Daniel Wright's new book, Bad Logic, is a meticulous, patient, lucid, and thoughtful account of the difficulties Victorian authors get themselves into when they try to describe desire. Wright buttresses his claims by delving into logical formations by Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Nagel, Bertrand Russell, G. W. F. Hegel, and Stanley Cavell, as well as a host of nineteenth-century mathematicians and logicians, and contemporary literary theorists. Wright's basic claim is this: Charlotte Brontë's, George Eliot's, Anthony Trollope's, and Henry James's attempts to represent their characters' erotic investments generate strange discursive claims that double back upon themselves—contradictions, tautologies, vaguenesses, diffusions. These are not momentary failures but, on the contrary, moments that make visible a fundamental underlying mode of thought in the author's oeuvre. Trollope's interest in tautological desire, for instance, turns out to name a core principle in his way of seeing the world. “Bad logic” names how these authors understand character and grapple with the nature and limit of representation. “Bad logic” isn't, in fact, bad; it's the way one has to write about the unrepresentable, which is to say, the way one has to write.Bad Logic's interest in scientific, mathematical, and logical paradigms in the nineteenth century reminded me of two other recent works, Devin Griffith's The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature between the Darwins (2016) and Benjamin Morgan's The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature (2017). In all three of these books, Victorian scientific paradigms become the framework within which we understand the authors' innovations. However, the work that Bad Logic perhaps most resembles is Allon White's classic study The Uses of Obscurity: The Fiction of Early Modernism (1981), which also made a case for the crucial significance of vagueness. Like White, Wright reveals the kind of ideological work that stylistic difficulty performs, although Wright's study addresses a different period and a more specific emotion than White's. In other words, Bad Logic updates an earlier kind of formalist stylistic analysis by affiliating it to a modern interest in the way Victorian authors used scientific and mathematical paradigms.Readers of this book may well think that the entire study concerns desire, but in fact Wright positions desire as a particular issue troubling the larger field of ethical, social, and representational values to which his authors are already committed. I appreciated Wright's recognition that, for the Victorians, desire was just one among many issues, and a disruptive, difficult issue as well. As Wright explains, the problem is how to depict desire. If the reader is to grasp the character's core self, the author must commit to conveying that character's inmost yearnings—yet love is a feeling that resists precise accounting, a contradictory, unspeakable, diffuse kind of sense—which means that, ironically, these authors' conscientious attempts to convey character accurately will require their immersion in a non-accurate milieu.Wright starts with an introduction that introduces not only desire but also what Victorian novelists positioned against desire: ethics. Wright points out that when Victorian writers try to represent desire, they fall into bad logic: contradictions, tautologies, vaguenesses, generalities. “Bad logic tries to have it both ways: it allows desire to resist logic to some extent, or to press against its limit, but it also maintains a connection to its mechanisms of intelligibility, its formal guarantees of truth and validity,” Wright explains (15). If desire is a pang, or a shock, or a feeling, or a truth about one's inmost self, it doesn't seem to consort well with logic, and yet the novel still wants what logic alone can give it: something like omniscience, impersonality, clarity. Thus Wright specifies that he's not out to solve cases of bad logic, but to attend to them. Such accountability, according to Wright, is an ethical imperative (2). It is important to figure out how to speak of inmost feelings.In chapter 1, Wright offers a satisfying reading of the way that Brontë's characters live between the poles of erotic self-negation and the ethical awareness of others. Contradiction, Wright points out, is “a form of reasoning that has its own meanings, textures, and possibilities, rather than a form that invariably shatters, or an unbearable tension that cries out for resolution or evasion, or that requires disciplinary containment” (41). Characters who feel trapped between two selves—such as Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe, with their passionate and imaginative wishes battling their reasonable faculties—must learn to live in that perpetual conflict. Lucy and Jane “end in a lived-in and comforting contradiction, simultaneously alone and in company; withdrawing and desiring; retreating within the self and venturing beyond the self” (66). You might be a Brontë character if you find that your reason battles with imagination or passion—or if you can imagine yourself as married and unmarried simultaneously because you are legislating your own rules—or if you have a public persona coexisting with a very different private self. The state of being a character might be to learn to live with this multiplicity.In stark contrast to Brontë's dualities is the next chapter, treating Trollope's single-minded tautologies. In Trollope's novels, a character is in love simply because she is in love (or, in the case of Lily Bart and Johnny Eames, not in love simply because she is not in love). Alice Vavasor loves John Grey. She just does. It cannot be explained rationally but “is presented as a self-evident truth that seems to arise from nowhere and to lead nowhere” (68). Erotic certainty, in Trollope, is so crystalline it is opaque (69). Wright is sensitive to the ways that this tautological thinking lends itself not only to queer politics but also to coercion, force, as in the nightmare of He Knew He Was Right. The kernel of erotic certainty might not be digestible by narrative. For Trollope, “the very first-person insistence of erotic desire might in fact trump, challenge, or eliminate the third-person perspective of ethical reasoning that is conducted according to the rules of good logic” (98). In other words, “I am what I am”—a line from La Cage aux Folles that acts as a leitmotif throughout this chapter—is both a glorious cry of self-assertion and an aggressive assertion of unchangeable, unaccountable, unintelligible core selfhood. It might feel wonderful to be the one announcing it, but it might be less so to be married to it.If Wright's Brontë and Trollope chapters show two novelists working in opposed ways, his chapters 3 and 4 show two novelists performing variations on a theme. Chapter 3 shows that for Eliot, vagueness can be richly evocative, or ethically dangerous, or simply an inherent, neutral quality of language (109). How does one depict, or evaluate, such a nebulous feeling? As Wright asks, “What if what brings one genuine pleasure always feels impulsive, nonlinguistic, irrational? Can there still be a place in such a picture for what we call ‘reason’ or for what Philip [Wakem] calls ‘rational satisfaction’?” (122) In Maggie Tulliver's experience, the richly absorbing pleasures of music, beauty, desire, and worship, militate against the everyday clarity needed for responsibility to others. Similarly, Dorothea's vague aspirations after beauty and Lydgate's floating thoughts struggle against their ethical agendas. This sensation may be true to the characters, but it creates a bind for the author, who must wonder how she can represent characters precisely when what they are feeling is inchoate (129). It is never clear, in Eliot, whether such oceanic self-surrender is a good thing, but what's more important is that Eliot shows us “what such a fuzzy structure looks and feels like, what it enables and disables in our everyday experience of the world” (141).Eliot's capacious understanding of the sway of pleasure is somewhat different from James's affection for “everything.” As Wright tells us in chapter 4, James favors diffusion, indirection, and inclusiveness. James's “everything” can literally mean everything or nothing; it can include the universe or simply act as a placeholder for the impossibility of specification, an unsatisfyingly unclear pronoun (143). Chapter 4 is perhaps the most philosophical of Wright's four case studies, featuring a category called “super-addition” and a mathematical discourse involving Russell, Hegel, Cavell, and contemporary philosophers of generality. The chapter also involves seven James novels. It is, in other words, a highly diffuse chapter in itself, a rare case in which Wright's own style ends up approximating the dynamic Wright describes. Is James's tendency to generalization a kind of evasive mechanism for a famously closeted author, a way of diffusing sexuality? “Once attached to everything, it's difficult to detach yourself,—one after all feels a kind of responsibility to the world in which we're mired.” Wright points out, but on the other hand, how can one write without detaching and observing? This is “the great challenge of novelistic form” for James (176).A through-line of attention to queer politics provides a warmer counterpoint to the stress on logic, particularly in the James chapter, and in my view the book would have benefited if Wright had expanded his attention to other kinds of love. In his afterword, Wright makes a moving case for how it feels to witness the “law” of one's own desires conflict with the juridical law. But in his discussions of Brontë, Eliot, and Trollope, a similar attention to marriage law—or at least to marital customs and expectations—would in every sense have supported Wright's claims and in most cases would have allowed him to extend those claims. The pain of those whose love dare not speak its name might rhyme with the pain of Victorian women who were not provided a language to speak desire or love. The oceanic diffusion of selfhood might express what it felt like to marry when that marriage stripped away one's legal self, name, and property, submerging one into another's identity.Almost all of Wright's subjects experienced agony about their marital status. This was partly due to the codification of marriage law in 1753, when Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act strictly defined the precise conditions under which marriage was legal—which meant that all other forms of union became illegitimate, their practitioners becoming erotic outlaws. Wright's subjects felt like those erotic outlaws, with the possible exception of Trollope, who divulged little about his marriage (but indeed the very fact of that silence might have indicated the extent to which he took his marriage for granted, its tautological rightness). Thus when Wright argues that Brontë imagined living in contradiction, he could have used the fact that Brontë herself experienced an agonizingly contradictory bind in loving a man who was already married and who did not love her—a love that had no future. Similarly, Eliot's use of absorbing vagueness might have served a woman whom the law defined with brutal clarity as a fallen woman. To focus on feeling, not status, might have helped Eliot just as “everything” helped manage same-sex desire for James.I am not arguing that Wright should have grounded his study in biographical information, but, rather, I am imagining how the kind of sensitivity Wright shows toward James's predicament could have been extended, and ‘bad logic’ could have been shown as something that could literally save one's life and sanity, against all available cultural logic, laws, and norms.If Brontë, Eliot, Trollope, and James engage in bad logic, Daniel Wright does not. Bad Logic is a measured, careful work in which careful readings of logicians and ordinary language philosophers share space with well-selected moments from authors' letters and key points in multiple novels. Wright is to be congratulated for having achieved not just an exceptionally broad range of reference, but also an admirably consistent clarity and care across that range. The subtitle of the book is Reasoning About Desire in the Victorian Novel, which is correct as far as it goes, since Wright is never less than reasonable when charting his subjects' failures of reason, but what it does not reveal is his humane attitude, his capacity to accommodate different ranges of representation with scrupulous consideration and a total absence of judgmentalism. Wright's book teaches us that in a world of cruel laws, sometimes bad logic is the very best we can do. That is not just reasonable, but also, perhaps more importantly, kind.