Incalculably Diffusive

Abstract

There are at least three ways to approach Alicia Mireles Christoff's rich and rewarding study of the Victorian novel and object relations psychoanalysis. First of all, it is a major contribution to the criticism on George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. The book's sustained and attentive readings of The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, The Return of the Native, and Tess of the D'Urbervilles should be debated and discussed alongside classic scholarship like Gillian Beer's Darwin's Plots. Second, Novel Relations asserts an inner affinity between the experience of Victorian fiction and the school of British analytic thought coming out of and after Melanie Klein. While many readers of this journal may have a passing familiarity with the writings of D. W. Winnicott, Christopher Bollas, and Adam Philips, this may be the first time we are encountering Michael Balint, Wilfred Bion, Paula Heimann, Betty Joseph, Thomas Ogden, and Masud Khan as theoretical figures for literary studies. Third, Christoff puts forward a methodological claim about the reading of fiction and aesthetic experience. In support of her method, she offers the best possible evidence: her own practice of reading, which is dazzling, immersive, and intensely personal.The readings in this book are layered, dense, and graceful. Hardy's image of “stray motes of light” or the “broken insect wings” in Middlemarch might stand in for Christoff's own scale of attention (117, 191). These notes are not ornamental flourishes. The argument takes place in her closeness to the novels, which are not considered as effects of textual ideology but as “internalized presence” (18). The readings are very close. One of the signature moments of Novel Relations is when Christoff proposes simply to list “some of the images [in The Return of the Native] that stand out to me,” and then catalogs fourteen brief details (113). “Images like these,” she says, “are one reason we love Hardy” (124). That is true, and it is not said often enough.The chapters alternate between case studies of novels by Eliot and Hardy. These authors have been chosen not because they are stolid bearers of realist norms but because they are “fruitfully uneven and unintegrated” (2). Although Eliot and Hardy each wrote a whole shelf of books, attention is focused almost solely on the four novels under discussion. Of all of their other novels, only Daniel Deronda and Jude the Obscure merit a single mention, and there is no discussion at all of works like Adam Bede or The Mayor of Casterbridge. Christoff is also not concerned, despite her avowed commitment to “novel relations,” to put her two authors into any kind of conversation. There is no interaction between the Eliot chapters and the Hardy chapters.Each of the chapters coordinates a feeling and a formal element of narrative in one novel with the theories of one or more object relations psychoanalysts. Chapter 1 is about loneliness as an aspect of character in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, as illustrated by Winnicott's essay, “The Capacity to Be Alone.” The reading offered here departs from accounts that insist on the persecution and paranoia that hound Tess throughout the novel until her death on the last page, or that see Hardy as a cruel punisher, inflicting relentless suffering on his heroine. By paying attention to quieter moments of “rapture, exaltation, reverie, dreams, drowsiness, and wonder,” we are to see solitude not as vulnerable isolation but as a positive capacity. Indeed, “Tess may seem most real to us in states where her personality is the most diffuse and dissolved” (30). We relate to Tess not in any fixed ontological register but rather in her modes of “unintegration” (38). Christoff asserts that unintegration is also one of Hardy's aesthetic commitments. Pointing to his poetry, she concludes, “Hardy is uninterested in bringing it all together” (39). But we should also remember that Hardy carefully revised his early novels in order to bring all the Wessex place names into consistency, even correcting smaller points like distances and directions. The most consequential and controversial claim in this chapter is likely to be that Tess is a “maternal” novel, that the novel is holding Tess the way a mother holds an infant (43). In my view, this comes close to discounting most of what happens in the text. It is as if Tess's rape, her dead baby, the exploitation she suffers, the murder she commits, and her execution could all be set to one side—apart from all that, we might say that Tess is being maternally held. More specifically, Christoff overlooks that Tess's “moments of self-absence, nonthought, and attenuated consciousness”—times when she might “unbe”—are also frequently moments of gendered vulnerability and catastrophe (30, 25). They are not a reprieve.Chapter 2 is about wishfulness as an aspect of plot in The Mill on the Floss, as brought out by Bion's theorization of projective mechanisms in terms of containers and contained. Wishing, and the flooding of the river in the novel's ending, are both moments of overflow, exceeding any containment. Christoff observes that the novel begins with the narrator dreaming, but that Eliot never closes this frame narration. We are offered instead an ending that has often seemed a kind of wish-fulfillment, which even Eliot describes as “dreamlike” (62). But it is not only this, Christoff argues. The ending also offers “an affective comportment that . . . bears with frustration” even while realistic possibilities for Maggie are not on the table (64). The ending demonstrates the diffusion, spread, overflow, and spillover of relations that are, to be sure, not realized in “unduly concrete” ways but only in an “intensity” that is “enlarged and widened by others,” however incomplete our contact with those futures (98). This argument relies on what is magical, mystical, and miraculous in the novel—especially Maggie Tulliver's reading of Thomas à Kempis, an author much closer to Eliot than the text will admit (81). The compelling conclusion here is that Eliot's moral passion requires “a kind of self-forgetting” and so is in tension with “omniscience” (98). To say this, however, may slight the role of social dependency and accountability in Eliot's morality. When Maggie says things like, “The real tie lies in the feelings and expectations we have raised in other minds,” or “If the past is not to bind us . . . [w]e should have no law but the inclination of the moment,” Christoff takes these views to be reductive and inadequate (96). But we have good reason to think that Eliot takes the question of social warrants, the recognition of claims, and the bindingness of commitments very seriously. Maggie's concerns about responsibility are not, for Eliot, merely “hyperboles,” containers of “rigid moralism” (97). The novel gives these issues a hearing because they open onto precisely the role of “others”—those who will be the past for us—in our self-realization.Chapter 3 is about restlessness in the setting of The Return of the Native. The novel takes place on the unreclaimed wilderness of Egdon Heath, overgrown with furze and briars. Drawing on Balint's understanding of the analytic situation as “an environment, a climate, a harmonious interpenetrating mix-up,” Christoff demonstrates that the heath is not the unified, hyperlocal thing criticism has taken it for (116). It is more like an atmosphere, a restless and shifting juxtaposition of “microclimates” (109). Atmosphere is understood as a relation, where the boundaries of politics, feeling, and art pass into “amorphous clouds, floating around” (115). What is needed, Christoff contends, is “a project of sensitization” and attentive description, which would bring out the small shifts within the jumble of the object relation. For while these “mix-up[s]” in the environment “may be vague, hazy, hard to pin down . . . they are there, they are felt to be there” (116). By following the allusions to colonial settings (the Black Hole of Calcutta) and the racialization of white characters (Diggory Venn's red hands, Eustacia Vye's performance as a Turk) in the novel, Christoff argues that the heath is surprisingly “full of the world” (111). It is notable that when the argument turns to its claims about race, empire, and colonial violence, the emphasis is much more on the interpretation of absences, suppressions, and silence than elsewhere. The crucial point for this dimension of Christoff's argument is that “both [Victorian] novels and psychoanalytic theory actively mute or avoid depicting [colonial] violence” (12). Thus in The Return of the Native, the history of empire is “disavowed,” or is “not quite spoken aloud, but seem[s] instead to get trapped in the novel's throat,” or is confined in “the black hole of oblivion” (124, 127, 196).Chapter 4 is about the aliveness of Eliot's narrative voice in Middlemarch. As in previous chapters, the Victorian author is seen as having the function of an analyst, and the novel is the analytic situation. Christoff's interlocutors here are Heimann on countertransference as a rapport of attentive feeling; Joseph on the minute, even sensory, shifts in tone as the experience of transference; and Ogden on metaphorical thinking. Starting from the opposition in Middlemarch between “ardor” and “weariness” as a version of “aliveness” and “deadness” within object relations, Christoff concentrates on the function of metaphor for the narrator and Mr. Casaubon (154). For Eliot, who asserts a kind of speculative identity in one of the novel's most famous passages, “sympathy [is] a definition of metaphor” (156). Thus Eliot's narrator is not a sententious monolith, spouting sagacious aphorisms, but a mobile, responsive, and attuned multiplicity of registers and voices. Meanwhile, the problem for Casaubon is precisely his “failure to let his metaphor break down” (172). This is one of the most human insights into Middlemarch that I have ever encountered. The discussion of Ludwig Feuerbach, whose book The Essence of Christianity Eliot translated at the start of her career, is also extraordinarily sophisticated and compelling. What is happening in religion's alienation of feeling, after all, is an avoidance of “the ultimate form of weariness . . . the intimation that for all we want to send an account of our experience out into the world, we know there is no one there to receive it” (187). This is an extraordinary observation. The “weariness” in Middlemarch is not only, resignedly, the rebuke of experience—that, as Wilhelm Meister puts it, “[w]e can't learn soon enough how dispensable we are in the world” (Goethe 362). That is not the end of the story in Christoff's reading because, while “[t]here may be no one to collect our experience for us, to hold it and to gather it together,” still there is “ourselves”—even if we can do it “only imperfectly” (188). The point is “to keep meaning moving” (189).Christoff's style as a critic—patient and responsive, so that her own noticing appears as an act of “co-making” with the text—models the program of object relations psychoanalysis as she presents it (10). Interpretation is at the forefront of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. For instance, one of the most famous applications of Lacanian theory to a literary text is surely Shoshana Felman's “Turning the Screw of Interpretation.” This essay is really a meta-interpretation of all previous readings of James's The Turn of the Screw. In Felman's reading of readings, interpretation is itself interpreted as desire. By contrast, object relations theory downplays interpretation, even at times appearing hostile to an interpretive posture. Winnicott frequently worries that an overly “authoritative interpretation” will be a form of coercion or intrusion, “next door to indoctrination” (Playing and Reality 73).As an account of British psychoanalysis approached through the Victorian novel, Novel Relations explores “the ways object relations thought is shaped by novelistic form” (201). Christoff is careful not to assert a direct causal influence wielded by novels over later theory. Neither does she apply psychoanalytic categories schematically to characters or stories as if they were case histories. “I am not interested . . . in saying who has a good-enough mother and who does not” (10). She does not provide an intellectual or cultural history of British psychoanalysis or a toolkit for “doing” object relations to literary texts. The emphasis instead is on the “looser” affiliations of shape and “special fit” between the Victorian novel and object relations theory (16, 17). Practicing a method she calls “relational reading,” Christoff brings an ear for “what sings out for us in both the novel and the theory that we could not hear” in their isolation (6). It is worth observing, with regard to Christoff's psychoanalytic orientation, the diminished and even embattled role of Klein here. Whenever Klein's ideas do appear, it is invariably for them to be revised, reworked, or otherwise departed from by later theorists. I was surprised, for instance, in a discussion of the colonial histories that subtend British psychoanalysis, to see Klein's important concept of reparation abandoned to David Eng's critique (149), since Eng seems to me to neglect (quite an oversight) that “bad objects” are always internal objects.Lastly, the stated argument of Novel Relations—above and beyond the specific claims of Victorian studies or object relations theory—is “that we never read or write alone” (1). One constant aim is to bring out “the richness of fictionality . . . and the richness of our own reading experience” (10). I expected here some more reference to the scholarship on reading as experience—for instance, to the work of Elaine Auyoung and Jesse Rosenthal, among Victorianists. Christoff's discussion is compelling on its own, however. Absence and solitude are seen not as privative but as relational: We might imagine loneliness, wishfulness, restlessness, and aliveness to be profoundly solitary emotions. But . . . we are never more intensely related to others than when we feel these ways. Although we might think of novel reading as a solitary activity as well, . . . paradoxically, we are related to others while we read: to narrators, authors, and other readers, and also to ourselves, in the new forms of self-relation evolved by Victorian novels and consolidated by British object relations psychoanalysis. (20)Some of the most striking writing in the book is directed to this point about how reading evokes “the multilayeredness and unevenness of presence” (195). A favorite image to illustrate this point is the sound of a piano string vibrating when the sustain pedal is held down (3, 193). This image also furnishes an apt description of Christoff's own prose and her argument. Novel Relations will be read and cited for its illuminating readings and its deep engagement with object relations theory—which we can only hope is the opening of further interest in these theorists among scholars of the novel. But it is Christoff's writing (which is to say, her reading) that most resonates and invites participation and that asks to be lived with and felt afterward.