129.1 ]

“The Natural History of My Inward Self”: Sensing Character in George Eliot’s Impressions of Theophrastus Such s. pearl brilmyer

Attempts at description are stupid: who can all at once describe a human be- ing? Even when he is presented to us we only begin that knowledge of his ap- pearance which must be completed by innumerable impressions under differing circumstances. We recognize the alphabet; we are not sure of the language. —George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (160)

ill not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out “ the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by Wwhich we see the blot?” asks the narrator of Middle- march (1874). Indeed it will, comes the answer, and in this regard there is “no speck so troublesome as self” (392). Metaphors of sen- sory failure in Eliot seem to capture the self-­absorption of characters who discount empirical knowledge in favor of their own straitened worldviews. In Middlemarch Casaubon’s shortsightedness is tied to his egocentric attempts to “understand the higher inward life” (21). Dorothea, who marries Casaubon in an effort to attain this kind of understanding, is correspondingly “unable to see” the right con- clusion (29), can “never see what is quite plain” (34), “does not see things” (52), and is “no judge” of visual art, which is composed in “a language [she does] not understand” (73). When Eliot describes obstacles to sensation, however, she does more than provide a critique of egoism in which the corrective is sympathetic exchange. More basically, Eliot’s fascination with the S. Pearl Brilmyer is a PhD candidate limits of perception points to an issue of increasing philosophical in comparative literature at the Univer- sity of Texas, Austin, where she is com- concern in her late work: that each being’s faculties illuminate but pleting a dissertation about problems a sliver of the world, leaving vast swaths of the universe dark and of description and characterization in unfelt. What would it feel like to step outside the human subject, to turn-of-­ the-­ twentieth-century­ litera- look on the world with an extrahuman range of faculties? “[I]‌t would ture, science, and philosophy. be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we

© 2014 s. pearl brilmyer PMLA 129.1 (2014), published by the Modern Language Association of America 35 36 Sensing Character in George Eliot’s Impressions of Theophrastus Such [ PMLA

should die of that roar which lies on the other motivation” that ground the modern notion  side of silence” (Middlemarch 182). To have “a of character. If we can distill a literary eth- keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human ics in Eliot’s final work, I argue, it is an eth- life,” the narrator of Middlemarch suggests in ics, to cite Love’s distinction, “grounded in this oft-­cited passage, would be to sense what documentation and description, rather than a human being cannot sense, to feel more empathy and witness” (375). As we shall see, than the human body allows one to feel (182).1 Eliot’s naturalistic investment in describing This essay proceeds from a literal inter- people in terms of the characterological traits pretation of this fantastical line, tracking they share with nonhuman animals calls into from here Eliot’s interest in literature as a question the human exceptionalism of novel- mode of enhanced sensation.2 This interest, as istic modes of characterization. Rather than we shall see, would culminate in her last pub- craft characters as uniquely psychological be- lished work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such ings, her sketches put them on the same plane (1879), a text much neglected in Eliot scholar- as other creatures; like fish, sea lions, or even ship.3 Although typically dismissed as inac- microscopic vorticellae, human beings are cessible and overly allusive, this collection of conditioned by bodily frameworks and ha- character sketches and philosophical essays bitual responses that allow them to sense and provides important insights into Eliot’s con- experience some things and not others. cern with the limits of human perception and Second, by taking inspiration from Love’s the relation of this problematic to her devel- postulation that literature might account for oping realist aesthetic. To have “a keen vision the variation and complexity of life, as well as and feeling of all ordinary human life,” Eliot for its richness and depth, I highlight Eliot’s implies in her final work, entails treating the interest in literature not only as a medium human being not as a subject to which the au- for intersubjective understanding but also thor has special access but as a new kind of as an amplificatory technology, a tool for the sensible object—a dense and complex mate- sensation of manifold realities. “How many rial body like any other. conceptions & fashions of life have existed to The Eliot delineated by this essay might which our understanding & sympathy have appear strange to readers familiar with por- no clue!” Eliot writes in a notebook dated traits of Eliot as a psychological novelist to the 1870s (qtd. in Collins 390).4 Her task whose “sympathetic ethics” rests on a deep or in Impressions is not to penetrate the depths humanistic approach to character. Eliot has of the human psyche but rather to sketch a long been read in support of the claim that vast characterological landscape, to put hu- literature inspires moral action by portraying manity into perspective by zooming out un- characters as “containing a rich inner life,” the til the human being appears as a speck in an hidden contents of which are essential to “de- array of sensitive life-­forms. Situating Eliot’s fining a creature as fully human” (Nussbaum 1879 sketches and essays in a longer history 90). While I admit Eliot’s concern with the of the character sketch, a history beginning value and agency of human beings, my read- with the ancient Greek naturalist and sketch ing of her late-­career sketches pushes against writer Theophrastus of Eresus, I show how the humanist interpretation of Eliot in two the observation-­based methodology Eliot ways. First, I suggest that her late-­career turn develops in her mature work draws on her to the typological tradition of the character longtime interest in the practice of natural sketch asserts a critical distance from what history. In aligning Impressions with the de- Heather Love calls “the traditional humanist scriptive traditions of natural history and the categories of experience, consciousness, and character sketch, I argue, Eliot puts pressure 129.1 ] S. Pearl Brilmyer 37  on the modern association of character with to record aspects of human character that individual human psychology. impress themselves upon the senses. These sketches thus inhabit the latter side of a dis- tinction Eliot once made between “‘psycho- Theophrastus Who? logical’ novels (very excellent things in their Impressions of Theophrastus Such chronicles way)” and works that provide “genuine de- the attempts of a curmudgeonly London scription of external nature . . . flowing from bachelor named Theophrastus to catalog spontaneous observation” (Rev. 288). In Im- and describe members of the human genus pressions persons are not uniquely conscious in order to better understand the species to or willful subjects but dense material forma- which he belongs. Eliot’s Theophrastus calls tions, nonhuman organisms such as touch- his project “the natural history of my in- wood or vorticella—namesakes of characters ward self,” a phrase that brings into strange I unpack as the essay unfolds. harmony the expansive, outward-­oriented In rendering character sensible, of course, practice of natural-­historical description Impressions risks the biological essentialism of and the inward-­oriented quest for self-­ Victorian pseudosciences that sought to cor- knowledge characteristic of novelistic nar- relate physical traits with moral or psycho- rative (104). This character-­narrator’s path to logical ones. Physiognomy and phrenology, self-­knowledge leads, however, not inward to for instance, like other nineteenth-­century the self but rather outward; it entails describ- epistemologies that linked the visible with the ing the members of one’s own species to dis- invisible, imagined one could read surfaces cern “the figure the human genus makes in for their deep, characterological meaning. the specimen which I myself furnish” (104). Unlike such discourses of character, however, Amassing descriptions of various unpercep- Impressions stays on the surface of the body, tive and unsympathetic human beings, many implying that the feel of a person’s character of whom are writers like him, Theophrastus is significant and deserves to be examined. tries to illuminate that which escapes his In his first chapter Theophrastus makes clear embodied awareness: the form of the species his disdain for physiognomic logic. Although of which he is but an instance. Through his he believes that “direct perceptive judgment sketches we meet characters such as Touch- is not to be argued against,” he critiques the wood, whose touchy temper repeatedly in- tendency of observers to make correlations terrupts his quest for knowledge (56–62); between a person’s “physical points” and Merman, a comparative historian who drives “mental” ones: “With all the increasing un- his career into the ground by forgoing histor- certainty which modern progress has thrown ical accuracy to maintain his pride (28–40); over the relations of mind and body, it seems and Spike, the “political molecule” who, hav- tolerably clear that wit cannot be seated in the ing none of his own opinions, votes always upper lip, and that the balance of the haunches unwaveringly for “Progress” (63–66). in walking has nothing to do with the subtle Attentive to the prominent and distinc- discrimination of ideas” (7). As a rule, Eliot’s tive qualities of people, Theophrastus’s char- novels warn against forms of knowledge that acter descriptions echo those of the historical situate a “key to all mythologies” in symbolic Theophrastus, the ancient Greek whose Char- systems of the visible and invisible.6 Instead of acters (c. 322–317 BCE) is considered the first seeing character as a static signified to which attempt at systematic character description.5 “physical points” can be correlated, Eliot in- Like the sketches of this other Theophrastus dicates that “character is not cut in marble—it (to which I will return), Eliot’s sketches try is not something solid and unalterable. It is 38 Sensing Character in George Eliot’s Impressions of Theophrastus Such [ PMLA

living and changing” (Middlemarch 694). It tion with perceptive limits in terms of what­  inheres in the body, but like the body “char- the historians of science Lorraine Daston and acter is a process and an unfolding”; it grows, Peter Galison have called the “moralization heals, and deteriorates (140). of objectivity” in the late nineteenth century At the same time, character is not some- (81): the tendency of nineteenth-­century sci- thing one can change at will or easily develop entists to equate objectivity with ideals of through practices of self-­making, or Bildung. self-­abnegation or self-­restraint (Levine, Dy- Impressions elucidates an unexamined ten- ing 171–99; Garratt 27–37). Yet to read Eliot’s sion between Eliot’s understanding of charac- concern with the failures of human percep- ter and the liberal discourses of self-­making tion under this purely epistemological rubric concerned with “the self-­reflective cultiva- risks reducing her affective vision to one in tion of character,” to use Amanda Anderson’s which the central problem is human access to phrase (4). In Impressions—as well as at other a nonhuman natural world. To the contrary, critical moments throughout Eliot’s corpus— Impressions refuses the anthropocentrism of character sticks in the living body and in its modern epistemology and its focus on the interactions, not in its intentions. It inheres singularity of the human knower. While I in the subject’s position in space and time, in agree with George Levine that for Eliot “per- the fact that one has an embodied perspec- sonality is an obstruction to perception,” I tive and cannot but look out of it. It is neither want to stress that both human and nonhu- voluntary nor essential; rather, it unfolds ac- man personalities provide such obstacles cording to the same logic and temporality af- (“George Eliot’s Hypothesis” 1). forded to bodies. Aligning human observers with nonhu- Indeed, Theophrastus’s failed attempts man observers and actors, Impressions treats to look inward, to know his character so that the problem of embodiment as a (species-­ he might transcend or correct it, demonstrate specific) universal. Theophrastus’s observa- the impossibility of shaking one’s embod- tions result in what might be read as a more ied perspective. In the book’s first chapter, basic and open-­ended claim that a structure “Looking Inward,” Theophrastus expresses a of sight and blindness is inherent to all sen- frustrated desire to overcome his character, a sitive bodies. Consider the above passage in desire akin to the wish to have one’s “squint which Theophrastus describes the correction or other ocular defect” corrected with spec- of his “inward squint” as the achievement of tacles (9). Lamenting the impossibility of a certain “non-­human independence.” He remedying his “inward squint,” he continues, yearns to experience the world not from an “Perhaps I have made self-­betrayals enough objective or God’­s-­eye view but from a non- already to show that I have not arrived at that human perspective, a perspective merely non-­human independence. My conversa- different from his all-­too-human­ one. As tional reticences about myself turn into gar- Theophrastus reminds us, the body of the sea rulousness on paper—as the sea-­lion plunges lion, while perfect for swimming, renders him and swims the more energetically because his “shambling on land.” The materiality of the limbs are of a sort to make him shambling on sea lion’s body limits his ambulatory capacity. land” (12). Here we find another metaphor of Similarly, Theophrastus cannot overcome the sensory failure of the sort with which I be- limits of his humanity and the gaps in percep- gan, another suggestion that the self some- tion and sensation that frustrate his writerly how “blots out” the world as a result of an existence. Like the sea lion, whose frustration egoism figured as a defect of vision. Literary on land inspires him to swim with vigor, how- scholars have tended to read Eliot’s fascina- ever, Theophrastus will put pen vigorously to 129.1 ] S. Pearl Brilmyer 39  paper, finding the extension of his experience away from Plato’s theory of forms and toward in the affective medium of the text. a mode that more highly valued sense experi- In a notebook passage thought to have ence as a foundation of knowledge. Sensation been composed around 1874, Eliot turns to a and affect played crucial roles in Theophras- German proverb to explicate a similar notion. tus’s philosophy, as can be seen most clearly “‘Es ist dafür gesorgt [sic] dass die Bäume nicht in his treatise On Sensation (Baltussen 71–94). in den Himmel wachsen,’” she writes, adding In his best-­known work, the Characters, he “in other words, everything on this Earth has applies the Peripatetic methodology to the its limits which may not be overpassed” (qtd. study of human behavior, producing the first in Collins 387). This quotation (the epigraph systematic attempt at character description. to part 3 of Goethe’s Autobiography) trans- Theophrastus also wrote treatises on lates as “it has been arranged that trees do not stones and on ethics, and he is said to have grow in the sky” (my trans.). While many of inaugurated the field of botany in the West Eliot’s contemporaries might have placed hu- with his many detailed studies of plants mankind in the sky in this schema, thereby (Sharples 126–27). Like his colleague Ar- contrasting the infinite potential of humanity istotle, whom he succeeded as head of the to the limited nature of nonhuman life, Eliot Peripatetic school, he composed an array of extends this proverb to capture the limits of philosophical and naturalistic studies based the human, arguing that “a being like man, on careful observations of the natural world. having a certain shape, certain modes of The two friends’ approaches to the organiza- movement, certain forms of movement sense, tion of this world differed, however. Where & certain unchangeable wants must continue in Aristotle’s ordered universe the base and to be determined & limited by these in all his the monstrous are deviations from ideals, invention” (qtd. in Collins 387–88). In Eliot’s in Theophrastus’s Metaphysics baseness and scala natura, human beings are no more ex- monstrosity are the rule, and harmony and empt from limits imposed by nature than any beauty are exceptions. Likewise, the Charac- other creature. They have great potential, yes, ters focuses on ignorance and other negative but they have bodies, forms, sense capacities, aspects of human life, describing such types modes of desiring and moving. as the thankless man, the coward, and the bore. In Theophrastus’s philosophy this rel- egation of the noble and the ignoble to the Descriptive Minutiae same ontological plane comprehends the rela- That Eliot names her protagonist after the -an tion of the human to the nonhuman. Instead cient Greek naturalist Theophrastus of Eresus of according the human a special or high (c. 371–287 BCE) situates Impressions in a place in the natural order, he grants people, lineage of natural-­historical practices that be- rocks, and trees the same ontological status.7 gins in the fourth century BCE. Her explicit Eliot’s Theophrastus is also interested and implicit references to practices of species in exploring lateral rather than hierarchical identification tie the text to the long history of relations between forms of life. Characters biological classification and taxonomic rank- crystallize in descriptions, thick with zoo- ing that has allowed scientists to understand logical reference, that draw parallels between the phylogenetic interrelation of life-­forms. human and nonhuman behavior. The char- Around 335 BCE Theophrastus, a student and acter Merman, a scholar who reacts aggres- friend of Aristotle, helped him found the Peri- sively when his arguments are challenged, is patetic school in Athens’s Lyceum—the school said to resemble a walrus, which, “though not that instigated the shift in Greek philosophy in the least a malignant animal, if allowed 40 Sensing Character in George Eliot’s Impressions of Theophrastus Such [ PMLA

to display its remarkably plain person and victims while the swallower waits passively at  blundering performances at ease in any ele- his receipt of custom. (55) ment it chooses, becomes desperately savage and musters alarming auxiliaries when at- This parable serves to explain the actions of tacked or hurt” (34). Another writer charac- Mrs. Cadwallader, whose attempts at match- ter, Vorticella, recalls the parasitic single-­cell making, the narrator implies, might at first organisms called vorticellae, which encase appear like the workings of some masterly themselves in a cystic covering to reproduce. and premeditated plot. On closer inspection, Dismissing all criticism of her writing, Vor- however, one will find that her actions stem ticella allows vanity to overtake her like a not from “any ingenious plot, any hide-­and-­ “polypus, tumour, fungus, or other erratic seek course of action,” but rather from “a outgrowth, noxious and disfiguring in its play of minute causes producing what may be effect on the individual organism that nour- called thought and speech vortices to bring ishes it” (126). Consumed by the success of her the sort of food she needed” (55). her only book, she brings it up at every pos- Scholars have typically understood this sible moment, driving away her company to passage to comment on the interpretive na- live the life of solitude to which her name ture of knowledge. But it does something else seems to have destined her. In a recent article too: it places human and nonhuman organ- on the zoophyte in Victorian natural history, isms on the same plane as a strategy to de- Danielle Coriale has suggested that the polyp scribe human behavior as no more rational “resisted, repulsed, or confused sympathetic or intentional than that of other organisms. attachment, human identification, and intel- What might appear to be the willing actions ligibility in the Victorian imagination” (19). of a subject are shown to be the passive com- Consistent with this view, Eliot uses the vor- pulsions of a hungry animal. “Thought and ticella to portray an unsympathetic, gothic speech”—ostensibly characteristic of human character, self-­absorbed and self-­enveloping. behavior—are reduced to a “play of minute Readers of Middlemarch will remem- causes” like those that allow the lowly vor- ber that the vorticella is a favorite figure for ticella to eat. Eliot’s language in this passage Eliot. It crops up in that novel in a parable echoes that of her longtime partner, George that, like the sketch form, grants priority to Henry Lewes, whose discussion of the vorti- the minutiae of everyday experience over the cella in his Studies in Animal Life (1862) be- drama of narrative action. In Middlemarch gins with a call for a more sustained study Eliot attends to the characteristic of the vorti- of life’s “minuter or obscurer forms” (3).8 cella from which its name derives: the vortex Impressions puts what Lewes called the “Phi- formed in its mouth through the simultane- losophy of the infinitely little” into literary ous beating of the small hairs, called cilia, practice, looking to the sketch form in order that surround the oral cavity: to render visible the microscopic (Studies 1). If plot, as Eliot suggests in Middlemarch, is Even with a microscope directed on a water-­ the “telescopic watch” that fails to register the drop we find ourselves making interpreta- subtle motivations of folks like Mrs. Cadwal- tions which turn out to be rather coarse; for lader, description is the microscope (55). whereas under a weak lens you may seem to see a creature exhibiting an active voracity into which other smaller creatures actively To Sketch a Species play as if they were so many animated tax-­ pennies, a stronger lens reveals to you certain By the time Eliot turned to the descriptive tiniest hairlets which make vortices for these genre of the character sketch at the end of the 129.1 ] S. Pearl Brilmyer 41  nineteenth century, the Theophrastan sketch have in the production of a character named had long since seen its heyday. The ancient Ganymede, an aging dandy who continues to Theophrastus’s Characters had been made believe himself “girlishly handsome” despite famous by a 1592 Latin translation by Isaac having grown older and less attractive (101).12 Casaubon—a name familiar to Eliot readers, Ganymede’s self-­delusion occurs when “out- to be sure—which inspired a surge of imita- ward confirmations” of his youth uttered tions throughout the seventeenth century.9 during his boyhood come to form the basis Undoubtedly the most popular was Jean de La of his “habitual inward persuasion” (103); Bruyère’s Les caractères, ou les mœurs de ce siè- “being strongly mirrored for himself in the cle (1688), which went through eight editions remark of others,” Theophrastus explains, in six years and to which Impressions refers.10 Ganymede “was getting to see his real char- Scholars of the novel have long suggested acteristics as a dramatic part, a type to which that the character sketch’s “flat” portraits of his doings were always in correspondence” ethical and social types were replaced by the (100). Instead of typing Ganymede by inter- “round” and individualized characters of the preting his behaviors to signal some kind of novel.11 In The Economy of Character (1998), characterological essence, Eliot suggests that however, Deidre Lynch reframes this history, he performs his identity in reference to a type. directing our attention to a different set of Ganymede, importantly, is not an invert—he terms. In Lynch’s history, as character stretched just believes it a “disturbing inversion of the further across the axis of plot, it cleaved from natural order that any one very near to him the surface and materiality of the body, becom- should have been younger than he” (103).13 ing an “inner” as opposed to an “outer” qual- And yet, while Eliot does not suggest that ity. It was not until the late eighteenth century, types are prefigured or inherent, the concept she contends, when the expanded market for of the type plays an important role in Impres- printed matter facilitated new strategies for sions. In this the text could be said to recall distinguishing public from private personae, the aims of eighteenth-­century sketch writ- that character came to be understood as some- ers who “described not men, but manners, thing deep and hidden. According to Lynch the not an individual but a species” (Fielding novel was “founded on the promise that it was 189) more than those of nineteenth-­century this type of writing that tendered the deepest, authors, many of whom saw themselves as truest knowledge of character” (28). But the producing “original, discriminated, and in- production of characters with private interiors dividual person[s]‌” (Scott 549). Indeed, the was not always the aim of fiction, nor would it book’s title, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, necessarily continue to be, even in the hands of puts it in conversation with this older, typo- novelists like Eliot. logical model of characterization by echoing Building on Lynch’s innovative approach the original Theophrastus’s ancient sketches, to the history of character, I want to suggest each of which begins with the formula “Such that Impressions marks a unique moment in a type who . . .” (Henry, Introd. xviii).14 character’s historical dialogue with depth and Still, Eliot’s engagement with ancient and surfaces. Here in 1879 character seems almost early modern modes of character sketching anachronistically apparent; rather than a hid- is more than a backward turn. It is a meta- den or buried kernel of personality or moral critical commentary on the history of char- fiber, it is a surface phenomenon produced acterization and typing itself, one that seems through a dialogue between outward obser- to confront the novel’s interest in “character vations and inward beliefs. The chapter “So development” with the diffuse and nonlinear Young!” highlights the role that outside forces descriptive structure of the sketch.15 42 Sensing Character in George Eliot’s Impressions of Theophrastus Such [ PMLA

Impressions explores the “such” of Theo- sketch at the fin de siècle. At a time when  phrastus’s refrain—the connection between the triple-­decker novel was breathing its last the actions of a person and the type of person breath and the aesthetic movement was pro- who performs them. Like the sketches of the ducing slimmer volumes, this “old” mode of ancient Theophrastus’s Characters, which de- character depiction had returned to trouble scribe first an abstraction (complaisance, ar- the transition from plot-­driven narrative to rogance, superstition, irony) and then a man the experiments with perspective and sense exemplifying it, Eliot’s sketches often start perception emergent with aestheticism.17 In with a meditation on a behavior, situation, tension with individualized and psycholo- or emotion and turn after a paragraph or so gized notions of character also developing at to a human instantiation of the phenomenon this time, the late Victorian character sketch she is describing. A sketch of Touchwood, an (like its many precursors) located character incendiary type whose name refers to wood on the surfaces of bodies, clothes, and other that easily catches fire, begins with the ques- observable objects. Unlike the sketches that tion “What is temper?” (56). This sketch, appeared before them, however, late Victorian however, quickly moves to consider the role sketches tend to focus on the body’s effect on temper plays in our understanding of char- the writing process. In Human Documents: acter itself (something the historical Theo- Character-­Sketches of Representative Men phrastus’s sketches do not do). Why is temper and Women of the Time (1895), Arthur Alfred thought inessential to character whereas Lynch, for instance, suggests that “man’s intel- lectual work is determined in great measure other characteristics are thought to be es- by his physical constitution and his emo- sential parts of personality? Too often, Eliot’s tional quality,” giving examples such as “By- narrator remarks, ron’s lame foot” and “Carlyle’s dyspepsia” (v). we hear a man declared to have a bad tem- Unlike its predecessors, the late-­nineteenth-­ per and yet glorified as the possessor of ev- century character sketch situated character ery high quality. When he errs or in any way squarely in bodily experience, a move that— commits himself, his temper is accused, not like our own “dyspeptic” narrator’s attempt his character. . . . If he kicks small animals, to write the “natural history” of his “inward swears violently at a servant who mistakes self”—works through the fraught relation be- orders, or is grossly rude to his wife, it is re- tween materiality and subjectivity (89). marked apologetically that these things mean nothing—they are all temper. (56) The Natural History of Human Life In Impressions few things are cast aside as Eliot’s own experience of human finitude in- unimportant to sketch writing: all of what terrupted her composition of Impressions. In one observes should be accounted for in the November 1878—nine days after the manu- description of character. While interested in script had been sent off to her publisher—her descriptive detail, however, Eliot’s final text partner, George Henry Lewes, died, putting an calls for a typological systematicity in the de- end to their twenty-­four years together. Halt- scription of character, complicating the sug- ing editorial work on Impressions until the fol- gestion that her realism eschews typological lowing year, Eliot set out to complete Lewes’s thinking for a particularism in which every five-­volume magnum opus, Problems of Life character appears unique.16 and Mind (1874–79), the last two volumes of While Eliot herself is hard to type, she which remained unfinished. When Impres- was not alone in turning to the character sions was finally published, it included a prefa- 129.1 ] S. Pearl Brilmyer 43  tory note explaining the delay in publication just the same species of feelings which would with reference to the “domestic affliction of be excited by the presentation of a similar the Author” (qtd. in Henry, Introd. xxxvn5). type of character in real life” (288). While finishing Lewes’s treatise in psy- Some twenty years earlier, in her seminal chology, Eliot enlisted the help of their close essay “The Natural History of German Life” friend James Sully, a physiological psycholo- (1856), Eliot made an argument like Sully’s gist and aesthetic theorist who shared with about the potential of literary description to Eliot and Lewes a fascination with the effects shuttle one back to the world from which one’s of literature on the body. Sully’s 1874 essay impressions first emerged.20 “It is an interest- collection Sensation and Intuition: Studies in ing branch of psychological observation,” Eliot Psychology and Aesthetics (owned and read writes, “to note the images that are habitually multiple times by Eliot and Lewes) stood at associated with abstract or collective terms— the forefront of research about the physiologi- what may be called the picture-­writing of the cal effects of reading.18 For Sully the literary mind, which it carries on concurrently with text was a unique interface in the back-­and-­ the more subtle symbolism of language.” The forth between inner experiences and external degree of fixity of the image associated with stimulations that constituted consciousness. a given word, Eliot moves on to hypothesize, Character was central to Sully’s literary-­ might be “a tolerably fair test of the amount theoretical inquiry into the effects of read- of concrete knowledge and experience which ing, which investigated the aesthetic aspects a given word represents in the minds of two of human character as well as the capacity of persons who use it with equal familiarity” art to reproduce that character in literature— (107). The vividness of the images conjured in what Sully called “transformed embodiments one’s mind speaks to the wealth of experience of character” (284). In his essay “The Repre- one has had with the thing described, and sentation of Character in Art,” Sully argues the words of a successful description create that while it is “a tolerably easy matter” to impressions that recall the world from which represent in literature such things as thought they arose. For Eliot, as for Sully, the affective and speech, the central challenge of fiction is power of the literary text does not induce fan- to use words “to suggest to the reader’s mind tasy; on the contrary, it pulls one back to the . . . an intricate series of visual and other im- textures, densities, and layers of the physical pressions, such as those conveyed by the per- world. As Eliot’s Theophrastus puts it, “A fine son’s figure, dress and outward carriage, by imagination . . . is always based on a keen vi- the varying cadences of his voice, and so on.” sion, a keen consciousness of what is”; it is an When properly executed, that is, “the descrip- “energy constantly fed by susceptibility to the tive word” creates “impressions” triggering veriest minutiae of experience” (109–10). memories of previous experiences and their Recent scholarship on Eliot has focused “corresponding sensations.”19 Through the on how the burgeoning mind and brain sci- activation of dormant feelings and impulses ences of the period influenced Eliot’s repre- already present in the observer, description sentation of the embodied and adaptive mind directs readers to “partake in the vivid inter- (e.g., Ryan, Thinking). While early Victorian est of present reality” (285–86). As both Sully psychology increasingly localized character and Lewes stressed, the “sensuous medium” in the human brain, however, the science of of words does more than produce imaginary natural history continued to view character thought worlds (Sully 284). According to as more dispersed—that is, as the collection Sully “the representation of human character of physical qualities and behaviors rendering in fiction appears sufficiently real to awaken any organism or species distinct. Scholars 44 Sensing Character in George Eliot’s Impressions of Theophrastus Such [ PMLA

who founded the study of Eliot’s connections the network of relations in which organisms  to science have suggested that Eliot turned participated, including their behaviors, hab- away from her early interest in the “static its, and other readily observable traits. Like science of natural history” to a more narra- the ethologists who followed him, Siebold tive and developmental model of scientific wondered about his contemporaries’ ten- knowledge, one that stressed that the deepest dency to look only at morphology in their truths are initially invisible to the senses and studies of animals: “But where is the obser- can be discovered only with the imagination vation of the way of life of these animals, (Shuttleworth 22).21 In contrast to this work, why does one learn so little of the activities in which Impressions receives little if any at- of those very animals whose [anatomical] or- tention, I contend that Eliot maintained a ganization is known with the utmost preci- profound interest in the observational sci- sion?” (qtd. in Nyhart 432). ences until the end of her career. Her forays In “The Natural History of German into En­glish tide pools in the 1850s to collect Life,” Eliot echoes the life-­history scientist’s polyps and anemones with Lewes for his Sea-­ emphasis on observable traits, activities, and side Studies (1858) were just the beginning ecological relations over morphological struc- of a lifelong fascination with the sensuous tures. Responding to the work of the German modes of collection and arrangement that sociologist Wilhelm Riehl, she argues for a ground natural-historical­ work. literary-sociological­ practice she calls “the Much is lost in approaching Eliot’s work Natural History of social bodies,” a practice as a symptom of a large-scale­ shift in modern that would depict human interaction through science away from the descriptive and induc- “gradually amassed observations” (131, 127). tive practice of natural history and toward In this early formulation of her realist aes- the more argumentative and deductive model thetic, Eliot maintains that knowledge of a of modern biology—a narrative that histori- people derives from the sensory experience ans of science have shown to be problematic. required to produce a detailed description Natural historians have not only continued rather than from conceptual familiarity with to practice into the twenty-­first century, they ideals and abstract categories. Not unlike her have also retained the respect of the scientific anthropologist contemporaries, Eliot insists community, which has relied heavily on their that to understand how a people lives one systematic documentation. As Lynn Nyhart needs the experiential knowledge of the nat- has argued in the context of Germany, while uralist, not the theoretical knowledge of the modern experimental zoology excluded some physicist, chemist, or physiologist. “Just as the of natural history as unscientific, it incorpo- most thorough acquaintance with physics, or rated major aspects of it into its theory and chemistry, or general physiology will not en- practice. Although many nineteenth-­century able you at once to establish the balance of life zoologists advocated a strictly morphological in your private vivarium,” she suggests, so too perspective focused on anatomical form and one cannot know or describe a people by the- development, others argued for a zoology that orizing; one must observe and converse with would incorporate natural history’s emphasis them in person (130–31). Eliot uses Riehl’s on systemics, the study of relations between observation-­based methodology as a spring- species and their organization in nature. board for the formulation of a theory of lit- Thus, nineteenth-­century biologists like the erature. Like Riehl, whose “vivid pictures” life-­history scientist Karl Theodor Siebold in- of German people rely on empirical rather sisted on an observation-­based practice that than conceptual knowledge (Eliot, “Natural would retain natural history’s attentiveness to History” 134), she advocates a detailed and 129.1 ] S. Pearl Brilmyer 45  engaged yet unromantic mode of literary de- to highlight characteristics held in common scription that would account for the diversity by seemingly disparate forms of life. How or of the human species. why study the human in isolation? Why—if Eliot’s comments here speak to a culture we share our being with so many other crea- of natural-­historical writing more central to tures—should our perspective on the human the Victorian period than is sometimes rec- be solely a human one? For Eliot the human ognized in literary studies.22 As historians of being is not the most important knower or science have demonstrated, narratives of the observer, pitted against the unknowing phys- “emergence” of experimental biology or the ical being of nonhuman objects of inquiry. Darwinian “revolution” overlook not only Rather, all perceptive beings lie on a single the long history of morphological and evo- ontological plane. One might experience one- lutionary thought (Secord; Desmond) but self as a center, but the surface is infinite. also the continued import of observational To close, I will unpack one more moment sciences like natural history to nineteenth-­ in the literary critique of human-­centered on- century culture (Nyhart; Ritvo). Amy King tologies Eliot offers in Impressions, one that has shown how the techniques of close obser- positions literature as a kind of nonhuman ex- vation developed by natural history resound tension of the human body: “a delicate acous- in the Victorian novel’s attention to detail, its tic or optical instrument,” as she put it in 1855, long descriptive passages, and its fascination “bringing home to our coarser senses what with nonhuman things.23 If Darwin’s theory would otherwise be unperceived by us” (Rev. of evolution “provided ‘plots,’” King writes 289). In Impressions every character’s blind with reference to Gillian Beer’s classic study spot consists in an overestimation of his or her Darwin’s Plots (1983), “natural history con- own perceptive abilities: the belief that he or tinued to model—far beyond its professional she sees more or better than other creatures. demise—descriptive techniques, detail, and Pushing this argument about the limit of hu- interest in describing the small scale and the man knowledge to its extreme, the chapter local that became essential to the realist novel “Shadows of the Coming Race” tells the story in Britain” (158). Where other novels worked of mechanical automata that “transcend and to proliferate descriptive detail, however, Im- finally supersede” the human because of their pressions looks back to the desire of natural-­ ability to communicate without the “fussy ac- historical writing to disentangle words from companiment of consciousness” (138, 140).25 things, to let organisms stand naked in their These inorganic posthumans evolve out of physical being. More than this, in situating tools intended to enhance human perception, the human as an object of natural-­historical “micrometers and thermopiles and tasimeters inquiry, Eliot’s final work decenters and de- which deal physically with the invisible, the hierarchizes the human within the scala impalpable, and the unimaginable,” such as “a natura. It positions man humbly, as many microphone which detects the cadence of the pioneering naturalists had, “in the class of the fly’s foot on the ceiling” (138). Undermining animals, which he resembles in everything the suggestion that consciousness renders hu- material” (Buffon, qtd. in Sloan 112).24 man beings superior to other beings, in “Shad- ows” Eliot playfully imagines an alternative hierarchy of being in which consciousness is After the Human a burden rather than a boon. As Impressions implies, science and litera- Structured something like a Platonic di- ture equally might benefit from the power alogue between Theophrastus and his friend of what Sully called “the descriptive word” Trost, the chapter speculates about a future 46 Sensing Character in George Eliot’s Impressions of Theophrastus Such [ PMLA

race of creatures that would “carry on the Although Eliot’s work is typically aligned  most elaborate processes as mutely and pain- with the humanism of an earlier generation lessly as we are now told that the minerals of German theorists, elements of the anti­ are metamorphosing themselves continually anthropocentric thinking emergent in Fried- in the dark laboratory of the earth’s crust” rich Nietzsche’s philosophy can be found in (142). The rise of these “steely organisms,” Impressions. In 1873—five years before Eliot Theophrastus explains to the incredulous started writing Impressions—Nietzsche began Trost, would eventually enable “banishing his essay “On Truth and Lies in a Non-­moral from the earth’s atmosphere screaming con- Sense” (published posthumously in 1896) with sciousnesses which, in our comparatively a fable in which “clever beasts” who invented clumsy race, make an intolerable noise and “knowing” perish after just a short time on fuss to each other about every petty ant-­like earth, taking their consciousnesses with performance” (138, 139). In this posthuman, them. This fable, Nietzsche writes, is intended postlinguistic world, “changes as delicate and to demonstrate “how shadowy and transient, complicated as those of human language” are how aimless and arbitrary the human intel- carried out by “beings who will be blind and lect looks within nature.” The same could deaf as the inmost rock. . . . [T]‌here may be, be said of the fable presented in “Shadows.” let us say, mute orations, mute rhapsodies, Nietzsche’s conscious beasts take their form mute discussions, and no consciousness there of consciousness to be the highest and best. even to enjoy the silence” (142). However, “if we could communicate with “Shadows” might be interpreted as a re- the gnat,” Nietzsche writes, “we would learn action to the “conscious automaton” debates that he likewise flies through the air with the of the 1870s among Thomas Henry Huxley, same solemnity, that he feels the flying center Herbert Spencer, William James, and John of the universe within himself” (114). Eliot’s Elliott Cairnes (Offer).26 John Fuerst has read story likewise draws attention to egoism as a this chapter as a prescient vision of the digi- condition of embodied perception, human or tal computer, as an imagining of the kinds of otherwise. Taking “the humble mollusc” as an symbolic logic that would produce the first example, at a different point in Impressions, forays into artificial-­intelligence research Theophrastus points out that although one (45). Most relevant to our purposes, however, might imagine such an insignificant creature is the radical thought that “Shadows” makes “to have a sense of his own exceeding softness possible through its dalliance with science and low place in the scale of being,” in reality fiction: Theophrastus’s musings confront us he is “inwardly objecting to every other grade with the possibility of a world in which con- of solid rather than to himself” (41). As Eliot sciousness is not the precondition for reality, and Nietzsche demonstrate through powerful a world in which communication is nothing analogy, if every being overestimates its role like human language but instead involves in the scala natura, there may be no reason to metamorphic, material processes. In ancient think human beings the highest or most in- Greek χαρακτήρ (kharaktēr) refers to the tool telligent creatures—or even to think human for writing as well as the impression made in language the most efficient or best mode of wax writing tablets. Theophrastus’s words communication. Rather, as Nietzsche argues enact this double impression: he writes, and in his essay, language is merely an agreed-­on a world hitherto unimaginable is impressed set of norms that erases the differences and on our senses, for words, ironically, in their particularities of the sensible world. materiality can lead us to imagine a world In the published version of Impressions, without words as its medium. the dark and dystopian chapter “Shadows” 129.1 ] S. Pearl Brilmyer 47  is followed by a more optimistic one, “The What is more, carp is reminiscent of Theo- Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!,” exploring the role phrastus’s interest in the negative, the base, of the nation in a global human society.27 As and the minor, since to carp can of course the page proofs demonstrate, however, Eliot mean to talk too much or to complain (“Carp, initially intended “Shadows” to be the final V1”). This pejorative sense is connected to the chapter, but it was inexplicably moved to the otherwise neutral definition of carp as “dis- penultimate position just before publication.28 course” or “the power of speech” itself, more Nancy Henry has suggested that Eliot may common between the twelfth and seven- have backed away from the radical implica- teenth centuries (“Carp, N2”). Theophrastus: tions of ending with “Shadows.”29 The possi- fish, word, fruit-­bearing plant; carp capable bility of this alternative ending of Impressions of imagining humanity’s extinction. Where motivates my closing remarks, which explore the all-­too-­human Trost cannot conceive of whether in “Shadows” Theophrastus trans- his species’s end, his interlocutor, this ghost forms into a kind of expansive hybrid entity of a dead philosopher and literary entity, can that can peek outside the human perspec- imagine it and imagine embodying it. tive and experience the “nonhuman inde- “I try,” Eliot wrote to a friend in 1870, pendence” he longed for in chapter 1. When “to delight in the sunshine that will be when pressed to defend his theory about the end of I shall never see it any more. And I think it humanity at the hands of a robotic species, is possible for this sort of impersonal life to Theophrastus explains to Trost: attain great intensity, possible for us to gain much more independence, than is usually [I]‌t is less easy to you than to me to imagine believed, of the small bundle of facts that our race transcended and superseded, since make our own personality” (“To Mrs. Rob- the more energy a being is possessed of, the ert Lytton” 107).31 By the end of Impressions, harder it must be for him to conceive his own Theophrastus seems to have gained such in- death. But I, from the point of view of a re- flective carp, can easily imagine myself and dependence, to have unwoven his personality my congeners dispensed with in the frame of to the extent that he begins to feel such in- things and giving way not only to a superior tensity, an affective intensity not unlike the but a vastly different kind of Entity. (140) extrahuman roar on the other side of silence. His text appears to have achieved, if but mo- In this curious comparison, Theophrastus mentarily, the state for which Daniel Deronda claims that where Trost’s humanity prevents longs when, in a “half-­involuntary identifica- him from imagining his species’s extinction, tion of himself with the objects he was look- Theophrastus is able to see things “from the ing at,” he attempts to “shift his centre till his point of view of a reflective carp.”30 own personality would be no less outside than In nineteenth-century­ England­ carp the landscape” (160). Fascinated by similar might have been read as a reference not only remarks across Eliot’s oeuvre, George Levine to the fish (“Carp, N1”) but also to the com- has read Eliot’s frustration with the limits of bining form used in botanical discourse to de- perception in terms of nineteenth-­century note the fruit and seed pods of plants (“Carp-, epistemological narratives of objectivity in Comb. Form”): as in hemicarp, a half-­fruit which the embodied self is seen as an im- unit, or mericarp, a one-­seeded unit. The pediment to knowledge and revelation must terms carpos (fruit) and pericarpion (seed), thus occur in the “negation of embodiment” moreover, were coined by none other than (Dying 69). Yet to situate Eliot’s anxiety about Theophrastus of Eresus in an effort to develop selfhood in this scientific-­epistemological a special botanical terminology (Singer 178). frame risks obscuring the affective aims of 48 Sensing Character in George Eliot’s Impressions of Theophrastus Such [ PMLA

her literary project as it seeks to render tac- 3. Even since Nancy Henry’s pathbreaking edition  tile a reality beyond the human and especially from 1994, Impressions has attracted little scholarly at- tention. Given the book’s robust engagement with Vic- human modes of representation. torian natural-­historical, biological, and psychological In the literary-­turned-­philosophical real- discourse, it is especially disappointing to discover its ism of Impressions, we find a curiously sensa- absence from book-­length studies of Eliot and science tional Eliot, intent on imagining what reality (e.g., Shuttleworth; Davis). might feel like if one could crack through the 4. In this late notebook Eliot calls for further explo- ration of the nonhuman and nonlinguistic worlds: “we human vantage point—if, precisely through are the better off for knowing better the nature of fishes the “sensuous medium” of words, one might & storms & acting according to that knowledge” (qtd. in unravel character into mere impressions and Collins 392). affective states. Her frustration with the lim- 5. Eliot had considered titling her book Characters its of perception abides in the desire not to and Characteristics: Impressions of Theophrastus Such, a more direct reference to the ancient text (Henry, Introd. transcend or obliterate the body but rather xxxvin11). The most recent En­glish translation of Char- to have more of a body, more sense capaci- acters at the time of Impressions’s composition was by ties. We could relate this opening up of the Richard Jebb (1870), whom Eliot met five years before she self to the use of prostheses like the micro- began work on Impressions (Millett 122n3). scope or the telescope (two of Eliot’s favorite 6. In Middlemarch the “Key to All Mythologies” is Cas­au­bon’s unfinished magnum opus. figures), but the aim of literary description in 7. On the decentered position of the human in Theo- Eliot’s work, I hope to have shown, has to do phrastus’s philosophy, see Hughes; Cole. less with the production of knowledge than 8. Vorticellae also appear in Lewes’s Sea-­side Studies with the production of new modes of feeling (56) as well as his essay “Only a Pond!” (597), as Henry, and perception, new ways of sensing human “George Eliot” 47–51, and Wormald 501, 516–17, discuss beings and the multifarious reality of which in greater detail. 9. According to Haight, Eliot was familiar with Isaac they are a part. Casaubon and “knew his fine edition of Theophrastus’s Caracteres” (448). In Middlemarch, when Casaubon be- comes ill the town doctor prescribes him two novels with clear connections to the Theophrastan tradition by the eighteenth-­century writer Tobias Smollett, The Adven- Notes tures of Roderick Random (1748) and The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771 [269]). This piece first emerged at the Max Planck Institute for 10. Shaftsbury’s Characteristics of Men, Manners, the History of Science, in Berlin, under the auspices of Opinions, Times (1711) is also an important referent here. the DAAD fellowship. I am grateful to my supporters and 11. According to Forster, “round” characters are friends in Berlin, Austin, and New York for helping me to three-­dimensional, develop and change, and are origi- tackle this essay and its many tentacles. Special thanks go nal and individual, while “flat” characters are two-­ to Ann Cvetkovich, Samuel Baker, Tracie Matysik, Em- manuela Bianchi, Heather Love, Bradley Irish, Stephanie dimensional, remain the same, and are mere types (67). Rosen, Nancy Henry, Lorraine Daston, Fernando Vidal, 12. In Greek mythology, Ganymede is the most beau- Amy King, Rosemarie Bodenheimer, and Deidre Lynch. tiful of mortals. He is kidnapped and granted eternal 1. This trope first appears in Eliot’s novella The youth by Zeus. Lifted Veil (1859), in which her protagonist’s ability to 13. It is uncertain whether the word inversion would “participat[e] in other people’s consciousnesses” is com- have carried any queer connotation in 1879. The German pared to his having “a preternaturally heightened sense sexological term konträre Sexualempfindung (from which of hearing, making audible to one a roar of sound where the En­glish word inversion is derived) had been in par- others find perfect stillness” (15, 18). For a powerful read- lance since 1870. ing of this passage attentive to Eliot’s curiosity about sen- 14. The Theophrastus scholar William Fortenbaugh sory expansion, see Hertz 39–41. translates the original Greek “Toioutos tis, hoios” as 2. Here I follow the lead of a recent wave of scholar- “someone such as to . . .” (17). ship exploring how Victorians conceived the effect of 15. Eliot also began her career with the sketch form, reading on the sensorium (esp. Dames; Ablow). in Scenes from Clerical Life (1858). 129.1 ] S. Pearl Brilmyer 49  16. Something implied, e.g., by Armstrong 127–28 30. In Middlemarch Casaubon’s scholarly rival is and Miller 84. On the tension of type and individual in likewise named Carp, and Carp’s associates are Pike and Eliot, see Gallagher. Tench. 17. See, e.g., Vernon Lee’s Baldwin: Being Dialogues on 31. Probably a reference to David Hume’s theory of Views and Aspirations (1886) and Walter Pater’s Imaginary the self as a “bundle or collection of different percep- Portraits (1887). Pater’s conclusion to Studies in the History tions” (188). of the Renaissance (1873) is also an important touchstone, tied as his notion of “impressions” is to the “weaving and unweaving of ourselves” (119). On the nineteenth-­century sketch form more generally, see Sha; Garcha; Hamilton. Works Cited 18. Lewes’s diary reports that the couple read Sensa- Ablow, Rachel, ed. The Feeling of Reading: Affective -Ex tion and Intuition on 12 July 1874 and many times there- perience and Victorian Literature. Ann Arbor: U of after (Shuttleworth 230n17). Michigan P, 2010. Print. 19. On the historicity of impressions, see Sully 38 and Anderson, Amanda. The Powers of Distance: Cosmopoli- Lewes, Problems 101–02. Before Lewes and Sully, the con- tanism and the Cultivation of Detachment. 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