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 Jil Larson Plotz, John. Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2018. Pp. xiii + 329. US$35.00. Semi-Detached is fascinating for many reasons, not least of which is how it taps into our current concern with technology’s fracturing of attention only to direct our thoughts to historical antecedents, encouraging us to wonder, “when have we not been semi-detached?” (17). The book also promotes not only acceptance of simultaneous absorption and detachment, but a complex, appreciative understanding of this state of consciousness, especially given its pertinence to aesthetic experience. In the book’s introduction, John Plotz, professor of Victorian literature at Brandeis University, clarifies his central concept by invoking several examples. In George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, for instance, the narrator emphasizes being at once in the [End Page 620] fictional world and external to it, remarking on his/her arms getting numb from resting on the bridge outside the mill, but quickly revising that image to elbows pressed against the arms of the chair he/she is sitting in, caught in reverie. In an essay on Impressionism, Ford Madox Ford likens this doubled awareness to reflection in a glass that is so bright he can see a landscape through it while also seeing the reflected face of a person standing behind him. Ford found this window glass an apt metaphor for life: “we are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other” (qtd. in Plotz 3). The reflection in the glass can function as a metaphor for the fictional world we see looking forward with an overlay of the real-world personal experiences we see behind us. This is the concept Plotz defines and redefines with playfulness and intellectual zest through nine wide-ranging chapters focusing on novelists, painters, and filmmakers between 1815 and 1930. Plotz is as interested in the artist’s awareness of this phenomenon as he is in the state of doubled consciousness itself. The book does more, then, than note moments of being semi-detached: it traces the artists’ reflections on the experience and their ways of prompting an audience’s reflection, too. George Eliot does so through the momentary disorientation of her narrator in The Mill on the Floss but also by confronting readers with how partial our attention to others is even in the most powerful moments of connection, as in Dorothea’s hard-won empathy for Rosamond in Middlemarch. Readers of novels by Dickens, Eliot, and James are offered vantage points on characters’ consciousness that prompt our own reflection on unreliable memory, lapses in attention, and variable meaning. Plotz challenges Lukacs’s distinction between nineteenth-century realism with its strong social context and modernism with its subjectivist narrative experiments, arguing that Victorian novelists are doing something in between, working within a narrative form that fits neither of Lukacs’s categories. In these novels, the world is neither “event” nor “experience,” but a tangle of both. Plotz draws on Catherine Gallagher’s work to emphasize “fictionality’s cognitive complexity” and how consciousness of experience, past and present, gives shape to episodes or events in the lives of characters and readers alike. One of the early chapters in the book explores the aesthetics of virtual experience through an illuminating discussion of John Stuart Mill’s ideas about reason, imagination, and “conceiv[ing] of other minds in various imperfect ways” (49). The prelude to this chapter, with its complex discussion of the aesthetic theory of Kant, Coleridge, Schiller, and Lamb, brilliantly paves the way for Mill’s ideas about sociability and reading. If imagination is stimulated by what is absent, in Kant’s formulation, then the semi-detached for Mill involved the “mediating intervention of the written word” (55). Reading plays a valuable role in developing moral character and supplementing direct sociability. Plotz humorously illustrates what he means with the example of “excusing oneself from a dinner with Bentham to go upstairs and read some Bentham” (56). For Mill, there was greater liberty in reading than in social interaction because society’s coercive...