Authentic Ressentiment: The "Experimental" Novels of Gissing

Abstract

Gl ISSING'S EARLY NOVELS raise two interesting issues for a post-formalist approach to literature. The first has to do with the relationship between literary quality and documentary value, a tension often and overhastily formulated as that between form and content. The fundamental problem here-known to technical aesthetics as the axiological one-is the alleged incapacity of a historicizing approach to do justice to the phenomenon of literary value. And it is certain that, in spite of Lucien Goldmann's very sensible suggestion that it is the greatest literary works which are the most representative-their greatness consisting precisely in their capacity to articulate the most significant contradictions of a given age-those of us still formed by the attitudes of a now distant Romantic tradition find it hard to overcome the instinctive feeling that it is only the average which can be more representative or typical, the greatest works being those which are the most personal and distinctive, and thus in one way or another profoundly uncharacteristic of the socially typical materials with which a sociological or a historical approach has to deal. That the early novels of Gissing with which this essay will deal-Demos: A Story of English Socialism (1886), Thyrza (1887), and The Nether World (1889)-are average at best, no one will wish to deny; at the same time all three of them have so often been pressed into service as historical or documentary testimony about the condition of the British working classes in the late nineteenth century that the question of their adequacy for such a task becomes an unavoidable one.