about why Eliot should have adopted the first person stance in this novella. It isn't obviously demanded by the fiction. There is a conventional fictional pretext for Latimer's giving us the account of his life
"It is only that the story of my life will perhaps win a little more sympathy from strangers when I am dead, than I ever believed it would obtain firom friends while I was living" (P. 4)
but that is hardly compelling. But it is not a satisfactory solution to the puzzle to think of The Lifted Veil as a 'critique' of 'male convention'. One would expect a critique of a literary convention to display more interest in first person narration as a literary device than Eliot does here. She is not, in fact, greatly concerned even to keep the narrative voice constant throughout. Often, for example, her control simply falters. When there are abstract points to be made, Latimer's narration slips out of focus. A couple of examples will
suffice. Latimer is not himself either perceptive or morally profound. However grisly his experience, he has not learned enough from it to have become wise. It is not easy to think of Latimer expressing this thought,
"It is an old story, that men sell themselves to the tempter, and sign a bond with their blood, because it is only to take effect at a distant day; then rush on to snatch the cup their souls thirst after with an impulse not the less savage because there is a dark shadow beside them for ever more. There is no short cut, no patent tram-road, to wisdom: after all the centuries of invention, the soul's path lies through the thorny wilderness which must be still be trodden in solitude, with bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old time." (P. 31)
That is George Eliot, not Latimer. Still less is it possible to imagine Latimer saying this "We try to believe that the egoism within us would have easily been melted, and that it was only the narrowness of our knowledge which hemmed in our generosity, our awe, our human piety, and hindered them from submerging our hard indifference to the sensations and emotions of our fellows. Our tenderness and self-renunciation seem strong when our egoism has had its day-when, after our mean striving for a triumph that is to be another's loss, the triumph comes suddenly, and we shudder at it, because it is held out by the chill hand of death." (P. 32)
Latimer's gifts of fey sensitivity are only such as are consistent with a character who is ill- educated, egotistical, and less than ordinarily perceptive in natural ways. Even to the end, during his last month of bitter regret, we cannot think of him as a man given to abstract reflection. Eliot’s abstract thoughts are perforce expressed in Latimer's voice, as his is the
only one admitted by this restrictive device, but they are not Latimer's own thoughts, and consequently they leadenly punctuate, rather than naturally flow from, his account of his life.
There is an unaccustomed lack of narrative sureness, out of which Gilbert and Gubar, and indeed Uglow and Gillian Beer are eager to make psychological capital, but I am persuaded that there is a less engaging but simpler explanation. Eliot was tempted by first person narration on this occasion in order to solve a problem posed by the nature of the ideas explored in The Lifted Veil. In 1852 she wrote to the phrenologist George Coombe, in reply to a letter of Coombe’s which deplored what he understood to be the Westminster Review's uncompromisingly aggressive policy with regard to articles which made respectful reference to mesmerism or phrenology. Eliot defended the periodical, not on the grounds that mesmerism and phrenology deserved disparagement, but on the grounds that
"the great majority of 'investigators' of mesmerism are anything but 'scientific'. The reason for excluding that or any other subject of moment from the Review, would be the difficulty of getting it adequately treated. An ordinary pilot will do for plain sailing, but we want clear vision and long experience when we set out on voyages of discovery"23
Seven years later, in writing The Lifted Veil, she herself was sailing well into discovery territory, but clearly did not want to be constrained by the lack of scientific proof that the supernatural elements she was playing with have some basis in fact. There is no reason, of course, why a fiction writer should feel so constrained, but The Lifted Veil marks a
departure from the stringent research whose stamp Eliot's writing customarily bears.24
Without scientific proof, there might have been some rigorous reluctance on her part to put the account of Latimer's clairvoyance in the omniscient mouth of her customary narrator, and so seem to make claims for its veridicality.
23 Gordon Haight (ed) Collected Letters, Vol VIII (Quoted in the Afterword to the Virago edition) 24por example, The Middlemarch Quarry is a collection of detailed research notes Eliot made about medical and scientific history of the period.
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One attractive way out of this dilemma was to put the account of the story into the mouth of a narrator whose veracity is not beyond question. In restricting us to the
claustrophobic narrowness of Latimer's uneasy, almost diseased, preternatural vision, Eliot denies us a stable island in the shifting sands of Latimer's perceptions, which an
omniscient authorial voice would have provided. In most of Eliot's fiction, a single narrative voice presents the fiction, unobtrusively arbitrating between the many different visions and perceptions which, circling round it, seem to triangulate upon the tmth.
The assertion that Eliot's customary narrator provides a stable objective standpoint needs some justification. It is somewhat at odds with the position adopted by David Lodge. In an excellent article, mistakenly in my view, he 'defends' Eliot as a producer of an open- ended text.^ The position he is attacking is expressed in a quotation,
"The text outside the area of inverted commas claims to be the product of no articulation, it claims to be unwritten. This unwritten text can then attempt to staunch the haemorrhage of interpretations threatened by the material of language. Whereas other discourses within the text are considered as materials which are open to reinterpretation, the narrative discourse functions simply as a window on reality.
Give or take a rhetorical flourish, and leaving aside the puzzling references to 'unwritten' texts, McCabe's thought is similar to mine. He is claiming that the veracity of the
omniscient narrator is given a special status in the novel. Lodge disagrees. Lodge's detailed analysis of passages in the novel certainly demonstrates, as it was intended to, that it is inappropriate to claim that Eliot's language ever tries to appear 'unwritten', or indeed functions 'simply' as anything. Her writing, as he shows, is often complex and is clearly meant to be.
His conclusion, however, is unjustified. He says.
Lodge, D., Middlemarch and the Idea of the Classic Realist Text'. Presented at the George Eliot Centenary Conference Leicester 1980 published in Arnold Kettle (ed) The Nineteenth Century Novel
^^Colin McCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (1979) quoted in Middlemarch and the Idea of the Classic Realist Text.
"To sum up, the authorial commentary, so far from telling the reader what to think, or putting him in a position of dominance in relation to the discourse of the characters, constantly forces him to think for himself, and constantly implicates him in the morsi judgements being formulated.
There is a conflation here of the idea that the authorial commentary constantly forces the reader to think for himself, and constantly implicates him in the moral judgements being formulated (which Eliot's commentary undoubtedly does), with the idea that Eliot's
authorial commentary does not hold an epistemicaUy privileged position in the novel (which is false).
I would want to argue that Eliot's customary narrator does occupy an epistemicaUy privileged position; and that her narrative does indeed put the attentive reader in a 'position of dominance' in relation to the discourse of the characters. One example among many of the tightness and subtlety of her narrative control is Chapter 45 of Middlemarch, where the right conclusion on Lydgate is to be reached. It opens,
"That opposition to the New Fever Hospital which Lydgate had sketched to Dorothea was, Hke other oppositions, to be viewed in many different lights. He regarded it as a mixture of jealousy and dunder-headed prejudice" ^
And indeed it is, and so too is the growing opposition to Lydgate himself. Like the opinion of the hospital, it is subject to the jealousy of Gambits and Wrenches, and the dunder- headed prejudices of Mawmseys and Dollops. But in not recognising the strength of this growing opposition, Lydgate's opinion of himself is also at fault. His medical opinion is solid enough, but he too is prejudiced and dunder-headed. The way in which the narrator brings us to see this is characteristic. Late in the chapter, the narrator's voice seems completely commendatory.
"Many thoughts cheered him at this time-and justly. A man conscious of enthusiasm for worthy aims is sustained under petty hostilities by the memory of great workers who had to fight their way not without wounds, and who hover in his mind as patron saints, invisibly helping...
Lodge, D., Middlemarch and the Idea of the Classic Realist Text' (P 232)
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There was something very fine in Lydgate's look just then, and any one might have been encouraged to bet on his achievement."^^
But the commendation is subtly shot through with doubts raised earlier in the chapter about whether Lydgate really did have to 'fight his way not without wounds'.
The last sentence quoted is the voice of that uninformed 'one' whose opinion Eliot often invokes. This confident opinion supposedly might have been formed by 'any one' who did not know (as we do: it has been telegraphed often enough in the fiction that Lydgate's is a story of tragic failure) that to bet on Lydgate would be ill-advised. But that uninformed 'one' is not one of the Middlemarchers: they would not bet on Lydgate, and even Farebrother has his doubts. It means presumably not that this is what was thought by most, but rather that one would be forgiven for betting on his achievement. So whom are we to forgive for this other than Lydgate himself? His is the self-indulgent romanticising which makes the comparison with Vesalius, and refuses to be other than complacent about his reputation. This is Lydgate's self-image. Even the mild criticism, that he is an
'emotional elephant', recalls his flirtatious claim, in Chapter 16, to be a 'bear' apt to be taught by Rosamund's 'exquisite bird'. And the sting of the criticism is mainly directed against the tinkling Rosamund whose tunes he doesn't distinguish.
But earlier in the chapter, when the emotional elephant tramps on all his colleagues' toes, the epithet could have been applied without indulgence. For example,
"Lydgate did not dispense drugs. This was offensive both to the physicians whose exclusive distinction seemed infringed upon, and to the surgeon apothecaries with whom he ranged himself; and only a little while before they might have counted on having the law on their side against a man who without calling himself a London-made M.D. dared to ask for pay except as a charge on drugs.
29 ibid (P. 496) 30 ibid (P. 483)
Eliot's narrator does not of course endorse this opinion. The last charge is the expostulation of an outraged colleague, but it is one which Lydgate having foreseen as dunderheadedness ought to have tried to forestall. And worse follows.
"But Lydgate had not been experienced enough to foresee that his new course would be even more offensive to the laity; and...he was injudicious enough to give a hasty popular explanation of his reasons..."31
Because his patients are ignorant, he treats them as if they were also idiots. When
Mawmsey says that some people pretend to tell him things, when they might as well say, "Mawmsey, you're a fool", one feels the justice of the remark. Lydgate chooses to see all opposition as martyrdom at the hands of the jealous. When that model of sagacity
Rosamund warns him that he has enemies enough, he cheerily tells her
"So had Vesalius, Rosy. No wonder the medical fogies of Middlemarch are jealous, when some of the ^eatest doctors living were fierce upon Vesalius
because they had believed in Galen, and he showed that Galen was wrong. They called him a liar and a poisonous monster. But the facts of the human frame were on his side; and so he got the better of them. "32
But it is not heroic, rather it is impolitic in Lydgate to gratuitously offend if he wishes his solid medical opinion to become influential. So although we are to take the commendation at the end seriously (Lydgate is admirable) it is indulgent, not disinterested, and needs to be tempered by the grains of truth expressed by jealous, prejudiced dunderheads.
To understand how to regard Lydgate we have to listen carefully to the Rosamunds, the Mawmseys and the Dollops. But the narrator's discourse is in 'total interpretive control of them'. There is certainly subtlety in the judgement we are to reach. But subtlety and openendedness are not the same thing. Lodge's conclusion seems to tacitly accept that novels which are 'open-ended' in the sense that the authorial commentary holds no claim to objective truth, are superior to those which are, in this sense 'closed'. In his conclusion he says.
31 ibid (P. 483) 32 ibid (P. 497)
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