"All Art is Quite Useless": The Essence of Truth and the Ethical Responsibility of the Artist

Walter Pater discusses experience in his conclusion to The Renaissance. He writes: “At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when reflexion begins to play upon those objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick of magic (551). Pater is referring to a phenomenon more accurately described by Friedrich Nietzsche in his essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” published in 1873—the same year as The Renaissance. In this essay, Nietzsche asserts that truth itself is merely a metaphor, that is when we name something, the truth of that label is merely illusory; it is not truth-in-itself. Both Pater and Oscar Wilde assert that art has no external function in-itself. It is autotelic. I argue, however, that the assertion that all experience is metaphor is not enough to claim all art as merely for itself with no ethical responsibility incumbent upon the artist.

Nietzsche’s discussion of the formation of what I would describe as concrete abstract concepts is very similar to Pater’s assertion that the critic has “no need to trouble himself with the abstract question what beauty is in itself, or what its exact relation to truth or experience” (546). Nietzsche provides the following example regarding honesty:

We call a person ‘honest,’ and then we ask ‘why has he behaved so honestly today?’ Our usual answer is, ‘on account of his honesty.’ Honesty! [. . .] We know nothing whatsoever about an essential quality called ‘honesty’; but we know of countless individualized and consequently unequal actions which we equate by omitting the aspects in which they are unequal and which now designate as ‘honest’ actions. (1174)

The same can be applied to beauty, and Pater recognizes this. We know nothing of any essence of beauty; it is impossible for us to describe beauty—or any abstract concept—in language. Thus, Nietzsche comes to the conclusion that truth itself is “[a] movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms [. . .] which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions” (1174). In other words, Nietzsche argues that the totality of our experience begins as metaphor, and through repetition, it solidifies.

Pater writes, “To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought,” and Nietzsche’s claim certainly falls in this category. But Pater’s claim that art exists for itself is only partially consistent with a belief that we cannot know the essence of things. If all experience is metaphor, then it is incumbent on us as the ones who experience the world to create meaning and, more importantly, an order. Through this conception of truth—the fixed, canonical, and binding—Nietzsche sees

the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries—a new world, one which now confronts that other vivid world of first impressions as more solid, more universal, better known, and more human than the immediately perceived world, and thus as the regulative and imperative world. (1175)

This order, which includes the privileging of oppositions, is what allows a viewer to interpret and provide meaning for a work of art. It is what allows us to debate what even constitutes art. If we think of art the same way Ferdinand de Saussure thinks of language, then we see that meaning floats free from the signifier, that is meaning is always impermanent and arbitrary. Therefore, it is natural to see the responsibility of meaning creation on the shoulders of the viewer, the reader, the listener, etc. This is something we do every day—we throw off any intentions of the author and create meaning as we see it in a text.

But there is an inherent problem in leaving the discussion there. The suggestion that we ultimately have no control over language or meaning is closely tied to the existentialist (and nihilist) proposition that the universe is ultimately meaningless. According to Nietzsche and the postmodernists in the 20th century who follow him, this is true. However, if left here, this discussion would imply that there is absolutely no ethical responsibility on the part of the communicator. If we return to Kant’s categorical imperative, we will see that the model of meaning set forth by Nietzsche and Pater actually does absolve the artist, or any communicator for that matter, of ethical responsibility. Under Kantian ethics, the only ethical responsibility an individual has is to himself. The individual must make decisions based upon whether or not his action can be universalized. If we adhere to Pater’s belief that art is autotelic, under Kantian ethics, there is never a situation where the artist would be held ethically responsible for his or her art because the object itself is without meaning. It is incumbent upon the viewer to place meaning onto the object.

Kantian ethics has a difficult time justifying itself in a reality that is completely subjective. This is because there can be no objective truth which the subject can gauge his actions against. In Kantian ethics, the subject must have the ability to universalize his or her actions, that is make them objective. In Nietzsche’s explanation of reality, this is completely impossible. Enter Emmanuel Levinas and his concepts of alterity and The Other (Totality and Infinity). The Levinasian Other is not the same as the Lacanian Other or even the post-colonial Other, though anthropologists use the term alterity to describe cultural otherness. There isn’t time to explain all the differences (which I do not fully understand anyway), but Levinas’ concept of otherness is important to this discussion. For Levinas, the Other is not knowable. That is, we cannot know the quality of otherness of someone else (Totality and Infinity). I am Other to all of you, and you to me; however, none of us can be each other so we can never know what the Other is fully. In Levinasian ethics, the subject’s responsibility is to the Other—not to himself. Ethics is something outside of subjectivity just as the Other is; therefore, ethical responsibility precedes any objective search for truth. This makes much more sense in the context of Niezsche’s proposition because it binds the subject who exists in a reality where seemingly “everything is permitted” as Camus would say. But Camus also notes that simply because “‘everything is permitted’ does not mean that nothing is forbidden” (67). This adheres to an ethics of responsibility. Therefore, the same can be said of the artist. If art is autotelic, then the artist’s first responsibility must be to the Other. If the artist creates something that he knows will disgust, terrify, offend—with absolutely no other purpose but that—then the artist must question whether or not he is upholding his responsibility to the Other. This, of course, is a question that is quite difficult to answer, and would probably make for good discussion on Tuesday as we discuss Dorian’s ethical responsibility (or lack of.)

Works Cited

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. 1955. New York: Vintage International, 1991.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. Pittsburg: Duquense University Press, 1969.

Pater, Walter. “From The Renaissance.” 1873. Prose of the Victorian Period. Ed. William E. Buckler. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958. 545-53.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” The Rhetorical Tradition. Ed. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001. 1171-9.

Metaphors of Nature and the Nature of Metaphor: Nietzsche as a Predecessor of Play

The rhetorical tradition experiences multiple ruptures in discursive practices during the 18th and 19th centuries. Universities begin training students of varied disciplines in rhetoric rather than only the divinely inspired as in the medieval period. Furthermore, divination itself, as a discursive practice, begins to dissipate as well. Friedrich Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” is an excellent example of this type of rupture. Nietzsche enters into a new type of discursive practice, one that seeks to expose the edifice of absolute truth as artifice. Nietzsche’s discussion of truth in relation to nature paves the way for Jacques Derrida to enter into a new discursive practice described most clearly in relation to Nietzsche in his essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”; in this essay, Derrida displaces Nietzsche.

While Derrida makes the statement in Of Grammatology that “there is nothing outside of the text,” Nietzsche does not go so far as to say there is nothing. He seems to closely follow the work Kant and Schopenhauer—though Bizzell and Herzberg point out that Nietzsche also rigorously criticizes Schopenhauer (1173)—in that he asserts there is a reality behind the veil of human perception, what he calls “nature.” Nietzsche begins by posing this question: “What does man actually know about himself?” (1172). The answer is certainly very little. If man knows so little about himself, then where does his scrupulous conception of truth come from? It is the distinction between true and lie that Nietzsche must confront because this is the basis for all knowledge. He wishes to establish a discourse for discussing truth, and in order to get to the root of truth, he must begin with how truth is described—through language.

It is in Nietzsche’s discussion of language that we can see the framework for semiotics begins to take shape. Nietzsche is interested in the relationship between “language and thought, rhetoric and knowledge” (Emden 1); he wants to examine the possibility for contingence between these and at what point they connect if ever. He points out first and foremost that the establishment of truth can be seen as a sort of “peace treaty” (1172); its meaning is a social contract. He writes: “[A] uniformly valid and binding designation is invented for things, and this legislation of language likewise establishes the first laws of truth” (1172). Thus, man despises and punishes the liar because the liar does not adhere to these laws; however, Nietzsche also points out that “what [he] hate[s] is basically not deception itself, but rather the unpleasant, hated consequences of certain sorts of deception” (1173). In other words, it is not that the essence of the lie, the lie-in-itself, that man hates; rather, it is merely the consequences based upon the contract which was fashioned by man in the first place. Here, the opposition between truth and lie is essentially deconstructed. The consequences or rewards for lies and truths, respectively, have nothing to do with what those words are, as things-in-themselves. But if we cannot decide the difference between truth and lie at the level of our understanding, then how can we claim anything as truth? It is this question that Nietzsche answers next.

Nietzsche provides three steps for utterance-formation. He writes that a word is “the copy in sound of a nerve stimulus; between the stimulus and the sound is the image” (1173). Nietzsche also points out, however, that there are certain abstract concepts which we pretend to be familiar with outside of the context of their use. He writes: “The ‘thing in itself’ (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for” (1173). Discovering the nature of an object, being able to pull back the veil of perception, is what Nietzsche is referring to. What he draws from this is the idea that language is not “logical” because it is arbitrary. Words are not “derived from the essence of things” (1174). If we understand Nietzsche’s essay in terms suggested by Christian Emden, as a discussion of the relationship between “language and thought, rhetoric and knowledge” (1), Nietzsche’s project becomes clearer as a discursive practice. There is a rupture between language and thought because language cannot be contained by thought nor can it describe outside of the limits of what our minds can conceive. This is best exemplified in Nietzsche’s discussion of the concept and the differences between concrete and abstract concepts. The concrete is formed “by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences [between individual concrete objects—Nietzsche’s example is ‘leaf’] and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects” (1174). This concrete concept formation illuminates the inability of language to shed its own artifice in order to describe the essence of an object. Even more perplexing is the formation of the abstract concept. Nietzsche provides the following example:

We call a person ‘honest,’ and then we ask ‘why has he behaved so honestly today?’ Our usual answer is, ‘on account of his honesty.’ Honesty! [. . .] We know nothing whatsoever about an essential quality called ‘honesty’; but we know of countless individualized and consequently unequal actions which we equate by omitting the aspects in which they are unequal and which now designate as ‘honest’ actions. (1174)

Ultimately, Nietzsche is describing our account of reality as a system of metaphors. Nothing we describe in language is actually completely accounted for through language; it is only alluded to. Language exists on the fringes of nature, never able to get beyond itself to nature.

However, Nietzsche repairs this rupture between language and thought. This is not how we account for reality, that is day to day, one does not consciously recognize all language as metaphor. Rather, the metaphor has gone through a process of “petrification and coagulation” to become rigid and fixed—seemingly unmovable (1176). In the middle of his essay, Nietzsche finally answers the question that he set forth at the beginning. He writes:

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force [. . .]. (1174)

Again, the opposition between truth and lie is deconstructed because truth is described in terms of falsity. Truth is not the same as what we believe its essence to be. This must be the case because truth embodies the very nature of all reality. If all concepts and their individual objects, both concrete and abstract, are metaphors—are not true essence—then truth itself, not truth-in-itself, must be described in the same way—as nothing more than a metaphor for the essence of truth, whatever that may be. Nietzsche writes, “The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself” (1177). It is not then a rupture between language and thought, but a disconnection of thought and language from nature. Language and thought are inextricably linked in order to turn metaphor into truth. Through this conception of truth—the fixed, canonical, and binding, Nietzsche sees

the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries—a new world, one which now confronts that other vivid world of first impressions as more solid, more universal, better known, and more human than the immediately perceived world, and thus as the regulative and imperative world. (1175)

He describes here the ordering and structuring of oppositions which begin, for Nietzsche, with true/false. These oppositions arise out of the coagulation of metaphor—of the vivid world of first impressions. As Nietzsche says, it is a way to make reality “more human.” But this pyramidal structure is exactly that—a structure, man-made and impermanent.

Lee Hardy writes that “ ‘knowledge,’ for Nietzsche, is a kind of error, and what passes for truth among us is but a fiction, devised for vital purposes” (31). The relationship between rhetoric and knowledge is very important. If all knowledge is erroneous, but rhetoric attempts to disseminate knowledge, then the discursive practices of the past certainly need to be re-evaluated—Nietzsche’s own discursive practice should be as well. However, Nietzsche fails to acknowledge this point. Hardy poses this very important question to ask of Nietzsche: “Is the claim that all of our ‘truths’ are little ‘t’ truths—good for us to believe, perhaps, but ultimately false—itself a big ‘T’ truth, one that gets it just right, one that tells us how the world is set up such that our truths must always be spelled with a little ‘t’; or is the claim that all of our truths are little ‘t’ truths itself a little ‘t’ truth, that is, nothing more than a useful fiction?” (31). It seems very clear, in this essay at least, that Nietzsche would like to claim his explanation to be an absolute truth but he cannot. At the same time, however, he does not acknowledge the totalization his discourse demands. There is no room for other possibilities because all possibilities are contingent on empty metaphor. But this becomes self-legitimizing, which sets the stage for a displacement of this discursive practice with another.

Derrida creates points of contingence and rupture in one vital place within Nietzsche’s discourse. I use the terms contingence and rupture together as one in the same because this is the way in which Derrida describes his displacement of not only Nietzsche, but Freud and Heidegger as well. Oppositions such as contingence and rupture are both necessary tools in his discursive practice. First, Derrida recognizes the sign, to use Saussure’s terminology, as arbitrary and made of two parts, the signifier and signified, which function as two sides of a piece of paper. They are inextricably linked. These terms are essentially the same as language and thought in Nietzsche’s text. Language, the signifier, arouses thought, the signified. However, unlike Nietzsche, Derrida does not necessarily see any “nature” behind language. Derrida’s project is to discover the “nothing” that is outside of the text. He begins this in his essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” with a discussion of the “center” of structure. Derrida writes:

[I]t has always been thought that the center which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure which while governing the structure, escapes structurality. This is why classical though concerning the structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. The center is at the center of totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere. (279)

In other words, “the center,” in Western metaphysics, must transcend the structure that it supports. This conception of center is based on the metaphysics of presence. Centers such as “essence, existence, [. . .] transcendentality, consciousness, God, man” all demand presence (280). Derrida points out, however, that a signified that demands presence limits the play of the signifier, that is if there is the possibility of an absolute the play of the signifier is finite.

However, Derrida is not interested in the destruction of Western metaphysics, which is what he claims Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger do. Derrida acknowledges that these discursive practices seek to establish a conception of truth that defies Western metaphysics and attempts to solve its central problems, questions of being, truth, and knowledge, by destroying its foundations. Derrida points out that “all of these destructive discourses and all their analogues are trapped in a kind of circle. This circle is unique. It describes the form of the relation between the history of metaphysics and the destruction of the history of metaphysics. There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics” (280). For Derrida, it is impossible to critique metaphysics by attempting to dismiss its terminology because we “have no language—no syntax and no lexicon—which is foreign to this history; we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest” (280-1). It is impossible to escape the use of a discursive practice if one seeks to critique that same practice. One must use the same language.

Because of this, one cannot escape the inevitability of what would seem like contradiction in Nietzsche’s discursive practice. Derrida uses the example of Claude Lévi-Strauss and his discussion of incest prohibition to illustrate this phenomenon. Lévi-Strauss is concerned with the distinction between nature and culture—a distinction that goes at least as far back as the Phaedrus in the discussion between Calicles and Socrates. Incest prohibition seems to exist as part of both nature and culture because it is universal across all cultures, but it also belongs to a system of norms because it is a prohibition. Derrida writes “By commencing his work with the factum of the incest prohibition, Lévi-Strauss thus places himself at the point at which this difference, which has always been assumed to be self-evident, finds itself erased or questioned” (283). This is what deconstruction does. It destabilizes oppositions that were for so long though to be self-evident. It rearranges them, reorders them. In this way, Derrida’s discursive practice displaces Nietzsche’s because Nietzsche’s practice would have been concerned with exposing this pyramidal structure as metaphor, non-truth, not truth-in-itself. Derrida, however, wants to move beyond this and not merely tear down and destroy the opposition, but see how it can be rethought.

Lastly, Derrida confronts the notion of totalization. Nietzsche, as Derrida points out, defines totalization as “useless, and sometimes as impossible. This is no doubt due to the fact that there are two ways of conceiving the limit of totalization” (289). In Nietzsche’s view, totalization is impossible because he sees it as an attempt to master the unmasterable. It is the use of finite language to try and contain the infinite. Derrida, however, writes, “[N]ontotalization can also be determined in another way: no longer from the standpoint of a concept of finitude as relegation to the empirical, but from the standpoint of the concept of play” (289). Rather than seeing language as a finite field which cannot cover the infinite, Derrida sees that the “nature of the field” itself “excludes totalization” (289). That is, it is not that the field is too large; rather there is “something missing from it” (289). The field of language is missing a center. The sign replaces the center, thus “One cannot determine the center and exhaust totalization because the sign which replaces the center [. . .] occurs as a surplus, as a supplement” (289). Language, for Derrida, does not function merely as a finite system of metaphors but as a system where the “center,” the transcendent, presence, is always missing.

Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

—. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. 278-93.

Emden, Christian J. Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness and the Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Hardy, Lee. “Postmodernism as a Kind of Modernism: Nietzsche’s Critique of Knowledge.” Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought. Ed. Merold Westphal. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. 28-43.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” The Rhetorical Tradition. Ed.
Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001. 1171-9.

“The Heath is a Cruel Taskmaster to Me”: Nihilism and Nature in The Return of the Native

A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."
- Stephen Crane

The ending of The Return of the Native sparked controversy not only in Hardy’s time but in our class on Thursday as well. I speak, of course, of the “true” ending to the novel; the one which Hardy had originally intended to be the ending of the novel. I think an important point in understanding and deciding what exactly happens to Eustacia and Wildeve at the end of Book Five is the distinction between what I will term Hardy’s Nature and Huxley’s Nature. I think if we were to read the end of the novel in terms of Huxley’s Nature, which is an agnostic view, then their deaths would be very upsetting because even though there is no belief in a specific creed, as Huxley says, there is still the sense that human life can have meaning (1436); however, read in terms of Hardy’s Nature, which I argue is nihilist, their deaths are perfectly understandable and should warrant no emotional response because ultimately their lives were meaningless—they simply succumb to the vast uncaring power of Nature.

Nihilism, defined as simply as possible, is a belief in the meaninglessness of everything; therefore, the nihilist, by definition, is an atheist because he believes that nothing has meaning and thus believes in nothing. Let me reiterate the distinction I made in class between nihilism and existentialism because it is a point of misunderstanding that I have discovered even in published critical essays in my research for my master’s project. First, there are really multiple forms of existentialism, but the two main distinctions are theistic and atheistic. First, it is important to note that the thinkers I will discuss here vehemently denied the label existentialist and such a term was not in existence during Kierkegaard’s time but was applied to his work later. Last week, I mentioned Kierkegaard (and Dr. Varner mentioned him in class) who would be considered a theistic or Christian existentialist. Both schools, theistic and atheistic, believe in the meaninglessness of the universe itself. Kierkegaard argues that this is where the “leap of faith” for the Christian comes in—there is no way to absolutely prove the existence of God given the universe we find ourselves in; we must take a leap of faith. Therefore, meaning is found within a meaningless universe through faith. Atheistic existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus are concerned with discovering meaning without appeal. Sartre famously describes the term “being-in-itself” in Being and Nothingness meaning that existence precedes essence. In other words, human beings do not have a purpose or meaning before they actually come into existence—they create that meaning. The importance of this is to note that while existentialism does post the universe as meaningless, it denies the belief that everything is without meaning. Camus even writes in The Rebel that his entire life’s work is dedicated to the opposition of nihilism.

A comparison between Hardy and a couple American naturalist authors, Stephen Crane and Jack London will help to illuminate the nihilism found in The Return of the Native. In Crane’s “The Open Boat,” four survivors of a ship that has sunk find themselves at the mercy of the sea in a ten-foot dinghy that is slowly taking on water. A few days into their journey, they spot land, but they only have oars and cannot get to the shore quickly enough. The narrator, at this point writes that the men in the boat may said something to this effect: “ ‘If I am going to be drowned—if I am going to be drowned—if I am going to be drowned, why [. . .] was I allowed to come this far and contemplate sand and trees? Was I brought here merely to have my nose dragged away as I was about o nibble the sacred cheese of life? It is preposterous.’ [. . .] Afterward the man might have had an impulse to shake his fist at the clouds. ‘Just you drown me, now, and then hear what I call you!’” (Crane 909). At the end of the story, everyone makes it ashore but the one. The narrator writes, “The welcome of the land to the men from the sea was warm and generous, but a still and dripping shape was carried slowly up the beach, and the land’s welcome for it could only be the different and sinister hospitality of the grave” (919). In Crane’s story, the characters are completely at the mercy of Nature. Even when they arrive on shore, death beckons them. The fact that one dies and three survive is solely chance for the narrator and the characters—there is no inherent meaning.

Similarly, in Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” the nameless main character, a new-comer to the wild, attempts to challenge nature though he sees the possibility that he will lose before he sets out into the freezing expanse of the Yukon. On his trip he falls into a shallow creek and attempts to build a fire to keep himself from freezing to death. He, like Crane’s characters, is faced with nature which he knows he cannot control. The narrator writes: “When it is seventy-five below zero, a man must not fail in his first attempt to build a fire—that is, if his feet are wet. [. . .] [T]he circulation of wet and freezing feet cannot be restored by running when it is seventy-five below. No matter how fast he runs, the wet feet will freeze the harder. All this the man knew” (London 982). The main character is aware of Nature’s uncontrollability, but he still believes he can beat it as long as he knows how to beat it. But his hands are numb with frostbite. He struggles to start the fire, but as soon as he gets one going, snow from a tree falls on it and puts it out. The reader knows deep down that hope is lost, but still desires to see the man prevail. The man, too, convinces himself that by his sheer willpower alone, he can defeat Nature his way; if he can just keep a steady pace and continue to walk towards his destination, he will make it. The narrator writes “Without a doubt he would lose some fingers, and toes and some of his face; but the boys would take care of him, and save the rest of him when he got there” (986). The man is attempting to reconcile the situation in whatever way he can. Even when he is on the verge of death, the narrator tells us, “Well, he was bound to freeze anyway, and he might as well take it decently. With this new-found peace of mind came the first glimmerings of drowsiness. A good idea, he thought, to sleep off to death. It was like taking an anaesthetic. Freezing was not so bad as people thought. There were lots worse ways to die” (987). There is a profound irony in the way in which the man continually attempts to reconcile his situation in the face of hopelessness. Or, in other words, he attempts to create meaning in an utterly meaningless and hopeless situation, and the way in which the narrator presents this to the reader makes his struggle seem utterly futile.

A clear parallel can be drawn between these American short stories and The Return of the Native. What happens to Mrs. Yeobright can clearly fit into the indifferent attitude of Nature, but and interpretation of the end of Book Five is even better served when put into a nihilistic context. Eustacia’s death can be read not only as suicide but as a succumbing to the power of Nature. When Clym finds Wildeve looking for Eustacia, they standoff in silence, but the narrator tells us: “While they both hung thus in hesitation a dull sound became audible above the storm and wind. Its origin was unmistakable—it was the fall of a body into the stream in the adjoining mead, apparently at a point near the weir” (Hardy 365). The reader does not know exactly how Eustacia fell into the stream, but Clym’s remarks immediately following give some indication. He asks Wildeve if he thinks it could have been Eustacia who they heard. When Wildeve asks, “ ‘Why should it be she?’”, Clym responds, “Because last week she would have put an end to her life if she had been able. She ought to have been watched!’” (365). Because Clym had threatened Eustacia just a few days before because he blamed her for his mother’s death, he feels responsible. During their argument, she tells him, “ ‘I almost wish you would kill me,’ [. . .] ‘It is with no strong desire, I assure you, that I play the part I have lately played on earth. You are no blessing, my husband’” (323). Both Clym and Wildeve jump into the water to save Eustacia. Diggory Venn is able to pull them out, but both Wildeve and Eustacia are dead.

Nihilism comes into play in these events in two major ways. First, Eustacia and Wildeve, just as in the American tales, are defeated by nature. The narrator describes he lifeless body as “more than whiteness; it was almost light. The expression of her finely carved mouth was pleasant, as if a sense of dignity had just compelled her to leave off speaking” (371). The narrator then compares Wildeve to her: “Less repose was visible in his face than in Eustacia’s. [. . .] The only upon him of his recent struggle for life was in his finger-tips, which were worn and scarified in his dying endeavors to obtain a hold on the face of the weir-wall” (371). In this comparison, we see that Eustacia did not struggle at all—she succumbed to the power of Nature. And even though Wildeve struggled to survive, he could not defeat Nature. The nihilistic Nature, an indifferent, uncaring, meaningless universe destroyed them both. Second, Clym laments the losses to Venn, saying: “ ‘I am getting used to the horror of my existence. They say that a time comes when men laugh at misery through long acquaintance with it. Surely that time will soon come to me!’” (372). What Clym speaks of is flying in the face of the meaningless universe, which is what the survivors in Crane’s story and the man in London’s both do. They face it head on because in nihilism there is nothing else to do but laugh at it since the universe can crush them at any moment—and does. Venn asks him, “ ‘Why should you say such desperate things?’” and Clym responds, cementing his nihilism in the mind of the reader: “ ‘No, they are not desperate. They are only hopeless; and my great regret is that for what I have done no man or law can punish me!’” (372). This hopelessness is at the heart of nihilism. It seems fairly obvious that Hardy wanted to end the novel here, after those lines, to emphasize the meaninglessness of the universe and man’s inability to create anything meaningful within it. There is nothing but hopelessness.

What a bummer!

Works Cited

Camus, Albert. The Rebel. 1951. New York: Vintage International, 1991.

Crane, Stephen. “A man said to the universe:.” 1899. The Complete Poems of Stephen Crane. Ed. Joseph Katz. Ithica: Cornell UP, 1972. 102.

—. “The Open Boat.” 1897. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 6th ed. Vol. C. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: Norton, 2003. 903-19.

Hardy, Thomas. The Return of the Native. 1878. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005.

Huxley, Thomas Henry. “From Agnosticism and Christianity.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 7th ed. Vol. 2. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: Norton, 2000. 1354-5.

London, Jack. “To Build a Fire.” 1902. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 6th ed. Vol. C. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: Norton, 2003. 977-87.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. 1943. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Of Quite Infinite Depth, Of Quite Infinite Expansion: Huxley, Mill, Carlyle, and the Authority of Natural Science as a Meta-Narrative

We discussed in class the change in worldview for the Victorians from the certainty of The Church to possible uncertainty to the new certainty of Science. I would like to examine this shift and point out the ways in which Science is a meta-narrative similar to the meta-narrative of Christianity. This is a characteristic of natural science that remained ignored really until the 1980s when Jean-François Lyotard published The Postmodern Condition in which he points out that science is also a meta-narrative with its own set of values and restrictions. Our culture, and certainly the late Victorians, tends to place science and religion at odds primarily because science can be “proven” where as religion cannot. Using Mill and Carlyle as guides, I would like to look at Huxley’s work and question his definition of certainty.

I will begin with Huxley’s assertions. As a context for looking at “On the Physical Basis of Life,” I would like to point out Huxley’s claim in “Agnosticism and Christianity”: “it is wrong for a man to say he is certain of objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty” (537). We can assume, then, that in his lecture “On the Physical Basis of Life,” he believes that evidence which logically justifies his assertions has been produced; therefore, he can speak with certainty. Of course, this evidence is Darwin’s Origin of the Species. But what if the scientific method by which this evidence was produced could be called into question? How much more certain would Huxley’s claims be than assertions made on religious foundations?

If we return to Carlyle, we’ll see the establishment of the early Victorian conception of nature. Carlyle writes, “To the wisest man, wide as is his vision, Nature remains of quite infinite depth, of quite infinite expansion; and all Experience thereof limits itself to some few computed centuries and measured square-miles” (107). Carlyle’s view can be compared and possible considered a precursor to existentialism of the 20th century. For other philosophers who are more traditionally considered precursors to existentialism, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, experience is the only thing that human beings have to create any sort of meaning in their lives. Like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Carlyle points out here that Nature, the universe, is completely beyond human understanding. 20th century existentialists like Sartre and Camus argue that the world is completely devoid of meaning outside of what meaning humans attribute to it. This seems to line up nicely with Huxley’s discussion of protoplasm and Darwin’s later work The Descent of Man because both make the assertion that there is nothing inherently “special” about human beings. However, to assert that this is an absolute is to limit what Carlyle is saying. Carlyle specifically addresses “the wisest man” which in Huxley and Darwin’s view would certainly be the scientist. Carlyle claims that no matter how wide this man’s vision, Nature is far too vast to be explained in total. Yet Darwin’s theories certainly attempt such a totalization—and 20th and 21st century society certainly believes that his theories provide it.

In On Liberty, Mill points out how vital it is to question authority and writes that, “the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it” (252). Certainly we cannot ignore that this is precisely what Huxley and Darwin are doing—dissenting from popular opinion and for anyone to have silenced them at the time would have been wrong, as Mill points out. However, there is an underlying assumption in Huxley’s argument—that the scientific method is objective and without ideology. It is upon this underlying assumption that science has gained its massive credibility over the last 150 years. Even Mill acknowledges that nothing man-made is without any ideology. He writes that the problem with suppressing any opinion is that “the opinion which it is attempted to suppress by authority may possibly true. Those who desire to suppress it, or course deny its truth; but they are not infallible” (253). Therefore, why has the authority of science been so un-questionable” since the time of Darwin?

Mill defines Nature as “the aggregate of the powers and properties of all things. Nature means the sum of all phenomena, together with the causes being as much a part of the idea of Nature, as those which take effect” (314). He goes on to say that, “mankind have been able to ascertain, either by direct observation or by reasoning processes grounded on it, the conditions of the occurrence of many phenomena; and the progress of science mainly consists in ascertaining those conditions” (314). Mill delivered these statements in a lecture approximately twenty before Huxley’s lecture; however Three Essays on Religion was published about five years after. We can see that Mill’s view on science is similar to Huxley’s. For some reason, there is a disconnect between what Mill wrote in On Liberty and what he is saying here. Science is not seen as something that needs to be questioned because it is presumably based on objective conditions.

In The Postmodern Condition, Jean-François Lyotard argues that even science is based on ideological foundations. He points out that “Scientific knowledge is a discourse” (3). There is a danger in accepting all knowledge that is developed and based on scientific conclusions. Lyotard goes on to argue, “Scientific knowledge does not represent the totality of knowledge; it has always existed in addition to, and in competition and conflict with, another kind of knowledge [narrative knowledge]” (7). Lyotard does stipulate that he does not mean to suggest that narrative knowledge can prevail over scientific knowledge, rather that we must recognize the two exist together. The problem is that the language of science is self-legitimizing. We can see this in both Mill’s statement above as well as in Huxley. Huxley writes, in regard to the concept of protoplasm,

But if, as I have endeavoured to prove to you, their protoplasm is essentially identical with, and most readily converted into, that of any animal, I can discover no logical halting-place between the admission that such is the case, and the further concession that all vital action may, with equal propriety, be said to be the result of the molecular forces of the protoplasm which displays it. (524)

Huxley asks the members of his audience to accept protoplasm as a universal force as long as he has convinced them of the existence of protoplasm. But this assumes that the method by which protoplasm is “proved” is completely objective—that it represents the totality of knowledge. This is how science can be viewed as a meta-narrative. In Huxley’s explanation of protoplasm, he provides a totalizing, universal account for all knowledge and experience. Does that mean that he is wrong? Not necessarily, but it is important that we recognize that such explanations are not completely objective and are not necessarily totalizing.

Works Cited

Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus. 1831. Prose of the Victorian Period. Ed. William E. Buckler. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958.

Huxley, Thomas Henry. “On the Physical Basis of Life.” 1869. Prose of the Victorian Period. Ed. William E. Buckler. Boston: Houghton, 1958.

—. “Agnosticism and Christianity.” 1892. Prose of the Victorian Period. Ed. William E. Buckler. Boston: Houghton, 1958.

Lyotard, Jean-Fransçois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. 1979. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota, 1984.

Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. 1859. Prose of the Victorian Period. Ed. William E. Buckler. Boston: Houghton, 1958.

—. Three Essays on Religion. 1874. Prose of the Victorian Period. Ed. William E. Buckler. Boston: Houghton, 1958.

Narration and the First Novel For Grown-ups

The narrator seems to be point of contention for many of us, so I’d like to throw my two cents in. First, I’d like to disagree with Amy’s use of the term meta-fiction. My reasoning will be laid out with the rest of my argument, but I think it’s important to be clear on this point from the beginning. In order for Middlemarch to truly be meta-fiction, our narrator would have to consciously draw attention to her own devices as elements of fiction. In other words, she would have to be self-conscious not only of her position as narrator, but she would also need to comment on and call attention to the fact that the characters in her story are works of fiction. I argue that Middlemarch can be read as a meta-narrative for the Victorian period which is what truly makes it the “first novel for grown-ups.”

I will define meta-narrative shortly, but first I would like to clarify the type of narration that we are dealing with in Middlemarch. Wayne C. Booth offers us our best contemporary description of types of narration. He writes, “If we name over three or four of the great narrators—say Cervantes’ Cid Hamete Benengeli, Tristram Shandy, the ‘I’ of Middlemarch, and Strether, [. . .] we realize that to describe any of them with terms like ‘first person’ and ‘omniscient’ tells us little about how they differ from each other, or why they succeed while others described in the same terms fail” (149-50). Thus, “The Voice of the Wise Woman” needs to be defined more precisely. Paraphrasing Booth, there is, at the most basic level, a distinction between dramatized and undramatized narrators. There is also always a sense of implied authorship. Undramatized narrators can be first or third person; however, the stories they tell seem to come to us completely unmediated. There is no distinction between the implied, undramatized narrator and the implied author. Middlemarch is seemingly part of this category. but we can only know for sure if we know the requirements for a dramatized narrator. Such a narrator comes into existence, generally, as soon as he or she acknowledges himself with “I.” We must then decide to what degree the narrator aligns himself or herself with the implied author or distinguishes himself or herself as a character separate from the implied author, participating in the action of the story, with its own thoughts and feelings. Generally speaking, these narrators are characters; they are “never explicitly labeled as narrators at all” (Booth 152). However, sometimes these narrators are disguised as undramatized narrators. Booth writes that though narrators “of this kind are seldom labeled so explicitly as God in Job, they often speak with an authority as sure as God’s” (152). Therefore, I propose that the narrator in Middlemarch is a dramatized, first person narrator, who is aligned directly with the implied author. Now that we have many of these distinctions laid out, it should be clear how Middlemarch is not exactly meta-fiction. A good example of a meta-fictive narrator would be Tristram Shandy. Sterne’s narrator is a dramatized, first person narrator who draws attention to himself as narrator. The “I” in Middlemarch never points to the fact that she is telling a story. Her commentary is restricted to the character’s feelings and motives, and never touches on the process of story telling.

This is important because the narrator in Middlemarch is then not a narrator-agent, such as Shandy, Huckleberry Finn or Montressor in Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado,” through which the reliability of the narration is easily called into question. We can clearly see that her narration is not delivered to us unmediated—she gives us commentary. Of course, a question of reliability was raised in class regarding her commentary. Booth argues, however, that “To treat [commentary] as a single device is to ignore important differences between commentary that is merely ornamental, commentary that serves a rhetorical purpose but is not part of the dramatic structure, and commentary that is integral to the dramatic structure” (155). The commentary here only serves rhetorical purposes, and in some cases is perhaps purely ornamental, but it is never part of the dramatic structure because the narrator never interacts with any of the characters. The Voice of the Wise Woman speaks with the authority of God. The question of reliability also contains within it a question of distance. The examples I mentioned earlier, Shandy, Huck Finn, and Montressor, are all distant, as Booth points out, from their implied author intellectually, morally, temporally, etc. Furthermore, these narrators are not omniscient. The Wise Woman has full privilege into the minds of all the characters and has no visible distance from the implied author. How does this affect her reliability? Booth writes that “Generally speaking, the deeper our plunge [into a character’s mind] the more unreliability we will accept without loss of sympathy” (164). Based on all of these factors, we can safely accept the narrator’s commentary as reliable. This of course does not mean that we must accept it as reliable—it is merely a guide.

It is this notion of guide on which I base my assertion that Middlemarch can be read as a meta-narrative. The best example to illustrate the characteristics and purposes of meta-narrative is perhaps the Bible. This text attempts to establish an authoritative foundation on which to base one’s life. The parables, allegories, and historical accounts endeavor to institute a universal, totalizing order which explains all knowledge and experience. Middlemarch, essentially, attempts the same self-legitimization. Booth even compares Middlemarch’s narrator type, as we’ve defined it, to God in the book of Job. There are some distinct differences—the Bible is considered the Word of God; therefore, God is the narrator, but He is also a character, referred to in the third person. However, the narrator’s psychological commentary matches that of the Voice of the Wise Woman. The narrator of Job tells the reader that Job “was blameless, upright, fearing God, and turning away from evil” (NASB Job 1:1). There are countless examples of this type of commentary in Middlemarch, but I only need provide one to demonstrate the correlation. The following commentary refers to Casaubon: “[H]e was as genuine a character as any ruminant animal, and he had not actively assisted in creating any illusions about himself” (Eliot 186). There are also moments of commentary where The Wise Woman confronts the reader directly, asking him to examine his own experience and thus come to the same conclusion that she has regarding a universal truth. The Wise Woman’s purpose in presenting these types of commentary could be read as an attempt to establish a meta-narrative for Victorian society. The question of reliability only becomes relevant if the reader chooses to believe in the meta-narrative or not—just as members of Christianity believe the narration in the Bible is reliable while atheists do not.

Finally, I will address Virginia Wolff’s statement regarding the status of Middlemarch as the first novel for grown-ups. First, if we view Middlemarch as a meta-narrative, then we certainly must decide that it is a novel for grown-ups. Yes, the Bible has many stories that are taught to children, but they are certainly not written for children. Children may be able to grasp the concept of meta-narrative on the level of allegory or morality tale. However, the complexity of the commentary and its implications put both of these meta-narratives out of reach. These are not the only examples. Marxism, Enlightenment science, and Freudian theory all seek to construct a meta-narrative to systematically provide a totalizing explanation for all knowledge and experience. Children certainly would not be able to grasp any of these. Whether or not this is the first novel for grown-ups would be difficult to say. However, it is the first that I can think of that can be defined as a meta-narrative and that treats its subjects in a completely adult manner.

Works Cited

Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1961.

Eliot, George. Middlemarch. 1871. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003.

New American Standard Bible. Ed. The Lockman Foundation. Grand Rapids: The Zondervan Corporation, 2002.