Bartlett Meredith Start

MEREDITH & ENDS BY JAMI BARTLETT

A description is composed of sentences whose order one can generally reverse: I can describe this room by a series of clauses whose order is not important. A gaze roams as it wishes. Nothing more natural, nothing more true, than this vagrancy; for . . . truth is chance. But, if this latitude, and the habit of facility which goes with it, become the dominating factor, it gradually dissuades writers from employing their ability for abstraction, just as it reduces to nothing the slightest necessity for concentration on the reader’s part, in order to win him over with immediate effects, rhetorical shock tactics. . . . This mode of creating, legitimate in principle, and to which we owe so many beautiful things, leads, like the abuse of landscape, to the diminution of the intellectual part of art. —Paul Valéry, “Degas, Danse, Dessin”1

I. BITTERNESS AND EXAGGERATION

George Meredith is a canonical writer generally agreed to be bad at writing, and this article is less about why this is the case, or how one could go about recovering him, than it is about what we find in Meredith when we are no longer looking. I will complicate the assumption, adapted from Paul Valéry above, that novelists share a fraught relationship to the work that description does, that the task of the novelist is to motivate character, plot, and “the intellectual part of art” in spite of it, and that the result separates good novels from bad. There is a grandeur in the simplicity of my approach that smacks of Meredith—he opens his 1879 novel The Egoist by pitting The Comic Spirit against The Book of Earth—but I intend to make use of a kind of modest close reading that is in many ways counterintuitive to the way we read novels in general and Meredith in particular. Rather than seizing on his attempts at motivated description in order to accumulate multiple conflicting or corroborating interpretations of why he’s sayELH 76 (2009) 547–576 © 2009 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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ing what he says the way he says it, I want to isolate and reduce the semantic content of those descriptions to the point where they mean very little. This will allow me to resituate the trade-off that Valéry describes between the detail and the abstraction, so that rather than engage arguments about the reflexive complexity of the novel genre and its contemporary social or intellectual commitments, I can create resonance between Meredith’s granular descriptions and the philosophy of language. This discourse, concerned with how words mean but not what or why, will offer us a different approach to the mechanics of description, and a new vocabulary for its role in novel theory. ******

The first page of the Critical Heritage anthology devoted to Meredith’s reception levels its attack at his “difficult” style, “liable to charges of affectation, obscurity, structural weakness, and a lack of proportion.” Even worse, his bad descriptions are contagious: it is, it seems, impossible for critics to distinguish between, for they often use the same examples to evidence, “his successful experiments and his lapses from good taste.” There has never been agreement “about his permanent place in letters,” and arguments to this effect abound in “bitterness and exaggeration.” Even in his own lifetime, Meredith “failed to make an impact on the public at large or to obtain from the critical Press the degree of respect and understanding to which he was entitled.”2 This is grim stuff, but it is charged with the inducement of a dare; Meredith’s awfulness is just an obstacle to be overcome, and our resistance to his intricacy is born of both an unimaginative relationship to the pleasures of description, and an unrigorous examination of the reasons why we read what we do. Meredith’s “lapses in good taste,” figured as “affectation” and “obscurity” in the Critical Heritage, galvanize the distinction Valéry makes between the chanciness of particularity and the stability of abstraction, and recasts his separation of description from the “intellectual part of art” as a process, a syllogism that folds Meredith’s abstractions into his accretion of details.3 Critics have tried to account for this rhetorical process by turning to the compression of his aphorisms. In “The Decay of Lying” Oscar Wilde writes that Meredith “is always breaking his shins over his own wit,” and that “[b]y its means he has planted round his garden a hedge full of thorns, and red with wonderful roses.”4 Something in those roses stands in for both Meredith’s aestheticism and its origins; his martyrdom makes itself reiteratively available as an 548

Meredith & Ends