[Théodore de] Banville and Gautier were declared to be warmed­up dishes of the ancient world’.23 In the 1880s, then, realism was already in question. By 1910, if Virginia Woolf is to be believed, the realist novel was worked out, with modernism waiting in the wings to take over.24 With this trajectory in mind, one of the suggestions of my readings is that the realist novel, like the human, is always a belated category. For Foucault, writing in the 1960s, man is not only the invention of a recent 20   Peter Adkins, Wendy Parkins and Claire Colebrook, ‘Victorian Studies in the Anthropocene: An Interview with Claire Colebrook’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 26 (2018). https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.819. 21  Jameson criticises ‘generations of critics intent on somehow separating Zola from the mainstream of nineteenth-century realism’. Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2013), p. 45. 22   ‘realism, n’, 4.a, OED Online (Oxford University Press). www.oed.com/view/ Entry/158931. Accessed 20 September 2021. 23  George Moore, Confessions of a Young Man (London: William Heinemann, 1928 [1886]), p. 76. 24  Virginia Woold, Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown (London: Hogarth, 1924), pp. 11–12.

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date, but one ‘perhaps nearing its end’.25 More recently, for Cohen and Colebrook, ‘humanity comes into being, late in the day, when it declares itself to no longer exist, and when it looks wistfully, in an all too human way, at a world without humans’.26 Behind these ideas is Hegel’s owl of Minerva, which ‘spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk’.27 Historical understanding, argues Hegel, always emerges belatedly, when that which it describes is coming to an end. In this manner, the realist novel not only grapples with a figure of the human which new discoveries in biology, evolution, geology and astronomy had placed in doubt, but does so in a form that seemed already on the point of replacement by the time it had been fully conceptualised.

Human Tissue: A Concept for Reading It is no coincidence that the writers I discuss here were all interested in scientific, and especially biological, theories of human and animal life. Charles Kingsley was the author of Glaucus, or the Wonders of the Shore (1855), and lectured on The Limits of Exact Science as Applied to History (1860), as well as corresponding with Darwin. George Eliot shared G.H. Lewes’s interest in biological science, and wrote ‘The Natural History of German Life’ in parallel with Lewes’s Sea-Side Studies in 1856.28 Zola based his account of the experimental novel on the work of the physiologist and vivisectionist Claude Bernard (1813–78). One of Vernon Lee’s earliest essays was a scientific opposition to vivisection (‘Vivisection: An Evolutionist to Evolutionists’ in 1882), and she produced several works on ‘psychological aesthetics’ that proceeded from a scientific basis (including Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics in 1912, with Clementine AnstrutherThompson, and The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics in 1913). In each case, a desire to scientifically investigate the human by means of literary writing combines with moments of the dissolution, disintegration or contestation of the human.

 Foucault, p. 422.  Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook, p. 12. 27  G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. by T.M Knox (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 13. 28  Diana Postlethwaite, ‘George Eliot and Science’, in The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, ed. by George Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 98–118 (p. 104). 25 26

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In order to explore this conjunction, the readings in this book are organised around the concept of ‘human tissue’. As I understand it, this is an ambiguous term that hovers on the border between biology, philosophy and literature. Among other possibilities, human tissue activates the following concerns, which recur across the following three chapters: 1. The question of what lies (materially, biologically) at the basis of the human, one version of which would be Lydgate’s interest in primitive tissue in Middlemarch. 2. A concern with layering, which can be biological (layers of skin, cells etc.) but also temporal, in terms of the layering of epochs, or of evolutionary stages, or archaeological strata. 3. Tissue as the stuff of literature, or of writing, as in the feuilleton or the triple-decker novel; the novel can also be understood as thematically or generically layered, as when Dickens conceives of Oliver Twist alternating tragedy and comedy like ‘layers of red and white in a side of streaky, well-cured bacon’.29 4. The question of infection and interpenetration, as when Baudelaire writes in 1851 of the visitors to Paris’s public gardens, who had let their ‘tissues be permeated by white lead, mercury, and all the poisons needed for the production of masterpieces’; infection here is both within the individual, and the permeation of semi-urban space by the working classes.30 5. The psychical structure of the modern subject, especially as explored by psychoanalysis; Derrida, rereading Freud, remarks that ‘the subject of writing is a system of relations between strata’.31  Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 134.  Charles Baudelaire quoted in Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. by Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2006), p. 102. 31  Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan Bass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 227. See also Freud’s archaeological metaphors, including analysis as like ‘excavating a buried city’ (Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, The Standard Edition, Volume II, trans. by James Strachey and others (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 139) and a similar passage in ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’, in The Standard Edition, Volume III (1893–1899), trans. by James Strachey and others (London: Vintage, 1975), pp. 189–221 (p.192), as well as the passage on Rome as ‘a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past’ in Civilization and its Discontents, in Civilization, Society and Religion, The Penguin Freud Library, Volume 12, ed. by James Strachey and Albert Dickson (London: Penguin, 1985), pp. 243–340 (pp. 257–58). 29 30

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Without overriding or replacing it, the tissue offers an alternative to the web, which is the figure Gillian Beer uses to analyse George Eliot, as discussed in Chap. 3, and which Jane Bennett employs when describing what she calls ‘vibrant matter’ as ‘the complicated web of dissonant connections between bodies’.32 It is also an alternative to Donna Haraway’s ‘string figures’ in Staying with the Trouble, or Timothy Morton’s ‘threads’ in Dark Ecology.33 To talk of tissues is to place less emphasis on organised or distributed networks than the web, and less on lines of extension and twisting than strings and threads, while still sharing some affinity with these ways of thinking. Attending to tissues means paying close attention to practices of accretion and excavation, of piling up and digging down, and to lines of connection between the biological and the literary. It is closest perhaps to Iovino and Oppermann’s description of ‘storied matter’ as a ‘material “mesh” of meanings, properties, and processes’.34 Yet even here, tissue places a greater emphasis than mesh on processes of layering, which, as will become clear, are a central feature of each of the literary readings that follow. As the above reference points indicate, this book touches on issues that have been discussed in the field of material ecocriticism. In her work on vibrant matter, for instance, Bennett develops the concept of an ‘out-side’, understood as a strange, uncanny dimension related to the human but also resistant to it.35 Seeking to decentre the human in favour of the role of ‘nonhuman materials in public life’, Bennett explores the ‘becoming of things’, in which objects take on forms of agency and other attributes conventionally associated with humans.36 Stacy Alaimo’s concept of ‘trans-­ corporeality’ similarly posits that ‘the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world’, so that Nature can no longer be understood as a background, but must be recognised as being close as our own

32  Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 4. 33  Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 10. Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Colombia University Press, 2016). 34  Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, eds, Material Ecocriticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), pp. 1–2. 35  Bennett, p. 3. 36  Bennett, p. 2, p. 8.

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skin.37 Alaimo moves beyond traditional feminist theory, which tended to insist on a (necessary) separation of ‘woman’ from ‘nature’, but in doing so left the concept of a fixed, acultural nature ‘dangerously intact’.38 In arguing for a new conception of the biological body that sees it as changing and changeable, responsive to various forms of what we call culture, so that biology is not destiny, Alaimo develops an idea that I would argue is also present in a nascent form in Eliot’s use of ‘primitive tissue’ in Middlemarch. If, as Chap. 3 explores, primitive tissue raises the possibility of unfolding potential within the body, of tissue that is not singular even within itself, then Tertius Lydgate’s failure to unlock its meanings is symbolic of the way he becomes locked into a static and alienated identity, that of the respectable bourgeois doctor. In such instances, a trans-corporeal understanding of the human makes its presence felt, but as this example indicates, in the novels I consider this remains always in contestatory tension with a drive towards the establishment of Man in Foucault and Wynter’s sense.

Human Tissue in the Nineteenth Century Human tissue is, I would suggest, a particularly appropriate metaphor for reading literature of the Victorian period. The first use of ‘tissue’ in English comes in the fourteenth century, from Latin via Old French, and referred to richly woven cloth, often with gold or silver, but by the eighteenth century, the word had started to gather new meanings.39 First, the figurative meaning of that which is like a woven fabric: networks, webs, intertwined masses, and so on. This use is active from at least 1711. Second, the term ‘Tissue-paper’ emerged by the 1770s as a technical term for thin sheets of paper, a usage that is still familiar. These included in particular the printing paper that enabled a transferral of designs to pottery-ware, in a technique called ‘transfer printing’. From the 1750s, transfer printing was pioneered in England by Wedgwood (founded 1759) among others, to transfer often intricate printed designs from engraved copper or steel plates to tissue paper, and then to ceramics. The ubiquitous Willow 37  Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010), p. 2. 38  Alaimo, p. 5. 39  ‘tissue, n’, OED Online (Oxford University Press). www.oed.com/view/Entry/202513. Accessed 21 September 2021.

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pattern, for instance, first engraved in 1780, relied on this technique.40 This meaning connects tissue with processes of production, and indeed with early forms of mechanical mass reproduction. The most significant development of the Victorian period, however, was the biological application of ‘tissue’ to describe the substance or structure of animal and plant life. A tissue in this sense is an aggregation of related cells, which then itself forms part of a larger organism. The first citation in the OED for this usage comes from Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus in 1834, making it in effect a Victorian coinage. Carlyle’s hybrid work—at once a novel, a satire and a philosophical treatise—layers the new meaning on top of the older meaning of woven fabric, since the conceit of the text is that it is a philosophy of clothes. Reflecting in the opening chapter on the way that ‘man’s whole life and environment have been laid open and elucidated’, Carlyle’s imagined editor observes that ‘every cellular, vascular, muscular Tissue glories in its Lawrences, Majendices, Bichâts’.41 He then asks: How, then, comes it, may the reflective mind repeat, that the grand Tissue of all Tissues, the only real Tissue, should have been quite overlooked by Science—the vestural Tissue, namely, of woollen or other Cloth; which Man’s Soul wears as its outmost wrappage and overall; wherein his whole other Tissues are included and screened, his whole Faculties work, his whole Self lives, moves, and has its being?42

Carlyle satirically reverses the search for the truth of human life, which had penetrated down to the inner tissues of human biology, by finding the ‘only real Tissue’ to be the outermost one, the clothing we wear. The centripetal study of biological life as a route to understand the human is turned outwards, and replaced by a focus on the most apparently frivolous and superfluous aspect of the human. This early use of ‘tissue’ as a feature of the human body therefore immediately places it under question, 40  Robert Allen, ‘Technology’, in The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain: Volume 1, 1700–1870, ed. by Roderick Floud, Jane Humphries and Paul Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 292–320 (p. 310). 41  Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 3, p. 4. Carlyle is referring to the English surgeon and anatomist Sir William Lawrence (1783–1867), the French physiologist and vivisectionist François Magendie (1783–1855), and the French anatomist and pathologist Marie François Xavier Bichat (1771–1802), whose work on elementary tissue is an inspiration for Lydgate in Middlemarch. 42  Carlyle, p. 4.

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drawing attention to its doubleness as a term of both the inside (muscular or cellular tissue) and the outside (woven cloth or wrapping). Sartor Resartus is also a book about reinventing the human by breaking it down and building it back up again, on a model influenced by Christian spiritual autobiographies, but reshaped in a secular form. One way of reading the text is as moving progressively through the layers of clothing and human thought until we reach the ‘centre of indifference’, a negative state in which Carlyle’s hero, Professor Teufelsdrockh, feels himself to be ‘Nothing, Nobody’, a ‘dissevered limb’ of humanity, before this zero-state is reversed in the chapter called ‘The Everlasting Yea’ into a positive sense of duty and capacity that (modifying German idealism) finds transcendence in the everyday conditions that surround us: ‘Yes here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy ideal’.43 In this way, the book is a working through of Foucault’s argument that modern Man nominates itself as its own principle on the basis of finitude, and it is a forerunner of Charles Kingsley’s own imaginative version of this process in Alton Locke (1850), as discussed in Chap. 2. Yet to call the book’s narrative progressive or structured is to underplay what Carlyle is doing with the concept of tissues. In Book 1, Chapter 8, the frustrated editor of Teufelsdrockh’s papers comments that ‘by what chains, or indeed infinitely complected tissues, of Meditation this grand Theorem is here unfolded, and innumerable practical Corollaries are drawn therefrom, it were perhaps a mad ambition to attempt exhibiting’.44 Meditation, which is to say thought, is here a confection of tissues, understood not as neatly layered on top of one another but as interwoven in highly complex ways, so that this exercise of philosophical reason comes to resemble madness. Teufelsdrockh develops this concept in Book 1, Chapter 11, where it is explicitly metaphorical language that is the tissue of thought: Language is called the Garment of Thought: however, it should rather be, Language is the Flesh-Garment, the Body, of Thought. I said that Imagination wove this Flesh-Garment; and does not she? Metaphors are her stuff: examine Language; what, if you except some few primitive elements (of natural sound), what is it all but Metaphors, recognized as such, or no  Carlyle, p. 139, p. 149.  Carlyle, p. 41.

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longer recognized; still fluid and florid, or now solid-grown and colorless? If those same primitive elements are the osseous fixtures in the Flesh-Garment, Language,—then are Metaphors its muscles and tissues and living integuments.45

This passage anticipates Nietzsche in ‘On Truth and Lying in an Extra-­ Moral Sense’ (1873), where he argues that ‘when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers, we believe we know something about the things themselves, although what we have are just metaphors of things, which do not correspond at all to the original entities’.46 In both cases, language is made of metaphor, meaning it always stands in for something else, over which it is layered, and that there is no way of speaking ‘truthfully’, outside metaphor. Thought, which relies on language, is therefore also necessarily metaphorical, and the metaphor for metaphor, the thought which thinks thought, is tissue. In Sartor Resartus, then, human tissue becomes a heavily interwoven and mobile concept, referring to biological structure, clothing, human selfhood, thought, language and metaphor. The process of breakdown and reconstruction of the self that we find in Sartor Resartus can be described as what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘deterritorialization’ and ‘reterritorialization’, processes of de-structuring and re-structuring that are always ‘connected, caught up in one another’.47 This is also one way of framing the argument of this book: that the realist novel, at least in the examples discussed here, de- and re-territorializes the figure of the human by turning literary writing to bear on the material of science and philosophy. Appropriately, Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1980) can itself be approached as a tissue-work. According to Brian Massumi, for Deleuze and Guattari ‘a plateau is reached when circumstances combine to bring an activity to a pitch of intensity that is not automatically dissipated in a climax’, and this intensity can be connected to other plateaus, ‘creating a fabric of intensive states between which any number of connecting routes could exist’.48 This ‘fabric’ functions like a particularly disordered tissue, since Deleuze and Guattari push against  Carlyle, p. 57.  Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense’, in Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, ed. by Sander Gilman, Carole Blair and David Parent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 246–57 (p. 249). 47  Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. by Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 11. 48  Brian Massumi, ‘Translator’s Foreword’, in Deleuze and Guattari, pp. ix–xvi (p. xiv). 45 46

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structure and hierarchy more persistently than Teufelsdrockh’s already disordered notes in Sartor Resartus. ‘Each plateau can be read starting anywhere and can be related to any other plateau’, they claim, making this a malleable and open text; a ‘Body without Organs’ rather than ‘that organisation of organs called the organism’.49 Such ideas make Deleuze and Guattari especially appropriate for reading instances of the breakdown and regrowth of the human organism, as I do in Chap. 2. While the texts and authors explored in the following chapters are clearly not as amorphous and deterritorializing as Deleuze and Guattari, their anthropocentric positing of the human is nonetheless ambiguous. In different ways, Charles Kingsley, George Eliot, and Émile Zola and his English-language interlocutors have left us texts in which the human is produced in spite of, and through, all the things that make it impossible, ungraspable or unthinkable. Their writing portrays the human through a building up and breaking down of layers and interconnections that is as much allegorical, metaphorical and literary as it is realist, rational and scientific.

Chapter Outline Chapter 2 focuses on Chapter 36 of Charles Kingsley’s 1850 novel Alton Locke, where the hero recounts a dream during which he undergoes a series of transformations into various animals, beginning at ‘the lowest point of created life’ as a madrepore or coral, and culminating with the early history of humanity. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘becominganimal’, it argues that the evolutionary fantasy Alton Locke recounts plays out a tension between the restoration of fixed, molar identity and the molecular disruption of identity. The relevance of the dream’s origin in pestilence and fever is also considered, as is the role of death within it. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Kingsley’s text can help us formulate the new, ambiguous concept of ‘becoming-evolutionary’. Chapter 3 explores the figure of the human in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Middlemarch (1871), starting from the much-­ debated ending of The Mill on the Floss, which sees the heroine and her brother killed by a sudden and devastating flood. It argues that both novels are simultaneously realist and allegorical, and that Eliot’s vision of the human, which draws on her work translating Ludwig Feuerbach’s The  Deleuze and Guattari, p. 5, p. 149, p. 158.

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Essence of Christianity (1841/1854), is ambivalent. There is a combination of drives in these novels, through which they strive by turns to centre and de-centre the human. Reading through recent debates around the Anthropocene, and through Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘natural history’, allows us to see that Eliot’s allegorical realism has the potential to help us in thinking through the perceptual and representational challenges raised by climate crisis. Chapter 4 starts from Émile Zola’s ‘The Experimental Novel’, which in attempting to locate a scientific basis for the novel relies problematically on the ideas of the vivisectionist Claude Bernard. The chapter argues that this scientific cutting open and penetrating of the novel is part of an anthropocentric and reductive process, but that this is countered by features of the novelistic practice of Zola, such as the descriptions of the market in Le Ventre de Paris (1873), which register a sickness in bourgeois assumptions about the human and the treatment of animals that accompanies them. The chapter traces the influence of this tension within Zola to two late-nineteenth century writers who responded to him: George Moore and Vernon Lee. Moore imitated but also rejected Zola, while Lee wrote ‘On The Moral Teachings of Zola’ (1893) as part of her critical aesthetic project, but also published articles against vivisection. These ambivalent relationships to Zola, the chapter argues, reproduce a fundamental ambiguity within Zola’s own writing regarding the relationship between human life, animal life, and the realist novel as a form. The Conclusion revisits the topics raised in this Introduction by asking whether nineteenth-century realism has its own ‘primitive tissue’. With reference to Walter Benjamin and Fredric Jameson, it suggests that while realism often carries its own sense of ‘aura’, it is best approached as split, multiple, layered and permeable; in short, as a tissue.

CHAPTER 2

Becoming-evolutionary?: Animal Transformations in Alton Locke

Abstract  This chapter focuses on Chapter 36 of Charles Kingsley’s 1850 novel Alton Locke, where the hero recounts a dream during which he undergoes a series of transformations into various animals, beginning at ‘the lowest point of created life’ as a madrepore or coral, and culminating with the early history of humanity. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘becoming-animal’, it argues that the evolutionary fantasy Alton Locke recounts plays out a tension between the restoration of fixed, molar identity and the molecular disruption of identity. The relevance of the dream’s origin in pestilence and fever is also considered, as is the role of death within it. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Kingsley’s text can help us formulate the new, ambiguous concept of ‘becoming-evolutionary’. Keywords  Charles Kingsley • Evolution • Becoming-animal • Dream • Deleuze and Guattari Charles Kingsley (1819–75) was not only a priest, novelist, poet and Professor of History at Cambridge (1860–69), but also a keen amateur naturalist and biologist. In his 1855 book Glaucus; or, The Wonders of the Shore, which enthusiastically describes the pleasures to be gained from studying the flora and fauna along the coastline of Britain, he writes:

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Moore, Human Tissue in the Realist Novel, 1850–1895, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26640-9_2

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Happy, truly, is the naturalist. He has no time for melancholy dreams. The earth becomes to him transparent; everywhere he sees significancies, harmonies, laws, chains of cause and effect endlessly interlinked, which draw him out of the narrow sphere of self-interest and self-pleasing, into a pure and healthsome region of solemn joy and wonder.1

For Kingsley, the naturalist’s ecstatic vision of the natural world is an indication of God’s greatness. It is a vision defined by organic unity, in which ‘significancies’ and ‘harmonies’ create a wholly ‘interlinked’ and readable world. In Kingsley’s most telling phrase, the earth does not appear chaotic but ‘becomes […] transparent’. Later, he suggests that in observing scratches in rocks caused by glaciers, ‘the naturalist acknowledges the finger-­mark of God, and wonders, and worships’.2 The order and systematicity of the ‘Great Chain of Being’, which pre-­ Darwinian theories of evolution from Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Robert Chambers and others had disrupted, has here been reimagined in a new scientific register, as what Kingsley calls ‘chains of cause and effect endlessly interlinked’.3 As the critic Michael Page puts it, referring to Kingsley’s 1863 novel The Water-Babies, Kingsley is ‘concerned with affirming Christian values in light of the challenges put forward by Darwin’s evolutionary schema’; not by rejecting evolution, but by showing that the new scientific knowledge of the nineteenth century leads to a greater recognition of God’s glory.4 In this sense, the Christian naturalist is able to exceed narrow self-interest and achieve a transcendent state of ‘solemn joy and

1  Charles Kingsley, Glaucus; or, The Wonders of the Shore, 4th edn (Cambridge and London: Macmillan, 1859), p. 15. 2  Glaucus, p. 17. 3  The concept derives from classical Greek thought, particularly Plato. It holds that all organisms are connected in a unified and hierarchical structure, which is ultimately sublimated under God or some form of ‘Absolute’, with humans positioned above all other beings. According to Phillip Sloan, attempts to move away from such hierarchical fixity began in the 1740s with Linnaeus (1707–78), but became particularly prominent in Britain in the 1830s–40s. See Phillip Sloan, ‘The Concept of Evolution to 1872’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 Edition), ed. by Edward N. Zalta. URL = http://plato. stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/evolution-to-1872/. Wynter points out that the Chain of Being was reformulated in the nineteenth century as a structure of racial hierarchy, with black Africans positioned between white Europeans and animals. Wynter, p. 306. 4  Michael Page, The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H.G.  Wells: Science, Evolution, and Ecology (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), p. 119.

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wonder’ in which human reason, divine wisdom and the natural order are seamlessly combined. Kingsley pursued this theme of divine natural order in his sermons, at one point preaching that: Nothing is idle, nothing is wasted, nothing goes wrong in this wonderful world of God. The very scum upon the standing pool, which seems mere dirt and dust, is all alive, peopled by millions of creatures, each full of beauty, full of use, obeying laws of God too deep for us to do aught but dimly guess at them.5

This claim that even scum, dirt and dust have beauty, law, order and meaning indicates how deeply Kingsley’s vision of a harmonious natural world permeated his thinking, informing not only his perception but also his sense of what lay beyond perception. At the same time, he remains happy to concede that the divine law and meaning he found throughout nature remains only partly intelligible, even to the informed scientific observer. If Kingsley’s seaside naturalist has ‘no time for melancholy dreams’, melancholy dreams are nonetheless precisely what Kingsley had provided in his earlier novel of 1850, Alton Locke: Tailor and Poet, on which I focus in this chapter. In particular, I explore the extraordinary Chapter 36, ‘Dream Land’, where the hero, Alton Locke, experiences a fevered evolutionary fantasy that offers, at least in part, an alternative to the harmonious organic unity described in Glaucus. Reading Alton Locke through Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘becoming animal’, as outlined in A Thousand Plateaus, will allow me to interpret this dream as playing out a drama of ‘deterritorialization’ and ‘reterritorialization’, in which the unitary, or molar, is disrupted by the diffuse, or molecular, which then in turn undergoes a new restructuring. My reading also aims to show that the idea of evolution this chapter presents is in tension throughout with what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘involution’, a process which ‘form[s] a block that runs its own line “between” the terms in play and beneath assignable relations’.6 Unlike evolution, involution does not connect biological entities into a tree or line of progress, but instead brings them into provisional but

 Charles Kingsley, Charles Kingsley’s Sermons (New York: R. Worthington, 1882), p. 36.  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. by Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 263. 5 6

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transformative relations, which Deleuze and Guattari call ‘becomings’ (devenir). By combining involution and evolution, I argue, Kingsley’s novel indicates that before the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, evolutionary consciousness was in a state of openness, not yet defined by the binary choice between acceptance and denial of Darwinism. In the 1840s and early 1850s, at a moment when the general form of evolution was becoming clear but its details not yet publicly known or understood, a space had opened up for human and animal to come together in new imaginative and speculative ways. In taking this position, I pursue in theoretical terms a recent move towards analysing non-Darwinian evolutionary theories in Victorian fiction identified by Cannon Schmitt, who cites articles by Straley, Towheed and Glendenning.7 I am indebted, too, to Gillian Beer’s recognition that ‘Evolutionism has been so imaginatively powerful precisely because all its indications do not point one way. It is rich in contradictory elements which can serve as a metaphorical basis for more than one reading of experience’.8 At times, as in Alton Locke’s dream, these contradictory elements mean evolution has the potential to turn into its own undoing, to tip over into involution or becoming. In the final parts of the chapter, I take this idea further by asking whether Kingsley’s novel can be employed to formulate a new category of becoming, what might be termed ‘becoming-evolutionary’.

Alton’s Dream: The Collapse and Restoration of Self Before discussing Deleuze and Guattari in more detail, I want to sketch out the main features of Alton Locke’s dream. Kingsley’s novel, which is often considered part of the ‘Condition of England’ debate, is set against the background of Chartism, and focuses on the spiritual and psychological development of the working-class poet Alton Locke, torn between a desire for political action, attraction towards the aristocratic Lillian, and 7  See Cannon Schmitt, ‘Evolution and Victorian Fiction’, in Evolution and Victorian Culture, ed. by Bernard Lightman and Bennett Zon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp.  17–38 (p.  24). For an overview of pre- and non-Darwinian theories of evolution, see Pietro Corsi, ‘Before Darwin: Transformist Concepts in European Natural History’, Journal of the History of Biology 38 (2005), 67–83. 8  Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 6.

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the attempt to write an authentic poetry that goes beyond the inherited tradition of Romanticism. His dream in Chapter 36 takes place after he has visited the slum dwelling of an acquaintance, Jemmy Downes, where the air is ‘heavy with pestilence’, and where he witnesses the bodies of Jem’s wife and children lying dead from ‘poisonous fever gases’.9 Fever and pestilence here represent a miasmic disruption of ordered, coherent bodies, a form of ‘becoming-molecular’ that threatens to cross spatial and class boundaries, simultaneously undermining the beauty of nature praised by Kingsley and reinforcing his insistence that nature is formed of ‘chains of cause and effect endlessly interlinked’.10 The miasmic potential of fever reaches its moralistic apex in Chapter 39, where it is revealed that Alton’s cousin George has died of typhus contracted from a coat ‘which covered the corpses in that fearful chamber [i.e. Jem’s house]’ (AL 372), and which was later bought by George, in an example of his ‘buy-cheap-and-sell-dear commercialism’ (AL 372). In a move typical of English novels around this period (Bleak House (1852–53) being another famous example), Kingsley implies that wealth cannot escape the diseases of poverty, but should instead work to ameliorate their causes. As the police arrive in pursuit of Jem, who is suspected of killing his family, Alton sees him leap into an open sewer and drown, before stumbling home to his own apartment and to bed. Alton has contracted some form of fever or illness at the house, however, and it is this illness which gives rise to his dream, creating favourable conditions for the disruption of temporality and identity that follows, giving an example of what Freud calls ‘internal organic somatic stimuli’.11 For Freud, such stimuli are only one factor in generating dreams, and the same is true here for Kingsley, who integrates the illness with elements of Alton’s intellectual, religious and libidinal life. As the dream begins, Alton experiences ‘a strange confusion and whirling’ (AL 334) in his brain, and sees the figure of his mother standing at the foot of his bed, but finds himself unable to follow her. Time and space become deformed, as ‘The bedclothes gr[ow] and gr[ow] […] into a vast 9  Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 331, p. 332. Further references to this edition are given in the main text as AL. 10  Deleuze and Guattari, p. 300. 11  Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. by James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1976), p. 95.

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mountain, millions of miles in height’ (AL 334). Alton then enters a ‘raging fever’ (AL 335) in which: My fancy, long pent-up and crushed by circumstances, burst out in uncontrollable wildness, and swept my other faculties with it helpless away over all heaven and earth, presenting to me, as in a vast kaleidoscope, fantastic symbols of all I had ever thought, or read, or felt. (AL 335)

As Michael Page points out, one of the books Alton has been reading is Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle (1839), and the dream that follows resembles a passage in William Chambers’s popular evolutionary work of 1844, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.12 Beer also links the passage to Chambers’s ‘scale of development’.13 We might observe too that in Chapter 15 Alton reports reading books by William Bingley, who had written on British quadrupeds and botany in the early nineteenth century, and Thomas Bewick, author of a famous History of British Birds (1797–1804) which is also cited in Jane Eyre, published three years before Kingsley’s novel.14 Like the naturalist in Glaucus, Alton starts to see ‘significancies’ everywhere, but rather than appearing transparent and ordered, the world becomes a jumble of ‘fantastic symbols’, seen ‘as in a vast kaleidoscope’. His thoughts and experiences break free from controlling consciousness and the prosaic ‘circumstances’ that constrain them, to recombine in fantastical ways. In this sense, the dream is a pre-­psychoanalytic imagining of the collapse of repression. After a series of visions involving monstrous Hindu gods, culminating with an earthquake and tornado, Alton dreams that his soul is dropped into a cavern by the seaside, upon which he falls into darkness and is ‘turned again to my dust’ (AL 336), a phrase that invokes the funeral service from the Book of Common Prayer, and hence Christian death and rebirth. He next finds himself ‘at the lowest point of created life; a madrepore rooted to the rock, fathoms below the tide-mark’ (AL 336). Alton has now become an animal, if only barely one, and proceeds to pass through a whole series of animal embodiments, from crab, to fish, to ostrich, to giant sloth and finally baby ape, before becoming a child, then an adult, experiencing a symbolic progress through prehistory and the  Page, p. 117.  Beer, p. 273. 14  Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, 3rd edn (New York and London: Norton, 2001), p. 6. 12 13

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history of religion that culminates with Christianity, guided throughout by Eleanor, Lillian’s deeply religious cousin, reimagined as an angel. The descent into nothingness that precedes Alton’s animal transformations is not often commented on by critics, but is nonetheless important in the context of Kingsley’s theology. It can also, to anticipate my discussion below, be read as a form of becoming molecular. In envisaging a literal descent in which Alton ‘fell and fell for ages’ (AL 336), Kingsley touches on a theme he would explore in more detail in his sermon ‘De Profundis’, published as part of the Westminster Sermons in 1874. In this sermon he glosses the opening of Psalm 130, ‘Out of the deep have I cried unto thee, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice’, envisaging the psalm’s spiritual despair as a ‘horrible pit’ of confusion and disorder, in contrast to ‘the beautiful world of light, and order, and righteousness where he [David, the psalm’s voice] ought to be’.15 Through this experience, as Kingsley reads it, both physical and psychological identities are extinguished, matching Alton’s loss of self. The pit is described as: a place of darkness and of storms, a shoreless and bottomless sea, where he is drowning, and drowning […] It is a torturing, disgusting disease, which gives his flesh no health, and his bones no rest, and his wounds are putrid and corrupt. […] Yea, it is hell itself, the pit of hell, the nethermost hell, he says, where God’s wrath burns like fire.16

These references to disease and drowning recall Jem Downes, who dies in an ‘open tidal ditch’ (AL 333) behind his house, filled with ‘bubbles of poisonous gas, and bloated carcases of dogs, and lumps of offal, floating on the stagnant olive-green hell-broth’ (AL 333). In these ‘lumps of offal’, as with the corrupt and putrid wounds in the sermon, animal and human bodies are reduced to formless, disgusting matter, in a horrifying inversion of the divine natural order Kingsley imagines elsewhere. The chapter in which Jem dies is called ‘The Lowest Deep’ (Ch. 35, AL 325), referring to Alton’s despair at the failure of Chartism and Jem’s despair at the death of his family, as well as Jem’s death by drowning, but also evoking the ‘deep’ of Psalm 130, especially when taken in the context of the later sermon. In another connection between sermon and novel, Jem’s room is said to be ‘the very mouth of hell’ (AL 333), while in ‘De  Sermons, p. 66.  Sermons, p. 67.

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Profundis’ the watery deep is called the ‘pit of hell’, suggesting an equivalence between Jem’s death and the fall into spiritual darkness; an equivalence that is symbolically figured by Jem’s attempted suicide on Waterloo bridge, next to a ‘huge reflection of Saint Paul’s’ cathedral (AL 328) that points ‘down – down – down’ (AL 328). The sermon therefore reinforces the correlation already implied by the novel between physical, religious and psychological descent. Alton’s fever dream, however, allows him a baptismal rebirth out of water which is denied to Jem; towards the end of Chapter 36 he passes ‘like one who recovers from drowning, through the painful gate of birth into another life’ (AL 350). Such a rebirth would later become the central theme of The Water-Babies, where the death of Tom the chimney-sweeper in a river becomes the start of a new evolutionary growth, in which, as Beer puts it, he is ‘released from the ordinary cycle of human development, allowed to grow anew’.17 Anticipating Tom’s trajectory in the later novel, Alton’s dream knits an evolutionary understanding of the animal kingdom into a history of human progress that ends with a rational, Christian subject restored to wholeness and health. Kingsley’s mapping of the development of the natural world onto the growth of the individual is explicitly indicated at the end of the dream, just before the fever breaks, when angel-Eleanor tells Alton ‘your penance is accomplished. You have learned what it is to be a man’ (AL 350). Justin Prystash, in an article which draws together Kingsley, Carlyle, and Deleuze and Guattari in a discussion of Victorian identity formation, argues convincingly that Kingsley draws here on the theory of ‘recapitulation’ popularised in the early nineteenth century. This proto-evolutionary theory, which ‘holds that the stages of individual development (ontogeny), especially in the embryo, recapitulate or resemble the stages of species development (phylogeny)’, provides a basis for Kingsley ‘grounding identity in a single, divine origin’, as humanity and the natural world both come to be understood as pre-ordered parts of a larger whole ordained by God.18 Such a narrative relies on the idea that self-development is deeply embedded in, and manifested through, the tissues of the human body, making it as a form of ‘hybrid ontogeny/sociogeny’ that is as much biological as religious.19  Beer, p. 126.  Justin Prystash. ‘Rhizomatic Subjects: Thomas Carlyle, Charles Kingsley, and the Origins of Victorian Identity’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 66.2 (2011), 141–69 (p. 160). 19  Wynter, p. 273. 17 18

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Deleuze and Guattari I: Series, Structure and Desire Although Prystash’s interest in Deleuze and Guattari centres on their concept of the rhizome, taking Alton’s dream as a recapitulation also provides a way of moving towards Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘becoming-­ animal’, by pointing towards the presence, in Chapter 36 of Alton Locke, of what they call ‘series’ and ‘structure’, both of which are opposed to genuine ‘becoming’. In this section I consider briefly how series and structure operate in Alton’s dream, before shifting to explore how forms of becoming might function to undo or deterritorialize the order that has been imposed. For Deleuze and Guattari, a series works through resemblances: In the case of a series I say a resembles b, b resembles c, etc.; all of these terms conform in varying degrees to a single eminent term, perfection, or quality as the principle behind the series. This is exactly what the theologians used to call an analogy of proportion.20

In a series, the natural world typically comes to correspond to God, who perfectly embodies features which are imperfectly present in animals and humans. Evolution operates as a series of this kind if it is understood as a progression (or regression) along a line stretching from lowest to highest; even though, as critics such as Beer and Schmitt have shown, Darwinian natural selection properly understood threatens this view by removing all agency or teleology from evolution, insisting instead on ‘permanent instability and open-endedness’.21 Alton’s dream, however, does operate as a series in its progression from ‘lower’ to ‘higher’ forms of life, with organisms gradually becoming more and more perfect, from madrepore to rational Christian man. Interestingly, Deleuze and Guattari note that for Carl Jung, archetypal animal series were important in dreams, where ‘each term plays the role of a possible transformer of the libido (metamorphosis)’, although for Jung man was ‘no longer the eminent term of the series’.22 Under this reading, Alton’s animal transformations are a kind of sexual metamorphosis in which his libido has been released from repression and is seeking to locate an appropriate form in which to realise desire. In this respect, it is worth noting  Deleuze and Guattari, p. 258.  Schmitt, p. 25. 22  Deleuze and Guattari, p. 260. 20 21

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that Beer finds a pre-psychoanalytic primality elsewhere in Kingsley’s writing, claiming that The Water-Babies ‘has an oceanic richness typical of just pre-Freudian storytelling, in which all the elements of primal experience are present without interpretation’.23 The Jungian association of animal series and libido becomes especially relevant to Alton Locke if we follow Christopher Hamlin’s suggestion that Kingsley ‘sought to understand sexual desire in terms of Christian mysticism and as an aspect of incarnation’.24 Susan Chitty comments in a similar vein, if rather mildly, that the dream ‘has a faintly erotic tone’.25 In fact, sexual desire is positioned as a fragmenting, anti-rational force in the dream, most clearly when Eleanor states: ‘He who tears himself in pieces by his lusts, ages only can make him one again’ (AL 336). Alton’s self-­ destructive lust for Lillian, and his associated anger at his cousin and rival George, is dramatized through various metaphors of castration, including Lillian and George laughing at him as a ‘soft crab’ with ‘soft useless claws’ (AL 337), and Lillian hunting him as an ostrich in the form of an ‘Amazon queen, beautiful, and cold, and cruel’ (AL 337). She ends up wearing in her hair the plumes which have been torn from ostrich-Alton’s wings by his cousin, who has become a wild-cat. The dream’s journey towards manhood, then, is also about the gradual controlling and mastering of sexual desire, which is figured as dangerous and in need of replacement by healthy labour and spirituality. One way to understand this progression is in terms of the conflict Prystash identifies in Kingsley’s work between rhizomatic femininity and unified, coherent masculinity.26 This conflict reappears as the dream heads towards its conclusion, when Lillian returns as a ‘veiled maiden’ (AL 346) who tries to tempt the prehistoric human Alton away from his adherence to hard work, telling him: Come! I will be your bride, and you shall be rich and powerful; and all men shall speak well of you, and you shall write songs, and we will sing them together, and feast and play from dawn to dawn. (AL 346)  Beer, p. 126.  Christopher Hamlin, ‘From Being Green to Green Being’, Victorian Studies 54.2 (2012), 255–81 (p.  259). Hamlin here follows Susan Chitty, Charles Barker, ‘Erotic Martyrdom: Kingsley’s Sexuality Beyond Sex’, Victorian Studies 44.3 (2002), 465–88, and J.M.I. Klaver, The Apostle of the Flesh: A Critical Life of Charles Kingsley (Leiden: Brill, 2006). 25  Susan Chitty, The Beast and the Monk (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1974), p. 136. 26  Prystash, 145–7. 23 24

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By this point Alton is able to resist her however, and continues his task of boring through a vast mountain, displaying what T.C.  Sandars would famously call Kingsley’s ‘muscular Christianity’ in an 1857 review of his novel Two Years Ago.27 The dream’s series thus moves simultaneously from simpler to more complex forms of life, and from disordered to ordered libido. Alton’s dream also involves elements of ‘structure’. Structuralism, Deleuze and Guattari argue, rejected the theological progression-­ regression series in favour of structural relationships that could be compared with one another, in which different roles have analogical functions: ‘Thus [the anthropologist Jean-Pierre] Vernant can say that marriage is to the woman what war is to the man’.28 We see this pattern of analogy in the symbolic equivalence between Alton’s progression through the animal kingdom, the history of religion and the development of the human individual. It is significant in this respect that half way through the dream, at a point that marks the transition from animal to human, Alton experiences ‘Child-dreams—more vague and fragmentary than my animal ones; and yet more calm and simple’ (AL 342). The child is the border, or threshold, between the states of animal and human, which are at once analogically equivalent and positioned as lower and higher respectively. This is a combination of series and structure that equates to, and helps reinforce, Kingsley’s combination of Christianity, which believes in a teleological series culminating in God; and science, which is invested in a structural understanding of the world where visible signs provide evidence of immutable laws.

Deleuze and Guattari II: Becoming-animal and Becoming-molecular If my reading so far has positioned Kingsley primarily on the side of series, structure, progression and order, Alton’s feverish perceptions notwithstanding, there are also aspects of the chapter that operate as forms of ‘becoming’. Becoming for Deleuze and Guattari is ‘not imitating, or identifying with something; neither is it regressing-progressing; neither is it corresponding, establishing corresponding relations; neither is it producing, producing a filiation or producing through filiation’. One favourite  T.C. Sandars, ‘Two Years Ago, Saturday Review 3 (21 Feb 1857), 176.  Deleuze and Guattari, p. 261.

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example is the ‘block of becoming that snaps up the wasp and the orchid’, a reference to flowers, like the hammer orchids of Western Australia, which resemble female wasps, encouraging male wasps to attempt to mate with them and thereby bring about pollination. For Deleuze and Guattari such alliances or symbiotic manoeuvres are not primarily about filiation or evolution, since no ‘wasp-orchid’ will ever emerge from this practice, but rather about communication, or better, contagion, across boundaries. They call this ‘involution’, which can be understood as a creative act that moves between and across series and structure, cutting through both.29 Alton’s dream, as I have shown, begins with a contagion that fills the houses of the poor, and this inflects and infects the shape of all his animal experiences. In the same way as he flees death and disease at the house of Jem Downes, his dreams repeatedly trace a line of flight from death, which nonetheless repeatedly catches him. First, when he is a madrepore, or coral, he undergoes a dissolution of identity that is a kind of death: worst of all, my individuality was gone. I was not one thing, but many things—a crowd of innumerable polypi; and I grew and grew, and the more I grew the more I divided, and multiplied thousand and ten thousand-fold. If I could only have thought, I should have gone mad at it; but I could only feel. (AL 336)

The madrepore is an example of what British naturalists called zoophytes, a term Kingsley uses in Glaucus, defined by Danielle Coriale as ‘an intermediate category that floated between animals and plants’, neither one nor the other, and hence both fascinating and unsettling.30 Prystash notes that the madrepore’s name, meaning ‘mother-passage’, and its description in Glaucus as a ‘pretty mouth’ which is also ‘a slit with white crenated lips’, make it threateningly and rhizomatically feminine—the rhizome being taken by Deleuze and Guattari as a model for ‘acentered systems, finite networks of automata in which communication runs from any neighbor to any other’.31 We might add that madrepores, which for Prystash ‘contest the human/animal divide’, are not only feminine and rhizomatic, but also  Deleuze and Guattari, p. 263.  See for instance Glaucus, p.  33, p.  128, p.  170. Danielle Coriale, ‘When Zoophytes Speak: Polyps and Naturalist Fantasy in the Age of Liberalism’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 34.1 (2012), 19–36 (pp. 20–21). 31  Prystash, 146. Glaucus, p. 107. Deleuze and Guattari, p. 19. 29 30

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a kind of swarm or pack, as the above quotation makes clear.32 It is precisely this multiplicity of coral polyps, according to Coriale, that defined them for Victorian writers, in contrast to freshwater polyps, which were seen as individuated or even individualist. This multiplicity gave rise to utopian narratives involving coral polyps that were ‘oriented around collectivity and mutual labor’ (Coriale 28), in G.H. Lewes and others.33 In the passage above, however, Alton does not become one polyp among a wider community, but instead has his individuality painfully shattered into ‘innumerable’ parts. Rather than one of many, he is many, and only escapes insanity because he is no longer human, and hence no longer able to think. For Deleuze and Guattari, ‘A becoming-animal always involved a pack, a band, a population, a peopling, in short a multiplicity’.34 They emphasise that all becomings tend towards becoming-molecular: a dissolution into collectivities of particles that is also a movement towards death. Becoming-­ molecular inverts the Freudian death-drive, since the death-drive tends towards stasis whereas becoming tends towards pure, imperceptible movement.35 Deleuze and Guattari recognise the potential nihilism of becoming-­ molecular, however, emphasising that ‘there is no deterritorialization [a move towards the molecular] without a special reterritorialization [a restructuring return towards the molar]’.36 Taken as a whole, Alton’s dream plays out such a drama of de- and reterritorialization, as the dreamer is first broken up into dust, then from the swarm-like madrepore onwards begins to reintegrate as a unitary subject. The series of deaths and rebirths Alton experiences with each embodiment complicates this reterritorialization however, since it means the movement towards the molar is never clean or direct, but always disrupted. The conflict between molar and molecular can also be identified in Glaucus, where Kingsley acknowledges the disruptive, deterritorializing capacity of zoophytes to break down established reason and knowledge, but then invokes the reterritorializing authority of a rational Christian God:  Prystash, p. 164.  Coriale, 28. 34  Deleuze and Guattari, p. 264. 35  Though at the same time ‘movement also “must” be perceived’, an apparent contradiction Deleuze and Guattari resolve by referring to different planes, the ‘plane of transcendence’ and ‘plane of consistency’, on the former of which movement is merely a secondary attribute of objects, while on the latter, movement ‘cannot but be perceived’. Deleuze and Guattari, p. 310, p. 311 (and generally pp. 309–311). 36  Deleuze and Guattari, p. 334. 32 33

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no branch of science has more utterly confounded the wisdom of the wise, shattered to pieces systems and theories, and the idolatry of arbitrary names, and taught man to be silent while his Maker speaks, than this apparent pedantry of zoophytology, in which our old distinctions of ‘animal’, ‘vegetable’, and ‘mineral’, are trembling in the balance, seemingly ready to vanish like their fellows—‘the four elements’ of fire, earth, air, and water.37

The language of ‘shattering’, ‘trembling’ and ‘vanishing’ echoes Alton’s dissolution of identity, as the new science of zoophytology breaks down old series and structures. The breaking down which takes place is always in the service of a reformed, Christian science however, just as Alton’s dream is in the service of producing a reformed Christian subject. Kingsley concludes this section of Glaucus by stating that ‘in science, as in higher matters, he who will walk surely, must walk by faith and not by sight’ (Kingsley 1859, 39), thereby restoring order through the higher rationality of God.38

Evolutionary Progress vs Death and Disruption If the reterritorialization in Alton’s dream takes the shape of progress towards rational scientific Christian man, such reterritorialization is also repeatedly disrupted by death, which recurs throughout in different forms. First Alton-crab is ‘squelched […] flat’ (AL 337) by Alton’s cousin; then Lillian-flying fish is consumed by cousin-shark, as Alton-remora seeks to hold him back (AL 337); then Alton-ostrich is killed by cousin-cat and Lillian-Amazon (AL 338). Next, Alton becomes a mylodon, or giant ground sloth, at which point he learns for the first time ‘the delight of mere physical exertion’ (AL 338). Alan Rauch, who has explored Victorian accounts of the ground sloth, points out that the creature represented something of an evolutionary failure in this period, calling it ‘a powerful emblem of the impossibility of advancement’.39 Once again, death accompanies this creature, as Alton-mylodon is crushed by a falling tree while he attempts to save his cousin, now reimagined as an American backwoodsman (AL 340). Finally, Alton is shot as a baby-ape in Borneo, before seeing himself dissected ‘bone by bone, and nerve by nerve’ by a ‘smirking,  Glaucus, pp. 33–4.  Glaucus, p. 39. 39  Alan Rauch, ‘The Sins of Sloths: The Moral Status of Fossil Megatheria in Victorian Culture’, in Victorian Animal Dreams, ed. by Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin Danahay (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 215–28 (p. 223). 37 38

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chuckling surgeon’ (AL 342), an experience that evokes vivisection, to which I return in Chap. 4. This latter example is a portrait by Kingsley of the misdeployment of science, as the surgeon attempts to use his knowledge to take apart rather than to unify the natural world. When Alton finally turns into a man, he does not die, but this section of the dream includes a great uprising in which the poor ‘hunted [the rich] down like wild beasts, and slew many of them’ (AL 347). This allegory of revolution is also an indication that the disruptive forces of death have not been wholly escaped. If death and rebirth is perhaps the greatest de- and reterritorialization, its recurrence emphasises the evolutionary idea that each lower form must be subsumed and replaced by a higher. This produces a tissue-like structure in which discontinuous forms of life are layered on top of one another. At the same time, the repetition of death represents a line of flight that cuts through the chapter, involving the disruptive forces of fever, death and contagion, which are only reincorporated into molar identity when Alton awakes at the end of the extended passage, having recovered from his illness. As I have noted, the motif of transformation through death is used again in The Water-Babies, where Tom, a chimney-sweep, becomes a kind of aquatic hybrid, leaving behind his body as a ‘black thing in the water’, like a caddisfly.40 This ‘black thing’ is the body as remainder or waste, aligned with the polluting forces of industrialisation that have blackened it. It is of a piece with the ‘lumps of offal’ that fill the ditch where Jem drowns. Both Alton’s dream and The Water-Babies, in this case, represent sustained attempts to reimagine death as productive, to recover the abject lumps of offal death leaves behind as generative of new life, as what George Eliot will call ‘primitive tissue’, capable of developing into new forms of life. The fact that this imaginative work must be repeated, however, including in Alton’s dream, suggests that higher life is always at risk of slipping back into deindividualised matter, of devolving rather than evolving. This is how the dream starts, with Alton’s falling into dust, and it is a process Kingsley revisited in his fantasy of the ‘Doasyoulikes’ in The Water-Babies.41 This tribe is said to have left ‘the country of Hardwork’ to live a life of useless leisure, but after descending into stupidity they choose to live on a volcano, which in the end erupts, ‘whereby one-third of the Doasyoulikes were blown into the air, and another third were smothered in ashes; so  Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 44.  The Water-Babies, p. 124.

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that there was only one-third left’.42 The tribe’s destructive return to formless matter is followed by a further degeneration that finally leaves only one apelike creature remaining, who is shot by the explorer M. Du Chaillu, echoing the fate of the Borneo ape in Alton’s dream. As well as the sequence of transformations I have described, the structure of the dream sequence as it appears on the page is important. Each animal-becoming is separated from the next by a gap, indicated in the most recent Oxford edition by a single asterisk, and in the 1850 first edition by a single or double line of asterisks, with each succeeding passage getting gradually longer as Alton’s identity begins to cohere.43 Each of these breaks is a leap, or discontinuity, disallowing direct connection between the dream’s sections. In the context of 1850, when natural selection was incompletely understood, these gaps represent a lack of knowledge of precisely how evolution between species took place. In Glaucus, such a lack of knowledge is what fractures the mastery of science and its powers of naming, though this fracture is reterritorialized by Kingsley through the figure of God. However this lack can also be interpreted as what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘the secret’, a concept associated with becoming because, simply by being unknown, it disrupts molar mastery. In its most developed form, which they find in psychoanalysis (a discipline that seeks to recover secrets which have been lost or repressed), the secret is a recognition that ‘a nonlocalizable something has happened’.44 In Alton’s dream, death takes the place of this secret, which is textually represented by the gaps on the page. In this case, the secret is simply the fact that evolution is not yet part of an ordered series or structure. As we have seen, these deaths are castrative, as is the secret. Deleuze and Guattari point out that ‘the secret of man is nothing, in truth nothing at all. Oedipus, the phallus, castration […] it is enough to make women, children, lunatics, and molecules laugh’.45 Though the gaps in the dream are reterritorialized as forms of Christian rebirth by God and his agent, the angel-Eleanor, who throughout the dream stands in opposition to the biological, sexual femininity of Lillian, they nonetheless hint at a non-evolutionary understanding of human and  The Water-Babies, p. 126.  Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke (London: Chapman and Hall, 1850), pp. 214–33. 44  Deleuze and Guattari, p. 318. 45  Deleuze and Guattari, p. 319. 42 43

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animal, in which each reincarnation may not be progression or regression; in which these animal embodiments are shaken up like pieces in a kaleidoscope and do not come back together in the right order.

Machines, Assemblages and Haeccities To pursue this line of thought, we might take the elements of Alton’s dream not as complete embodiments, or as contributing to a line of progress, but as machinic assemblages. As Colin Manlove has pointed out, Kingsley’s vision of the natural world is highly machinic; he ‘gives the machine a place in the natural order of things, breaking down the usual distinction between the mechanical and the organic’.46 To take an example, one of the creatures Tom encounters after his transformation in The Water-Babies is a creature with ‘two big wheels, and one little one, all over teeth, spinning round and round like the wheels in a threshing-machine’.47 This machine is biological, or in this creature the biological has become a machine. For Deleuze and Guattari, following Spinoza, to think nature in terms of becoming is always to think machinically: The plane of consistency of Nature is like an immense Abstract Machine, abstract yet real and individual; its pieces are the various assemblages and individuals, each of which groups together an infinity of particles entering into an infinity of more or less interconnected relations.48

From this perspective, Alton’s dream becomes a series of assemblages in which connections are momentarily formed, then dissolved. On this reading, elements of Alton’s identity and experience, and elements of the natural world, are repeatedly arranged without discrimination into what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘haeccities’, which are momentary singularities that consist ‘entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected’. These relations combine to create a particular situation without a dominating identity, in which separation between objects, and between objects and qualities, blurs. As they put it, ‘[a] degree of heat can combine with a certain intensity of white, as in certain hot skies of a hot summer’.49 46  Colin Manlove, ‘Charles Kingsley, H.G. Wells, and the Machine in Victorian Fiction’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 48.2 (1993), 212–39 (p. 216). 47  The Water-Babies, p. 49. 48  Deleuze and Guattari, p. 280. 49  Deleuze and Guattari, p. 287, p. 288.

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What distinguishes Alton’s dream from simple evolution is the fact that he is not restricted to one fixed identity in an ongoing chain, but adopts multiple haeccities. In each case, Alton is not just an animal, but a situation: ‘and I was an ostrich, flying madly before the simoom wind, and the giant sand pillars, which stalked across the plain, hunting me down’ (AL 337); or ‘I was a baby-ape in Borneon forests, perched among fragrant trailers and fantastic orchis flowers’ (AL 341). While in one sense there is a progression between these states, moving towards the restoration of rational human identity, in another sense there is no continuity, and each situation has its own specificity, independent of those around it. In the end, Alton’s dream is only ever an interlude in the novel of which it forms a part. The dream concludes with another, more permanent and less Deleuzian rebirth, in which Alton passes ‘like one who recovers from drowning, through the painful gate of birth into another life’ (AL 350). This return to masculine authority is not a becoming, since as Deleuze and Guattari point out, ‘There is no becoming-man because man is the molar being par excellence, whereas becomings are molecular’.50 Yet the final restoration of Alton’s identity as a fixed, albeit spiritually rejuvenated point, does not occlude the possibility of reading the dream, as I have done, as double, in tension with itself. In this sense, Alton’s peculiar hallucination is not only a theologically based evolutionary fantasy, but also an involution, a series of becomings that are not wholly connectible to one another or satisfactorily reconcilable to a molar structure. But can these two sides of the dream—becoming and evolution—be brought together, or are they destined to remain as opposing forces? To put it another way, is there such a thing as ‘becoming-evolutionary’? If we follow Deleuze and Guattari, it seems clear there is not, since evolution, in its focus on development and generation, is precisely what becoming, aligned with involution, opposes. Deleuze and Guattari describe the ‘plane [plan] of consistency’, where becoming takes place, as: a plane of proliferation, peopling, contagion; but this proliferation of material has nothing to do with an evolution, the development of a form or the filiation of forms. Still less is it a regression leading back to a principle. It is on the contrary an involution, in which form is constantly being dissolved, freeing times and speeds.51  Deleuze and Guattari, p. 322.  Deleuze and Guattari, p. 294.

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At the start of Alton’s dream, Eleanor, as angel, provides a clear evolutionary structure for what follows, remarking, in a formula that echoes the genealogies of the Old Testament, ‘The madrepore shall become a shell, and the shell a fish, and the fish a bird, and the bird a beast; and then he shall become a man again, and see the glory of the latter days’ (AL 337). This statement seems to clearly mark the dream as what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘the development of a form’, thereby controlling the proliferation of material the dream contains. In the terms presented by Deleuze and Guattari, then, there is no such thing as becoming-evolutionary. Nonetheless, it is worth asking: if there could be such a becoming, what would it look like? Can Kingsley’s novel open up a way, however tentative and speculative, in which such a becoming-evolutionary might take place?

Becoming-Evolutionary Firstly, becoming-evolutionary would have to involve proliferation and multiplicity. In this sense it is not only the multiplicity of Alton’s animal experiences that is important, but also the multiplicity of ideas about evolution that were circulating in the 1840s, as the novel was being composed. As well as Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle and Chambers’s Vestiges, as noted above, French debates around transformism continued to exert considerable influence on British scientific discussions, particularly the debate about the possibility and extent of species change that took place between Geoffrey St. Hilaire and Georges Cuvier in the 1820s. As Phillip Sloan observes, the issues they raised were explored by Robert Grant, who taught Darwin, and Richard Owen, who dedicated lectures and publications to the topic in the mid-1840s.52 Kingsley refers to Owen and T.H. Huxley in The Water-Babies, where the narrator insists on the limits of both men’s knowledge, stating that one would need to know ‘a great deal more about nature’ than either before being sure of ‘what cannot be, or fancy[ing] that anything is too wonderful to be true’.53 This conceptual openness, linked to the fact that evolution was not fixed in its form or scope in mid-century, lays the groundwork for becoming-evolutionary to emerge. Secondly, I would suggest that becoming-evolutionary requires a certain ‘feverishness’, which is registered in writing. Leonard Lawlor’s article  Sloan, Section 3.1.  The Water-Babies, p. 42.

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‘Following the Rats’, which explores becoming-animal in order to articulate the possibility of developing a non-dominating relationship between humans and animals, helps explain this point. Lawlor notes that in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari focus on becoming-rat as an archetype of becoming-animal (an idea behind which lurks Freud’s Rat Man). They draw particular attention, Lawlor observes, to Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s (1874–1929) ‘Lord Chandos Letter’, written in the persona of a seventeenth-century English lord.54 Lawlor focuses on a comment that does not appear in Brian Massumi’s translation of Deleuze and Guattari, where they state that Hofmannsthal’s text depicts: a composition of speeds and affects involving entirely different individuals, a symbiosis; it makes the rat a thought in [dans] the man, a feverish thought [une pensée fiévreuse], at the same time as the man becomes a rat, a rat who gnashes and is in agony’.55

Lord Chandos is said to receive a ‘strange imperative’, ‘either stop writing, or write like a rat’.56 Alton’s dream, as I have shown, erupts out of pestilence as a feverish thought that generates writing, in this case Alton’s own writing, which is recorded through his first-person narration of the novel. But what exactly does it mean to write feverishly, like a rat? Glossing Deleuze and Guattari in relation to the Lord Chandos letter, where a pack of rats are poisoned, Lawlor suggests that such writing ‘would be a tale of the rat’s struggle with death. Writing like a rat then would be to write in the style of agony, in the style of an “agon”, a contest, or struggle, against death: “agony against all the deaths”’ (Lawlor is here quoting Deleuze’s What is Philosophy? (1991)).57 As I have argued above, Alton’s dream is a struggle against death, or a flight from death, in which death returns repeatedly, in different forms. In this sense it plays out as an alternative to Jem Downes’s fate in the preceding chapter. Returning to Jem also allows us to see that Alton’s dream is in fact directly linked to the rat, an animal which does not feature in the dream itself but haunts it as a negative presence. When Alton meets Jem, Jem 54  Leonard Lawlor, ‘Following the Rats: Becoming-Animal in Deleuze and Guattari’, SubStance 37.3 (2008), 169–87 (p. 179). 55  Lawlor, p. 179. The interpolations are Lawlor’s. The relevant section of Massumi’s version is Deleuze and Guattari, p. 265. 56  Deleuze and Guattari, p. 265. 57  Lawlor, p. 181.

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appears ‘quite demented’ (AL 329), and describes to Alton an imagined horde of rats, from which he must flee: ‘The rats! – the rats! don’t you see ‘em coming out of the gully holes, atween the area railings—dozens and dozens?’ ‘No; I saw none’. ‘You lie; I hear their tales whisking; there’s their shiny hats a-glistening, and every one on ‘em with peelers’ staves! Quick! quick! or they’ll have me to the station house’. (AL 329)58

The rats represent the police of course, but they also represent a death that is terrifying because it is not single but overwhelmingly swarmlike, and which will soon catch Jem. Rats are also aligned with fever and pestilence through their ability to penetrate everywhere, with Jem telling Alton ‘the rats ‘ll get in at the roof, and up through the floor, and eat ‘em all up, and my work too’ (AL 330). It is not at first clear what “em’ refers to, but Alton’s later observation that ‘the rats had been busy already’ (AL 332) with the bodies of Jem’s wife and children indicates that it is Jem’s family which has been consumed. Jem’s fear of rats even explicitly takes the same form as his fear of fever, which he personifies: ‘Day after day I saw the devils come up through the cracks, like little maggots and beetles, and all manner of ugly things, creeping down their throats; and I asked ‘em, and they said they were the fever devils’ (AL 332). The rat and the fever are both swarms from which one must flee, and which cannot be distinguished from one another. They break down human tissue and with it individual identity, consuming both in a destructive frenzy. In becoming feverish, then, Alton also becomes ratlike, and both these things influence the form of his narrative. Becoming-evolutionary would be inseparable from such feverish, ratlike writing, and would draw on evolution not to generate a new molar identity, but to create a line of flight built from haeccities, or assemblages, thereby producing, almost as a by-product, new fragile and temporary affinities with non-human creatures. 58  Although rats do not feature elsewhere in Alton Locke, they make an appearance in Glaucus, where Kingsley refers to a species of madrepore collected on ‘Rat Island’, near Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel. Rat Island appears to be a kind of evolutionary holdout, where ‘still lingers the black long-tailed English rat, exterminated everywhere else by his sturdier brown cousin of the Hanoverian dynasty’ (Glaucus, 109). These rats, then, are also struggling against death. They seem to form a peculiar Deleuzian alliance with the madrepore, which is also ‘by profession a scavenger’ (Glaucus, 108).

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Conclusion I will end by recalling that Alton Locke’s goal throughout the novel is to produce a new kind of poetry. This is where the novel ends, with Eleanor telling Alton: I have long hoped for a Tropic poet; one who should leave the routine imagery of European civilisation, its meagre scenery, and physically decrepit races, for the grandeur, the luxuriance, the infinite and strongly-marked variety of Tropic nature, the paradisiac beauty and simplicity of Tropic humanity. […] Go for me, and for the people. See if you cannot help to infuse some new blood into the aged veins of English literature. (AL 384)

Eleanor summons a colonialist ideal of poetry, in which the English poet mines the authentic unsullied life of the Tropics to reinvigorate a decaying European tradition. She depicts this process as a form of infection, albeit a benign one, as the poet ‘infuses new blood’ into English literature. As it turns out, Alton is not able to achieve this goal, heading to Texas but dying soon after his arrival (AL 389). It is in Chapter 36, therefore, that he comes closest to producing a new form of literature: one which is feverish, which takes on the characteristics of animals, which breaks the self apart even while rebuilding it, and which creatively plays out a struggle against death. Such a literature gestures towards, even if it does not wholly fulfil, the paradoxical possibility of becoming-evolutionary.

CHAPTER 3

Allegorical Realism and the Figure of the Human in The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch

Abstract  This chapter explores the figure of the human in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Middlemarch (1871), starting from the much-debated ending of The Mill on the Floss, which sees the heroine and her brother killed by a sudden and devastating flood. It argues that both novels are simultaneously realist and allegorical, and that Eliot’s vision of the human, which draws on her work translating Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841/1854), is ambivalent. There is a combination of drives in these novels, through which they strive by turns to centre and de-centre the human. Reading through recent debates around the Anthropocene, and through Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘natural history’, allows us to see that Eliot’s allegorical realism has the potential to help us in thinking through the perceptual and representational challenges raised by climate crisis. Keywords  George Eliot • Ludwig Feuerbach • Allegory • Realism • The Mill on the Floss • Middlemarch • Natural history • Primitive tissue • Walter Benjamin • Anthropocene Henry James’s 1866 article ‘The Novels of George Eliot’ famously condemns the conclusion of The Mill on the Floss for going against the principles of realism Eliot had previously established: © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Moore, Human Tissue in the Realist Novel, 1850–1895, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26640-9_3

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The chief defect—indeed, the only serious one—in ‘The Mill on the Floss’ is its conclusion. Such a conclusion is in itself assuredly not illegitimate, and there is nothing in the fact of the flood, to my knowledge, essentially unnatural: what I object to is its relation to the preceding part of the story. The story is told as if it were destined to have, if not a strictly happy termination, at least one within ordinary probabilities. As it stands, the dénouement shocks the reader most painfully. Nothing has prepared him for it; it casts no shadow before it.1

As Caroline Levine puts the problem, ‘if George Eliot is a consummate realist, then what are we to make of the allegorical ending of The Mill on the Floss’?2 F.R. Leavis agreed with James, writing that the flood has ‘no symbolic or metaphorical value’, though more recent critics have observed that Eliot in fact carefully prepares the ground throughout the novel for the flood that sweeps away Maggie and Tom.3 Emily Steinlight, for instance, lists a number of ways in which the novel seems to make Maggie’s death an inevitable destiny rather than a random event. For Renata Wasserman, this is still not sufficient, since although the flood ‘completes the abundant water imagery of the novel […] it does not resolve the contradictions set up in the plot’, and so registers as unsatisfactory and non-realist.4 Yet Steinlight argues that there is in fact an ‘appeal to chance’ in the ending to the novel which resists both mere accident (as criticised by Lukács in ‘Narrate or Describe?’) and narrative as a structure of fixed deterministic causation (as criticised by Jacques Rancière); chance of this

1  Henry James, ‘The Novels of George Eliot’, The Atlantic Monthly 18.108 (October 1866), 479–92 (p. 490). 2  Caroline Levine, ‘Victorian Realism’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. by Deirdre David (Cambridge: CUP, 2012), pp. 84–106 (p. 85). 3  F.  R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, 2nd Impression (New York: George W. Stewart, 1950), p. 45. Kathleen Blake summarises critical responses to the novel’s ending in ‘Between Economies in The Mill on the Floss: Loans versus Gifts, or, Auditing Mr Tulliver’s Accounts’, Victorian Literature and Culture 33 (2005), 219–37 (p. 231). Kyle MacAuley de-emphasises the flood but argues that ‘the entanglement of different types of water structures the novel at its deepest level’, in ‘George Eliot’s Estuarial Form’, Victorian Literature and Culture 48.1 (2020), 187–217 (p. 190). See also Adelene Buckland on the misreading of the ending as ‘catastrophist’ in Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 221–2. 4  Renata Wasserman, ‘Narrative Logic and the Form of Tradition in The Mill on the Floss’, Studies in the Novel 14.3 (1982), 266–79 (p. 268).

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kind is what ‘keeps realism alive’.5 Steinlight’s goal is to suggest that the conclusion of Eliot’s novel is not anti-realist, but rather supports a particular anti-egotistical form of realism, which ‘fractures any organic continuity in the succession of events’, and requires giving up all ‘fidelity to character’.6 What the novel threatens, on this reading, is not James’s ‘ordinary probabilities’, but the illusion that a character-centred narrative is the natural order of things. Such a form of realism would recognise that any particular individual is ultimately replaceable: that Casaubon can stand in the place of Dorothea, for instance, or that even great scientists are only links in a larger chain.7 These questions about realism and probability are also questions about the position of the human in Eliot’s writing, which is my concern in this chapter. The overarching issue is how far Eliot is involved in building a liberal, bourgeois version of the human which stands against nature and believes itself able to independently define and enact its own principles of teleological progress, and how far her writing undoes this anthropocentric picture by pulling apart its premises. The end of The Mill on the Floss crystallises this problem: does the ‘hideous triumph’ of the flood that kills Maggie and Tom testify to the vulnerability of the human in the face of nature, despite our attempts to tame its power through arable and industrial forms of management; or does the final image of the chapter, where ‘brother and sister had gone down in an embrace never to be parted’, instead elevate the human to an ideal sphere in which it can remain inviolate from nature’s depredations?8 This question is complicated by the ‘huge fragments’ (MF516) of wooden machinery the flood carries along, which seem to be its most destructive element. This image of ‘nature’ is therefore not pure, but is 5  Emily Steinlight, ‘Why Maggie Tulliver Had To Be Killed’, in Rancière and Literature, ed. by Grace Hellyer and Julian Murphet (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp. 164–82 (p. 172). See Georg Lukács, ‘Narrate or Describe?’, in Writer and Critic, ed. and trans. by Arthur Kahn (London: Merlin, 1970), pp. 110–48. 6  ‘Why Maggie’, p. 179. For Steinlight’s de-emphasising of character see also Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018). 7  Middlemarch famously asks ‘why always Dorothea?’, and it is Lydgate in that novel who wishes to become ‘a link in the chain of discovery’. George Eliot, Middlemarch (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2004), p. 242, p. 141. Further reference to this edition given in the main text as MM. 8  George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2007), p.  516. Further references to this edition given in main text as MF.

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more like Latour’s nature-culture, or what Benjamin calls natural history, to which I will return.9 Does the flood after all represent the threat to human life and industry posed by nature, or does it rather stand for the ways industry exacerbates and multiplies the destructive force of nature? This question begins to shift us away from realism and towards allegory, by asking what the flood stands for rather than about its fidelity to real life. On the other hand, we might turn back towards materialist realism by asking whether, as some critics have recently argued, the flood’s significance is to emphasise a particular historical conjunction of human industry and ecological processes, at a moment between 1825 and 1845 when technologies of river and mill management were being radically transformed?10 This materialist interpretation is not necessarily at odds with Henry James, since he allows that the flood is not ‘essentially unnatural’, but condemns its inclusion in this story because the narrative otherwise remains within the scope of ‘ordinary probabilities’. James’s argument is less about adherence to reality than it is about the maintenance of generic conventions, and in this sense he exemplifies the position Amitav Ghosh critiques in The Great Derangement, where Ghosh finds an Aristotelian attachment to probability deeply embedded in the novel form. ‘Probability and the modern novel are in fact twins’, he writes, ‘born at about the same time, among the same people, under a shared star that destined them to work as vessels for the containment of the same kind of experience’.11 As a result, there is a ‘banishing of the improbable’ in which exceptional events, such as natural disasters, are relegated to the background of the novel, 9  Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. by Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 7. 10  Archer, Jayne Elisabeth, Richard Marggraf Turley and Howard Thomas, ‘“Moving accidents by flood and field”: The Arable and Tidal Worlds of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss’, ELH 82.2 (2015), 701–28 (p. 702). On this transformation and its limits, see also Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016), especially pp. 96–120. 11  Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), p. 16. On probability and the modern novel see also Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Leland Monk, Standard Deviations: Chance and the Modern British Novel (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1993); Steven Kern, A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Maurice Lee, Uncertain Chances: Science, Skepticism, and Belief in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Paul Fyfe, By Accident or Design: Writing the Victorian Metropolis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

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while the focus is placed on everyday, ordinary life.12 Ghosh’s conclusion is that the realist novel makes climate change unthinkable. This fits with James’s point that the final pages of The Mill on the Floss, which we can read today as anticipating the extreme weather events brought about by anthropogenic climate crisis, break with realist form. Does Eliot’s novel then illustrate Ghosh’s point, because the conclusion registers as jarring, even as an aesthetic failure; or should we read it as a counterpoint to Ghosh, agreeing with those critics who see the flood as carefully plotted within the novel’s structure, in which case the text becomes Eliot’s demonstration that the realist novel is in fact capable of accommodating the extreme and improbable? My argument is that in a sense both sides of this alternative are correct, but only if they are read simultaneously. I interpret the conclusion of The Mill on the Floss as at once realist and allegorical, natural and historical, and involved in the destruction and idealist preservation of the human, all in ways that are inextricably layered on top of one another like a tissue. The denouement, I suggest, provides a focal point that allows us to see this conjunction elsewhere in the novel, and beyond that in the world of Middlemarch, despite the apparent contrast between that novel’s ‘slow, meliorist version of history’ and the radical upheaval of the flood.13 Further, I use these discussions as a starting point to propose that Eliot’s construction of a modern figure of the human in her fiction, informed by her work translating Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841, translation 1854), is predicated on a logic that pulls us allegorically away from the human. Ultimately, I argue that there is a supplemental but necessary drive of allegory in Eliot’s realist account of the human, which means that her literary vision of the human-nature relationship is, like Charles Kingsley’s in Alton Locke, always ambivalent. Eliot’s novels are simultaneously anthropocentric and anti-anthropocentric, at once constructing and undermining the stability of the human.

The Passions of the River Though James denies it, the river is indeed deeply woven into the semantic structure of The Mill on the Floss, so that the ending must be seen as the culmination of a building pressure as well as an unpredictable event. This  Ghosh, p. 17.  ‘Why Maggie’, p. 179.

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pressure is as much allegorical, in Benjamin’s sense of that term, as realist. It draws together what lies inside the human (Maggie’s passion, Mr Tulliver’s obsessions) and what acts upon it from outside (the forces of history, fate, and nature). These competing pressures are clearest in the case of Maggie, for whom the river represents her character, but also what acts upon her, and what finally destroys her. This dynamic comes out, for instance, in the description of her mental struggles after her aborted elopement with Stephen Guest: But there were things in her stronger than vanity […] and the stream of vanity was soon swept along and mingled imperceptibly with that wider current which was at its highest force to-day, under the double agency of the events and inward impulses brought by the last week. (MF442)

Maggie is here a river made up of various streams, but one which is shaped by a ‘double agency’ of what is outside it (‘the events’) and what is inside it (‘inward impulses’). As an early review in the Spectator puts it: In the case of Maggie, we have a career regarded both from the inside and from the outside; we feel the throbbing of her heart at each new sensation, and we see, as it were, from our own stand-point, the outward facts that awaken her to new life.14

There is both a drive from within and a drive from without, and the interaction between the two is what builds Maggie’s ‘career’, in the manner we might expect of a Bildungsroman. This typically realist building up of Maggie’s character, though, operates by allegorically bringing the river within her, where it serves as the metaphorical basis for her identity. This is an unstable basis on which to found a character, since the meanings of the river multiply to make it highly over-determined, its final role never certain. The extent of this over-determination becomes clear if we attempt to catalogue the river’s meanings. These include death, present in Mrs Tulliver’s fear that her children will be ‘brought in dead and drownded some day’ (MF142), but also divine salvation or mercy, as in the legend of St Ogg relayed in Chapter 12, where Ogg receives the blessing that ‘whoso steps into thy boat shall be in no peril from the storm; and whenever it  Review of 7 April 1860 in MF, pp. 547–51 (p. 550).

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puts forth to the rescue, it shall save the lives both of men and beasts’ (MF155). The river stands for law in the form of repression of women, as in the picture of a drowning woman suspected of witchcraft that Maggie sees in Defoe’s The History of the Devil (MF62), but also for law as contract and land use, in Mr Tulliver’s court cases against Pivart and the lawyer Wakem about who has the right to utilise the river (e.g. MF190–91). It also represents Mr Tulliver’s anger; ‘The old mill ‘ud miss me’, he tells Luke, ‘There’s a story as when the mill changes hands, the river’s angry’ (MF288), anticipating his later attack on Wakem. In the chapter that follows, the river Rhone, a grander version of the Floss, is described as an ‘angry, destroying god’ (MF292). In its role as a metaphor for Maggie’s passion, and her fate, the river hints at a death drive motivating her, as when we are told that ‘Maggie’s destiny, then, is at present hidden, and we must wait for it to reveal itself like the course of an unmapped river: we only know that the river is full and rapid, and that for all rivers there is the same final home’ (MF409, see also MF442). Philip Wakem, who is in love with Maggie, dreams of her ‘slipping down a glistening, green, slimy channel of a waterfall’ (MF433), an inversion of the river that implicitly directs it downwards towards hell and damnation. Many of these allusions culminate in the chapter ‘Borne along by the Tide’, whose title is taken from the Catholic Catechism, where it refers specifically to the ‘tide of passion’ (MF461n1) that distracts the ‘sensualist’ (MF461n1) who is estranged from God. This chapter, in which Maggie initially submits to be carried along the Floss with Stephen, so that they appear to have eloped, associates the river with dreaming, as when ‘Maggie was hardly conscious of having done or said anything decisive. […] Every influence tended to lull her into acquiescence’ (MF470). In addition, the river is a return to the past, and a return of the repressed, as when a younger generation of residents in St Ogg’s who ‘had seen several small floods’ (MF508) disbelieve the old men who talk of ‘sixty years ago, when the same sort of weather brought on the great floods, which swept the bridge away’ (MF508). This recalls Book 1 Chapter 12, where the narrator observes that ‘the present time was like the level plain where men lose their belief in volcanoes and earthquakes, thinking tomorrow will be as yesterday, and the giant forces that used to shake the earth are forever laid to sleep’ (MF156). In light of Ghosh, this might be seen as a repression of the force of nature insofar as it exceeds realism, so that the flood acts on the people of St Ogg, who believe nature to be moderate and

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orderly, as a force from outside (or ‘out-side’ to use Bennett’s term).15 In this reading, the fashionable provincial society depicted in the second half of the novel represents domestic, novelistic realism, which cannot contain the disruption of the flood. The flood in fact explicitly breaks the probabilistic patterns of thought associated with realism when the narrator remarks, in a moment focalised through Maggie, that: ‘The whole thing had been so rapid—so dream-like—that the threads of ordinary association were broken’ (MF513). Through these disruptions of middle-class order the river becomes an incomplete allegory for revolution, and for modernity, counterbalancing its tendency to return to the past. It is comparable in this respect to the Captain Swing rioters and arsonists mentioned earlier in the novel (MF173), who break machines, as the river does when it smashes the ‘wooden machinery’ (MF516) on the wharves of St Ogg’s. As already mentioned, it is this machinery which destroys Tom and Maggie, and its opposite is the narrator’s fantasy of a return to an idealised rural past: ‘the days when they had clasped their little hands in love, and roamed the daisied fields together’ (MF517). This fantasy returns us to Chapter 1, where the narrator has been ‘dreaming that I was standing on the bridge in front of Dorlcote Mill’ (MF52–53). The river is what activates this fantasy of return for Maggie and the narrator, so that its temporal and political role is ambivalent, combining revolutionary progress and conservative regression.

The Natural History of the Anthropocene Such a layering of associations refuses a separation between the human and non-human nature, or between nature and history. Steinlight suggests that in Eliot’s writing, ‘nature and history are not either/or propositions’.16 This puts us on the terrain of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s much-cited essay ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, whose first thesis is that ‘Anthropogenic Explanations of Climate Change Spell the Collapse of the Age-old Humanist Distinction between Natural History and Human History’.17 For Chakrabarty, the dominant idea of human history as active  Bennett, p. 3.  ‘Why Maggie’, p. 179. 17  Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History’, Critical Enquiry 35.2 (2009), 197–222 (p. 201). 15 16

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and agential in a way that natural history, including biological species history, is not, cannot hold once human action is recognised as reshaping nature. Eliot had already pushed against such a separation of human history and natural history in her early writing. Her 1856 article ‘The Natural History of German Life’, which lays out her approach to realism, was partly inspired by helping G.H. Lewes with researches for his Sea-Side Studies (1858), a work of natural history which informs her call for a ‘man of sufficient moral and intellectual breadth’ to ‘devote himself to studying the natural history of our social classes’.18 The perspective she wishes for is a scientific one guided by human intellect, but also one that recognises continuities between plant and animal life on one hand, and human culture on the other. Walter Benjamin’s unconventional conception of natural history, which is associated with allegorical perception, bears comparison with this tendency in Eliot.19 For Benjamin, it is ‘by virtue of a strange combination of nature and history that the allegorical mode of expression is born’.20 He argues that in the German baroque Trauerspiel, or mourning play: The word ‘history’ stands written on the countenance of nature in the characters of transience. The allegorical physiognomy of the nature-history, which is put on stage in the Trauerspiel, is present in reality in the form of the ruin. In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting.21

Nature is revealed as historical insofar as it is always bound to decay and ruin, and, reciprocally, history is shown to be inseparable from its setting within nature. Nature and history in this case combine to produce a fallen, broken writing which the allegorist can (attempt to) read. Of the baroque writers, Benjamin comments: ‘nature was not seen by them in bud and bloom, but in the over-ripeness and decay of her creations. In nature they saw eternal transience, and here alone did the saturnine vision of this

18  George Eliot, ‘The Natural History of German Life’, in The Westminster Review, vol. LXVI (July 1856), 51–79 (p. 56). 19  For a detailed account of Benjaminian natural history, see Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998). 20  Walter Benjamin, On the Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. by John Osborne (London: Verso, 2009), p. 167. 21  Origin, pp. 177–8.

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generation recognize history’.22 To see nature historically is, for Benjamin, to see allegorically, and this means recognising the apparently eternal face of nature as the site of transience and decay. At times, Eliot’s writing seems antithetical to this form of natural history. Her sonnet sequence ‘Brother and Sister’ (1874), which like The Mill on the Floss reworks childhood memories of her estranged brother Isaac, clearly does not see nature as decay in lines such as these: The firmaments of daisies since to me Have had those mornings in their opening eyes, The bunched cowslip’s pale transparency Carries that sunshine of sweet memories,     And wild-rose branches take their finest scent     From those blest hours of infantine content.23

The mood here is of a Wordsworthian capacity for memories of nature and childhood to be preserved as ‘life and food/For future years’.24 The ‘firmaments of daisies’ recall Wordsworth’s daffodils, which are ‘Continuous as the stars that shine/And twinkle on the milky way’.25 In Sonnet V of the sequence, Eliot closely echoes ‘Tintern Abbey’ when she writes, ‘Those hours were seed to all my after good’.26 The final stanza, which describes the brother and sister’s separation once school begins (the dangers of schooling are of course a concern of Wordsworth’s in poems such as ‘The Tables Turned’), remarks that that ‘the twin habit of that early time/ Lingered for long about the heart and tongue’, repeating the sentiment of Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations Ode’. In that poem: Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;     We will grieve not, rather find     Strength in what remains behind.27  Origin, pp. 179.  George Eliot, ‘Brother and Sister’, Sonnet II, in The Mill on the Floss, pp. 541–6 (p. 542). 24  William Wordsworth, ‘Lines Written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798’, in Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 193–8, ll. 65–6. 25  William Wordsworth, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th ed, Volume D: The Romantic Period, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 2012), pp. 334–5, ll. 7–8. 26  Eliot, ‘Brother and Sister’, p. 543. 27  Eliot, ‘Brother and Sister’, p. 546; William Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’, in Norton Volume D, pp. 337–41, ll. 177–80. 22 23

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The Mill on the Floss opens with a memory of nature too: ‘I remember those large dipping willows. I remember the stone bridge’ (MF51), and of childhood: ‘That little girl is watching it [the mill] too: she has been standing on just the same spot at the edge of the water ever since I paused on the bridge’ (MF52). The stone bridge and mill, with its ‘unresting wheel’ (MF52), form a continuum with the willows, water and fields, such that the signs of human activity are blended with non-human nature. In both the sonnets and the opening chapter of The Mill on the Floss, we encounter nature not as decay and ruin but as an idealised wholeness. On the other hand, such idealised nature is always located in the past rather than the present, so that by contrast the present is implicitly decayed and fallen, an allegory of something which is both lost and preserved as ruin. The end of the novel subtly reframes the opening in a way that makes this clear. Assuming the little girl is Maggie, the novel’s conclusion invites us to reappraise her as a ghost of what has been lost, since we end with Maggie’s ‘tomb’ (MF518). At the same time, the narrator registers a shift in how the landscape is perceived between the introduction and conclusion. In the latter, we hear that: Nature repairs her ravages—but not all. The uptorn trees are not rooted again; the parted hills are left scarred: if there is a new growth, the trees are not the same as the old, and the hills underneath their green vesture bear the marks of the past rending. To the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair. (MF517)

This description, without quite fully committing to the death’s head imagery favoured by Benjamin, nonetheless starts to make the scene historical, to frame it as natural history. These ‘marks of the past rending’ register the fact that history—the history of the flood, which is both human and natural—has written on the face of nature with ‘characters of transience’. As Archer, Turley and Thomas point out, the conclusion refers explicitly to the ‘fifth autumn’ (MF517) after the flood, suggesting there have been ‘five years of dearth for those working the land along the Floss’.28 More importantly for my reading, the conclusion retrospectively transforms the introduction, which was always described as a memory and a dream, into the precondition for a turn towards Benjaminian natural history. It is only ‘the eyes that have dwelt on the past’—the eyes of Chapter 1, that  ‘Moving accidents’, p. 720.

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is—which can properly comprehend the impossibility of ‘repair’. But Chapter 1 is spoken from the position of a narrator who is aware of the novel’s conclusion, so that the first and last chapters should be read dialectically. In this sense, the conclusion shows that the idealised vision of the opening could only be constructed as whole and ideal once it was already lost. To reverse Eliot’s formula, it is only the eyes that have seen a scarred landscape which can imagine an unravaged nature. The wholeness at the outset can only ever exist as a negative image, as something unreachable. This is why the ‘Brother and Sister’ poem sequence is less effective, and less modern, than the novel; it dwells on the fantasy of wholeness that forms the first pole of this relationship, whereas the novel explores how that fantasy is generated retrospectively out of an experience of loss. The kind of interrogative allegorical thinking towards which Eliot is moving in the conclusion of The Mill on the Floss is useful for reappraising the figure of the human, both then and now. Elizabeth DeLoughrey argues that Benjaminian natural history can counter the universalising force of post-Enlightenment discourses regarding humanity and nature, and so help us think through the Anthropocene era in which we find ourselves today.29 To achieve this, she says, allegory must ‘“provincialize” the Anthropocene, much as postcolonial studies “provincialized” the universalising discourse of Europe, to borrow from Dipesh Chakrabarty’.30 However we must also ‘parochialize allegory as much as the Anthropocene’, in order to avoid turning allegory into a mode which makes false claims to universal representation.31 This echoes Timothy Morton’s contention that ‘it is [empty, smooth, homogeneous] space that has turned out to be the anthropocentric concept, now that we are able to think it without a myth of constant presence’.32 By contrast, localised and parochial allegory can help conceptualise our relation to an ‘absent, unrepresentable totality’, in which ‘individuals can add up to more than their sum’.33 This is precisely the challenge posed by the Anthropocene, which requires us to confront 29  Crutzen’s original article dated the origin of the Anthropocene to James Watt’s steam engine in 1784. Paul Crutzen, ‘Geology of Mankind’, Nature 415.23 (2002), 23. 30  Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Allegories of the Anthropocene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), p. 2. 31  DeLoughrey, p. 9. 32  Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Colombia University Press, 2016), p. 11. 33  Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 10, quoted in DeLoughrey, p. 15.

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the simultaneous connection and disjunction between the actions of individual humans and the planetary, geological impact of humans as a species. In this context, allegory in the tradition of Benjamin enables us to ‘see Anthropocene discourse (not the epoch) as a secular and in some cases positivist allegory of the planet, a substitution of the alterity of the nonhuman divine with anthropogenic force’.34 It can help us, that is, to avoid the danger of allegorically elevating humanity to the status of a divine and singular force shaping the earth.

The Externalised Essence of Humanity: Feuerbach This brings us to Eliot’s 1854 translation of Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, where Feuerbach consciously does what DeLoughrey is warning against, and what Sylvia Wynter criticises, by elevating the human into the place of the divine. Yet there is an ambiguity in Feuerbach’s philosophy that comes from its intermediate nature, its maintaining of (at least part of) the form of religion even as it radically questions its content. This incomplete secularisation was identified most famously by Marx in his ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ (1845), whose Thesis VI argues that ‘Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual’.35 Thesis VII follows with the fundamental objection that ‘Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that the “religious sentiment” is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual whom he analyses belongs to a particular form of society’.36 Feuerbach misrecognises, on Marx’s reading, a product (religious sentiment) as an essence, even while he sees correctly that it is human rather than divine in origin.37 Feuerbach must therefore be condemned as

 De Loughrey, p. 16.  Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, trans. by W.  Lough. https://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm. 36  ‘Theses’. 37  Etienne Balibar notes that there have been divergent readings of Thesis VI by Ernst Block, who sees Marx as redefining human essence, as the set of social relations, and Louis Althusser, who sees it as destroying the very concept of a human essence. He follows this with a detailed analysis of his own. Etienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, updated new edition, trans. by Chris Turner and Gregory Elliott, ‘Afterword: Philosophical Anthropology or Ontology of Relations? Exploring the Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach’ (London: Verso, 2017), epub. 34 35

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ahistorical—he does not take into account the way human action is determined by the ‘particular form of society’ in which we live. As Marx puts this point in the opening of the ‘Eighteenth Brumaire’ essay (1851–52), ‘men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past’.38 Yet Feuerbach’s position between two stools, between religious explanations of the human on one hand and the materialist analysis of Marx on the other, turns out, I want to argue, to lay the ground for an allegorical decentring of the human in Eliot’s fiction, even as it supports her generation of an idealising conception of humanity as a new kind of totality. As with Charles Kingsley’s activation of pre-Darwinian accounts of evolution in Alton Locke, Eliot’s engagement with Feuerbach’s intermediate account of the human both constructs and unsettles the category of the human. Feuerbach argues that God, who appears to constitute humanity by standing outside it, is in fact the projected essence of ‘man’. ‘Consciousness of God’, Eliot writes in her translation, ‘is self-consciousness, knowledge of God is self-knowledge’.39 And a little later, ‘man first of all sees his nature as if out of himself, before he finds it in himself. His own nature is in the first instance contemplated by him as that of another being’.40 Religion is an ‘indirect form of self-knowledge’, which must be replaced in the life of humanity by self-recognition, just as childhood is replaced by adulthood in the life of an individual.41 This coming to self-knowledge is inseparable from coming to knowledge of others for Feuerbach, in a key move that Eliot inherits from him. As Etienne Balibar notes, Marx seems to have misread or misrepresented this feature of Feuerbach when he claims that Feuerbach sees the human species as an ‘abstract instance “inhabiting” each individual separately’.42 Although Marx’s reading is right to note the lack of collective production in Feuerbach, it omits his quite prominent post-Hegelian emphasis on interpersonal recognition as the basis for both individual human identity and humanity in general. 38  Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, Chapter I, trans. by Saul K. Padover. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/. 39  Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, translated from the Second German Edition by Marian Evans (London: John Chapman, 1854), p. 12. 40  Feuerbach, p. 13. 41  Feuerbach, p. 13. 42  Balibar, ‘Afterword’, epub.

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In a chapter called ‘The Mystery of the Cosmogonical Principle in God’, Feuerbach describes the importance of interpersonal relations. He proceeds from the tension between an internal drive outwards and an external pressure inwards, which closely mirrors the ‘double agency’ that shapes Maggie: Consciousness of the world is the consciousness of my limitation; if I know nothing of a world, I should know nothing of limits: but the consciousness of my limitation stands in contradiction with the impulse of my egoism towards unlimitedness.43

This tension is resolved by the encounter with the other, who ‘is indeed another and in so far gives me the perception of my limitation, but in such a way as at the same time to affirm my own nature, make my nature objective to me’. This moves Feuerbach towards the Eliot-esque claim that ‘my fellow-man is the bond between me and the world. I am, and I feel myself, dependent on the world, because I first feel myself dependent on other men’.44 This element of Feuerbach offers the possibility of salvaging him from the dangers of totalising allegory he undoubtably raises. If we can only ever confront humanity as such—the abstract ‘human essence’— through its partial realisation in other people, then each relationship is a local, parochial allegory for humanity, but no single relationship is ever definitive. The individual self, but also humanity in general, is then a series of layers or tissues, laid down progressively through interactions with others. The Feuerbachian challenge of coming to self-knowledge is one of the main obstacles faced by Maggie in The Mill on the Floss, and one which falters when she is caught between total egoism and total renunciation of self after reading Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ (c. 1418–27). She finds in this book the hope of ‘a sublime height to be reached without the help of outward things’ (MF311), of ‘insight, and strength, and conquest, to be won by means entirely within her own soul, where a supreme teacher was waiting to be heard’ (MF311). This is not only a description of the promise of religious salvation found within the human soul, but also, if we take the ‘supreme teacher’ to be humanity rather than God, of Feuerbach as read by Marx. Marx’s Feuerbach imagines that the human  Feuerbach, p. 81.  Feuerbach, p. 81.

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essence is abstractly present in each individual, in which case a kind of Emersonian self-knowledge becomes the route to knowledge of humanity. Yet Eliot is a closer reader of Feuerbach than that, and Maggie’s attempt fails. In attempting to become less self-centred, to turn outwards from herself, she ends up returning to another kind of egoism: ‘she threw some exaggeration and wilfulness, some pride and impetuosity, even into her self-renunciation: her own life was still a drama for her, in which she demanded of herself that her part should be played with intensity’ (MM313). Maggie’s error, which Feuerbach also repudiates, is to think that any single person or book, or even God Himself, can be a sufficient grounding for one’s personal development, or for a relationship to humanity in general. This error is also why, in Middlemarch, the ‘dilettanteism’ (MM374) of Will Ladislaw is preferable to the narrowly obsessive focus of Casaubon, which despite the grandeur of his proposed ‘Key to all Mythologies’ (MM77) leads him to become ‘lost among small closets and winding stairs’ (MM183) in Rome, losing ‘sight of any purpose which had prompted him to these labours’ (MM183). These closets and stairs describe not only the Vatican Museum but also the ‘labyrinthine extent’ (MM47) of Casaubon’s mind, from which he is unable to form a bridge to humanity in general. Will Ladislaw is not without his own idealism, but he is able to accept the mediating interaction with other people, which is what represents allegorical contact with the alienated essence of humanity for Feuerbach, and which is unreachable either by self-contemplation or by self-abnegation. We see this acceptance of human interaction, albeit grudgingly, in Will’s work for the ‘Pioneer’ newspaper: Ladislaw had now accepted his bit of work, though it was not that indeterminate loftiest thing which he had once dreamed of as alone worthy of continuous effort. His nature warmed easily in the presence of subjects which were visibly mixed with life and action, and the easily stirred rebellion in him helped the glow of public spirit. (MM374)

Will’s ‘indeterminate loftiest thing’ is appealing but deceptive, and must be overcome, as must any approach to humanity that is entirely abstracted from specific interpersonal relationships. My reading here builds on Tambling’s suggestion that the narrator is critical of Lydgate’s famous question in Chapter 15, ‘what was the primitive tissue?’ (MM143), because Lydgate ‘returns to essences and

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appearances: he assumes the existence of something that need not be discussed in terms of structural relationships’.45 Perhaps surprisingly given Marx’s assertion of his radical break with Feuerbach on this score, the critique of belief in essences is a key theme of The Essence of Christianity: God is an existent, real being, on the very same ground that he is a particular, definite being; for the qualities of God are nothing else than the essential qualities of man himself, and a particular man is what he is, has his existence, his reality, only in his particular conditions. Take away from the Greek the quality of being Greek, and you take away his existence.46

Feuerbach may not have theorised the importance of the ‘particular form of society’ in Marx’s sense of class interaction within material relations of production, but he does locate the ‘essence’ of the human precisely in the ‘particular conditions’ we inhabit. From this viewpoint the human essence is neither within individuals, nor an abstract idealised condition beyond them, but an emergent quality of interaction with others under specific local conditions. What Feuerbach does retain from Christianity is not the concept of God, but what he calls the predicates of God, the ideas and qualities which attach to Him, and which are the alienated capacities of humanity. What Feuerbach says of the qualities of God (which he recognises as varying through time, so that Roman Gods have different qualities to the Christian one), Marx says of labour power, and hence ultimately of value: that these capacities need to be reconnected to the subjects from whom they have become abstracted.47 Feuerbach’s incomplete move towards materialism is evident here. Whereas Marx sees material production as what is alienated, Feuerbach focuses on immaterial qualities (‘the principle of my salvation, of my good dispositions and actions’), which are recoverable through our interactions with others.48 Feuerbach’s view of human potential is fundamentally positive, both in the sense that Christianity is evidence of the basically moral, altruistic, generous and honourable character of the society he is writing about, but also in the philosophical sense that he sees a positive content in this 45  Jeremy Tambling, ‘Middlemarch, Realism and the Birth of the Clinic’, ELH 57.4 (1990), 939–60 (p. 952). 46  Feuerbach, p. 19. 47  Feuerbach, p. 20. 48  Feuerbach, p. 30.

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externalised human essence, which has simply to be reconnected to the humans from which it is alienated. This optimistic, interconnected vision of humanity clearly differs from the fragmentation of Benjaminian allegory, even though it similarly proceeds through partial accretion. Yet even here, Slavoj Žižek’s Hegelian reading of Feuerbach provides a route to find a potential for Benjaminian natural history in Feuerbach; or at least for seeing how Eliot’s development of Feuerbach points in this direction. For Žižek, Feuerbach is, like Kant, an example of ‘external reflection’ rather than ‘determinate reflection’.49 This means Feuerbach sees humanity externally reflected in God: ‘“God” is thus man himself, the essence of man […] but perceived in the form of externality’. In determinate reflection, however, which for Žižek is given to us by Hegel (and Lacan), we experience the ‘self-fissure of the essence’, and so recognise that ‘essence can appear only in so far as it is already external to itself’.50 Rather than seeing God’s qualities as the truth of the subject, we can recognise the gap between humanity and God as the self-difference on which the subject is founded. This is a possibility that the conclusion of The Mill on the Floss raises, even as it elevates Tom and Maggie’s embrace to the status of an ideal relationship, by which I mean one that is no longer partial but in which the whole of humanity is evoked. In the first place, as I have shown above, the river which destroys the brother and sister is both Maggie’s externalised essence and something alien to her, which we might term non-­ human nature. In this way it represents the self-fissure of the subject, whose truth lies in the gap between herself and the relationships to other humans that reveal that self; but also (and this is beyond Feuerbach) in the trans-corporeal links between herself and the non-human world. In the second place, the unrepaired ravages of the flood, which as I have argued form the retrospective precondition of the dream-vision of the opening chapter, indicate that the truth of the subject is not so much in her relationship to the external world, or even her memories (‘the eyes that have dwelt on the past’), but in the scar on the face of nature, which is both apart from and an index to the self. This scar generates a fantastical vision of idealised wholeness and goodness, with which we want to identify, precisely by opening up a gap between that ideal state and our existing subjective position. In this way, the rending of both nature and the (past) self is  Slavoj Žižek, p. 256.  Žižek, p. 257.

49 50

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what allows the human subject, and humanity as such, to appear. The idea underlying this, that to be unrent would mean to cease being human, is repressed by the narrator, but nonetheless hinted at in the Biblical epitaph on Tom and Maggie’s tomb: ‘in their death they were not divided’ (MF518). We might take this as an implicit recognition that only in death is an undivided state possible, not just between siblings but even within the self. This lesson is applicable to the Anthropocene. It is precisely the rending of the natural world by humans, in the form of greenhouse gas emissions and environmental destruction, that allows humanity to appear as a geological force. The image of humanity as a unified abstract force, what Morton calls a ‘hyperobject’, appears only when—like the flood that kills Maggie and Tom—that force is split off from and turned back against us, and recombined with a nature which it also now destroys.51 The flood, like the Anthropocene, or the Capitalocene to use Andreas Malm’s term, is a messy combination of human activity, industrial development, cyclical weather patterns and random natural destruction.52 It is not unified, but an amalgamation of disparate elements that are gathered together as a single aesthetic and conceptual unit. The novel’s fantasy of an ideal childhood, which is not in fact supported by the descriptions of Maggie and Tom’s actual childhood, thus allegorically represents the fantasy of a pre-­ Anthropocene wholeness, before the intrusion of industrialisation. Such wholeness is only generated retrospectively, however, as a dream of what has now been lost.

Fragments, Strings and Scratches Tellingly, in one of her early letters, before Feuerbach, Eliot represented herself not as a unified whole but as an amalgamation of elements, using metaphors drawn from geology and natural history. She wrote to Maria Lewis, on 4th September 1839: I have lately led so unsettled a life, and have been so desultory in my employments, that my mind, never of the most highly organized genus, is more 51   See for instance Timothy Morton, ‘Victorian Hyperobjects’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 36.5 (2014), 489–500. 52  Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016), p. 391.

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than usually chaotic, or rather it is like a stratum of conglomerated fragments that shews here a jaw and rib of some ponderous quadruped, there a delicate alto-relievo of some fernlike plant, tiny shells and mysterious nondescripts, encrusted and united with some unvaried and uninteresting but useful stone. My mind presents just such an assemblage of disjointed specimens of history, ancient and modern, scraps of poetry picked up from Shakespeare, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Milton; newspaper topics; morsels of Addison and Bacon, Latin verbs, geometry, entomology, and chemistry; Reviews and metaphysics—all arrested and petrified and smothered by the fast-thickening anxiety of actual events, relative anxieties, and household cares and vexations.53

The nineteen-year-old Mary Anne Evans had not yet encountered Cara and Charles Bray—she would do so in 1841—who would help shape and focus this ‘assemblage’ of ‘conglomerated fragments’. What is telling in this early letter, however, written at a time whose memories she drew on while writing Maggie in The Mill on the Floss, is both its evocation of geological strata as a way of conceptualising the mind and its overlaying of natural history onto human history, meaning both the history of human thought and the intellectual history of this particular human. Not only do we proceed from ribs to plants to shells to stones, in an unpredictable manner, but these are equivalent to, indeed are allegorically overlaid upon, ‘scraps of poetry’ (Shakespeare, Cowper, Wordsworth, Milton), and then a wider collection of textual and intellectual scraps (newspaper topics, Latin verbs, geometry, entomology and so on). These are overlaid again by the lava-like ‘actual events’ and ‘household cares’ that form the everyday texture of Evans’s life at this time. This passage indicates a tendency towards Benjaminian natural history that persists alongside Feuerbachian humanism in Eliot’s later writing. For instance, part of what Eliot condemns in ‘The Natural History of German Life’ is the flattening of humanity, which does away with particular conditions in favour of a simplified and generalised morality: Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-­ made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that

53  The George Eliot Letters, Volume 1, ed. by Gordon Haight (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 29.

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attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment.54

Such ‘sympathy ready-made’ might seem to evoke a Feuerbachian religion of humanity, but as Eliot recognises it in fact leaps straight to the error of generalised allegory that falsifies humanity as an idealised, abstract, unchanging force. Instead, what is needed is the dislocating rupture that takes us out of ourselves into relationship with, and partial understanding of, another person. It is this dislocation of self towards the other that is for Eliot the ‘raw material of moral sentiment’. We can detect in this ‘raw material’ an anticipation of the ‘primitive tissue’ that fascinates Tertius Lydgate in Middlemarch. Such raw material is not so much an object to be grasped as an openness or potential. It is a primitive tissue in the sense that we today understand foetal stem cells to be; it holds the possibility for future development without determining in advance what that development will be. The concept of stem cells was just being developed at the time Eliot wrote Middlemarch. One of the earliest uses of the term Stammzelle was by Ernst Haeckel in his 1868 Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte [The History of Creation], where it describes ‘the ancestor unicellular organism from which he presumed all multicellular organisms evolved’.55 Eliot had probably read Haeckel’s book by 1871, the year in which Book I of Middlemarch was published, so that it is likely she was familiar with both the term and the concept.56 From this point of view, Lydgate’s question—‘what was the primitive tissue?’ (MM143)—is not quite right. It should be phrased less in terms of being than becoming. A better question might be ‘what can primitive tissue become?’, or ‘what can primitive tissue enable?’. Significantly, a preference for becoming over being is indicated in the following paragraph, where the narrator remarks that ‘character too is a process and an unfolding’ (MM143). The potential for a process of unfolding is exactly what is evident in the ‘natural history’ of Mary Anne Evans’s mind in her letter of 1839, except that this has been arrested by the ‘fast-thickening anxiety of actual events’. Nonetheless, the conglomerated fragments are a kind of  ‘The Natural History’, p. 54.  Miguel Ramalho-Santos and Holger Willenbring, ‘On the Origin of the Term “Stem Cell”’, Cell Stem Cell 1.1 (2007), 35–8 (p. 35). 56  Avrom Fleischman, ‘George Eliot’s Reading: A Chronological List’, George Eliot— George Henry Lewes Studies 54/55 (2008), 1–106 (p. 56). 54 55

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primitive tissue, ready for modification and activation through interpersonal contact, as would indeed happen in Eliot’s later career. As George Eliot’s novels frequently show, while the everyday can be stultifying and inhibiting, as Lydgate and Rosamond’s domestic life proves to be, it is also the stage on which the interpersonal relationships which shape our lives are played out. In light of the ‘Natural History’ essay, primitive tissue might therefore be redefined simply as an attention to what is apart from ourselves. In a sense, this is what stem cells exhibit, and in moral terms it is the prerequisite for human connection. Such attention is what allows a Feuerbachian human essence to emerge, one which is not fixed within the self but generated in encounter with others, as a ‘process and an unfolding’. This reading chimes with Gillian Beer’s argument that Middlemarch forges new relationalities which challenge Enlightenment accounts of the individual as a self-determining monad: George Eliot seeks out ways beyond the single consciousness. She creates a sense of inclusiveness and extension. Nothing is end-stopped. Multiplicity is developed through the open relation created between narrator and reader, through participation in the immanent worlds of others and through the unlimited worlds of ideas. 57

Such openness to multiplicity anticipates forms of material ecocriticism, such as Donna Haraway’s interest in string-figures and tentacular thinking, and her concept of sympoiesis as a ‘making-with’ other beings.58 In Haraway’s view, the conglomerations of microscopic cells and organisms known as holobionts ‘do not precede their relatings; they make each other through semiotic material involution, out of the beings of previous such entanglements’.59 In Haraway’s interpretation, Holobionts are constituted from relationships and becoming rather than being, emerging in entanglement rather than isolation. Whether or not such an account is 57  Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 161. 58  Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 58. 59  Haraway, p. 60. Haraway objects to the Anthropocene as a ‘tool, story, or epoch to think with’, partly because of its tendency towards the totalising myth-making and homogenising of space which DeLoughrey sees as the bad and imperialist form of allegory. Haraway instead prefers the terms ‘Capitalocene’ for formulating critique and ‘Cthulucene’ for generating new forms of thinking and relating. Haraway, p. 49, p. 51.

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supported by biologists, it provides an alternative conceptual model for the primitive tissue of the human which Eliot seeks to explore, and which Lydgate cannot quite grasp. There is a limit to how far we can align Eliot with Haraway however, which can be marked by the difference between Haraway’s string-figures and Eliot’s preferred metaphor of the web, which Beer has analysed at some length.60 String figures are more variable, less centralised, and more tangled than webs. The ‘Cthulucene’, Haraway’s term for thinking in string figures and tentacular forms, ‘does not close in on itself; it does not round off; its contact zones are ubiquitous and continuously spin out loopy tendrils’. Despite this, Haraway’s reference point here is a spider, pimoa cthulhu, so that the web is at least implicitly present.61 Holobionts are also said to generate ‘heterogeneous webbed patterns’, and Haraway uses webs as a metaphor for antiracist and anti-genealogical feminist relationships, remarking that ‘such webs are necessary for staying with the trouble’.62 As with Eliot, the web for Haraway evokes both a natural form and the weaving of fabric, though the latter is more prominent in the nineteenth century. Beer also identifies in Eliot a relationship to Darwin’s ‘inextricable web of affinities’, the relationship between species that evolution has generated, so that the web in Eliot evokes ‘spider, fabric, human tissue’.63 It is, therefore, like the river in The Mill on the Floss, a figure that gathers multiple meanings, and a tool of realism that becomes allegorical in its deployment by Eliot. Importantly, the social web in Middlemarch is not universal but particular, and unlike Haraway’s string-figures it is more often constraining than it is enabling. At the start of Chapter 15 the narrator famously distinguishes him/herself from Henry Fielding, stating: ‘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’ (MM137). The abstract totality of the universe is rejected in favour of particular, local, concrete totality. Eliot here puts into practice Feuerbach’s injunction to locate humanity in individual relationships, but develops this idea by gathering relationships into a network. It  Beer, pp. 156–68.  Haraway, p. 33. 62  Haraway, p. 60, p. 216 n4. 63  Beer, p. 156, p. 157. 60 61

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is not always acknowledged, however, including by Beer, that Eliot’s localised web can become a trap for the subject, as with Bulstrode, who has spent years ‘perpetually spinning [his pleas] into intricate thickness, like masses of spider-web, padding the moral sensibility’ (MM487).64 This is part of the subtext of the web’s companion metaphor, the scratched mirror, in Chapter 28: Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent—of Miss Vincy, for example. (MM232)

While it is the egoism of Rosamond that is being directly critiqued, there is also an implicit awareness that the perspective of the narrator, and even the scheme of the novel itself, which places the town of Middlemarch at its centre, is itself a distorting egoism. As Tambling points out, relationships in Middlemarch are ‘gathered round a knowable center or body, under the dominant gaze of the novelist’.65 But while the narrator is surveying or spinning the web, she might also, like Bulstrode, become caught in it. This is implied by the pier-glass metaphor, which recalls the narrator’s declared aim in Chapter 17 of Adam Bede (1859): to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel […] bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is.66

64  Beer does comment on the web’s ‘entanglement’, recalling Darwin’s tangled bank at the end of On the Origin of Species, but does not frame this negatively. Beer, p. 167. 65  Tambling, p. 953. 66  George Eliot, Adam Bede (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), pp. 164–5.

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The realism posited here is like the river of The Mill on the Floss in that it is both outside (‘a faithful account of men and things’) and inside (‘as they have mirrored themselves in my mind’) the human subject. It is what we spin out of ourselves, like Bulstrode, or cast out as illumination, like Rosamond, but also what acts upon us or catches us, and what we cannot control. This danger is exemplified by Lydgate, who in Chapter 18 feels for the first time ‘the hampering threadlike pressure of small social conditions’ (167), and by Chapter 31 finds that hints from Mrs Bulstrode about his relationship to Rosamond are ‘woven like slight clinging hairs into the more substantial web of his thoughts’ (258). If the web and scratched mirror are not as dramatic an allegorical statement as the flooding river, they still show that what forms the basis for a realist description of the human is liable to turn back against the human, disrupting or threatening it.

Threads, Tissues and Layers Although the structures of human society depicted in The Mill on the Floss are less complex and developed than in Middlemarch, there are moments here too where metaphors of webs and tissues become prominent, complementing the ruling theme of the river. In Book 5, Chapter 7, the narrator comments of the Tulliver family, in a section focalised through Tom, that ‘apparently the mingled thread in the web of their life was so curiously twisted together that there could be no joy without a sorrow coming close upon it’ (MF370). The web here is imagined primarily as a woven fabric, in which the ‘threads’ of various events and the feelings they provoke are entangled. If the web here is the Tulliver family, two chapters earlier it is specifically the inner life of Maggie. As Maggie contemplates whether to ‘sacrifice’ (MF352) herself in a marriage to Philip Wakem, whom she is attached to but does not love sexually or romantically, the chapter ends with the reflection that ‘the tissue of vague dreams must now get narrower and narrower, and all the threads of thought and emotion be gradually absorbed in the woof of her daily life’ (MF352). This ‘tissue of vague dreams’ anticipates Will Ladislaw’s ‘indeterminate loftiest thing’, while the suppression of thought and feeling by the weight of daily life looks back to the 1839 letter to Maria Lewis. Whereas the web in Middlemarch has expanded to a community, in The Mill on the Floss it is still individual and internal, or at most familial. This reflects a Feuerbachian progression, in which coming to a fuller knowledge of humanity requires encountering a widening circle of people; a process that is allegorical and in principle

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nearly infinite, since ‘as many are the men, so many are the power, the properties of humanity’.67 The web is also important in Book 6, Chapter 14, named ‘Waking’, which resolves the boat trip during which Stephen asks Maggie to elope. The title indicates that the experience with Stephen is associated with dreaming, just as Philip, through his surname ‘Wakem’, is allegorically associated with waking. As Maggie comes to her senses: ‘there was a moment of utter bewilderment before her mind could get disentangled from the confused web of dreams; but soon the whole terrible truth urged itself upon her’ (MF473). The web is another name for the ‘tissue of vague dreams’, and both are associated with a confused, involuntary state. This alignment returns in a moment I have already quoted, where the flooding river is linked to the dream as a web or tissue of fabric: ‘the whole thing has been so rapid—so dream-like—that the threads of ordinary association were broken’ (MF513). If the river during the ride with Stephen was a wish-fantasy of desire, in the denouement it has become a nightmare, but in both cases this is imagined as a web or tissue within Maggie. The web in The Mill on the Floss is implicitly opposed to both the single thread, representing the conscious, directed will of the subject, and the ‘woof’ of daily life, which cuts across it. Something like the Freudian unconscious is being evoked, in which the human subject contains a substratum of webs or tissues in which ‘conglomerated fragments’ and ‘disjointed specimens’ jostle for attention, underneath the pressures of daily life, while concerted action requires consciously drawing out or following an individual thread (or group of threads). This concept of the individual thread as a guide is present in Middlemarch, where Dorothea is famously figured in Chapter 19 as the Greek princess Ariadne (MM176), whose thread guides Theseus through the labyrinth of Minos. The emphasis in The Mill on the Floss is on Maggie as the focal point of web and river metaphors, both of which are ways of allegorically representing the multiple forces and layers that constitute the human whilst also reaching out beyond the human to the natural world. In Middlemarch, meanwhile, just as the web has a social rather than an individual fabric, the river is reimagined as a social metaphor: [Dorothea’s] full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing  Feuerbach, p. 22.

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good of the world 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. (MM640)

In this well-known ending, the river is transformed from a single thread into a network of many streams, which allow Dorothea’s influence to become ‘diffusive’, spreading to those around her (if not to society as a whole). Rather than being broken by the river, as Maggie is, she is metaphorically split apart, but this paradoxically allows her to survive rather than being swept away.

Conclusion In broad terms, the trajectory of these two allegories of the human—the river and the web—is from the internal life of the individual subject in The Mill on the Floss to interpersonal relationships in Middlemarch. The shift between the two novels thus parallels Maggie’s own attempts to move beyond the sole self, following a Feuerbachian logic. This is not simply to say that Middlemarch is a more developed or mature novel than The Mill on the Floss (a tradition of reading that goes back at least as far as Leavis), but rather that reading the two novels together dialectically allows us to see that the allegorical tools which are directed towards individual interiority are the same as those which allow Eliot to conceptualise social interconnectedness.68 While the final outcomes for Maggie and Dorothea are in a sense antithetical, in that the first is destroyed by the unbroken power of the river and the second survives by becoming a river whose power is broken, Dorothea’s fate should also be read as an altered repetition of Maggie’s, and one which is simultaneously more realist and more allegorical. More realist because the dramatic final scenes of the earlier text are replaced by ‘unhistoric acts’, so that daily life takes the place of Maggie’s death-drive fantasy, but more allegorical in that the material reality of the river from The Mill on the Floss is replaced by metaphorical description in Middlemarch, and in the way the individual tragedy of Maggie is modified into the shared social melancholy of an indeterminate ‘number’ who lie in ‘unvisited tombs’. Dorothea’s final significance is as an allegorical figure for this unnamed multitude, so reversing the exceptional individualism of 68  According to Leavis, ‘the supremely mature mind of Middlemarch is not yet manifested in The Mil on the Floss’. Leavis, p. 39.

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Saint Theresa, to whom she is compared in the Prologue (MM31), while nonetheless retaining a form of Theresa’s martyrdom. The two women and the two novels are in this sense layered upon one another. Moreover, as I have suggested above, these novels construct the human through a process of layering and interlacing in which the individual subject can, following Feuerbach, only come to self-knowledge by turning outwards towards the other, and in which the ‘essence’ of humanity is readable only through a series of local, particular relationships. These novels display this also through the interlacing of realism and allegory, in which allegory is not arbitrary but a supplement which ‘intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of’ realism, to put it in Derrida’s terms.69 This takes place especially through the layering of history and nature, which at times comes close to Benjaminian natural history. Although humanity is a central point of attention for Eliot, and her work is constantly concerned with probing its features and its qualities, as part of this very process novels such as The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch end up pulling away from and allegorising the human. Such an approach has continuing relevance for thinking through challenges of the Anthropocene. To follow Eliot and think simultaneously through realism and allegory might help us avoid the dual risks of an excessive realism, which is unable to imagine or properly represent sudden environmental destruction, and a too-universal allegorisation, which, in making humanity a geological force, transplants it into the place of God.

69  Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 145.

CHAPTER 4

Zola, Moore, Lee and the Vivisectional Novel

Abstract  This chapter starts from Émile Zola’s ‘The Experimental Novel’, which in attempting to locate a scientific basis for the novel relies problematically on the ideas of the vivisectionist Claude Bernard. The chapter argues that this scientific cutting open and penetrating of the novel is part of an anthropocentric and reductive process, but that this is countered by features of the novelistic practice of Zola, such as the descriptions of the market in Le Ventre de Paris (1873), which register a sickness in bourgeois assumptions about the human and the treatment of animals that accompanies them. The chapter traces the influence of this tension within Zola to two late-nineteenth century writers who responded to him: George Moore and Vernon Lee. Moore imitated but also rejected Zola, while Lee wrote ‘On The Moral Teachings of Zola’ (1893) as part of her critical aesthetic project, but also published articles against vivisection. These ambivalent relationships to Zola, the chapter argues, reproduce a fundamental ambiguity within Zola’s own writing regarding the relationship between human life, animal life, food, disgust and the realist novel as a form. Keywords  Émile Zola • Vivisection • Vernon Lee • George Moore • Le Ventre de Paris • ‘The Experimental Novel’ • Food • Disgust • Realism

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Moore, Human Tissue in the Realist Novel, 1850–1895, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26640-9_4

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In his essay ‘The Experimental Novel’ (1879), Émile Zola famously compares the principles of naturalism to those of scientific experimentation, asking ‘is experiment possible in literature, in which up to the present time observation alone has been employed?’.1 Zola closely follows the French physiologist and vivisectionist Claude Bernard (1813–78) in making his argument that the naturalistic novel can and should be a sphere of experimentation analogous to natural science. He emphasises the mastery over life and nature exerted by the (male) experimenter as part of this process, quoting Bernard’s claim that ‘the experimenter is the examining magistrate of nature’, then reformulating this as ‘we novelists are the examining magistrates of men and their passions’ (TEN 10). Zola asserts that literature can break down human thoughts and feelings into knowable components, as science does with the body, and that these components can then be gathered and understood by the ‘genius of the experimentalist’ (TEN 34): When it has been proved that the body of man is a machine, whose machinery can be taken apart and put together again at the will of the experimenter, then we can pass to the passionate and intellectual acts of man. […] A like determinism will govern the stones of the roadway and the brain of man. (TEN 16–17)

The human functions in two distinctly different ways here: firstly it is understood as a ‘machine’, no different in fundamentals from inanimate matter, such as the ‘stones of the roadway’. This is human tissue as malleable, knowable and de-sanctified. But secondly, the human as a transcendent rational being returns, in a scientific register, in the form of the ‘genius’ who orchestrates and interprets these experiments that human bodies and minds undergo. This organising dichotomy becomes even more apparent in Section III, where Zola writes: This, then, is the end, this is the purpose in physiology and in experimental medicine: to make one’s self master of life in order to be able to direct it. […] We shall enter upon a century in which man, grown more powerful, will make use of nature and will utilize its laws to produce upon the earth 1  Émile Zola, ‘The Experimental Novel’, in The Experimental Novel and Other Essays, trans. by Belle Sherman (New York: Haskell House, 1964), p. 6. Further references given in the main text as TEN.

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the greatest possible amount of justice and freedom. There is no nobler, higher, nor grander end. Here is our rôle as intelligent beings: to penetrate to the wherefore of things, to become superior to those things, and to reduce them to a condition of subservient machinery. (TEN 25)

This dream, he says, is ‘also that of the novelist’ (TEN 25). But although the role of ‘man’ is to penetrate into things and become superior to them, at the same time it is precisely the ‘body of man’ and the ‘brain of man’ that are the objects of investigation, as the above shows. The human is therefore both broken down into inanimate matter to be studied, and elevated—or at least a certain privileged sector of humanity is elevated—to become the godlike creator of ‘justice and freedom’, the ruler over all nature, including human nature, which has now become ‘subservient machinery’. If in Zola’s essay there is already a split in the function and meaning of the human, it is nonetheless clear that the main goal is to propose a scientific form of realism that can penetrate into all facets of human life in order to bring them into knowledge. This takes place on the model not just of science in general, but of Bernard’s form of science, which is deeply reliant on vivisection—the cutting open, usually in agonising ways, of living creatures for the purposes of experimentation—which was the subject of an extended debate in Britain and elsewhere in the late nineteenth century.2 As Zola recognises, Bernard’s Introduction à l’Étude de la Médecine Experimentale (1865), on which he bases his arguments, ‘treats of practical experiments on living beings, of vivisection, of the preparatory anatomical conditions, of the choice of animals’ (TEN 4). The concept of the experimental novel, therefore, might equally be described as that of the ‘vivisectional novel’. The naturalist novelist experiments on living (albeit fictional) human animals, as Bernard does on non-human animals. My argument in this chapter is, in the first place, that despite Zola’s construction of a model of the vivisectional novel which simultaneously treats the human as a form of passive matter to be studied, and establishes it (in the form of the genius experimenter) as the privileged centre of all knowledge, his novels undermine this vivisectional logic. Taking the 1873 novel Le Ventre de Paris (The Belly of Paris) as a case study, I will show that Zola’s fiction turns against the attitudes of scientific detachment and 2  For an overview, see A.W.H.  Bates, Anti-Vivisection and the Profession of Medicine in Britain: A Social History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

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anthropocentrism that he proposes in ‘The Experimental Novel’, leading to a structural tension in the way Zola depicts the human, and its relation to the animal, so contesting the possibility of human mastery for which he overtly argues. This brings to the fore the suppressed contradiction on which ‘The Experimental Novel’ is based. In the second part of the chapter I turn to two important figures who respond to Zola in the British and Irish contexts: George Moore (1852–1933) and Vernon Lee (1856–1935). My goal here is to show that the same ambiguity which marks Zola’s relation to the human is repeated, in a different form, in both Moore and Lee’s engagements with Zola. As part of this reading, I want to argue that analysing Lee’s 1893 essay on Zola and morality through her 1882 article ‘Vivisection: An Evolutionist to Evolutionists’ can lead us to a potential explanation of why and how the vivisectional novel might turn against vivisection. Zola’s form of realism, and these responses to it, are ultimately shown to be split between a rational anthropocentrism on the one side, and, on the other, a framing of the human in terms of both animality and forms of matter that are not passive, but fluctuate between the living and the dead, the edible and the putrid.

Zola’s Nauseating Kitchen Against the figure of the novelist as a genius who objectively applies an ‘experimental method’ and carefully studies the results, we should set the contemporary responses to Zola’s writing. Especially in Britain, these frequently centred on disgust, in ways that are inseparable from questions of food and consumption. Considering this tendency will help bring into focus the tensions that run through Zola’s depiction of the human, leading to Le Ventre de Paris. George Moore, who was first a disciple of Zola and then rejected him, records a powerful response to reading his ideas on science and naturalism in Le Voltaire.3 Like certain words which had affected him deeply in childhood and youth (‘Shelley’, ‘France’), Moore claims that he ‘experienced the pain and joy of a sudden and inward light’. This ‘new art based upon science’ stands in contrast to Moore’s attempts at decadent poetry, which 3  This might be ‘The Experimental Novel’ itself, which appeared in Le Voltaire in October 1879, shortly after its first publication in a Russian journal, Vestnik Evropy, or perhaps one of the other articles that were later collected in The Experimental Novel and Other Essays in 1893.

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are ‘dead flowers that could not be galvanized into any semblance of life’.4 Yet this idea that Zola’s approach brings ‘life’ is retrospectively condemned by Moore, his novels now described as ‘the putrid mud of naturalism’.5 Robert Louis Stevenson, writing from a quite different literary perspective, criticised Zola in similar terms, claiming that ‘to afford a popular flavour and attract the mob, he adds a steady current of what I may be allowed to call the rancid’.6 Alison Morehead notes that early responses to ‘The Experimental Novel’ took a similar line, with one writer criticising Zola’s alignment of the ‘filthy’ naturalist novel with Bernard’s scientific renown, and another attacking his implied assimilation of vivisection to literary style as ‘a symptom of mental illness’.7 Nana in particular, which began its serial publication in the same issue of Le Voltaire where ‘The Experimental Novel’ appeared, made Zola: the object of mockery and moral indignation, inciting accusations of writing ‘ordurous’ and ‘putrid’ literature and provoking a series of caricatures in the 1880s: Zola the scavenger; Zola the director of a theatre of disgust; Zola cooking a soup of disgusting waste.8

This final image of Zola cooking a soup of waste is part of a recurrent association of his writing with food, usually food as rotten and repulsive. Moore, for instance, accuses Zola and Edmond de Goncourt of lacking digestion; they ‘cannot, or will not, understand that the artistic stomach must be allowed to do its work in its own mysterious fashion’.9 In the British context, disgust towards Zola’s work culminated in 1888 with the prosecution of the publisher Henry Viztelly (1820–94) for obscenity, after his publication of a translation of La Terre (1887). The 4  George Moore, Confessions of a Young Man [1886] (London: William Heinemann, 1928), p. 74, p. 75, p. 74. 5  Moore, p. 82. 6  Robert Louis Stevenson, The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson: Tusitala Edition: Volume 18 (London: Heinemann, 1924), p. 70. See William Gray, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Literary Life (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 44–5. 7  Alison Morehead, Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), p. 27. 8  Rikka Rossi, ‘Writing Disgust, Writing Realities: The Complexity of Negative Emotions in Émile Zola’s Nana’, in Writing Emotions: Theoretical Concepts and Selected Case Studies in Literature, edited by Ingeborg Jandl, Susanne Knaller, Sabine Schönfellner and Gudrun Tockner (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2017), pp. 277–94 (p. 280). 9  Confessions, p. 104.

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parliamentary debate on ‘corrupt literature’ that took place on 8th May 1888 provides a concentrated expression of these sentiments. Samuel Smith, MP for Flintshire, opened by proposing a Motion for vigorously enforcing and if necessary strengthening ‘the law against obscene publications and indecent pictures and prints’.10 The poisonous influence of Zola’s novels was the specific target.11 Smith suggests that the young of Britain are suffering less from ‘the effect of an excessive use of strong drink than they were from the more subtle poison of vile and obscene literature’. There is ‘nothing that so corroded the character, or so sapped the vitality of a nation’, with Viztelly blamed for ‘translating and selling in the English market more than 1,000,000 copies of the worst class of French novels’.12 As Smith continues, quoting frequently from the periodical press, disgust, animality and consumption are combined, so that Zola’s books become a form of food that is corrupting, filthy and repulsive. His novels are ‘only fit for swine’, and will turn the mind into ‘something akin to a sty’. Zola’s realism, according to the Saturday Review, is ‘dirt and horror pure and simple’, with La Terre the ‘bestial chef d’oeuvre’.13 Smith asks whether the country should ‘wait until the moral fibre of the English race was eaten out, as that of the French was almost’, stating that ‘nothing to him was more melancholy than the garbage on which the children of London fed’.14 Some lines quoted from the Edinburgh Review—describing the ‘cheap penny papers’, treated here as equivalent to Zola—serve to summarise this set of ideas: The feast spread for them [the children of London] is ready and abundant, but every dish is a false one, every condiment vile. Every morsel of food is doctored, every draught of wine is drugged; no true hunger is satisfied, no true thirst quenched; and the hapless guests depart with a depraved appetite, and a palate more than ever dead to every pure taste and every perception of what is good and true.

10  ‘Corrupt Literature’, House of Commons, Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates: The Official Report (8 May 1888, cols 1708–25) [Online] [accessed 17 November 2022], col. 1708. 11  For an overview of literature as poison in Britain, see Patrick Brantlinger, ‘The Case of the Poisonous Book: Mass Literacy as Threat in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction’, Victorian Review, 20.2 (1994), 117–33. 12  ‘Corrupt Literature’, col. 1708. 13  ‘Corrupt Literature’, col. 1709. 14  ‘Corrupt Literature’, col. 1710.

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What appears to be food is in fact ‘unwholesome garbage’.15 This is a kind of consumption that breeds immorality, turning these vulnerable and susceptible children into ‘depraved’ and bestial adults. Zola’s novels become waste, filth, all forms of the abject, on which readers feed, making the novels machines of corruption that break down the potential purity and morality of the human subject. It is highly suggestive, then, that Zola himself deploys a metaphor which combines food and disgust in ‘The Experimental Novel’, quoting from Claude Bernard. This is presented as a justification for the ‘often cruel’ work of naturalist novelists: You will never reach really fruitful and luminous generalizations on the phenomena of life until you have experimented yourself and stirred up in the hospital, the amphitheater, and the laboratory the fetid or palpitating sources of life. If it were necessary for me to give a comparison which would explain my sentiments on the science of life, I should say that it is a superb salon, flooded with light, which you can only reach by passing through a long and nauseating kitchen. (TEN 27)

For Zola, as for his critics, the disgusting is indeed present, but must be confronted in order to pass through the ‘nauseating kitchen’ to the ‘superb salon’ of scientific enlightenment. In this he redeploys Bernard’s justification of vivisection: that it is a repulsive necessity in order to bring about scientific (and social and moral) progress. In rhetorical terms, what is significant here is the use of the kitchen as the site of the ‘nauseating’, so embracing the connection between food and disgust. Both vivisection and the vivisectional novel are implicitly compared to the violent transformation of living animal bodies into edible delicacies suitable for a salon. Zola, like Bernard, is willing to concede that the process by which this takes place is disgusting, nauseating, putrid, but instead of leading to corruption and decay—to dehumanization—it leads to the opposite, to entry into the (almost divine) light of knowledge.

Le Ventre de Paris: The Fat and the Thin This question of the nauseating kitchen becomes more complicated if we recognise that it is also a central setting and metaphor of Le Ventre de Paris, Zola’s 1873 novel of the great food market of Paris, Les Halles  ‘Corrupt Literature’, col. 1711.

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(built 1854–9). The novel follows the story of Florent Quenu, who was imprisoned after being caught up in Napoleon III’s coup d’etat of 1851, and has illegally returned to Paris in 1858 after escaping from Devil’s Island, a notorious penal colony off the coast of French Guyana. This is the same colony where Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army captain famously defended by Zola in his letter J’Accuse (1898), would later be imprisoned in 1895.16 Florent comes to live in the neighbourhood of Les Halles with his brother’s family, who run a charcuterie, his presence causing increasing unease and repulsion, since he signifies a return of the repressed violence and suffering on which the prosperity of the petit-bourgeois market society is built. The central division of the novel is represented as a battle between the Fat and the Thin. Claude Lantier, a bohemian painter based on Paul Cezanne who befriends Florent, makes this distinction explicit, asking ‘do you know “The Battle of the Fat and the Thin”?’, before going on to describe what he calls this ‘series of prints’ (190) [série d’estampes]:17 He mentioned certain scenes: the Fat, big enough to burst, preparing their evening orgies; the Thin, doubled up with hunger, staring in from the street like envious stick figures; and then again, the Fat, sitting at table, their cheeks bulging with food, chasing away a Thin man who has had the temerity to insinuate himself into their midst in all humility, and looks like a ninepin in a nation of bowls. In these pictures Claude saw the entire drama of human life; and he ended by dividing everyone into Fat and Thin, two hostile groups, one of which devours the other and grows fat and sleek and endlessly enjoys itself. (BP 191)

According to Claude, this contest is fundamentally marked by violence: ‘“Cain”, he said, “was a Fat man and Abel a Thin one”’ (BP 191). Brian Nelson, the translator of the Oxford edition, suggests Claude is referring to Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Fight between Carnival and Lent (1559), 16  For a summary of Zola’s role, see Owen Morgan, ‘“J’Accuse…!”—Zola and the Dreyfus Affair’ in The Cambridge Companion to Zola, ed. by Brian Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 188–204. 17  Émile Zola, The Belly of Paris, trans. by Brian Nelson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 190. Further references given in main text as BP. Lantier’s distinction has been read as an account of social Darwinism by critics such as Marie Scarpa and Éléonore Reverzy. See Émile Zola, Le Ventre de Paris, ed. by Marie Scarpa (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2013), p. 241 n1; Éléonore Reverzy, La Chair de L’Idée: Poétique de l’allegorie dans Les Rougon-­ Macquart (Geneva: Droz, 2007), p. 117.

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with its central image of a fat man jousting with a thin man. As Marie Scarpa notes, however, Bruegel’s set of two engravings, La Maigre Cuisine/De Magher Keuken [The Thin Kitchen] and La Grasse Cuisine/De Vette Keuken [The Fat Kitchen] (both 1563), more closely fit Claude’s description, despite the fact that Zola’s early draft refers to the images as ‘gravures anglaises’ [English engravings].18 These two images can be more accurately called a ‘série d’estampes’ than The Fight between Carnival and Lent. Moreover, La Grasse Cuisine seems to clearly show the Fat ‘chasing away a Thin man who has had the temerity to insinuate himself into their midst’, as Claude states. The Thin do not fit into the ‘Fat Kitchen’, and are violently driven out of it. In this way the Fat Kitchen simultaneously stands for the market of Les Halles (which will ultimately reject Florent), the city of Paris, and the regime of the Second Empire as a whole, from all of which the Thin must be expunged. The Fat interpret the Thin, that is, as disgusting waste to be expelled. Bruegel’s prints, however, also point to the repulsiveness of the excessive consumption of the Fat, which comes at the expense of the poor. This is therefore a different form of nauseating kitchen than what is projected in ‘The Experimental Novel’. Rather than a single repulsive space which must be passed through to reach an enlightened state, we have two kitchens, giving two perspectives, which collapse the human and what Jane Bennett calls ‘edible matter’ onto one another; as Claude puts it, one group ‘devours the other’.19 The distinction between two ways of understanding the human which Zola’s essay holds apart—the knowing subject and passive matter—cannot be sustained here. Human mastery is shown to come not from objective scientific knowledge, but rather from consumption of the weak as food. This disturbingly places the Thin in the position of matter which can be eaten but which also has a form of agency through that very act of eating, changing the bodies that consume it. As Alaimo notes, food is ‘perhaps the most palpable trans-corporeal substance’.20

18  Le Ventre de Paris, p. 240. Images of these engravings appear in Manfred Sellink, Bruegel: The Complete Paintings, Drawings and Prints, trans. by Marakele Translations (New York: Harry N.  Abrams, 2007), pp.  184–5. Online versions can be seen on the New  York Metropolitan Museum of Art website: http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-­ collection-­online/search/392426 and http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-­ collection-­online/search/392424. Accessed 11 November 2022. 19  Bennett, p. 39. 20  Alaimo, p. 12.

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In the novel, Florent acts as a kind of hinge between these two ways of seeing, and it is through his eyes that we see the disgusting occupying the same position as the healthy. Rather than the nauseating kitchen leading to the superb salon, the salon is revealed to already itself be such a kitchen. In observing the life of the markets, Florent sees displays of wealth, such as ‘gentlemen in silk hats and black gloves bargaining with the fishwives and eventually going off with a cooked lobster wrapped in newspaper’ (BP 120), yet finds that ‘the masses of food amongst which [he] lived now began to cause him the greatest discomfort’ (BP 121). As a result, ‘his own small stomach, the stomach of a thin man, was sickened as he passed by the displays of fish, which, despite all the water lavished on them, turned bad at the first sign of warm weather’ (121). The water thrown onto the fish here metaphorically represents an ongoing attempt to suppress the rottenness which Florent, with the eyes of the Thin, sees all around him. For Florent, and through him the novel’s readers, the Fat and Thin kitchens are layered on top of one another, forming a tissue that repudiates the idea of cleanly separating the healthy from the disgusting. This anticipates the anxieties expressed in the Parliamentary debate on Corrupt Literature, where Zola’s novels are both consumed as food and condemned as rotten. The novel’s most striking scene in this regard literally takes place in a kitchen, as Auguste, Florent’s brother’s assistant, beats pig’s blood to make black pudding in the back of the charcuterie: I beat it and beat it and beat it, you see? […] And then, when I take my hand out and look at it, it’s got to be like it’s greased with blood, a sort of red glove that’s the same colour of red all over. Then you can say, without the shadow of a doubt, ‘the black pudding’s going to be good’. (BP 79)

The making of the black pudding transforms violence—the death of the pig, the spilling of its blood—into comfort and well-being in the form of food. As the making of the pudding continues, Florent begins to relate what his young niece Pauline calls ‘the story of the man who was eaten alive!’ (BP 79). This is the horrific narrative of Florent’s experiences of Devil’s Island, which first adopts and then refutes the conventions of a fairytale: Once upon a time [Il était une fois] there was a poor man who was sent far away, right across the sea. On the ship that carried him away, there were four

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hundred convicts, and he was thrown among them. He had to live for five weeks with all these bad men, wear sail-cloth like them, and have his rations alongside them. Lice were eating him up and he sweated so much that he lost all his strength. (80)

In Jacques Rancière’s reading, this narrative is fatally undermined by the context of its telling: as this story of poverty, famine and injustice swells up, the joyous sputtering of the black pudding, the smell of fat, and the heady warmth of the atmosphere contradict it, transforming it into an incredible story told by a ghost from another age. This story of blood spilt, and of a man dying of hunger who demands justice, is refuted by the place and the circumstances.21

While it is certainly true that this disjunction makes it impossible for Pauline and her mother, Lisa, to credit Florent’s story (‘I don’t believe it’, says Lisa, ‘no one ever goes three days without food. When people talk about a person dying of hunger, it’s just a manner of speaking’ [BP 84]), the novel also does something significant here with the setting of the kitchen, drawing it into relation with questions of disgust and consumption, humanity and bestiality. Before the revelation that Florent and his fellow escapee had to survive on a raft for three days without food, after which the companion finally dies, Florent has already relayed the image of the man eaten alive. This image literalises, in a horrifying way, Claude’s metaphor of the Thin being consumed. In its disjunctive association with the making of the black pudding, it also speaks against the logic of the vivisectional novel outlined in Zola’s 1879 essay. When Florent (‘the man’) first escapes from the prison colony, he has two others with him, but one of these, who cannot swim, is left stranded on a rock while his companions attempt to find help. On their return, four days later: they saw their companion lying on his back, his hands and feet eaten away, his face gnawed, and his stomach full of crabs crawling about, making his sides shake, as if the half-eaten corpse, still fresh, was in the throes of a terrible death agony. (BP 83)

21  Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. by Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007), p. 49.

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This escaped prisoner, who has not been able to eat, is himself eaten, and in the eating becomes a terrible parody of over-consumption, his stomach stuffed full of crabs. This threat of consumption by crabs returns in the real-life experience of Alfred Dreyfus, who would later write of his time on Devil’s Island that: The most tiresome insect was the spider-crab; its bite is venomous. The spider-crab is a creature whose body resembles that of a crab, and its legs are long, like those of a spider. Altogether it is about as large as a man’s hand. I killed many of them in my hut into which they came through the aperture between the roof and the walls.22

Zola’s image creates disgust in Lisa and the other listeners, but this does not transfer to the regime that produced such suffering. Instead, it enhances their repulsion towards the Thin, allegorically represented by Lisa’s fear of ‘ravenous crabs crawling all over the kitchen, mixing their stench with the aroma of the bacon fat and onions’ (BP 83). This fear later returns in her visions of armed men ‘running past the charcuterie […], stealing sausages and andouilles from the window’ (BP 199), after she reads Florent’s revolutionary writings. In setting the image of the man eaten alive against the charcuterie kitchen, and against these responses, Zola’s novel thus creates a juxtaposition that reveals—to the readers if not the characters—consumption to be as horrific as starvation, the Fat to be at least as disgusting as the Thin. More than this, if we read the scene through ‘The Experimental Novel’, the man eaten alive by crabs becomes a reverse image of vivisection. Rather than the human experimenter eviscerating the living animal, here it is the animal, or rather the swarm of animals (this being what, as Chap. 2 discussed, lies at the heart of becoming-animal) that eviscerates the human, eating it alive. When the man’s body is discovered, it has not become passive, static matter, but moves as if ‘in the throes of a terrible death agony’. The body appears to produce a dark parodic laughter, as the crawling crabs make ‘his sides shake’. There are multiple forms of doubling at play here, since the crabs within the man’s stomach imply that he has eaten them, even as they are eating him. This devoured/devouring stomach is then echoed in both Florent’s thin man’s stomach that turns at the sight 22  Quoted in Piers Paul Read, The Dreyfus Affair: The Story of the Most Infamous Miscarriage of Justice in French History (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 130.

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of the grotesque abundance of Les Halles, and in the ‘rows of suspended carcasses […] all streaked with yellow fat and tendon, and with their bellies gaping open’ (BP 29) that hang in the market. Indeed, the stomach full of crabs acts as an inversion of the market as a whole, which as the novel’s title suggests is the (fat, overflowing) belly of Paris. It is therefore an image that destroys the neat categorisations of ‘The Experimental Novel’, in which the human is either objective matter to be studied or a subject accumulating knowledge. This means that while Florent’s narrative might at first glance look like a journey through the nauseating kitchen of Devil’s Island towards the superb salon of the markets, the novel thoroughly takes apart this opposition.

The Market as Slaughterhouse The opposition between kitchen and salon is also disrupted by the architectural structure of Les Halles, which again functions to layer the Fat and Thin Kitchens upon one another. Below the magnificent iron and glass halls of the main market, a vast series of cellars houses live animals waiting to be butchered. Lisa goes there in Chapter 4 with Marjolin, a foundling originally discovered ‘in a pile of cabbages’ (BP 153), who has grown up in the market. The world above, with its ‘pavilions with soaring roofs that seemed to expand and disappear from sight in shimmers of light’ (BP 8), conceals a diametrically opposed subterranean world, a ‘dark cavern where no light ever penetrated’ (BP 179), where the smell of animals makes Lisa feel ‘quite sick, and that she wouldn’t be able to eat chicken again for two months’ (BP 178). It is only in this underground space that Lisa feels the same disgust Florent does in the market above. When Lisa ‘poke[s] her fingers through the holes in the boxes, bemoaning the fate of the hens, so cooped up that they could not even stand upright’ (179), their imprisonment echoes Florent and the other convicts on Devil’s Island, similarly suffering but hidden from view. The slaughtering of the chickens takes place on ‘five huge stone blocks stretched out along the Rue Rambuteau under the yellow light from the gratings and the gas burners’ (BP 181). In the light of the 1879 essay, Zola’s description of the scene again evokes vivisection: At one end there was a woman bleeding chickens, which led him [Marjolin] to remark that this woman was plucking the poultry while they were still alive, because it was easier that way. […] The blood, he said, ran along the

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blocks and made puddles on the flagstones. Every two hours the cleaners came to wash the place down, scrubbing away the red stains with think brushes. (BP 181)

The chickens are plucked while still alive, producing streams of blood that must be continually washed away. Unlike in ‘The Experimental Novel’, the product of this suffering is not scientific knowledge but material comfort, in the form of food and feathers, which sell ‘for up to nine sous a pound, according to their quality’ (BP 181). (Though it should be noted that Marjolin also acts as a kind of parody of the scientific expert, with ‘no end to the information he gave’ (BP 181).) The aesthetic form of the novel, like Florent’s double perspective, stitches together these worlds of above and below, which Lisa and others insistently hold apart. It is not that the blood and suffering of the animals is a temporary stage through which one can pass, but an event repeatedly re-enacted (‘every two hours’) in order to maintain the world of plenty above. This drive to repeat is also a feature of vivisection, as Vernon Lee observes: as the physicist or chemist has to repeat his experiment […] so also must the physiologist try once, twice, and thrice, and again under slightly different conditions, his experiments upon his living subject, doing the same thing over again on the original animal, or taking a series of successors. […] His experiment must be repeated and re-repeated, his observations tested by all the other men who have any knowledge of the matter.23

If the logic of vivisection necessitates repetition, this means there is no foreseeable escape from the systematic infliction of suffering when once it is accepted. Le Ventre de Paris recognises something similar of the factory-­ like processes of slaughter that take place underneath the market. In this sense, the novel presents what ‘The Experimental Novel’ understands as a temporal progression (from the nauseating kitchen to the superb salon) in cyclical and spatial terms, belying Zola’s own rhetoric in the later essay. This slaughterhouse below the market is dramatically brought to the surface by Claude Lantier’s short-lived window display for the Quenus’

23  Vernon Lee, ‘Vivisection: An Evolutionist to Evolutionists’, The Contemporary Review (May 1882), 788–811 (pp. 791–2)

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charcuterie. This episode, which Rancière reads as heralding the onset of the ‘aesthetic regime’ in the arts, is described by Claude:24 What I did, you see, was produce a picture symbolizing the gluttony of Christmas Eve, when people meet at midnight after hymns and gorge themselves on empty stomachs after all the singing. At the top I put a huge turkey with a white breast, marbled under its skin by the black truffles. It was magnificent, like a huge belly, and with something so primitive and ironic about it that people stopped to look, alarmed by such a vivid display of colour. When my Aunt Lisa came back from the kitchen, she was terrified, and thought for a moment that I’d set the fat on fire. She thought the turkey was so obscene that she threw me out. […] That was my masterpiece. The best thing I’ve ever done. (BP 187–88)

In this display, the items in the shop are unchanged in themselves, but their rearrangement produces a wholly new vision. In Bennett’s terms, it changes the food from objects to things, but this is manifested less as a culture of vibrant matter than as a terrifying return of the repressed.25 Related to Florent’s thin-man’s perspective, this is a form of seeing which collapses distinctions between beauty and obscenity, satiation and disgust. For Rancière, it symbolises the aesthetic regime, which is a state in which all things are representable, producing a ‘principled identity of the appropriate and inappropriate’.26 If Claude’s window display brings about this conjunction of opposites in an artistic form, Zola’s novel does so in a literary one. Through this conjunction, animal and human bodies are both revealed to be sociobiological tissues encompassing multiple meanings, in which health, food, comfort—and, I am arguing, knowledge itself—cannot be separated from suffering, hunger and disgust.

George Moore: The Outer Skin of Naturalism The ambivalence which emerges when reading Zola’s claims about the experimental novel alongside Le Ventre de Paris is repeated in the way both George Moore and Vernon Lee respond to his work. In Lee’s case, as I will show below, this takes place in direct relation to vivisection, 24  Gavin Arnall, Lauara Gandolfi, and Enea Zaramella, ‘Aesthetics and Politics Revisited: An Interview with Jacques Rancière’, Critical Inquiry 38.2 (2012), 289–97 (p. 292). 25  Bennett, p. 5. 26  The Future, p. 126.

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whereas in the case of Moore we find an uncertainty about naturalism’s potential to be both scientific and realistic. In Moore, as in Zola, this is a question bound up with tropes of food, the body and disgust. As already mentioned, in the autobiographical Confessions of a Young Man (1886) Moore describes his first encounter with Zola as a revelation which showed him that his earlier work ‘could not be galvanized into any semblance of life’.27 Yet Moore elsewhere insists that art should be separated from life rather than aiming to scientifically penetrate it, writing to the Dutch novelist Frans Netscher, ‘you surely do not believe in the naturalistic school? You surely do not believe in a scientific art? I love art because it is not nature’.28 This apparent contradiction comes from an uncertainty about whether Zola’s writing produces a genuine appearance of life, or is instead a deceptive surface with no real content. Does it lead towards true knowledge of human life, or is it a mere artificial display? At stake is both the question of how we should assess the human in Zola, and the legitimacy of his perceived attachment to the rancid and rotten. In commenting on his re-evaluation of Zola in Confessions, Moore writes that when reading L’Assommoir (1877) he had at first ‘marvelled greatly at the lordly, river-like roll of the narrative, sometimes widening out into lakes and shallowing meres, but never stagnating in fen and marshlands’, but has now come to realise that he was ‘deceived, as was all my generation, by a certain externality, an outer skin, a nearness, un approchement’.29 This ‘outer skin’ was the depiction of modern Paris, which gave the sense of truth but without (so he now believes) real truth content. Later in the book, Moore similarly condemns vulgar kinds of realism, what he calls the ‘mildly realistic’, associated with ‘the degrading naturalism of a coloured photograph’, writing: Schopenhauer was right; we do not want the thing, but the idea of the thing. The thing itself is worthless; and the moral writers who embellish it with pious ornamentation are just as reprehensible as Zola, who embellishes it with erotic arabesques. We want the idea drawn out of obscuring matter, and this can best be done by the symbol.30

 Confessions, p. 74.  Quoted in Simon Joyce, Modernism and Naturalism in British and Irish Fiction, 1880–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 74. 29  Confessions, p. 78. 30  Confessions, p. 146. 27 28

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On the one side is ‘the thing itself’, direct mimesis, which gives no real insight or understanding and is aesthetically weak. On the other is ornamentation, which can either be moral or, as in Zola, obscene, taking the form of ‘erotic arabesques’. The latter is only a covering over of the ‘obscuring matter’ of real life however, not the transformation of it into a lasting symbolic form (as, for instance, Shakespeare is said to do). This same line of thought leads Moore, in the essay ‘A Visit to Médan’, included as an appendix to Confessions, to condemn Zola as a mere describer of the world (anticipating Lukács in ‘Narrate or Describe?’), his genius ‘but the triumph and apotheosis of common sense’, such that ‘during the last ten or a dozen years a striking resemblance has grown up between the Zola novel and the popular newspaper’.31 This critique of Zola as a writer of the mere surface extends to personal taste, since, Moore says, he has ‘squandered all he made on vulgar decoration and absurd architecture’.32 Implicitly, this line of thinking challenges the idea of Zola as a writer of the vivisectional novel: if he gives us only the outer skin of life, only vulgar decoration, we cannot sustain an image of him as penetrating the human animal and discovering its internal secrets. Yet in a laudatory preface to an English translation of Pot-Bouille (1882) from 1887 (published by Viztelly, who also brought out Moore’s The Mummer’s Wife in the same year), Moore offers a quite different picture. He there praises Zola as a ‘great epic poet’, who ‘possess the power of seeing a subject as a whole’ and seizing on ‘the main lines of its construction’.33 Moore concludes by stating of the novel that ‘the pungent odour of life it exhales, as well as its scorching satire on the middle-classes, will be relished by all who prefer the fortifying brutalities of truth to the soft platitudes of lies’.34 Moore is playing on the title here, literally ‘pot-boil’, a slang term referring to a large cooking pot and the stew or casserole inside it. The odour of the book is ‘pungent’, which signifies it as real, a picture of life, but also makes it very nearly rancid. Within this term of approbation itself we can therefore see how the central dichotomy of Zola’s writing brings together two sets of ambiguities: the fortifying/disgusting and the true/  Confessions, p. 258, p. 261.  Confessions, p. 265. 33  George Moore, ‘Preface’ to Émile Zola, Piping Hot! (Pot-bouille): A Realistic Novel (London: Viztelly and Co., 1887), pp. v–xviii (p. xi). 34  ‘Preface’, pp. xvii–xviii. 31 32

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false. As the next section will show, this double uncertainty is also at the centre of Lee’s engagement with Zola, in ways that speak back to the logic of the vivisectional novel.

Vernon Lee: The Moral Miasma of Zola In ‘The Moral Teaching of Zola’ (1893), her reckoning with what moral lessons can be learnt from the French novelist, Vernon Lee opens by first acknowledging Zola’s ‘genius’ and then the ‘horrors and indecencies’ of his books, so that reading them ‘must be attended with much disgust and perhaps some danger’.35 The question of the essay is what, if anything, can be morally drawn from the ‘tremendous pictures of pain, degradation, and injustice’ that fill his pages, putting aside any of Zola’s own professed ‘ethical theories’.36 This is, in effect, an aesthetic and literary transformation of the question that lies at the centre of Lee’s earlier 1882 article against vivisection. While acknowledging the ‘horror’ of vivisection, Lee there addresses the portion of each side of the debate for whom its existence presents a genuine moral dilemma, a choice between ending a morally repugnant practice and giving up substantial scientific benefits.37 The question becomes whether, given this scientific value, the repugnant ‘abomination’ of the practice should be permitted, and if not then on what grounds.38 In both essays, Lee asks whether disgusting, horrifying and potentially degrading matter—vivisection in one case and Zola’s novels in the other—can be morally justified. Reading the two essays through one another shows firstly that Lee locates what we might call a vivisectional aesthetic in Zola’s writing, but one that ultimately turns against vivisection. Secondly, such a reading reveals an ambivalence about the figure of the human, expressed in part through its relation to the animal. Repeating Zola’s own self-contradictions, we find a double movement in Lee by which the human is by turns broken down/deterritorialized and reconstructed/reterritorialized.

35  Vernon Lee, ‘The Moral Teaching of Zola’, The Contemporary Review (February 1893), 196–212 (p. 196). 36  ‘Moral Teaching’, 197. 37  ‘Vivisection’, 794. Lee also engages with vivisection in Baldwin: Being Dialogues on Views and Aspirations (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1886) and in the letter ‘How I am an Anti-­ Vivisectionist’, which appeared in the Morning Post on 4 August 1908. 38  ‘Vivisection’, 797.

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In the essay on Zola, Lee argues against any idea of him as straightforwardly realistic and scientific: ‘Zola is the last novelist in the world from whom we should expect an objectively faithful picture of life. His vision is limited and peculiar’. Like Early Modern dramatists such as Webster, Marston and Ford, he is interested only in the ‘tragic’ and ‘fatal’. He is ‘intensely dramatic’, his writing ‘lyric, metaphorical, and allegorical’, concerned not with individuality but with the ‘grind of life in its various forms’, through which individuals get ‘obliterated’.39 As I have argued of Kingsley and Eliot in the previous chapters, Lee proposes that what is commonly understood (including by Zola himself) as realism is in fact built out of the non-realist, out of allegory, and that this is an organising principle in his writing. We see this in the way features of the human are always dispersed onto the non-human: ‘the surroundings of life are never for a moment themselves, passive, indifferent, as they are in reality. They pant and quiver and discourse much more than the men and women’. What lies at the centre of these novels is not really the human (he has an ‘indifference to the individual human being’) but the setting.40 Through Zola’s ‘elaborate arrangements we learn what sort of misery and wickedness the world contains’, separated from any form of happiness or goodness, and this is in the end the moral worth of his writing, that it starkly displays ‘the various sorts and systems of the world’s tolerated evil’.41 A system of ‘tolerated evil’ serves also as a description of vivisection. One of the main problems of vivisection for Lee is that it is not a ‘barbarous’ practice associated with the past, but ‘a thing of modern development and infinite future extension’.42 It is this association with modernity and science, and hence the development of humanity, that leads to it being tolerated. Yet Zola’s novels bring us face to face with the filth of modernity, without allowing this filth to be split off from a pure human subject able to dwell in its own self-confidence. It is in the question of the clean and the filthy that Lee locates Zola’s difference from Honoré de Balzac: the latter’s novel Le Paysans (1844/1855) is ‘clean’ because Balzac stays detached from the agricultural poor, his ‘indignation rises only at the sight of the inconvenience and disgust which these rural habits must cause to people who can afford soap and morality’. Zola in La Terre, on the other  ‘Moral Teaching’, 198, 199, 200.  ‘Moral Teaching’, 198, 200. 41  ‘Moral Teaching’, 199. 42  ‘Vivisection’, 788. 39 40

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hand, ‘puts our fingers into the sore, our noses into the stench, and, what Balzac would never have done, our hearts also, for a while, into these repulsive creatures’ breasts’. Their obscenity and degradation, Lee argues, is shocking not simply because it is animalistic, but because Zola makes us ‘feel the human nature which we share with these poor, horrible wretches’.43 In putting our noses into the sore, Zola shows the condition of modern humanity itself to be tied to what is tainted and filthy. The characters in La Terre ‘have participated in certain effects of modern civilization, have become more nervous and more susceptible of suffering’, they are ‘like ourselves’ had we enduring the same conditions. Notwithstanding the colonialist logic of seeing some civilisations as more susceptible to suffering than others, Lee’s point is that Zola’s novels bring their readers within the experiential worlds they depict, rather than keeping these worlds at arm’s length, as objects of knowledge examined by an experimental genius: ‘I have lived through “Germinal” rather than read it. Lived in very real, dull, numbing, crushing suffering’.44 This experience of ‘suffering’ suggests a different kind of vivisectional novel than that for which Zola argues in ‘The Experimental Novel’, one which opens up the life of the human animal not in order to lead to any kind of clean knowledge, but rather to reveal the persistent proximity of the unclean. Zola’s books are ‘full of moral miasma’, but so is life.45 Lee in effect agrees with those critics of Zola who see him as a purveyor of repulsive waste, but argues that denying the separation between this repulsive waste and the humanity that would shun and reject it—as Le Ventre de Paris does—is exactly where Zola’s moral value lies. The central lesson of Zola’s works, Lee claims, is therefore to show that a sustained failure to benefit from ‘the good results of anything’ makes people ‘unable to become real human beings’, whether this is through lack of opportunities, proximity to ‘bodily misery’, or a preference for ‘artificial wants, sensual pleasures, vanity and covetousness’ in the case of the middle and upper classes.46 Zola’s subject is thus: the great mass of human shoddy, whether it exist as whole individualities which have been born or become unfit, or as the rubbishy parts of individu ‘Moral Teaching’, 201.  ‘Moral Teaching’, 202. 45  ‘Moral Teaching’, 212. 46  ‘Moral Teaching’, 205. 43 44

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alities composed for the rest of solid qualities; human shoddy, which keeps giving way and tearing with every movement of the social machine; for, little as that demands, it yet requires something less bad. The human material which is good—nay that which is just barely up to work—is rarely shown to us by Zola. But what Zola does show is quite as deserving of our attention; for it is this rubbishy portion of mankind, rubbishy natures, ideas, ideals, habits, and institutions, rubbishy wholes and rubbishy parts, rubbish in our neighbours and in ourselves, which causes so much tearing and so little progress in the Penelope’s web for ever stretched upon Time’s whirring loom.47

In referring to ‘shoddy’, Lee uses a term that emerged in the 1830s from textile manufacturing, where it describes ‘woollen yarn obtained by tearing to shreds refuse woollen rags, which, with the addition of some new wool, is made into a kind of cloth’.48 Famously weak and low-quality, so that it became a metaphor for any worthless material made to appear superior, shoddy is a tissue, in the sense that it combines old shredded rags with new wool. To see the human as shoddy is thus to see it as made of waste, but also as an amalgam, which is not resilient but easily torn. The ‘Penelope’s web’ (alluding to the perpetual weaving of Odysseus’s wife) of civilisation as a whole is compromised by the presence of this human shoddy, which is bound into it. The value of Zola’s novels is therefore that they testify to the need to abolish the conditions that have brought them about, meaning that if they are vivisectional novels they necessarily turn against vivisection. They show the failures of the human, from which we can learn how to morally reorient ourselves. In this way Lee’s reading involves both a decentring and a recentring of the human. This dynamic comes out most clearly in the vivisection essay, where Lee’s strongest and most convincing case against the practice is that it is not permissible to inflict pain on the few (animals) in order to help the many (humans), ‘if the few are separate from the many, if they alone can lose, and they alone cannot win’.49 Her rejection of the idea that exclusively human benefits can outweigh the suffering of non-human animals is a weakening of anthropocentrism, involving the application of philosophical principles of justice and, at least implicitly,  ‘Moral Teaching’, 205–6.  ‘shoddy, n’, OED online, Oxford University Press, September 2022. www.oed.com/ view/Entry/178430. Accessed 28 November 2022. 49  ‘Vivisection’, 800. 47 48

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political forms of recognition to animals. Yet the main point throughout this part of the discussion is the protection of human honour, which alongside ‘evolutional morality’ is the basis for Lee’s moral case.50 Her argument is that it is ‘dishonourable’ to obtain benefits ‘for one class at the expence [sic] of another’, and that this dishonour morally compromises the humans who allow it to occur (though Lee makes highly dubious exceptions to emphasise her opposition to socialism, permitting the exploitation of ‘feudal serfs’ and ‘negro slaves’ since society supposedly benefits overall).51 This anthropocentric argument that vivisection taints the human and risks its degradation is reinforced by Lee’s appeal to evolutional morality, which acts as a kind of defence of Christian morals by other means, akin to Eliot’s use of Feuerbach to place the human at the centre of a religion from which God has been vacated. Since reason and honour, Lee claims, have been formed by evolution as its ‘highest result’, this means if we ‘prefer desire to right’ we risk weakening ourselves and the species, threatening both our ‘moral perception’ and our ‘intellectual nature’.52 This line of thinking is highly questionable, since it does not explain why these particular human attributes should be considered as the height of evolution, rather than, for instance, the drive to pleasure, which is condemned. The main thing to note here, though, is the centripetal movement back towards a human-centred morality, which aims at maintaining a clear distinction between the ‘evil’ and the ‘good’, preventing the taint of the former from infecting the latter.53 This corruption of morality is illustrated in the closing pages by quoting Ernest Renan’s (1823–92) support for Claude Bernard, who is pictured ‘surrounded by the fumes of the blood of the living beasts whom he had poisoned with curare’. Physiological handbooks such as Bernard’s are also said to give ‘innumerable admirably clear recipes for day-long torturings’.54 These references to Bernard and to the ‘recipes’ produced by the nauseating kitchens of vivisection bring us back to Zola’s ‘The Experimental Novel’, and to its vivisectional logic of realism. Despite Lee’s firm rejection of vivisection in the 1882 essay, placing it alongside the 1893 one leads to a picture where disgust and  ‘Vivisection’, 803.  ‘Vivisection’, 801, 800. 52  ‘Vivisection’, 803, 805. 53  ‘Vivisection’, 805. 54  ‘Vivisection’, 809. 50 51

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suffering pull in two apparently contradictory directions: in the case of vivisection itself, the disgusting might appear morally justifiable but is in fact ­corrupting, whereas in Zola the disgusting might appear morally corrupting but is in fact justifiable, even necessary.

Conclusion Peter Brooks warns us to beware of ‘Zola’s advertisements for himself, which usually convey only part of what he is doing, and knows he is doing’.55 This is certainly the case of ‘The Experimental Novel’, which lays out a logic of vivisection that is already covertly divided against itself when it comes to the question of the human, splitting it between the genius experimenter and the objectified (but living) tissue to be investigated. If we follow Lee’s argument that in Zola’s work only the ‘particular genius, or madman, or monster of the book’ has any kind of individuality, we might even say that the individual human is displaced from the pages of the novel onto the ‘genius’ experimenter who writes it, and in this way preserved from the filth and corruption of the human beasts—what Zola calls La Bête Humaine in his 1890 novel—that fill it.56 As I have argued, a novel like Le Ventre de Paris disallows exactly this kind of separation of the pure and the dirty, the human and the bestial. Yet at some level Zola still has the desire to produce this separation, even to see it as the abstract goal of the realist novel. Vivisection is a highly ethically problematic model on which to base this account of realism, but also, as I have argued, deeply fitting to the ambivalences and contradictions that appear when reading the 1879 essay alongside the earlier novel. Variations on this same ambivalence reappear in George Moore and Vernon Lee’s engagements with Zola in the 1880s and 1890s, most strikingly when we read Lee’s interventions in the debates around vivisection and Zola as a couple, united by the problems of disgust and horror, and by the question of morality. Taken together, these writings add to the picture of Zola as a writer of the vivisectional novel, but this by no means simply establishes the rational human scientist as the master of the world. Instead, the human emerges at least as much as a layered and fluctuating sociobiological construct, what Lee calls a ‘great mass of human shoddy’.

 Peter Brooks, Realist Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 126.  ‘Vivisection’, 200.

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CHAPTER 5

Conclusion: The Primitive Tissue of Realism

Abstract  This Conclusion revisits the topics raised in the Introduction by asking whether nineteenth-century realism has its own ‘primitive tissue’. With reference to Walter Benjamin and Fredric Jameson, it suggests that while realism often carries its own sense of ‘aura’, it is best approached as split, multiple, layered and permeable; in short, as a tissue. Keywords  Primitive tissue • Walter Benjamin • Fredric Jameson • Human • Realist novel The final question I want to address in this Conclusion, modifying Lydgate’s question in Middlemarch, is ‘what is the primitive tissue of realism’? Indeed, does it even make sense to think of realism as having a tissue of its own? If so, is this tissue malleable or rigid? Is it best understood in terms of being or becoming, or some mixture of the two? In these closing reflections, I offer some inevitably limited and provisional responses to these questions, in light of the readings undertaken across the preceding chapters. In the same way as Man overrepresents itself as the human as such, it can seem that realism overrepresents itself as the central and necessary form of the novel. In this sense, even though it is made up of mechanically reproducible works, realism often appears to display what Benjamin in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ (second © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Moore, Human Tissue in the Realist Novel, 1850–1895, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26640-9_5

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version 1935–6) calls an ‘aura’, a unique ‘authenticity’ founded on ‘the idea of a tradition which has passed the object down as the same, identical thing to the present day’.1 Extending beyond its own relatively narrow spatial and temporal location, the realist novel can easily come to appear as the timeless and definitional form of literary narrative as such. Yet, as Jesse Oak Taylor points out, the aura in Benjamin is not in fact singular but a tissue: What, then, is the aura? A strange tissue [Gespinst] of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be. To follow with the eye—while resting on a summer afternoon—a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of those mountains, of that branch.2

As Taylor writes, Benjamin’s ‘turn of phrase emphasizes space and time as a weave, elements of a single fabric. And, like the bodily tissues that enable movement through tensioned suspension, that fabric is alive’. The German term Gespinst here could also be translated as web or weave instead of tissue, but whichever term is chosen, it is clear that once we begin to examine it closely the aura turns out to be multiple and layered. Taylor observes that Benjamin’s description slips ‘from sight to breath or, more productively, locates the aura in the multisensory realm of the atmosphere’.3 I would add that it makes the aura explicitly a bodily experience, and one that involves an interchange between the human body and non-human nature. This might be understood as producing a haeccity or assemblage in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, and following them Bennett’s, or as an openness to the trans-corporeal in Alaimo’s. In the terms I have been using in this book, we could instead say that the aura’s tissue of time and space is necessarily connected to, and channelled through, human tissue, in a process which pulls the human out of itself, without the human body ever fully being able to assimilate that which it ‘follows’ or ‘breathes’, since the maintenance of a certain distance is fundamental to the aura. In line with this understanding of Benjamin, my readings in this book have aimed to show that what might seem auratic in nineteenth-century realism, including its role in the production of an overrepresented Man, is 1  Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935–1938, ed. by Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2002), p. 103. 2  Selected Writings, pp. 104–5. 3  Taylor, p. 8.

5  CONCLUSION: THE PRIMITIVE TISSUE OF REALISM 

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frequently accompanied by the opening up of the human, revealing it to be a sociobiological tissue. In the case of the authors I have discussed, this takes place especially in connection with biological and philosophical discourses about the nature of the human. Of course, these readings do not displace the Foucault/Wynter analysis of how the biological sciences and other anthropocentric discourses of knowledge have been fundamental to the creation of the modern figure of Man, but they do at least show that when these discourses enter into literature, an allegorical and trans-­ corporeal version of the human is always liable to emerge, forming a counterpoint to fixed models of both realism and Man. Another way to think of realism as a tissue is through Fredric Jameson’s The Antinomies of Realism, which conceives of realism as a dialectic combining two different forms of temporality, which can be summarised as ‘destiny versus the eternal present’.4 The former is associated with the mythic or narrative impulse to tell, and the latter with the dominance of immediately present affect, which later becomes hegemonic in what is usually called modernism. Affect is for Jameson associated with ‘the emergence of nameless bodily states’ during the course of the nineteenth century, which struggle to find proper elaboration in language.5 For Jameson, writing against Roland Barthes, realism is therefore not reducible ‘to signs alone’, but instead, through a tension in the way affect is registered in the realist novel, ‘allegory and the body […] repel one another and fail to mix’.6 Impressions and sensory traces can be allegories in these novels, but they can also act as bodily states which cannot be pinned down to a particular meaning. A novelist like Zola then becomes a meeting point between the forces of récit or narrative on the one hand, and a new language of affect on the other. For my purposes, Jameson’s reading is significant not only because it makes realism a tissue of competing interests, but because it argues that there is a new significance placed upon the human body within this tense structure. In Zola’s novels, for instance, there is ‘an immense collection of distinct phenomenological spaces’ in which ‘people begin to exist as bodies first and foremost’, leading to ‘immense accumulations of bodies in movement and intersection across such spaces’.7 These accumulating human bodies are both the basic stuff of realism, its newly  Antinomies, p. 21.  Antinomies, p. 32. 6  Antinomies, p. 36, p. 37. 7  Antinomies, p. 76. 4 5

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generated primitive tissue, yet are also resistant to absorption by realism’s language, to incorporation within its inherited modes of telling and thinking. In Chap. 3, I suggested that we might define primitive tissue as attention to what is apart from ourselves. From this point of view, the question I am directing towards the realist novel (or at least to its manifestation in Kingsley, Eliot and Zola) is whether it can take account of its others, whether it can think difference. For Wynter, this is what the figure of Man cannot do. In insistently marking themselves off from the racial, social and biological others they deem to be inferior, she argues, the ‘subjects of the West’ who reproduce this figure of Man ‘make opaque to themselves/ ourselves […] the empirical fact of our ongoing production and reproduction of our order, of its genre of being human, its mode of consciousness or mind’.8 Man is thus a thoroughly ideological figure, in denial about its own status as ideology. While it would be too simplistic to say that reading through the concept of human tissue I have laid out here allows the realist novel to escape this ontological and epistemological problem, my hope is that it at least opens up fracture points within the figure(s) of the human projected by realism, showing the concept of the human we find within it to be divided against itself. In Kingsley’s case, this takes place through a disruption of the idea of evolution as a smooth teleological process, in Eliot’s through an opening up of the fundamentally allegorical dimensions of human identity, and in Zola’s (and, indirectly, Moore’s and Lee’s) through a contestation of vivisectional logic. These examples lead me to suggest that the primitive tissue of realism is perhaps simply its status as tissue; its capacity for layering, accretion, permeability and interpenetration, even while it also capable of acting as a border, barrier or blockage.

8

 Wynter, p. 307.

Index1

A Alaimo, Stacy, 10, 11n37, 11n38, 75, 75n20, 92 trans-corporeal, 11, 56, 75, 92, 93 trans-corporeality, 10 Allegory, 31, 42, 43, 46, 49, 50, 53, 56, 59, 60n59, 66, 85, 93 allegorical, 2, 15, 16, 40, 43, 44, 47, 50, 52, 54, 61, 63, 65, 85, 93, 94 allegorically, 43, 44, 48, 51, 57, 58, 64, 78 Anstruther-Thompson, Clementine, 8 Anthropocene, 2, 2n2, 7, 7n20, 16, 46–51, 50n29, 50n30, 57, 60n59, 66 Anthropocentrism, 2, 70, 87 anthropocentric, 6, 15, 16, 41, 43, 50, 88, 93 See also Man

Armstrong, Nancy, 2, 2n1 Aura, 16, 92 See also Benjamin, Walter B Balibar, Etienne, 51n37, 52, 52n42 Balzac, Honoré de, 85 Le Paysans, 85 Barthes, Roland, 93 Baudelaire, Charles, 9, 9n30 Becoming-evolutionary, 15, 20, 34, 35, 38 Beer, Gillian, 10, 20, 20n8, 22, 22n13, 24–26, 24n17, 26n23, 60–62, 60n57, 61n60, 61n63, 62n64 Benjamin, Walter, 9n30, 16, 42, 44, 47, 47n19, 47n20, 49, 51, 91, 92, 92n1

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Moore, Human Tissue in the Realist Novel, 1850–1895, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26640-9

95

96 

INDEX

Benjamin, Walter (cont.) Trauerspiel, 47 ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,’ 91 Bennett, Jane, 10, 10n32, 10n35, 10n36, 20n7, 46, 46n15, 75, 75n19, 81, 81n25, 92 edible matter, 75 vibrant matter, 10, 81 Bernard, Claude, 8, 16, 20n7, 68, 69, 71, 73, 88 Bewick, Thomas, 22 History of British Birds, 22 Bildungsroman, 44 Bingley, William, 22 Book of Common Prayer, 22 Bourgeois, 3, 5, 11, 16, 41, 74 bourgeoisie, 5, 6 Bray, Cara, 58 Bray, Charles, 58 Bruegel, Pieter, 74, 75, 75n18 The Fight between Carnival and Lent, 74, 75 C Capitalocene, 57, 60n59 See also Anthropocene Captain Swing, 46 Carlyle, Thomas, 12, 12n41, 12n42, 13, 13n43, 13n44, 14n45, 24, 24n18 Sartor Resartus, 12–15, 12n41 Catholic Catechism, 45 Cezanne, Paul, 74 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 46, 46n17, 50 Chambers, Robert, 18, 22, 35 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, 22 Champfleury, Jule-Français, 7

Christianity, 23, 27, 55 Christian, 3, 13, 18, 22, 24–26, 29, 30, 32, 55, 88 Climate, 2, 16, 43 Colebrook, Claire, 7, 7n20, 8, 8n26 Colonial, 3 colonialist, 38, 86 coloniality, 3 Cuvier, Georges, 35 D Darwin, Charles, 5, 5n15, 7, 8, 18, 18n4, 20n7, 20n8, 22, 35, 60n57, 61, 62n64 Darwinism, 20, 74n17 On the Origin of Species, 20, 62n64 Voyage of the Beagle, 22, 35 Defoe, Daniel, 2n1, 45 The History of the Devil, 45 Robinson Crusoe, 4 Deleuze, Gilles, 14, 14n48, 15, 15n49, 19, 20, 21n10, 24–30, 25n20, 25n22, 27n28, 28n29, 28n31, 29n34, 29n35, 29n36, 32–36, 32n44, 32n45, 33n48, 33n49, 34n50, 34n51, 36n54, 36n55, 36n56, 92 becoming-animal, 15, 25, 29, 36, 78 becoming-molecular, 21, 29 haeccity/haeccities, 33, 34, 37, 92 involution, 19, 20, 28, 34, 60 A Thousand Plateaus, 14, 14n47, 19, 19n6, 36 What is Philosophy?, 36 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, 2, 2n2, 50, 50n30, 50n31, 50n33, 51, 60n59 Derrida, Jacques, 9, 9n31, 66, 66n69 Dickens, Charles, 2n2, 9, 9n29 Bleak House, 21 Oliver Twist, 9, 9n29

 INDEX 

Disgust, 70, 71, 73, 77–79, 81, 82, 84, 85, 88, 89 disgusting, 23, 71, 73, 75, 76, 78, 83, 84, 89 Dreyfus, Alfred, 74, 74n16, 78, 78n22 E Edinburgh Review, 72 Eliot, George, v, 1, 6, 8, 8n28, 10, 11, 15, 20n8, 31, 39–41, 40n1, 40n3, 41n7, 41n8, 42n10, 43, 46–48, 47n18, 48n23, 48n26, 48n27, 50–54, 56–61, 58n53, 59n56, 60n57, 62n66, 65, 66, 85, 88, 94 ‘Brother and Sister,’ 48, 48n23, 48n26, 48n27, 50 Felix Holt, 1, 6 Middlemarch, 9, 11, 12n41, 15, 41n7, 43, 54, 55n45, 59–66, 65n68, 91 The Mill on the Floss, 15, 39–66, 40n3, 40n4, 41n8, 42n10, 48n23 ‘The Natural History of German Life,’ 8, 47, 47n18, 58 Enlightenment, 50, 60 Evolution, 8, 18–20, 20n7, 25, 28, 32, 34, 35, 37, 52, 61, 88, 94 evolutionary, v, 9, 15, 17–38, 37n58 F Fabric, 11, 12, 14, 61, 63, 64, 92 See also Tissue Fanon, Frantz, 4 The Fat and the Thin, 73–79 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 15, 43, 51–57, 51n35, 51n37, 52n39, 52n40, 52n41, 53n43, 53n44, 55n46, 55n47, 55n48, 61, 64n67, 66, 88

97

The Essence of Christianity, 15–16, 43, 51, 52n39, 55 Feuerbachian, 53, 58–60, 63, 65 Fielding, Henry, 2n1, 61 Foucault, Michel, 4–7, 6n16, 6n17, 6n18, 8n25, 11, 13, 93 Freud, Sigmund, 9, 9n31, 21, 21n11, 36 Freudian, 26, 29, 64 G Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Étienne, 35 Ghosh, Amitav, 2, 3, 3n4, 3n5, 3n6, 5, 42, 42n11, 43n12, 45 God, 18, 18n3, 19, 23–25, 27, 29, 30, 32, 45, 52, 53, 55, 56, 66, 88 Goncourt, Edmond de, 71 Grant, Robert, 35 Great Chain of Being, 18 Guattari, Félix, 14, 14n48, 15, 15n49, 19, 20, 21n10, 24–30, 25n20, 25n22, 27n28, 28n29, 28n31, 29n34, 29n35, 29n36, 32–36, 32n44, 32n45, 33n48, 33n49, 34n50, 34n51, 36n54, 36n55, 36n56, 92 becoming-animal, 15, 25, 29, 36, 78 becoming-molecular, 21, 29 haeccity/haeccities, 33, 34, 37, 92 involution, 19, 20, 28, 34, 60 A Thousand Plateaus, 14, 14n47, 19, 19n6, 36 H Haeckel, Ernst, 59 Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, 59 Haraway, Donna, 10, 10n33, 60, 60n58, 60n59, 61, 61n61, 61n62 Holobionts, 60, 61

98 

INDEX

Hegel, G.W.F., 8, 8n27, 56 Hegelian, 52, 56 owl of Minerva, 8 Hugo, Victor, 7 Humanity, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 13, 15, 24, 38, 50, 52–59, 61, 63, 66, 69, 77, 85 Huxley, T.H., 35 I Individualism, 2, 3, 5, 65 individuality, 2, 3, 28, 29, 85, 89 Iovino, Serenella, 10 J James, Henry, 9n31, 21n11, 39, 40, 40n1, 40n3, 42, 43, 50n29 Jameson, Fredric, 7, 7n21, 16, 50n33, 93 The Antinomies of Realism, 7n21, 93 Jane Eyre, 22, 22n14 Jung, Carl, 25 K Kant, Immanuel, 56 Kingsley, Charles, v, 8, 13, 15, 17–24, 18n1, 19n5, 21n9, 24n18, 26–33, 26n24, 31n40, 32n43, 33n46, 35, 37n58, 43, 52, 85, 94 Alton Locke, v, 13, 15, 19, 20, 21n9, 25, 26, 32n43, 37n58, 38, 43, 52 ‘De Profundis,’ 23–24 Glaucus, 8, 17, 18n1, 18n2, 19, 22, 28–30, 28n30, 28n31, 30n37, 30n38, 32, 37n58 The Limits of Exact Science as Applied to History, 8 Two Years Ago, 27, 27n27

The Water-Babies, 18, 24, 26, 31, 31n40, 31n41, 32n42, 33, 33n47, 35, 35n53 Westminster Sermons, 19n5, 23, 23n15, 23n16 L Latour, Bruno, 42, 42n9 Leavis, F. R., 40, 40n3, 65, 65n68 Lee, Vernon, 8, 16, 42n11, 67–89, 80n23, 84n35, 84n37, 94 The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics, 8 Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics, 8 ‘On The Moral Teachings of Zola,’ 16 ‘Vivisection: An Evolutionist to Evolutionists,’ 8 Les Halles, 73, 75, 79 Levine, Caroline, 8n28, 40, 40n2 Le Voltaire, 70, 70n3 Lewes, G.H., 8, 29, 47, 59n56 Sea-Side Studies, 8, 47 Lukács, Georg, 4, 5n13, 6, 40, 41n5, 83 ‘Narrate or Describe?,’ 40, 41n5, 83 M Madame Bovary, 7 Man, 3, 3n7, 4, 6, 7n23, 11–13, 36, 71n4, 91, 92, 94 See also Anthropocentrism Marx, Karl, 51–53, 51n35, 51n37, 52n38, 55 ‘Eighteenth Brumaire,’ 52 ‘Theses on Feuerbach,’ 51, 51n35 Moore, George, 7, 7n23, 16, 70, 71n4, 81–84, 83n33, 89

 INDEX 

Confessions of a Young Man, 82 The Mummer’s Wife, 83 Morton, Timothy, 10, 10n33, 50, 50n32, 57, 57n51 N Napoleon III, 74 Natural history, 16, 42, 47–50, 47n19, 56–59, 66 See also Benjamin, Walter Naturalism, 68, 70, 82 naturalistic, 68, 82 Netscher, Frans, 82 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 6, 6n19, 14, 14n46 ‘On Truth and Lying in an Extra-­ Moral Sense,’ 14, 14n46 O Oppermann, Serpil, 10 Owen, Richard, 35 P Parliamentary debate, 72 R Rancière, Jacques, 40, 41n5, 77, 77n21, 81, 81n24 Realism, 3, 7, 7n21, 7n22, 16, 39, 41, 42, 45, 47, 61, 63, 66, 69, 70, 72, 82, 85, 88, 89, 91–94 realist, 2–4, 6–8, 14–16, 40, 41, 43, 44, 63, 65, 85, 89, 92–94 realist novel, 2–4, 6–8, 14, 16, 43, 89, 92–94 Renan, Ernest, 88 Ruskin, John, 7

99

S Saturday Review, 27n27, 72 Shoddy, 86, 87, 87n48, 89 Smith, Samuel, MP, 6n19, 72 Steinlight, Emily, 2, 2n3, 40, 41n5, 41n6, 46 Stem cells, 59, 60 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 71, 71n6 T Tambling, Jeremy, 54, 55n45, 62, 62n65 Taylor, Jesse Oak, 2, 2n2, 92, 92n3 Thomas à Kempis, 53 The Imitation of Christ, 53 Tissue, 10–14, 11n39, 12n41, 16, 31, 43, 63, 64, 76, 87, 89, 91–94 human tissue, 7–15, 37, 61, 68, 92, 94 primitive tissue, 9, 11, 16, 31, 54, 59–61, 91, 94 (see also Eliot, George, Middlemarch) sociobiological tissue, 4, 93 tissue-paper, 11 V Vivisection, 8, 16, 31, 69–71, 73, 78–81, 84, 84n37, 85, 87–89 vivisectional, 69, 70, 73, 77, 83, 84, 86–89, 94 vivisectional novel, 69, 70, 73, 77, 83, 84, 86, 89 (see also Zola, Émile, ‘The Experimental Novel’) Viztelly, Henry, 71, 83, 83n33 von Hofmannsthal, Hugo, 36 W Watt, Ian, 2, 2n1, 50n29 Web/webs, 10, 11, 61–65, 62n64, 87, 92

100 

INDEX

Wedgwood, Josiah, 11 Woolf, Virginia, 2n2, 7 Wordsworth, William, 48, 48n24, 48n25, 48n27, 58 Wynter, Sylvia, 3, 3n7, 4, 4n8, 4n9, 4n10, 4n11, 4n12, 11, 18n3, 24n19, 51, 93, 94, 94n8 Z Žižek, Slavoj, 56, 56n49, 56n50 Zola, Émile, 7, 7n21, 8, 15, 16, 67–89, 68n1, 71n8,

74n16, 74n17, 83n33, 84n35, 93, 94 ‘The Experimental Novel,’ 7, 16, 68, 68n1, 70, 70n3, 71, 73, 75, 78–80, 86, 88, 89 Germinal, 86 J’Accuse, 74, 74n16 L’Assommoir, 7, 82 La Terre, 71, 72, 85, 86 Le Ventre de Paris, v, 16, 69, 70, 73–81, 74n17, 75n18, 86, 89 Nana, 71, 71n8 Pot-Bouille, 83