George Eliot and Schiller

Intertextuality and Cross-Cultural Discourse

Deborah Guth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351755481
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria para la literatura comparada

This title was first published in 2003. Though Friedrich Schiller enjoyed prominent literary standing and great popularity in nineteenth century literary England, his influence has been largely neglected in recent scholarship on the period. With George Eliot and Schiller: Intertextuality and Cross-Cultural Discourse, Deborah Guth explores the substantial evidence of the importance of the playwright and philosopher's thought to Eliot's novelistic art. Guth demonstrates the relationship of Schiller's work to Eliot's plotting of moral vision, the tensions in her work between realism and idealism (which an understanding of Schiller redefines substantially), and her aesthetics. The specific focus of the study is the Schillerian subtext of George Eliot's work and a resultant reassessment of her realism. However, the intertextual methodology, applications of Iser's thinking on the translatability of cultures, and a placement of Eliot in a German context serve as a gateway for reconsidering Eliot's contributions in these areas, as well. While recent scholarship on Eliot has focused on gender analysis, New Historicism and cultural materialism, the frame remains largely English. Guth contends that the immense continental underpinnings of Eliot's writing should lead us to re-situate her beyond national boundaries, and view her as a major European, as well as English, writer.

Chapter 1
Intertextuality and Cross-Cultural Discourse

In recent years critical attention has turned with new interest towards re-positioning George Eliot at the nexus of an ever-expanding network of intertextual and cross-cultural currents. While older studies document the many influences that contributed to her work, the angle of perspective focused on individual agency rather than on aspects of cultural cross-fertilization and resulted mainly in emphasizing an authorial, as well as national, uniqueness that was the hallmark of Eliot studies. Although her wide reading and very intellectual approach were acknowledged as atypical,¹ and the freight of learned commentary in her novels was often felt to detract from her narratives, the essential Englishness of the final product was never brought into question. In this vein, while Gordon Haight's superb biography documents Eliot's many journeys to Germany, her ongoing exchanges with German intellectuals as well as her extensive reading and writing on German culture, these are presented largely as an incidental backdrop to the writing of her veiy TDnglish.' novels. In other words, in spite of the foreignness of many of her sources of inspiration it remained an unspoken and unchallenged premise that they in no way detracted from an 'Englishness' largely based on her famous and much-loved descriptions of rural England.² Thus we read her work selectively, and even when substantial evidence points in a direction other than that of our initial premise, it remains oddly unseen. The predisposition to view Eliot as a realist functioned in a similar way: her achievement as a novelist was charted following an arc that progressed from the early Wordsworthian ' novels toward the realization of her 'mature' and uniquely realistic art in Middlemarch and then tailed off or took an unaccountable turn in Daniel Deronda. Such novels as did not fit this general pattern (Silas Marner, Romola, The Lifted Veil', The Spanish Gypsy) were viewed as temporary, sometimes regrettable diversions and were consequently backgrounded without changing the overarching schema.

Things have changed since then. The Romantic aspects of Eliot's work have received greater prominence as boundaries between canonized periods have been challenged and eroded.³ Her realism has been questioned or redefined. The rise of multiculturalism and the concomitant fall from favour of nationalistically-motivated studies⁴ have led theorists to focus anew on the nature of inter-cultural transactions, on how and what changes in the process of moving from one set of cultural referents and values to another. Most relevant for this study, theories of intertextuality positing an ongoing and mutual interaction between texts — both literary and more broadly defined — have opened the way to positioning her work anew within a wider European context. Studies such as John Rignall's George Eliot and Europe (1997) and Andrew Thompson's George Eliot and Italy (1998) develop this new critical direction.⁵ The German context, however, has remained underprivileged, maybe for prosaic reasons such as the language barrier, or because post-World War II critics did not wish to engage in extensive studies involving German culture. Although more recent scholars such as Rosemary Ashton, Anthony McCobb and Gisela Argyle have focused on the extent of Eliot's German interests,⁶ Schiller's place in this as well as the larger question of cross-cultural discourse, of how cultural ideas are or can be transposed from their ground of origin to another culture and how this is effected, have not been examined in relation to Eliot's work even though she is acknowledged as a major vehicle for the introduction of German ideas to England.⁷

Theorists of intertextuality from Barthes and Kristeva to Bakhtin, Riffaterre and Culler have over the years developed an impressive array of methodologies.⁸ My own work will use these studies selectively in its discussion of Eliot and Schiller. It does not seek simply to establish sources or influence in the sense of a unidirectional line of descent from powerful pre-text to later imitative one, but rather to explore an intertextual framework through which central ideological and narrative conflicts in Eliot's work emerge in sharper focus. The conceptual distinction between the two types of analytical enterprise is substantial. Influence' tends to be about similarities; 'intertextuality' opens out the contextual field to include a wider and more complex range of relationships. As Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein point out, context should not be considered as 'a mere accessory, but as opening out a new connection that makes apparently "given" aspects [of the text] into a response'⁹ by positioning it in relation to other texts and ideologies that have a direct bearing on its meaning as well as on the narrative impulses that inform it. Intertextuality as well as the theories of dialogy that often underwrite it have thus radically changed the way we approach a literary text. They have substituted the model of influences flowing in towards a privileged centrepoint or closed space for a model of the text itself opening out towards various other 'texts' — both literary and more broadly defined as semi otic fields — which it dialogizes and to which it relates in a variety of ways. The direction is thus reversed, opening up many new questions concerning a text's participation in surrounding culture: responsive, challenging, pre-empting and so on, and giving new emphasis to Suzanne Langer's comment that a culture is defined less by the answers it provides than by the questions it asks.¹⁰

The difference between the authoritarian, master-disciple model underlying the concept of influence and the more expansive network of interrelations implied by intertextuality is particularly well articulated by Bakhtin. In his discussion of novelistic languages in 'Discourse in the Novel', he makes a crucial distinction between authoritative or 'enforced' discourse, such as that of the epic, which can only be transmitted in closed and finished form, and what he calls 'internally persuasive' discourse which inspires later authors to address its ideas in new ways:

Internally persuasive discourse ... is, as it is affirmed through assimilation, tightly interwoven with 'one's own word'. In the everyday rounds of our consciousness, the internally persuasive word is halfours and half-someone else's. Its creativity and productiveness consist precisely in the fact that such a word awakens new and independent words, that it organizes masses of our words from within, and does not remain in an isolated and static condition. It is not so much interpreted by us as it is further, that is, freely, developed, applied to new material, new conditions; it enters into interanimating relationships with new contexts ... The semantic structure of an internally persuasive discourse is not finite, it is open; in each of the new contexts that dialogize it, this discourse is able to reveal ever newer ways to mean.¹¹

Eliot reflects this same idea when she writes:

I wish you thoroughly to understand that the writers who have most profoundly influenced me ... are not in the least oracles to me ... [Even if] Rousseau's views of life, religion, and government are miserably erroneous ... it would be not the less true that Rousseau's genius has sent that electric thrill through my intellectual and moral frame which has awakened me to new perceptions, which has made man and nature a fresh world of thought and feeling to me — and this not by teaching me any new belief. It is simply that the rushing mighty wind of his inspiration has so quickened my faculties that I have been able to shape more definitely for myself ideas which had previously dwelt as dim 'ahnungen' in my soul — the fire of his genius has so fused together old thoughts and prejudices that I have been ready to make new combinations.¹²

On another level, Bakhtin's theory of dialogy, as well as his concept of heteroglossia which posits distinct ideological languages' interacting both intra- and intertextually, afford us new access to underlying ideologies as well as to the "hidden internal polemic[s]' that inform the Eliot-Schiller relationship.¹³ They enable us, through the interaction of discourses as well as the tensions generated between different dialogical axes, to pose new questions of the relation between textual sites, to examine multidirectional interactions and to see new, often more complex ideological dynamics at work.

The history of intertextual theory provides a fascinating narrative in its own right. Its attempt to displace the author and — involuntarily maybe — instate the theorist as guru of a new autonomous textuality affords its own intellectual challenges as well as the joys of transgression.¹⁴ However, in spite of its salutary defamiliarizing impact and major contribution to the understanding of cultural codes, the anti-humanist — or should we call it post-human? — drift encoded in Barthes' famous 'death of the author' tends to deprive textuality of a central component.¹⁵ Insofar as all utterances, especially literary ones, are 'oriented toward another person's word' the removal of any concept of authorial 'self or intentionality simultaneously deprives us of the dialogical angle of discourse, in other words, of the angle of intertextual refraction which underwrites its significance in the text and constitutes an important semantic component of specific intertextual moves. As Bakhtin puts it:

Discourse lives, as it were, beyond itself, in a living impulse toward the object; if we detach ourselves completely from this impulse all we have is the naked corpse of the word.¹⁶

For this reason, it is more fruitful for us to use some concept of implied authorial presence, or as Nancy Miller calls it the 'positionality'¹⁷ of the writing subject, in order to address the ideological debates Eliot is engaged in with Schiller. This positioning subjectivity, however, will not be viewed as a final explanation, or used to foster the image of a unified author-self. I shall use it rather as a working hypothesis in order to anchor the textual economy as well as the various dialogical axes at work in Eliot's novels. Following Friedman, I shall work not only with the 'signature'¹⁸ of the writer as situated in history, as Nancy Miller does, but also with the (con)texts of Eliot's biographical and historical record.

Which brings us to the more specific connection between George Eliot and Schiller. On a general level, Hillis Miller's theory of repetition may help clarify the quality of this relationship. In his now classic work on the subject, Hillis Miller outlines two basic types of repetition. The first, so-called Platonic type presents repetition as imitation of an original model and calls on us to view difference against a background of basic similarity. The second or Nietzschean type, on the other hand, is based on an awareness of the uniqueness of all things and views similarity as arising against a background of fundamental difference. 'Ungrounded doublings' he calls these similarities, ghostly likenesses or 'phantasms' whose meaning occurs in some strange 'empty space' between dissimilarity and real similarity which the opaque similarity crosses'.¹⁹ Such is the initial impression of Eliot's connection to Schiller, an elusive yet unmistakable play of similarity amid dissimilarity that permeates her work: uncanny likenesses of character and situation, as well as an arresting conceptual affinity that cannot be overlooked.²⁰ What Eliot particularly admired in Schiller's work was the intensity of his moral vision, his belief in man's capacity to transcend life's distracting chaos and triumph over the call of narrow self-interest and egoism, which were a constant preoccupation of hers. His extensive exploration of these topoi as well as of the moral dilemmas arising from his characters' high ideals in conflict with social and historical reality are clearly refracted in her own characters — in the passionately striving Maggie Tulliver; in the high-minded Dorothea Brooke who recalls the moral fervour of Schiller's Joan of Arc; in the medical researcher and failed idealist Lydgate who wanted to do 'good small work for Middlemarch, and great work for the world';²¹ in the fanatic redeemer Savonarola who felt empowered by God to take control of Florence at the expense of personal integrity; and in the social reformer Felix Holt whose stoic simplicity and uprightness recall Wilhelm Tell, to name but a few.

Of specific relevance in our context will be the interaction of idealism and realism that we find in Schiller's plays. For all his prominence in the pantheon of German idealism, Schiller was deeply aware of the need to balance the claims of the ideal with those of the real world and, unlike Kant, he saw the role of experience as vitally important to the cultivation of the moral human being.²² His emphasis on the determinism of circumstances — 'des Lebens Drang', the 'press of life'²³ — in shaping his protagonists' lives; his insistent focus on the limitations and dangers of the idealizing mind; and his refusal to idealize as he dwells insistently on his heroes' flaws, all these are central to his appeal to Eliot. On the one hand, as Donald Stone points out, 'Schiller fired her with a devotion to lofty feeling'²⁴ as well as with a reverence for man's capacity for self-transcendence which is visible in her treatment of her variously aspiring characters. On the other, she specifically praises the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Intertextuality and Cross-Cultural Discourse
• 2 'Our divine Schiller' : Contexts
• 3 The Heroism of the Common Man: Adam Bede and Schiller's Wilhelm Tell
• 4 Passionate Morality and The Mill on the Floss
• 5 The Idealist and the Realist: Romola
• 6 Narrative Ambivalence in Middlemarch and Felix Holt, the Radical
• 7 The Aesthetics of Sympathy
• Bibliography
• Schiller's Works
• Index