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The Decomposition of the Elephants: Double-Reading Daniel Deronda

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Cynthia Chase
Cynthia Chase*
Affiliation:
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
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Abstract

A letter to the hero in Daniel Deronda offers an interpretation of George Eliot’s novel, an account of its rhetorical principles: the Deronda plot discloses not the “effects of causes” but the “present causes of past effects.” This metaleptic plot structure contradicts the linking of origin, cause, and identity affirmed in the story of Deronda’s Jewish birth. The story must shift between constative and performative conceptions of language and must finally invoke the notion of an actual, nonlinguistic fact or act. The relevant referent is Deronda’s circumcision, which the novel must occlude; otherwise the story of discovering identity could not unfold. The scandal of this referent is its status as an exemplary signifier, alluding to the divine pact with Abraham, a story of the institution of signification. Circumcision is an emblem of the novel’s allusive or citational mode: the narrative makes its starting point, not a subject, but a rhetorical operation.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 93 , Issue 2 , March 1978 , pp. 215 - 227
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1978

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References

Notes

1 George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1967), p. 704 (Bk. vii, Ch. lii). Ail page references are to this edition of the novel.

2 In this rereading of Eliot's last novel, I follow the hint of Henry James's Theodora, that in Daniel Deronda the “mass is for the detail and each detail is for the mass,” and ask the question of whether, and how, the detail and the mass are “for” each other in this text. Theodora defends the novel in James's “Daniel Deronda: A Conversation,” originally published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1876 and republished in Gordon Haight's valuable collection, A Century of George Eliot Criticism (Boston: Houghton, 1965). I am indebted to previous critics of Deronda for analyzing the meanings of the novel enforced by its narrator and pointing out the contradictions and insufficiencies of this narration. Important studies include David Kaufmann's George Eliot and Judaism (New York: Haskell, 1970); F. R. Leavis' The Great Tradition (London: Chatto and Windus, 1948) and his introduction to the edition of the novel (New York: Harper, 1961); Barbara Hardy's The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form (London: Athlone, 1959) and her introduction to the Penguin edition (cited in n. 1); and W. J. Harvey's The Art of George Eliot (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961). Felicia Bonaparte's Will and Destiny: Morality and Tragedy in George Eliot's Novels (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1975) has a pertinent chapter on “loose threads in the causal web.”

3 These other notes or letters are Deronda's note to Gwendolen, accompanying her redeemed necklace; Lush's message to Gwendolen; Gwendolen's note summoning Herr Klesmer; the notes exchanged between Grandcourt and Gwendolen during their second courtship; Lydia Glasher's letter to Gwendolen, accompanying the poisoned diamonds; the Princess Halm-Eberstein's summons to Deronda; and Gwendolen's final missive to Deronda on his wedding day. In contrast with these decisive missives, the gratuitous, purposeless character of Meyrick's letter stands out sharply. The gratuitous character of order is also one of its explicit topics.

4 The distinction between two plots is a sort of fiction that begs a great many questions, and actually to distinguish “narrative modes” in the novel, with the intention of relating them to the separate plots, would be a complicated task, if not impossible. Nevertheless, this broad division has been registered almost unanimously by readers of the novel who, preferring “the English part,” have deplored its subordination to “the Jewish part.” There is more in this than a mere objection to what have been described as the novel's occasional sentimentalities or moralism; there is more also than Victorian readers' anti-Semitic objections to the glorification of Jewishness. As I shall argue, the supremacy of “the Jewish part” challenges fundamental tenets of belief about the structure and validity of language.

5 Meyrick practices, not just a narrative mode alien to the narrator's, but a nonnarrative art: he is a painter. Deronda's imaginative sympathy with the histories of the novel's heroines contrasts with Meyrick's enthusiasm for their appearance as paintings—Gwendolen as a “Van Dyke duchess,” Mirah as a Berenice (see Ch. xxxvii). Both the rivalry between language and painting and the conflict between different narrative modes appear also in Middlemarch. Will Ladislaw speaks up for the “fuller image” of language, the “true seeing [which] is within,” in objection to the painted images of Dorothea as a “perfect young Madonna” enthusiastically composed by his friend Adolf Naumann, a German painter (Ch. xix). But Ladislaw's easy and playful use of language resembles Meyrick's and contrasts with that of Casaubon, who searches for origins and causes, tracing the history of myths. Both Meyrick and Deronda, then, are revisions of the ambivalent and incompletely realized figure of Ladislaw. The different distribution of allegiances and values among these characters in Middlemarch and in Daniel Deronda could be the starting point for a study of the distinctive ways that these two texts exploit the functions of narrative.

6 The discrediting of Meyrick's letter is only one instance among many in which this strategy is employed; see, e.g., the beginning of Ch. xli (p. 568), which portrays Deronda's rehearsal to himself of the commonsensical view of his encounter with Mordecai. This is identified as “the answer Sir Hugo would have given,” an observation that partially discredits it, since Sir Hugo's limited judgment has been documented. In the novel's larger scheme, the English side as a whole comes to occupy this role. Since “English” characters' judgments are ironized, their criticism of, or disbelief in, the Deronda plot implicitly ratifies that plot's implausibilities.

7 Henry James, “Daniel Deronda: A Conversation,” in Haight. See also J. Hillis Miller on flowing water as one of the recurrent metaphors that tend to appear in expressions of the classic assumptions about narrative and history (“Narrative and History,” ELH, 41 [1974], 460).

8 Meyrick's next sentence continues the satire of formal critical discourse, with its pretensions to neutrality and exactness:

My own idea that a murrain will shortly break out in the commercial class, and that the cause will subsequently disclose itself in the ready sale of all rejected pictures, has been called an unsound use of analogy.... (p. 704)

The critical mind responds to Meyrick's nonsensical and mischievous fantasy by decrying merely his “unsound use of analogy”—an incongruous understatement parodying the whitened diction distinctive of philosophy and criticism (and deconstructive criticism).

9 The narrative is a series of “unwarranted substitutions leading to ontological claims based on misinterpreted systems of relationship”; see Paul de Man, “Action and Identity in Nietzsche,” Yale French Studies, 52 (1975), p. 20. De Man is describing Nietzsche's deconstructive account of our knowledge of entities, which resembles the issue involved in Daniel Deronda to the extent that both pose the question of the identity principle.

10 J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961), p. 223. Austin introduces a distinction between the constative, or descriptive, function of language and another, “performative” function. In its ordinary usage, language includes, in addition to statements, such performative utterances as “I apologize” or “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth,” assertions in which “in saying what I do, I actually perform that action.” Another example would be the act of baptizing, which confers a name and a religious identification on the person baptized. Conversion to Christianity can be effected by such a performative utterance. Mordecai's talks with Deronda partly function in this way, but they cannot confer Jewish identity.

11 The narrator stresses Mirah's “transformation” after her fairy-tale rescue and her adoption by the Meyricks (see Ch. xxxii).

12 Deronda did not go to live with Sir Hugo Mallinger until he was two years old.

13 Stephen Marcus, Representations: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Random, 1976), p. 212, n.: “It is only when he is a grown man, having been to Eton and Cambridge, that he discovers that he is a Jew. What this has to mean—given the conventions of medical practice at the time—is that he never looked down. In order for the plot of Daniel Deronda to work, Deronda's circumcized penis must be invisible, or non-existent—which is one more demonstration in detail of why the plot does not in fact work.”

14 Discovery of identity generally does involve both physical lineage and a spiritual, cultural, even financial patrimony, and the importance of one or the other factor may vary from case to case, but neither is so extreme or decisive as both are in Daniel Deronda.

15 In Bk. ii, Ch. i, of The Mill on the Floss the narrator criticizes the delusory effects of metaphor (see J. Hillis Miller, “Optic and Semiotic in Middlemarch,” in The Worlds of Victorian Fiction, ed. Jerome H. Buckley (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975). It is interesting that the passage aims at delusory metaphors as the basis of our sense of control or authority: the narrator is satirizing, specifically, the school authorities' control over Tom Tulliver. In Daniel Deronda, Meyrick's letter resists the narrator's authority to impose metaphors. The letter closes with a satirical citation literalizing a biblical metaphor: “But while her brother's life lasts I suspect she would not listen to a lover, even one whose ‘hair is like a flock of goats on Mt. Gilead‘—and I flatter myself that few heads would bear that trying comparison better than mine.”

16 The relation between the aphorism and the novel, that is, may be construed as an example of how metaphorical structure is deconstructed by narrative structure, or vice versa (since the conspicuous rhetoricity of the aphorism evokes a deconstruction of the narrative's rhetorical premises).

17 De Man, “Nietzsche's Theory of Rhetoric,” Symposium (Spring 1974), p. 40: 'The self which was at first the center of the language as its empirical referent now becomes the language of the center as fiction, as metaphor of the self. What was originally a simply referential text now becomes the text of a text, the figure of a figure.“ This narrative of the metamorphosis of the text should not be understood any more literally than the personification of two kinds of text.

18 See Meyrick's letter, p. 708: “Excuse the brevity of this letter. You are not used to more from me than a bare statement of facts without comment or digression. One fact I have omitted....”