Here Be Monsters

Abstract

In Human Forms, the most extensively discussed among Walter Scott's novels is Count Robert of Paris. This alone signals Ian Duncan's radical departure from much of his previous work, which has been devoted to publicizing the importance of stadial history to our understanding of the Waverley sequence by which Scott is best remembered and most commonly read and taught today. To be sure, Rob Roy makes an appearance, but not as a conventionally nostalgic national icon; in the context of this book's argument, he is positioned next to the orangutan, and as if from the world of the supernatural, one who has not died out with the inexorable progress of civilization but is “still out there somewhere” (104). This Rob Roy belongs in the company of Count Robert's characters, one of whom is an orangutan—characters who model a process of “retrograde evolution” (102) that indicates that history is heading in almost every direction except forward, governed by something other than the monogenetic theory of human life that informs the Waverley stories: governed by a “polygenetic potentiality of evolutionary trajectories and forms” fully at home in premodern, nondevelopmental Constantinople (106). If humanity is not one species but many, all kinds of borders are called into question: between races, between humans and animals, between nature and culture, between animal and machine. Polygenesis underwrites racialist science but also encumbers its chosen few with arguably indefensible boundaries.Also in transition is the form of literature, now a “meaning-generating apparatus” made up of “dislocated perceptual fragments” (113) rather than (or as well as) a neat evolutionary bildungsroman chronicling an inevitably progressive sequence of character and event. This second, tidier kind of fiction fits well with the historical novel famously mastered by Scott himself, albeit a bit less comfortably with the national tale (as described by Katie Trumpener) that preceded and accompanied it. Duncan's close attention to French and German novels here suggests that the model of a progressive national history as a template for fiction was always a British anomaly (5), and in the late Romantic historical novel he finds it to be falling apart (75). Under such pressure, the realism that is produced as a sort of rescue operation now “reverts to its primal strangeness” (4). This reversion is connected to (or perhaps derives from) a shift of emphasis in natural history happening around 1800, when all organic beings are seen as subject to unpredictable development: the human exception disappears along with any guarantees about the endgame (14).Duncan attributes to Johann Gottfried Herder, as first among others, the impulse toward “the full immersion of the human in a natural history of infinite formal variability” (40) and the creation of a “philosophical climate for the new ecology of the novel” (46). The rhetoric of providential teleology remains apparent, but its base is eroded. (Both run together, I would say, within the baggy apparatus whereby Hegel combines a manifest human—north European—destiny with myriad wrong turns, alternative energies, and exceptions: the chaos of life and history as it is lived and sensed. So seldom indeed does Geist show its work in the world that for most of historical time it might as well not exist.) Lamarckian ideas of species transformation played up adaptability but only at the expense of disturbing reliable boundaries between them, and to this inheritance Charles Darwin adds the emphasis on extinction, further severing the idea of man from any simple identity with the flux of biological matter. (Duncan's account of the lesser-known players in this long revolution—the likes of Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Baron Georges Cuvier, Robert Chambers, and the Comte de Buffon—is rich and detailed: a very useful book within the book.) All of this intellectual turmoil relates to both the form and the content of the novel.The content registers a whole range of figures (often scarcely characters) who are grotesque or monstrous; indeed, had Duncan or his publishers wished to play up the melodramatic potential of this study, they might have titled it a book of monsters (or, more technically, a teratology). While the anthropologists and biologists are attempting to establish (or erode) the boundaries keeping humans apart from apes and the rest of the animated world, the novelists (Sir Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens) are freely mixing up the categories with “weird quasi-human” incarnations (25). Frankenstein's monster lived a sadly solitary life in Mary Shelley's novel, but he belonged to a brotherhood of fictional figures. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire “made monstrosity a key research program for the new philosophical anatomy” (90), and the novelists echoed his efforts. In Dickens, following on from Scott and Hugo, the devolutionary evolution is embedded in the urban environment: it is in the city that “human nature comes undone” (126). (Odd not to see here, in a book otherwise so generous to its critical peer group, some reference to the work of Daniel Pick or indeed Christopher Herbert.) Duncan offers a masterly reading of Bleak House as the “supreme transformist thought-experiment in English before Darwin” and a “massive affront to an ascendant aesthetic of novelistic realism predicated on the constitutive centrality of the human form, scale, and perspective in the world” (25). This constitutes an “alternative realism, allegorical rather than mimetic in method” (127), advancing alongside and both in and out of step with Chambers's Vestiges of Creation, a hugely popular synthesis of transformist natural history. Along with Scott's Count Robert, the other key novel subject to Duncan's deep attention is Hugo's 1831 Notre-Dame de Paris, available in English from 1833. Quasimodo (as the hunchback) is a commonplace of everyday language, while the novel itself is seldom read even in the higher-education sector. Duncan's account of the book is exciting enough to change that: seldom has monstrosity been made so interesting.And what of the form of the novel? Or, rather, its lack of form? For it is lack of form that renders it open to embodying and reflecting the incoherence and discontinuity that Duncan finds to be the essence of evolutionary science. Mikhail Bakhtin, who was also interested in the grotesque, celebrated the loose form of the novel as the appropriate vehicle for the indefinite range of sociolects that make up “the” language. Duncan looks to fictional prose—“emergent, extensive, open, speculative, combinatory”—as an “analogue for the new, epigenetic model of biological development and the human figure it generates” (21). Its tendency is not toward totality but infinity, embodied, for example, in both the original form of Dickens's stories (serialization) and the chaotic structure of the printed books. Duncan finds an exemplary instance (and perhaps a sort of origin) here in Wilhelm Meister, the novel that Friedrich Schlegel, the theorist of the fragment, regarded as the exemplary representative of the zeitgeist. The ironic mode that Schlegel theorized for his times was one of permanent displacement, slippage, deferral, with no completion in sight for either the human subject (the self) or the literary form that purports to embody it. Play replaces plot as the principle of narration, and play is unpredictable in its outcomes and directions. These are the tendencies that Duncan traces in the Victorian novel.The book's final chapter is devoted to George Eliot. Duncan's argument inevitably sails into and across the wake of familiar studies of Eliot and Darwin by Gillian Beer and others, all dutifully acknowledged. It differs from its precursors in proposing a less congruent relationship between Eliot and Darwin, one wherein Eliot “activates other developmental forces besides natural selection, and deranges the scientific thought it brings into play.” It thus seeks “to make George Eliot strange again” (160). Of all the writers discussed in this book, Eliot comes closest to the norm of realism, which is most sustainable when hitched to the localities of provincial life and its imagined spatial and geographic coordinates and where “the range of morphological possibilities is reassuringly narrow” (189). In Daniel Deronda, above all, this breaks apart, as the bildungsroman form is overlaid with a language of “survival, atavism, and reversion” (168), amounting almost to “a kind of science fiction” (199). Similar strains emerge in and through the inner life of Maggie Tulliver. While Middlemarch might seem to be the classic instance of provinciality and therefore of relative epistemological manageability, Duncan restores the significance of the “involuntary, palpitating life” of which Dorothea feels herself to be a part, a life that is “microscopic and macroscopic, internal to each individual body and enfolding all of them” (185)—a life, above all, that is not predictable in its transformational tendencies.In the last analysis, Human Forms does not clearly decide the question of whether the novel is in the vanguard of a new way of experiencing the world, along the lines of Raymond Williams's “structures of feeling”—making tangible an element of the zeitgeist that is still in critical flux, not yet open to articulation except in the literary imagination—or whether it reproduces in a less pathbreaking way the lineaments of a scientific discourse that is already identifiable in physics and biology. But why would we ask such a question, unless we are driven by an urge to establish literature as historically prescient or belated in ways that are beyond or behind other disciplinary languages? Duncan affirms that novels are “active instruments in the ongoing scientific revolution” (3) and that fiction “reorganizes itself as the literary form of the modern scientific conception of a developmental, that is, mutable rather than fixed human nature” (8). Just as the scientific revolution relies upon figure and metaphor to make itself intelligible to itself, the novel turns either explicitly to science (as Eliot does) or absorbs and replicates its investigations as form and figure (as do Hugo and Dickens). Not all novels do this, of course, but Duncan's readings are powerful enough to make us look again at those we might think to be immune to his priorities (Ivanhoe and Corinne also come in for close attention, along with the books already mentioned). How, for example, does the “condition of England” novel reproduce or fend off the incursion of a scientifically affiliated disturbance of form? How does the hyperlocal commitment of, say, Thomas Hardy fare under similar inspection? What are the companionate sciences that carry a comparable charge in the modern novel (cosmological, biological, physical, cybernetic) and that might describe the play between its formal and a-formal energies? Human Forms gives us brilliant readings of only a few books and their historical-intellectual lifeworlds, but they are models for a reconsideration of everything that comes after. Duncan would I am sure agree that the results must remain unpredictable.