“ R A L Y I T ’ S G I V E M E S U C H A T U R N ” : R E S P O N D I N G T O T H E R E F L E X I V E I N T H E N I N E T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y N O V E L L . M . FIN D LA Y University of Saskatchewan J.he words of Miss Miggs at the end of chapter 41 of Barnaby Rudge perhaps strike a sufficiently arresting opening note for a paper which will respond to various fictional responses as part of a reflection on reflexivity and self-reference. I will return to Miggs later, in the course of my attempt to clarify and assess certain expressions which have gained currency in recent theories of fiction and criticism of the novel — reflexivity, textuality, the linguistic turn, the deconstructive turn1 — and to do so by comparing and contrasting the kinds and degrees of knowingness about the making and interpreting of fiction detectable in a number of novels still highly esteemed today. I will analyze one brief passage in considerable detail to give sufficient earnest of the complexity, ubiquity, and importance of the reflexive, will follow that with a summary enumeration of the principal theoretical points at issue, and will then illustrate these points via novels with which we are all familiar. Reflexivity will be seen to signify and implicate not only explicit comments on the scope and craft of fiction, but also a wide range of indirect musing on matters such as aesthetic response, linguistic codes and contracts, stability of reference and interpretation, the creating of meaning as intertextual play and the competition of discourses, self-reference as self reproduction, and the confinement and clarification of meaning by cultures and communities of interpreters. To be sure, literary history (like history more generally) abounds in famous examples of self-awareness, products of accident or desire, or a combination of both. One thinks, for instance, of Odysseus’ attendance at the singing of his already legendary self by the blind Demodocus in Book 8 of The Odyssey; of the transformation of Narcissus into the archetypally doomed self-scrutineer in the third book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, of the play within the play of Hamlet, of Michael Henchard’s meeting with his effigy in The Mayor of Casterbridge, of Sylvia Plath’s protracted, fatal mirror stage: “ I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. / Whatever I see I swallow immediately / Just as it is, unmisted by love or devotion.” 2 This is a list designed to terrify taxonomists, to induce a salutary sense of E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , x ii, 2, June 1986 overload in anyone inclined or determined to keep at bay both the virulently enigmatic relations of self and other, and the unsettling resonances of self as other so problematically purveyed by Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua, and so nicely captured in a recent French formulation: “Je est un autre.” 3 Literary history is not only full of reflexive forms and episodes; it regu larly characterizes itself according to notions of the self. Think, for example, of the supposed submersion of artistic individuality in social generality during the Augustan period, “the central self” of the Romantic period, the fugitive, the alienated or disintegrating self of our own century. Such influ ential emplotments of literary history take care of generic history too, documenting more or less soberly the move from reflective to reflexive poetic forms, the confinement and subsequent re-definition of the drama, and the rise of the novel, first to prominence and then to dominance as the genre most responsive to the critical demand for self-consuming or self-deferring artifacts, the only ones considered appropriate to narcissistic cultures such as ours.4 At this point, a brief semantic history of narcissus and its cognates might be in order.5 It would even be possible to offer a deconstructive read ing of the ‘original’ transformation of Narcissus, or, going, from...