This City Is a Clock

University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 8-2016 THIS CITY IS A CLOCK Daniel D. Wallace University of Tennessee, Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the Fiction Commons Recommended Citation Wallace, Daniel D., "THIS CITY IS A CLOCK. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2016. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/3881 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Daniel D. Wallace entitled "THIS CITY IS A CLOCK." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Michael Knight, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Misty Anderson, Margaret Lazarus Dean, Mary McAlpin Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) THIS CITY IS A CLOCK A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Daniel D. Wallace August 2016 Copyright © 2016 by Daniel Wallace All rights reserved. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Special thanks to the four members of my dissertation committee, my writing partners Matthew Blasi and Johanna Deane, the Judith Slagle fellowship, and the National Trust of Scotland. iii ABSTRACT This dissertation includes a novel, This City is a Clock, and a critical introduction, “Technologies of the Novel.” This City is a Clock charts the construction of Edinburgh’s New Town and the development of the Scottish Enlightenment. The protagonist is a boy when the novel begins and has grown to old age by the final pages. As a child, he is put to work by the architects of the new town when they discover that he has unusual mathematical gifts. To them, his strange talent seems an emblem of the new rational order they are hoping to create. And the boy is eager to help them: he wants to be able to escape his impoverished background. His family is so poor that they live next door to a witch, and she terrifies him. However, the architects repeatedly run into trouble, their goals being opposed by a variety of vested interests in the city, and the boy discovers that the only way he can overcome these troubles is to go to the witch and ask for her advice. But each time she offers to help, the cost to him and the rest of the city grows. “Technologies of the Novel” explores questions of craft, inter-generational artistic anxiety, and the development of the Anglophone novel over time. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Critical Introduction 1 This City is a Clock 48 Works Cited 583 Vita 586 v CRITICAL INTRODUCTION Technologies of the Novel: an essay on anxiety, craft, and influence Note to the reader: this essay is the critical introduction to my creative dissertation, the novel This City is a Clock. The argument presented here covers a large number of topics and connects together several historical periods. As a result, readers may (understandably) feel that it mentions too much in too great a hurry. Partly this is because I have elsewhere written full-length papers on some components of the argument (on Anthony Trollope’s narrator, for instance), and I am imagining that those papers would join this text as chapters in a potentially longer work. I hope readers will treat the excessive number of claims in this essay as either a scholar’s sketch of a broad idea, or as a creative writer’s explanation, offered in a slightly more informal mode, of how he sees literature, the novel, and the artistic climate in which he works. 1 Technologies of the Novel “It is, indeed, always dangerous to be placed in a state of unavoidable comparison with excellence, and the danger is still greater when that excellence is consecrated by death… He that succeeds a celebrated writer, has the same difficulties to encounter.” —Samuel Johnson, The Rambler No. 86 (qtd. in Bate 3) "Life is vulgar, but we know not how vulgar it is till we see it set down in his pages." —Henry James, from his review of Anthony Trollope’s Miss Maisie (qtd. in Michie 11) When my work as an aspiring fiction writer feels particularly difficult, I find myself only further disheartened by the memory of the late Victorian writer George Gissing. Gissing offers a disturbing lesson to those of us who believe that writers can improve their craft through study, or who assume the progression of the Anglophone novel is comprised of a linear accumulation of approaches and techniques. Gissing lived after the great Victorian realists, those famous and popular novelists such as Charles Dickens and George Eliot; Gissing always struggled to sell enough books to support his expenses, and 2 even his most popular work, New Grub Street, was not read on the level of, say, Dickens's most successful novels. Gissing, however, had the example of Dickens to learn from. He admired and studied Dickens in great detail, and wrote a book-length appreciation, Charles Dickens: a critical study. And yet, when one opens the early pages of New Grub Street, it reads nothing like the opening of most Dickens novels. There is nothing of the rhetorical scope of Bleak House, and none of the striving for pathos and sympathy of Great Expectations. To a present day reader, New Grub Street seems much more contemporary, more "literary" than most of Dickens's novels: the reader finishes the first scene of New Grub Street unsure what the novel is about, or who is the hero of the story is supposed to be. Narrative tone, alone, seems to suggest who to admire, and who to disdain: the first major character we meet merely announces, “with cheerfulness” (Gissing, New Grub Street), that someone is “being hanged in London at this moment.” Additionally, as the novel progresses, the book's subject matter seems captivated by rather narrow issues of art and artistic authenticity, questions which would have seemed very out of place in Oliver Twist or Middlemarch. The puzzle, therefore, is this: Gissing was talented and prolific. He desperately wanted to make a living from his writing. And he minutely studied from childhood a writer, Charles Dickens, he loved and considered “so original in subject and treatment, so wonderfully true in observation” (Gissing 7), who did successfully make a lot of money from his books. Why, therefore, is Gissing's work so very different from Dickens's? Why couldn't Gissing simply have imitated, just a little more closely, his model? 3 To tell one writer to copy another may seem, on first glance, perverse advice. After all, novelists want to be unique, to stand out from their peers and predecessors. Additionally, it is commonly said, and with good reason, that a writer can only write his or her way. One could not ask Gertrude Stein to write like Billy Collins, or demand that James Baldwin change his prose style to be more like Raymond Carver's. However, it is possible to deduce, from a writer's choices on the page, what sort of reader he or she is imagining, and the interests, patience, and deductive powers of such an imagined figure. The "implied reader," to use Wayne Booth's term, is to an extent discernible in the author's published text. A work of epic space opera, for instance, implies that its reader can keep track of a two dozen protagonists, and a similar number of futuristic technologies; a reader of a crime novel, the text implies, is able to detect subtle clues and psychological wrinkles. So while it makes no sense to complain that Gissing's work does not resemble Dickens's, it perhaps is reasonable to point out that Gissing's implied reader is, in comparison, a much more rarified creature. Gissing's novel suggests a reader who is willing to wait for many pages before discovering which characters to support; someone who is reading carefully enough to detect the purpose of a scene in a small shift of tone or emphasis. Strangely, however, this implied reader is also much more focused in interests than the one who read Bleak House. Gissing's implied reader can keep track of only a few characters, and dislikes meeting a broad range of society, caring more or less exclusively about the concerns of working artists. Of course, this implied reader may have reflected Gissing's actual public: a great amount of time had passed between Bleak House and Gissing's novel, and perhaps during that time external factors (such as literacy rates, 4 technological change, availability of books and rival entertainments) had altered the nature of the British novel reader, and Gissing was merely adjusting to meet their demands. Indeed, in his study of Dickens, Gissing himself comments that a “social revolution” separates their periods (Gissing 1). However, Gissing's popular and critical achievement relative to Dickens, both in his own time and since, suggests that if he believed he was adjusting his work to the requirements of a new age, he was not fully successful at doing so.

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