“When we feel the truth of a commonplace”

Abstract

This chapter examines the interdependence between figurative form, emotional inflection, and philosophical conceptualization in George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. It brings into focus the close interdependence of form and concept shaping how the philosopher and the novelist imagine the challenges of everyday conversation and exchange. Eliot and Wittgenstein both give primacy to the affective, and ethical manifestations of issues typically addressed by epistemology, resituating the language of inwardness within relational settings. Reading them together makes it possible to see how their conceptual emphases depend on remarkably similar formal and structural elements, including the use of multiple voices, tonal inflections, and digressions. The formal and methodological affinities between the philosopher and the novelist compel a reassessment of the authoritative exposition of psychic interiority offered by the philosophically inflected voice of Eliot’s principal narrator in Middlemarch. This chapter proposes a “resolute reading” of Middlemarch according to which the novel challenges its reader to relinquish the beautifully articulated hypotheses of existential egoism that the narrator persistently offers, and to attend instead to the ethical challenges embedded in the dynamics of expression, response, conversation, and its avoidance that comprise the novel’s main events.