WISE FOLLY in the BRITISH REALIST NOVEL a Dissertation
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WISE FOLLY IN THE BRITISH REALIST NOVEL A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Matthew David Fellion August 2012 © 2012 Matthew David Fellion WISE FOLLY IN THE BRITISH REALIST NOVEL Matthew David Fellion, Ph.D. Cornell University 2012 This dissertation proposes that British novelistic realism of the nineteenth century is not an authoritative form designed to represent a fixed reality and elicit readers’ assent to it. Instead, realist novelists, including Walter Scott, George Meredith, George Eliot, and Rudyard Kipling, use formal practices I call “wise folly” to perform an ambivalent authority that invites disagreement. With a history that can be traced through such earlier sources as Plato’s dialogues, Erasmus’s writings, and Shakespeare’s fools, wise folly unfixes standards of wisdom and folly in a work and complicates ethical judgments. Through close readings of forms of wise folly in realist novels, this dissertation revises conventional conceptions of the realist narrator as a rhetorically coercive voice and realism as a pretense to omniscience, proposing instead that realist novels, as formed objects apprehended by readers, are a means for negotiating diverse views of reality. The introductory chapter, “Wise Folly and Narrative Discourse,” outlines the concept of wise folly and, through readings of Tristram Shandy and Vanity Fair, explains its role in the emergence of a specifically realist narrative discourse. The second chapter, “Narrative Authority and George Meredith’s Gnomes,” examines gnomic utterances such as aphorisms, maxims, and epigrams in Meredith’s work, arguing that Meredith uses these utterances to construct an ambivalent narrative authority. The third chapter, “George Eliot’s Pharmacy,” explains the function of scapegoat figures who occupy the margins of Eliot’s novels and who, from those margins, trace the limitations of the dominant ethics in the novels. The fourth chapter, “Learning We Are Fools,” addresses the desultory status of literary quotation and allusion in the novels of Scott and Meredith, where the literary can be a source of folly and where education is an inherently intertextual process, fraught with error, through which one acquires means to understand the world. The fifth chapter, “If: Aesthetics and Ideology Revisited,” situates play in Kipling’s Kim within the context of wise folly and aesthetic theory, and describes Kipling’s canny treatment of knowledge in Kim, which employs Orientalist and other modes of knowing even as it imagines the impossibility of sure knowledge. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Matthew Fellion is an Assistant Professor of English at St. Francis Xavier University. He completed his B.A. in 2007 as an English specialist at the University of Toronto at Scarborough, where he received a Governor General’s Silver Academic Medal. He obtained his M.A. and his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2010 and 2012. iii For Cathy, Dave, and Nick Fellion, with love iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It is due to the intervention of my special committee that this dissertation is not entitled “Morosophy in the British Realist Novel.” In addition to acknowledging their invaluable expertise, thoughtful commentary on my work, and perpetual good sense, I thank Jim Adams for investing his confidence and enthusiasm in this project from its germination to its fruition, Harry Shaw for teaching me how to do things with novels and how to seek out just the right degree of precision, Paul Sawyer for being a caring mentor and friend, and Laura Brown for bringing order to whatever she touches. Other faculty members who have contributed to this dissertation through their advice and responses to my writing include Rick Bogel, Andy Galloway, Jonathan Culler, and Shirley Samuels. This project was made possible by the funding Cornell provided in the form of Sage fellowships, a Shin Yong-Jin fellowship, and teaching assistantships. I am grateful to my fellow graduate students at Cornell for the exchanges that nourished this project, in seminars, at the Nineteenth-Century Graduate Colloquium, and at the Victorian Reading Group, and especially to those who read and discussed my papers at the English Department Roundtable. Of these colleagues, Owen Boynton deserves special mention. It was Owen who, when I complained that I’d never managed to write anything about wise fools, suggested I do so. Our conversations invariably remind me why I am a literary critic and provoke me to be a more perceptive one. Owen’s extensive commentary on Chapter Three of this dissertation shaped not only the chapter but my presentation of the whole project. If, as Mikhail Bakhtin writes, one’s words are always oriented towards the responses of others, Owen’s responses are an indispensable part of this dissertation. v I am grateful to my family for their unflagging support. This work is dedicated to them. I thank my mother for worrying about me even when I protest, my father for showing me what it means to be a great teacher, and my brother for inspiring me always to reflect on the value of what I do. Finally, I am forever grateful to Katherine Alia Inglis for reading this project with a sympathy that George Eliot would have envied and for buoying me through the last four years with good humour and love. In his Essay on Comedy George Meredith attributes to Shakespeare and Cervantes a “laughter of the mind and heart conjoined.” I first heard Katherine’s when I recounted to her Adrian Harley’s Procession of the Cake from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. Her laughter sustains me daily, and I hope this dissertation shares some of its spirit. A version of Chapter Five is forthcoming in 2013 in SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900; the material appears here with permission. The anonymous reader helped immensely to focus the argument and improve the style. What wisdom there may be in the following pages I owe to many voices. The folly is all mine. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Wise Folly and Narrative Discourse ............................................................................................... 1 Narrative Authority and George Meredith’s Gnomes .................................................................. 24 1. Realist Narration and the Burden of Authority ..................................................................... 24 2. The Problem of Disagreeing ................................................................................................. 32 3. Meredith’s Gnomes ............................................................................................................... 39 4. Realism, Comedy, and Philosophy ....................................................................................... 56 George Eliot’s Pharmacy .............................................................................................................. 66 1. Maxims and Medicine........................................................................................................... 66 2. Pharmakon ............................................................................................................................ 75 3. Pharmakos ............................................................................................................................ 87 4. Pharmakeus......................................................................................................................... 112 Learning We Are Fools ............................................................................................................... 126 1. “Under Which King, Bezonian?” ....................................................................................... 126 2. Education ............................................................................................................................ 142 3. Adrian and Davie ................................................................................................................ 155 If: Aesthetics and Ideology Revisited ......................................................................................... 168 1. Wisdom, Folly, and Ethnology ........................................................................................... 168 2. Playing the Game ................................................................................................................ 177 3. Ignorance, Indifference, Irresponsibility ............................................................................. 190 Coda ........................................................................................................................................ 202 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 208 vii Chapter One Wise Folly and Narrative Discourse Fool, n. A person who pervades the domain of intellectual speculation and diffuses himself through the channels of moral activity. He is omnific, omniform, omnipercipient, omniscient, omnipotent. He it was who invented letters, printing, the railroad, the steamboat, the telegraph, the platitude, and the circle of the sciences. He created patriotism and taught the nations war—founded theology, philosophy, law, medicine, and Chicago. He established monarchical and republican government. He is from everlasting to everlasting—such as creation’s dawn beheld he fooleth now. In the morning of time he sang upon primitive hills, and in the noonday of existence