Re-Reading English by Widdowson Peter;

Author:Widdowson, Peter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

II

Daniel Deronda is treated at considerable length in The Great Tradition as an instance of the best and the worst in the work of George Eliot. Previous critics have failed to make the judgements of value, understood to be the business of criticism, which enable Leavis to identify the ‘fervid and wordy unreality’ of the bad half of the book, and to propose that the good half be extricated under the title Gwendolen Harleth. This would display George Eliot's art at its most mature, would demonstrate her ‘profound insight into the moral nature of man’, and would show her ‘for us in these days’ (1948, the aftermath of the Second World War) as ‘a peculiarly fortifying and wholesome author’. The health-giving qualities spring from her commitment to ‘life’, Leavis's most recurrent if slightly elusive positive value, which manifests itself in the presentation of the characters. These are not only richly and vividly realised ‘in the concrete’ so that we are made to feel their experience ‘from inside’; they are also morally ‘placed’, judged ‘with unfailing Tightness’. In Gwendolen Harleth George Eliot exhibits for our consideration ‘what we recognise from our own most intimate experience to be as much the behaviour of a responsible moral agent, and so as much amenable to moral judgment, as any human behaviour can be’ (Leavis, 1962, p. 124). Great novels combine the recognisably real with a complex and humane valuing of this reality. The bad half of Daniel Deronda, conversely, is ponderously abstract, remote from life, and not sufficiently ‘impersonal’. We feel the direct presence of George Eliot's own weakness, a tendency to exalted enthusiasms and idealisations unworthy of a mature intelligence, and in consequence her analysis lacks discrimination.

The discussion of Daniel Deronda is broadly characteristic of The Great Tradition as a whole, and especially in its emphasis on experience. In this respect Leavisian criticism strikingly reproduces the values which inform the novels singled out for inclusion in the great tradition. Empiricism, the conviction that experience is the source of knowledge, is one of the main determinants of narrative structure in the classic realist novels of the canon. Dorothea Brooke, Gwendolen, Isabel Archer and, in a rather different way, Conrad's Marlow, all learn from experience, moving in the course of the narrative towards an enhanced awareness of themselves and the world. This learning process, which propels the redistribution of the relationships between the characters, constitutes the core of the classic realist story. Ignorance, misunderstanding and misrecognition generate a series of crises (episodes) which finally produce a new and more stable pattern of relationships (closure).

Empiricism also determines the classic realist novel's mode of address, in so far as it undertakes to ‘show’ in a series of dramatisations the significant experiences of the characters. Dialogue, vivid description and close attention to realistic detail all contribute to the process of realisation of experience. And this in turn invites the reader to participate in the experience, to become part of the fictional world, and to learn with (or from) the experience of the characters.

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