Error and the Academic Self by Lerer Seth;

Author:Lerer, Seth;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004130, Literary Criticism/European/General, LIT000000, Literary Criticism/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2003-03-10T05:00:00+00:00

“To teach you to speak and write correctly, so that you can be understood,” said Mrs. Garth, with severe precision. “Should you like to speak as old Job does?”

“Yes,” said Ben, stoutly; “it’s funnier. He says, ‘Yo goo’—that’s just as good as ‘You go.’”

This episode stands as a brilliant parody of Casaubon’s ideals of learning. His conversations with Dorothea often hinge on problems of correctness, as if his goal is to teach his new wife “to speak and write correctly.” But the power of this scene lies in its dialect. Mispronunciation leads not—at least, in Ben’s eyes—to misunderstanding but to pleasure. The world of the Garths in this chapter is a world of sounds, not quite real language: of the music of a mispronunciation or, more generally, of the working rather than the learning world. Consider Caleb Garth: “The echoes of the great hammer where roof or keel were a-making, the signal-shouts of the workmen, the roar of the furnace, the thunder and plash of the engine, were a sublime music to him…. His early ambition had been to have as effective a share as possible in this sublime labour.” What is sublime here is not just the sound of labor in full force but the words that Eliot deploys to echo it. A locution like “a-making” has the reek of the rural or the archaic about it, as if what she is ventriloquizing is the language of Caleb’s own boyhood. And the “plash” of the engine is clearly, from the evidence assembled by the OED, a word that enters English through the North—a word from Gavin Douglas’s Scots translation of the Aeneid, a word from Walter Scott (cited three times in the OED entry), and a word, too, that Eliot herself clearly enjoyed (the Dictionary cites her use of it in Felix Holt and, in the entry for the verb “plash,” from Adam Bede; it appears three times in Middlemarch). The sublime here lies not in scholarship or literature but in the diction of a rural world. As the narrator says of Caleb Garth: “all these sights of his youth had acted on him as poetry without the aid of the poets, had made a philosophy for him without the aid of philosophers, a religion without the aid of theology” (chap. 24, 237).

The Garths posit a different vision of sublimity from Casaubon, specifically, in the sounds and words of childhood. Turn to young Lydgate for another vision of its revelations. As a boy, he would come home from play and find a book to read. Rasselas, Gulliver, Bailey’s Dictionary, the Bible, and others consume his interest, “but no spark had yet kindled in him an intellectual passion” (chap. 15, p. 135). And then he comes upon “the volumes of an old Cyclopaedia…. [T]hey were on the highest shelf, and he stood on a chair to get them down.” But when he opens up the volume, and his eyes light on the entry for anatomy, he finds his vocation: “He

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