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Six Variations on a Theme by Kilgour
Sep. 5th, 2020 09:48 pmAhhhh y'all I have a short paper! :D :D :D
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Six Variations on a Theme by Kilgour
I would like to examine the relation that I believe plays an important role in the conceptualization of all antitheses, that of inside and outside, which Derrida also sees as the foundation of all binary oppositions.
—Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism (4)
Kilgour’s claim fascinates me. For all the diffuseness of its expression here, the claim itself is very bold; yet for all its totalizing quality, it creates a space for endless discussion. Endless, that is, if antitheses are countless—on the other hand, one counterexample would do. As it happens, I’m no more interested in hunting one down than Kilgour is in proving there are none. I too, however, would like to examine the inside/outside antithesis—not in relation to other binary oppositions but in the context of six literary texts. The assignment that inspired this project was open-ended: to provide a synthesis of any six works on my reading list in nineteenth-century British literature. “Synthesis” is a mighty word. I might rather think of my project as an arrangement: Kilgour’s theme for six voices, if you will. Or, perhaps, six variations on a theme by Kilgour. The idea is to find the inside/outside antithesis at work in my six texts, and the gimmick is that I’ve chosen them for their titles rather than any internal affinities. The end composition, then, will indeed be an arrangement—a linear presentation of my separate discussions.
First on my list is Songs of Innocence and of Experience, which presents an antithesis in its title and structure. How might Blake’s “innocence” and “experience” relate to the inside/outside opposition I’m examining? A ready observation is that “experience” and “outside” seem aligned: what is experience if not experience of the outside world? This remark reifies by contrast the idea of the “inside” self, which is then, in the presence of the term “experience,” easily envisioned as a blank slate onto which “experience” is inscribed. At this point, the blankness of the slate is associated with the “innocence” of the baby, and the circle is complete.
We might forestall this rapid chain of associations if we ground ourselves on the page. Speaking of babies, let’s look at “Infant Joy” (plate 25) from Songs of Innocence and “Infant Sorrow” (plate 48) from Songs of Experience. The poems clearly differ across the innocence/experience divide. “Infant Joy” portrays the baby in a state of pure joy, living in the moment, expressing itself simply and directly: “I happy am.” In “Infant Sorrow,” on the other hand, the baby perceives time and space, and makes choices and comparisons. It also knows mother from father, groaning from weeping—and inside from outside: “Into the dangerous world I leapt.” This formulation—Into the dangerous world I leapt—turns the womb inside out: the baby is not expelled out of its mother’s body but rather leaps into the world. This baby is not a blank slate but a tabula rasa; it has erased the trauma of birth and rewritten the experience as a leap into adventure. And, having done so, it can repose in innocence, and name itself Joy: “I happy am.”
“Inside” and “outside,” then, are reversible in Blake’s poetic universe, and the infant writes its own story. The characters in Jane Austen’s novelistic worlds, on the other hand, are quite at the mercy of their author. Fortunately for them, Austen seems a beneficent despot whose main concern is to get them all happily married. And in the story of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, it turns out that much of the course of true love runs along the boundary between “inside” and “outside.”
Austen as much as traces this line in ink when she names the novel Pride and Prejudice. To prejudge something means to make a judgment about it before having all the facts, and in practice this usually shows up as judging people based on their appearance. Darcy, drawing the least generous conclusion possible from the fact that Elizabeth is sitting rather than dancing, dismisses her at a glance: “She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me; I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men” (chapter 3). To be sure, it is more properly pride than prejudice which is at work here; and indeed a simple reading of the novel’s title would assign pride to Darcy and prejudice to Elizabeth, who has every reason, after overhearing that comment, to have quite made up her mind against him. Yet it is more to the point that pride and prejudice form something of a vicious cycle, one it is Austen’s business to arrest and transform into the most virtuous of virtuous cycles—true love!
I hope that exclamation mark did its job, which was to mark a spot of irony—not mine but rather Austen’s, or so I imagine. “True love” belongs to the tradition she satirizes in Northanger Abbey. This isn’t to say that Mr. Darcy isn’t “a man violently in love,” but it is to point out that Austen never actually says he is: “he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do” (chapter 58), she writes. That is, having just swept away every vestige of misunderstanding between Darcy and Elizabeth, in the midst of the very first scene in which they speak with complete openness, Austen draws attention to the space between seeming and being. This space—or, to call it by another name, this boundary between outside and inside—is exactly what gave rise in the first place to the misunderstandings which kept the lovers apart for the bulk of the novel, and the unraveling of which is exactly the mechanism by which the plot moves from pride and prejudice to marriage.
The love story in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South follows the same arc; writing about the novel, Rosemarie Bodenheimer refers to “its Pride and Prejudice plot structure” (53). Within this structure, however, Gaskell is also telling an industrial story, so to speak. When Marjorie Garson calls North and South “a notoriously problematic text,” the problematic she has in mind is Gaskell’s linking of the two stories—of “the private love story with the public issue of industrialization” (37). Such a distinction between “private” and “public” depends on the opposition between “inside” and “outside”; in this case the boundary separating the two is the boundary of the home. Yet it is possible, in thinking about North and South vis-à-vis the inside/outside antithesis, to draw the boundary along another line. J. A. V. Chapple draws it along the edges of Margaret Hale’s subjectivity, arguing that it is her “process of enlightenment” and “inner progress” that constitute the novel’s “subject” and “main movement” (464, 472). As it happens, Gaskell might well have agreed: her original title for this love-story-cum-industrial-story was Margaret Hale.
If we feel, however, that Charles Dickens was definitely onto something when he renamed Gaskell’s work North and South, and if we feel too that Chapple misses half the point of the novel when he relegates Gaskell’s industrial story to its sidelines—then we may also feel, turning to Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, that Arnold is missing more than half an argument. Underlying these sentiments would be a sense of practical fact. Arnold is voluble, and I think quite wonderful, on the values he extols: “culture,” “perfection,” “sweetness and light.” He is equally voluble on the subject of England’s ills, to which “culture” is prescribed as the panacea. But he is silent on the specifics of how this panacea is to be administered. Catherine Gallagher interprets this silence as deliberate refusal: “In the name of culture, Arnold refuses to identify specific remedies for the spiritual and social ills he describes. The exclusive concentration on ‘machinery,’ he claims, is England’s problem and thus cannot be its cure” (228). I wonder if Arnold’s silence is not rather due to an inability to express specifics. His values are so lofty, his terms so exalted, his rhetoric so high-flown (well, except when he is throwing darts at his critics), that I am not sure they accommodate the expression of practical thinking. The difference between Gallagher’s and my interpretations of Arnold’s silence on practical, specific solutions comes down, I think, to a matter of inside and outside. Where I see Arnold operating within the limits of his rhetoric, Gallagher sees him employing his terms on a meta level. His refusal to be specific, she writes, is enacted “in the name of culture.” In this formulation, Arnold has an outside perspective on his argument, extracts from it the terms “culture” and “machinery,” and then invokes these terms to defend a major omission from that argument. To my mind, on the other hand, Arnold is feeling and feeding his rapturous rhetoric from the inside; and rapture has no head for specifics or vocabulary for practicalities.
Rapture is a mood that pervades much of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry, though it’s not quite traceable in “Spring and Fall,” a short lyric which strikes the notes rather of melancholy and worldly wisdom. I find the poem both gorgeous and frustrating. The beauty of the phrases describing woods and foliage—“Goldengrove unleaving,” “worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie”—elevate both Margaret and her grief. That is, the child is the more exquisite for grieving—and the grief itself is the more piercing and fine—the more beautiful are the woods now shedding their leaves for winter; and woods evoked in words so beautiful are beautiful indeed. But the poem’s ending robs the child of the exquisiteness bestowed on her at the poem’s start: her glorious sensitivity to beauty shrinks to an ignoble fear of mortality. At the beginning of the poem, she thrilled to the world, however painful was the thrill; at the poem’s end, she is attuned only to herself. Her tears are not a response to so much beauty outside but an expression of the great sadness inside. In general, “man,” “born for” the “blight” of death, sees its face and his fate everywhere he looks: inner fear has swallowed the outer world.
I find the egotism of all this repellently small-minded, but my reading, perhaps, is just as petty for being so ungenerous. Let me put the case another way: the poet is not illustrating the ego’s centripetal pull but rather illuminating the oneness of creation, the continuity between the human condition on the one hand and nature on the other; to grieve for the one is to mourn for the other. Better, isn’t it? As it happens, Robert Louis Stevenson assumes a version of this continuity in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A gothic tale, this long story employs a staple of the genre: events in the human sphere are mirrored in the skies, which turn lowering as needed to signal horrors encroaching or to register horrors discovered. Fog, in particular, does some work in Stevenson’s story, descending and dispersing in turn to complement the mood of the moment. Just as weather reflects mood in this story, so too does a man’s outer appearance reflect his inner character. Dr. Jekyll is handsome, and good, while Mr. Hyde, the embodiment of evil, is ugly as sin. This epithet—“the embodiment of evil”—captures yet another, and quite extraordinary, way in which Stevenson’s story marries “inside” and “outside.” The marriage hinges on the double valence of the word “embodiment.” If Hyde is the embodiment of evil in Stevenson’s moral fable, he is also the embodiment of evil in Jekyll’s scientific experiment. That is, Stevenson’s metaphorical vehicle and Jekyll’s literal creation are one and the same—the body of Mr. Hyde—and extradiegetic author and intradiegetic protagonist coincide at the point of their mutual creation.
If this meeting isn’t quite the marriage I promised, I hope I may be forgiven for the bait-and-switch. I might try to make amends by overdelivering on an earlier promise—whose toothless phrasing, I can now admit, was adopted with this moment in mind. I committed only to a linear presentation of my separate discussions, but I think they do form variations on a theme: the self is not free. Whether blank slate or tabula rasa, Blake’s infant must lug the thing around; it’s trapped in its helpless body. Elizabeth Bennet remains at two removes from the man she loves, separated not only by “supposed,” in the fragment I quoted, but also by “expressed.” When Chapple encloses Gaskell’s Margaret within her subjectivity, he’s just doing what all of our skulls do to all of us. Our writing may persist when our bodies are dust, but Arnold can’t throw darts at his critics today; and Hopkins reminds us that we’re all going to die. In the meantime, as Stevenson points out, we’re all stuck with ourselves, including the parts of ourselves we don’t like. In these six instances, the self inside is pictured vis-à-vis an antithetical term outside, be that the body, the world, or the other. My theme, then, turns out itself to be a variation on Kilgour’s: though I’m not speaking to all binary oppositions, it’s clear to me that those of mind/body, self/world, and self/other are founded on the inside/outside antithesis. To say that the self isn’t free is to say that it’s trapped inside—yet my authors collectively point a way out. Kilgour lists voice/writing as one binary pair that has been critically studied (3), and indeed, language is the medium in which we reach beyond the body, communicate with others, and become a presence in the world. Let me reverse two clauses above, then, and place the emphasis where it belongs: Arnold can’t throw darts at his critics today—but our writing persists when our bodies are dust.
( Works Cited )
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Six Variations on a Theme by Kilgour
I would like to examine the relation that I believe plays an important role in the conceptualization of all antitheses, that of inside and outside, which Derrida also sees as the foundation of all binary oppositions.
—Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism (4)
Kilgour’s claim fascinates me. For all the diffuseness of its expression here, the claim itself is very bold; yet for all its totalizing quality, it creates a space for endless discussion. Endless, that is, if antitheses are countless—on the other hand, one counterexample would do. As it happens, I’m no more interested in hunting one down than Kilgour is in proving there are none. I too, however, would like to examine the inside/outside antithesis—not in relation to other binary oppositions but in the context of six literary texts. The assignment that inspired this project was open-ended: to provide a synthesis of any six works on my reading list in nineteenth-century British literature. “Synthesis” is a mighty word. I might rather think of my project as an arrangement: Kilgour’s theme for six voices, if you will. Or, perhaps, six variations on a theme by Kilgour. The idea is to find the inside/outside antithesis at work in my six texts, and the gimmick is that I’ve chosen them for their titles rather than any internal affinities. The end composition, then, will indeed be an arrangement—a linear presentation of my separate discussions.
First on my list is Songs of Innocence and of Experience, which presents an antithesis in its title and structure. How might Blake’s “innocence” and “experience” relate to the inside/outside opposition I’m examining? A ready observation is that “experience” and “outside” seem aligned: what is experience if not experience of the outside world? This remark reifies by contrast the idea of the “inside” self, which is then, in the presence of the term “experience,” easily envisioned as a blank slate onto which “experience” is inscribed. At this point, the blankness of the slate is associated with the “innocence” of the baby, and the circle is complete.
We might forestall this rapid chain of associations if we ground ourselves on the page. Speaking of babies, let’s look at “Infant Joy” (plate 25) from Songs of Innocence and “Infant Sorrow” (plate 48) from Songs of Experience. The poems clearly differ across the innocence/experience divide. “Infant Joy” portrays the baby in a state of pure joy, living in the moment, expressing itself simply and directly: “I happy am.” In “Infant Sorrow,” on the other hand, the baby perceives time and space, and makes choices and comparisons. It also knows mother from father, groaning from weeping—and inside from outside: “Into the dangerous world I leapt.” This formulation—Into the dangerous world I leapt—turns the womb inside out: the baby is not expelled out of its mother’s body but rather leaps into the world. This baby is not a blank slate but a tabula rasa; it has erased the trauma of birth and rewritten the experience as a leap into adventure. And, having done so, it can repose in innocence, and name itself Joy: “I happy am.”
“Inside” and “outside,” then, are reversible in Blake’s poetic universe, and the infant writes its own story. The characters in Jane Austen’s novelistic worlds, on the other hand, are quite at the mercy of their author. Fortunately for them, Austen seems a beneficent despot whose main concern is to get them all happily married. And in the story of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, it turns out that much of the course of true love runs along the boundary between “inside” and “outside.”
Austen as much as traces this line in ink when she names the novel Pride and Prejudice. To prejudge something means to make a judgment about it before having all the facts, and in practice this usually shows up as judging people based on their appearance. Darcy, drawing the least generous conclusion possible from the fact that Elizabeth is sitting rather than dancing, dismisses her at a glance: “She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me; I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men” (chapter 3). To be sure, it is more properly pride than prejudice which is at work here; and indeed a simple reading of the novel’s title would assign pride to Darcy and prejudice to Elizabeth, who has every reason, after overhearing that comment, to have quite made up her mind against him. Yet it is more to the point that pride and prejudice form something of a vicious cycle, one it is Austen’s business to arrest and transform into the most virtuous of virtuous cycles—true love!
I hope that exclamation mark did its job, which was to mark a spot of irony—not mine but rather Austen’s, or so I imagine. “True love” belongs to the tradition she satirizes in Northanger Abbey. This isn’t to say that Mr. Darcy isn’t “a man violently in love,” but it is to point out that Austen never actually says he is: “he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do” (chapter 58), she writes. That is, having just swept away every vestige of misunderstanding between Darcy and Elizabeth, in the midst of the very first scene in which they speak with complete openness, Austen draws attention to the space between seeming and being. This space—or, to call it by another name, this boundary between outside and inside—is exactly what gave rise in the first place to the misunderstandings which kept the lovers apart for the bulk of the novel, and the unraveling of which is exactly the mechanism by which the plot moves from pride and prejudice to marriage.
The love story in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South follows the same arc; writing about the novel, Rosemarie Bodenheimer refers to “its Pride and Prejudice plot structure” (53). Within this structure, however, Gaskell is also telling an industrial story, so to speak. When Marjorie Garson calls North and South “a notoriously problematic text,” the problematic she has in mind is Gaskell’s linking of the two stories—of “the private love story with the public issue of industrialization” (37). Such a distinction between “private” and “public” depends on the opposition between “inside” and “outside”; in this case the boundary separating the two is the boundary of the home. Yet it is possible, in thinking about North and South vis-à-vis the inside/outside antithesis, to draw the boundary along another line. J. A. V. Chapple draws it along the edges of Margaret Hale’s subjectivity, arguing that it is her “process of enlightenment” and “inner progress” that constitute the novel’s “subject” and “main movement” (464, 472). As it happens, Gaskell might well have agreed: her original title for this love-story-cum-industrial-story was Margaret Hale.
If we feel, however, that Charles Dickens was definitely onto something when he renamed Gaskell’s work North and South, and if we feel too that Chapple misses half the point of the novel when he relegates Gaskell’s industrial story to its sidelines—then we may also feel, turning to Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, that Arnold is missing more than half an argument. Underlying these sentiments would be a sense of practical fact. Arnold is voluble, and I think quite wonderful, on the values he extols: “culture,” “perfection,” “sweetness and light.” He is equally voluble on the subject of England’s ills, to which “culture” is prescribed as the panacea. But he is silent on the specifics of how this panacea is to be administered. Catherine Gallagher interprets this silence as deliberate refusal: “In the name of culture, Arnold refuses to identify specific remedies for the spiritual and social ills he describes. The exclusive concentration on ‘machinery,’ he claims, is England’s problem and thus cannot be its cure” (228). I wonder if Arnold’s silence is not rather due to an inability to express specifics. His values are so lofty, his terms so exalted, his rhetoric so high-flown (well, except when he is throwing darts at his critics), that I am not sure they accommodate the expression of practical thinking. The difference between Gallagher’s and my interpretations of Arnold’s silence on practical, specific solutions comes down, I think, to a matter of inside and outside. Where I see Arnold operating within the limits of his rhetoric, Gallagher sees him employing his terms on a meta level. His refusal to be specific, she writes, is enacted “in the name of culture.” In this formulation, Arnold has an outside perspective on his argument, extracts from it the terms “culture” and “machinery,” and then invokes these terms to defend a major omission from that argument. To my mind, on the other hand, Arnold is feeling and feeding his rapturous rhetoric from the inside; and rapture has no head for specifics or vocabulary for practicalities.
Rapture is a mood that pervades much of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry, though it’s not quite traceable in “Spring and Fall,” a short lyric which strikes the notes rather of melancholy and worldly wisdom. I find the poem both gorgeous and frustrating. The beauty of the phrases describing woods and foliage—“Goldengrove unleaving,” “worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie”—elevate both Margaret and her grief. That is, the child is the more exquisite for grieving—and the grief itself is the more piercing and fine—the more beautiful are the woods now shedding their leaves for winter; and woods evoked in words so beautiful are beautiful indeed. But the poem’s ending robs the child of the exquisiteness bestowed on her at the poem’s start: her glorious sensitivity to beauty shrinks to an ignoble fear of mortality. At the beginning of the poem, she thrilled to the world, however painful was the thrill; at the poem’s end, she is attuned only to herself. Her tears are not a response to so much beauty outside but an expression of the great sadness inside. In general, “man,” “born for” the “blight” of death, sees its face and his fate everywhere he looks: inner fear has swallowed the outer world.
I find the egotism of all this repellently small-minded, but my reading, perhaps, is just as petty for being so ungenerous. Let me put the case another way: the poet is not illustrating the ego’s centripetal pull but rather illuminating the oneness of creation, the continuity between the human condition on the one hand and nature on the other; to grieve for the one is to mourn for the other. Better, isn’t it? As it happens, Robert Louis Stevenson assumes a version of this continuity in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A gothic tale, this long story employs a staple of the genre: events in the human sphere are mirrored in the skies, which turn lowering as needed to signal horrors encroaching or to register horrors discovered. Fog, in particular, does some work in Stevenson’s story, descending and dispersing in turn to complement the mood of the moment. Just as weather reflects mood in this story, so too does a man’s outer appearance reflect his inner character. Dr. Jekyll is handsome, and good, while Mr. Hyde, the embodiment of evil, is ugly as sin. This epithet—“the embodiment of evil”—captures yet another, and quite extraordinary, way in which Stevenson’s story marries “inside” and “outside.” The marriage hinges on the double valence of the word “embodiment.” If Hyde is the embodiment of evil in Stevenson’s moral fable, he is also the embodiment of evil in Jekyll’s scientific experiment. That is, Stevenson’s metaphorical vehicle and Jekyll’s literal creation are one and the same—the body of Mr. Hyde—and extradiegetic author and intradiegetic protagonist coincide at the point of their mutual creation.
If this meeting isn’t quite the marriage I promised, I hope I may be forgiven for the bait-and-switch. I might try to make amends by overdelivering on an earlier promise—whose toothless phrasing, I can now admit, was adopted with this moment in mind. I committed only to a linear presentation of my separate discussions, but I think they do form variations on a theme: the self is not free. Whether blank slate or tabula rasa, Blake’s infant must lug the thing around; it’s trapped in its helpless body. Elizabeth Bennet remains at two removes from the man she loves, separated not only by “supposed,” in the fragment I quoted, but also by “expressed.” When Chapple encloses Gaskell’s Margaret within her subjectivity, he’s just doing what all of our skulls do to all of us. Our writing may persist when our bodies are dust, but Arnold can’t throw darts at his critics today; and Hopkins reminds us that we’re all going to die. In the meantime, as Stevenson points out, we’re all stuck with ourselves, including the parts of ourselves we don’t like. In these six instances, the self inside is pictured vis-à-vis an antithetical term outside, be that the body, the world, or the other. My theme, then, turns out itself to be a variation on Kilgour’s: though I’m not speaking to all binary oppositions, it’s clear to me that those of mind/body, self/world, and self/other are founded on the inside/outside antithesis. To say that the self isn’t free is to say that it’s trapped inside—yet my authors collectively point a way out. Kilgour lists voice/writing as one binary pair that has been critically studied (3), and indeed, language is the medium in which we reach beyond the body, communicate with others, and become a presence in the world. Let me reverse two clauses above, then, and place the emphasis where it belongs: Arnold can’t throw darts at his critics today—but our writing persists when our bodies are dust.
( Works Cited )