Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens by John Plotz

Abstract

Reviewed by: Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens by John Plotz Jonathan Buckmaster John Plotz. Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2018. Pp. xiii + 329. $35.00. ISBN 9781400887850 In this enjoyable and expansive study John Plotz traces the artistic heritage of "semi-detachedness," a condition he characterizes as the "dual experience" (2) of inhabiting both the world of an artwork and the world in which the artwork exists. In his introduction, he offers two illustrative motifs: first, the moment in The Mill on the Floss when the narrator interrupts our observation of Maggie Tulliver to complain about their numb arms leaning on both Dolcote bridge (in the story) and the arms of a chair (from where they narrate the story). Second, we have Ford Madox Ford's description of Impressionism as "real life […] seen through bright glass" (3), whereby one apprehends the world of the painting as if it were real but simultaneously retains an awareness of the distance between [End Page 179] that world and our immediate surroundings. Plotz's primary focus is the novel, and how novelists use the state of semi-detachedness "to make sense of how consciousness, in life as in fiction, can be located in more than one place simultaneously" (13). Drawing on Franco Moretti's description of the "episodic" nature of fiction and Catherine Gallagher's notion of novels as "believable stories that do not solicit belief," Plotz feels that novels not only encourage escapism and "a release into the pleasures of an invented world," but also solicit from their readers "experiential attentiveness to the way the world is" (12). In chapter 1, Plotz reappraises the disregarded form of the mid-Victorian short story as one which "represents and reflects on readerly semi-detachment" (20). He traces short fiction through early experiments in the late Romantic period (such as those of James Hogg and John Galt) and demonstrates how such works were particularly amenable to articulating an experience of semi-detachedness, concerned as they are with "polydoxy" and "shifting frames of believability" (24). Dickens's early sketches build on this "inbetweenness," and counterpoise "detached empirical knowledge of city life" with "the shadowy spaces of individual feeling" (35): for example "Our Next-Door Neighbour" (1836) "toggl[es] between scientific and sentimental forms of knowledge" (36) in a narrative that develops from a comic taxonomy of door knockers and their owners through a world where such facile classifications are exposed as naïve, to end with a narrative of untimely bereavement. For Plotz, the Jamesian "loose, baggy monster" of the novel then began to digest the short story/sketch, first as an interpolated tale (which is digressive, disruptive and disjointed) and later fully integrated as the "pseudo interpolated" tale (which is unifying and complementary). Thus after Pickwick's standalone inset tales Plotz feels that all subsequent tales became absorbed into their "host" novel: Oliver Twist contains stories which initially appear to describe somewhere else, but ultimately "appertain" to the characters of the novel. Monks's narrative of Oliver's genealogy begins as the tale of an unnamed child in a remote place and time, but by the end, his auditor Rose has identified herself as one of its protagonists and Monks's place in the main narrative has been explained. However, Nicholas Nickleby contains both forms of interpolated tale, and one wonders how it might fit Plotz's theory–do they work as unrelated experiences, complement each other, or work against each other? And does the reader's awareness of the difference precipitate a different experience? Post Oliver, tales of family lineage become a popular variant of the pseudo interpolated tale for Dickens; Tulkinghorn relates to Lady Dedlock a thinly-veiled version of her own life story, and Pip becomes the audience for several similar familial narratives. Moreover, Pip himself uses such framing stories [End Page 180] to make (erroneous) sense of the events that shape his life, constructing fantasies around Miss Havisham's plans for him. Dickens reappears in Plotz's first "visual interlude," courtesy of his impassioned polemic against Millais's visual realism, which Plotz calls "a revealing moment" (75) and a...