The Carnivalesque Mode

TWO CARNIVALESQUE EVENTS are referred to in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda. One is used as an example in a discussion of political expediency: the Archbishop of Naples is said to have sanctioned, in what would now be called a populist gesture, the St. Januarius procession against the plague (1993, 384; bk. 4, ch. 33). The other is embedded in a simile: the attitude of the British mainstream society to Jews is compared with the attitude of the matrons of Delphi to the tired Maenads who had wandered into their city: the matrons “tenderly” minister to the Bacchae and take them “safely to their own borders” (195; bk. 2, ch. 17).¹

References to such events evoke images of pageants without footlights in which the spectators merge with the participants, everyday hierarchical social order is temporarily reversed, authorities are toppled and jesters crowned, people from different social compartments enter into a free and familiar contact with each other, comic mesalliances are formed and celebrated, and the borderlines of bodies, minds, groups, and classes are blurred (see Bakhtin 1968, 7; 1984, 108–47). These salient features of the carnival double as literary topoi in works of fiction that, following Bakhtin, one may regard as carnivalesque. Unlike the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, George Eliot's contemporary, Daniel Deronda does not display these topoi except in the dosage that few narratives of comparable volume might entirely eschew. There is, however, one feature of the carnival events that does constitute a prominent theme in Daniel Deronda: the blurring of boundaries – between the participants and the spectators, between the individual and his or her immediate physical or psychological environment, between the self and the other, the self and a larger whole – is a common denominator not only of the two subplots of the novel but also, and perhaps more importantly, between its concerns with vocation and with sympathy.²

The handling of this topos in the novel is associated with its negotiating an ideological stance counterpoised to both supererogation and nihilism.

Vocation

AS ALAN MINTZ HAS DEMONSTRATED, George Eliot is one of the major nineteenth-century novelists of vocation.³

In Daniel Deronda the concern with vocation involves the dialectics of the pursuit of social, national, or communal progress on the one hand and the agenda of self-perfection on the other: the Commissar and the Yogi, the change from without and the change from within (see Koestler 9–20), eventually enter into an uneasy alliance.

The proto-Zionist plot of Daniel Deronda emphasizes the change from without, the need for a radical restructuring of the existence of the Jewish nation. The novel's prophet of this change, Ezra Mordecai Cohen is, however, represented as a version of the Yogi, a mystic whose spirit transcends, and, as it were, consumes, his fragile body, and who therefore stands in need of the “executive self” in the shape of the healthy, handsome, puritanical Daniel Deronda. Daniel's ultimate endorsement of Mordecai's vision is partly caused (or at least well prepared for) by his inability to commit himself to British politics, the field that in her previous novel, Middlemarch, George Eliot presented as a sufficiently grateful sphere for the application of idealistic individual energies. The reference to the St. Januarius procession is made in the context of Daniel's reluctance to opt for party politics where he might experience a conflict between loyalty to the narrower and the broader frameworks – like the Archbishop of Naples who must have made a compromise with his conscience by allowing a carnivalesque event to raise the spirits of the population during an epidemic. The most significant of obstacles to Daniel's wholehearted dedication of his energies to the reform movement that characterized the Whig politics of the time is his sympathy with the potential opponents: though, as an apprentice of Sir Hugo, Daniel shares the ideology of the Whigs, he is strongly drawn to the valorization of traditions represented by the Tories. He is “fervidly democratic in his feeling for the multitude,” yet “through his affections and imagination, intensely conservative; voracious of speculations on government and religion, yet loath to part with long-sanctioned forms which, for him, [are] quick with memories and sentiments” (364; bk. 4, ch. 32). As a secret outsider, sensitive to the insecurity of his position, Daniel is drawn to the ethical aspects of the traditional forms of life just as much as, in the other sub-plot, Grandcourt, the legal heir to estates and ranks, is obsessed with the external, aesthetic shape of his status. Moreover, Daniel's painful misapprehension of his place in Sir Hugo Mallinger's household at the symbolic (Bar-Mitzva) age of thirteen makes him responsive to the suffering of others and sympathetic to the predicament of the losing side of struggles.⁴

As a result, “as soon as he took up any antagonism, though only in thought, he seemed to himself like the Sabine warriors in the memorable story – with nothing to meet his spear but flesh of his flesh, and objects that he loved” (364). Deronda is, a century ahead of his time, what Richard Rorty (xv) has called “a liberal ironist” – one who resists a complete surrender of his identity to the imperiousness of a larger ideological frame.

Yet Daniel's reluctance to commit himself to the British political arena is associated not only with his inability to choose a consistent political platform but also with a much more private fear of the loss of self. The verbal expression of this fear is in terms of compromises with his personal integrity into which politics might force him: “I don't want to make a living out of opinions…. I can't see any real public expediency that does not keep an ideal before it which makes a limit of deviation from the direct path. But if I were to set up for a public man I might mistake my own success for public expediency” (384; bk. 4, ch. 33). This is Daniel's secret meeting point with Gwendolen, who dreads her liability to impulsive wrongdoing and whom he advises to turn her dread into a safeguard. He himself acts in the spirit of his advice: aware of his own liability to confuse the personal and the public, he seeks, and eventually finds, a vocation in which the need for distinguishing between his self-actualization and the public good would be much less insistent. Meantime, however, he objects to political “humbug.” Sir Hugo's reference to a possible “good style” of humbug as opposed to a “bad style” does not suffice to overcome Daniel's ethical fastidiousness on the issues of party politics.

Ironically, this attitude is an ethical counterpart of Grandcourt's aesthetically poised scornful fastidiousness that goes a long way towards making him interesting to Gwendolen: the two meet in their shared intolerant awareness of “what brutes his fellow-creatures were, both masculine and feminine; what odious familiarities they had, what smirks, what modes of flourishing their handkerchiefs, what costume, what lavender water, what bulging eyes, and what foolish notions of making themselves agreeable by remarks which were not wanted” (670–71; bk. 7, ch. 54). In his early (and eventually surmounted) disgust with the pawnbroker Ezra Cohen and his family, Daniel displays his own tendency to share the leisure-class aesthetics epitomized by Grandcourt. Gwendolen likewise tries to train herself in Deronda's preference for ethical rather than aesthetic discriminations, though her aesthetic fastidiousness in human relations remains deeply ingrained.

Sympathy

THE SENSE OF PHYSICAL DISGUST in George Eliot's presentations of the pawnbroker's family has fostered some readers' suspicions that underneath the proto-Zionist ideas in the novel lies the kind of residual anti-Semitism which makes exception for those Jews who, like Mirah, Daniel, and his mother, do not display any would-be typical “Jewish peculiarities” (225; bk. 3, ch. 20)⁵

or whose uncouth racially marked physique is either refined and transcended by Mordecai's combination of disease and spirituality or redeemed by Klesmer's “genius.” It may, however, be argued, that the unattractive Jewish “specimen[s]” (206; bk. 3, ch. 19) in the novel are offered as a challenge “to the extension of our sympathies” that George Eliot called for in her essay “The Natural History of German Life” (276). Yet I agree with Lisabeth During's opinion (1998) that the treatment of sympathy in Daniel Deronda is significantly more ambivalent than in George Eliot's previous novels.

Indeed, several types of sympathy can be distinguished in the novel. One of them consists in acceptance, or toleration, of alien, unshared affects or cultural features. Mordecai, for instance, is practically resigned to the vulgarity, false claims, and intellectual limitations of the Cohens. His tolerant, self-disciplining attitude to the cultural inferiority that they represent is ideological: their mild misrule finds a slot in his fixed conceptual network. In an attempt to win Daniel to his messianic cause, Mordecai attempts to turn the Cohens into objects of Daniel's sympathy by reminding both Daniel and himself that it is the diaspora condition that causes the “spiritual poverty of the Jewish millions” (571; bk. 6, ch. 46). And yet this sympathetic condescension is shown to be misplaced and to shrink its objects in the eyes of the observer. Mordecai, it turns out, underestimates the Cohens when he believes that because of having lost the daughter of the family they will be made unhappy on meeting Mirah: to everyone's surprise the Cohens are quite able to transcend their hidden sorrow and to extend to Mirah a wholehearted welcome. Daniel is, of course, even less of a fair judge than Mordecai: his early exposure to “ugly stories of Jewish characteristics and occupations” (206; bk. 3, ch. 19) and his superficial early observation of Jews in London streets have lowered the threshold of his attention to whatever might further feed his prejudice. Behind his back, however, the implied author sends different signals to the reader – for instance, through the motif of knives. Whereas Gwendolen has to lock her knife in a box and a drawer for fear of her own violence, the Cohens make their little scion Jacob a gift of a knife and allow him to play with this knife, evaluate it, boast of it, compare it with other knives: apparently, they have no reason to fear any violent impulses that the knife may bring out.

Even after having moved towards Mordecai's attitude of tolerant sympathy for the stunted Jewish population that he comes to see as waiting for a Zionist redemption, Daniel does not develop the kind of resonating sympathy with the Jewish environment. This, however, is part of a more general pattern: hardly ever, in the course of the novel, is the emotion of any one character shown to enter into a synergetic unison with that of another. All the symbolic and literal ingredients of resonating sympathy are evoked in different episodes of Daniel Deronda but never really combined to produce this boundary-crossing phenomenon itself. When Klesmer is seated to observe and evaluate Mirah's singing, the hearts of the four Meyrick ladies are “beating fast with anxiety” (483; bk. 5, ch. 39) but this resonant pulsation is not publicly expressed and therefore not transformed into a carnivalesque pooling of affect. Mordecai's Zionist speech in the club does not arouse masses even if it enlists the wary interest of a handful of listeners. The narrative refers to the imperious “chord” (503; bk. 5, ch. 40) in Mordecai's voice when he claims Daniel's allegiance, but Daniel's ultimate endorsement of Mordecai's goals is caused not by psychological contagion, not by a resonating chord, not even by a consent to extend a dying man's life by his own⁶

; it is a matter of a rational persuasion on a subject in which – as during his eventide boating trips – his own “thinking and desiring melt together” (188; bk. 2, ch. 17). Vibrating chords, music, synchronized heartbeats, contagion, sympathy, cooperation – all these potential constituents of resonant Dionysian sympathy, of the horizontal blending of individual selves and the dissolution of boundaries between them, are held in check in the novel. With the one telling exception of the three Cohen children crying in cacophonous unison (574; bk. 6, ch. 46), individuals' affects are insulated from each other, as if to preempt the type of carnivalesque crowd experience against which, about a century later, the poetic anthropology of Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power would sound a potent warning.

By contrast to resonating sympathy, which is only allowed to remain in remoter backgrounds of the novel's action, a third kind of sympathy is rather massively staged. This kind of sympathy can be called redistributive: it consists not of pooling but of rationing the affect. The mechanism is described by the eighteenth-century economist and philosopher Adam Smith, who bases his understanding of sympathy on one's ability to “enter” into the situation of the other. Detailing the causes of one's grief to others allays part of the pain by transferring a diluted portion of it to the listeners while also entering into their experience of listening to oneself:

As if to prove that there is a considerable measure of economics in morality and, conversely, of ethics in economics,⁷ Smith's view suggests that the sum total of suffering does not change within an encapsulated situation. Rather, it is redistributed: the listener shoulders part of it, relieving the speaker of the onus. As in Bakhtin's pageant without footlights, the boundary between the spectator (listener) and the performer (speaker, sufferer) is thus crossed over by the transfer of a part of the affect from the latter to the former. Yet in contrast to carnivalesque affects, though there is an element of interchangeability in this transaction, a traffic across the boundaries of the self, there is no pooling of emotion, no blending: each subject steps in and out of the other's position in a move to imagine what he/she would feel in the other's footgear.⁸ This choreographic sympathy is what characterizes Gwendonlen's need for Deronda, and it is what has prompted Lisabeth During, for instance, to point to the major problem with this need: in the process of sympathy, part of the individual emotional life, ambitions, goals, loyalties and beliefs of the sympathetic listener may be erased.⁹ When the listener takes over some of the speaker's burden of pain, part of the listener's own personality shrinks. Such a self-mortification can, in principle, be salutary for the listener, but in Daniel Deronda the danger of excessive sympathy to its donor is emphasized at least as strongly as its positive effects on its recipient.

The theme of the reduction, cancellation, suppression, surrender of one's own self under the sway of sympathy is given striking expression when Daniel neglects his own studies at Cambridge in order to save Hans Meyrick's; he thus forfeits his own possible alternative vocation, that of mathematician.¹⁰

Another example of the theme of the self-immolating effect of sympathy is provided by Hans Meyrick himself in his story of “Bouddha giving himself to the famished tigeress to save her and her little ones from starving” (465; bk. 5, ch. 37). The utilitarian response of Mab Meyrick to this parable is to point out that, as a result of such actions, “[t]he world would get full of fat tigers” (466): if sympathy is not hedged in, its object may end up consuming its source.

Daniel Deronda thus effects a tour de force of linking sympathy with the metaphor of anthropophagia, of consuming another human being. Mordecai Cohen's terminal tuberculosis generates his desire to extend his life through blending with another, yet on meeting Daniel he does not try to appeal for personal sympathy. Unlike Gwendolen, Mordecai does not seek to appropriate Daniel's attention, self, life. What he does seek to elicit is Daniel's resonating sympathy with the cause. In so far as he wishes to erase the boundaries between himself and Daniel through what he misnames “the marriage of our souls,” it is not through consuming but through being consumed, internalized – in the “blent transmission” (751; bk. 8, ch. 63) of ideas and yearnings, or perhaps in gentle mourning.¹¹

This desire to feed the spirit of another by his own is symbolized by his morbid offer that his writings should be published under Daniel's name.

It can, of course, be argued that, in this craving to blend with another, the wish to be consumed is tantamount to the wish to consume. In the novel, however, the theme of cannibalism is diverted from Mordecai to the mentally sadistic Grandcourt, its main exponent. It is Grandcourt, whose sadism is the diametrical opposite of sympathy, who is consistently presented as a predator. It is he who is compared to an alligator (157; bk. 2, ch. 15), a lizard (137; bk. 2, ch. 13; 587, bk. 6, ch. 48), and a stalking predator (412; bk. 5, ch. 35).¹²

And yet this figurative language actually conflicts with the psychology of sadism (at least in its Schopenhauerian interpretation that seems to underlie George Eliot's presentation of this phenomenon): the precondition of the perpetrator's sadistic enjoyment is his (mistaken, Schopenhauer would say) sense of total separateness between himself and his victim (cf. also McCobb). However that may be, Grandcourt's alligator eyes are a decoy for the motif of devouring another person, a motif which Mordecai's search for an “executive self” could otherwise have attached to this consumptive idealist.

Idealism Revised

WHEREAS THE FINAL PART OF THE NOVEL tells the story of Daniel's endorsing his new vocation, it also tells the story of his tactfully and gently resisting the personal demands of Gwendolen and Mordecai alike, since Gwendolen might present an obstacle to his ideological agenda and Mordecai might signify the wrong reason for its pursuit. It is out of conviction born through the questioning of the principles of others while putting his own assumptions at stake, rather than in surrender to an ideologist's charisma or in a Bouddha-like compassion, that Daniel chooses his course of action. This is not to deny the role of emotion, especially love for Mirah, in Daniel's choices. Though, as noted above, Daniel Deronda cannot be described as a carnivalesque novel, it shares a key modal feature with the Socratic dialogues (which Bakhtin regarded as one of the roots of the carnivalesque): its protagonist is engaged in ideological maieutics. In most of the episodes where he appears, Daniel is presented as an active and often tone-setting party to charged conversations with exponents of a variety of ethical principles. Unlike Socrates in Plato's dialogues, he seldom seeks to persuade interlocutors; instead, through critical dialogue, he attempts to construct his own aims and principles. His ultimate choice of the proto-Zionist course, uniquely appropriate to the kind of person that he is, a course in which generalizable intellectual conclusions blend with his love for a particular woman, may be regarded as a refraction of the ad hominem twists to which Socrates occasionally takes recourse in the process of philosophical argument.

Mordecai is but one in the series of spokesmen for Daniel's ideological options; the sway of his personality is, emphatically, not the sole reason for Daniel's taking this particular option. With a gentleness that might accord with real-life tolerant sympathy for the sick and dying, George Eliot mildly subverts Mordecai's stature by the end of the novel, in particular in the ethical argument which he holds with Mirah and which pertains to the fine-tuning of the ethical stance in the novel as a whole.

In order to emphasize his point about personal sacrifice (“Burn, burn indiscernibly into that which shall be, which is my love and not me”), Mordecai tells his sister what he believes to be a Midrashic story of “a Jewish maiden who loved a Gentile king so well, that this is what she did: – She entered into prison and changed clothes with the woman who was beloved by the king, that she might deliver that woman from death by dying in her stead, and leave the king to be happy in his love which was not for her.” For Mordecai, this is “the surpassing love, that loses self in the object of love,” but Mirah sees it not as a case of supererogation but as one of psychological egoism: the Jewish maiden “wanted the king when she was dead to know what she had done, and feel that she was better than the other. It was her strong self, wanting to conquer, that made her die.” She goes on to argue that the maiden “must have had jealousy in her heart, and she wanted somehow to have the first place in the king's mind. That is what she would die for.” Mordecai has nothing but an unfair ad hominem argument against this position:

Mirah's tactful silence in response to her brother's sententious and patronizing last utterance (an utterance, which, however, implies a contrast between modern literature and the traditions of Midrashic analysis) is, under the influence of his allusion to Mirah's heart, all too easily read as referring to the nature of her own jealous love for Daniel. This is another decoy, since it is not Mirah's but Mordecai's supererogation that is at issue. By presenting the self-sacrificing Jewish maiden as a kind of Henry Jamesian Milly Theale, who succeeds, after her death, in taking precedence over Kate Croy in Densher's heart, Mirah demystifies Mordecai's idealistic exegesis. Her undermining of the parable of supererogation, however, may send the reader back to the remarks on St. Theresa of Avila in the Prelude of George Eliot's Middlemarch, where the traditional concerns of the Spanish lady are presented as “light fuel” to a brilliant girl, whereas a demanding spiritual or ideological cause is expected to provide a more sustaining nourishment: “Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self” (xiii). The figurative language, the metaphorics of consuming and being consumed, that aligns Dorothea Brook as an avatar of St. Theresa with the prophet of Zionism in Daniel Deronda pits the belief in supererogation against skepticism about the motives for self-sacrifice – as possibly originating in the pursuit of exalted or triumphant states of the soul.

This hesitation about the moral credit of idealism if fuelled by personal need is consistent with the novel's cautious bracketing of the transgression of boundaries between the self and the other or the self and the larger whole. Jean-Paul Sartre's famous statement that “[a] writer's technique always relates back to his metaphysics” (84) can, arguably, be extended to the writer's moral philosophy, though it is not so much narrative structure as the modal features of the work that tend to link up to salient features of the system of values that informs it. Whereas carnivalesque narratives generally tend to explore and develop what Dorothea Krook called the higher view of human possibility (1–18), that is, a non-utilitarian ethics, of a predominantly deontological kind, which allows for the human capacity for totally disinterested action, idealistic self-sacrifice, and the desire for good for its own sake while also recognizing the profundity of the evil of which a human being is capable; the non-carnivalesque narratives manifest a pronounced leaning towards utilitarian ethics and the Aristotelian golden mean, a leaning towards skepticism about altruistic service of ideals but also towards a denial of the existence of radical evil. This is the “low” view of human possibility, where “low” is not synonymous with “sordid” but merely indicative of the pitch of legitimate ethical expectations.

Indeed, the uneasy modal affiliation of Daniel Deronda, a non-carnivalesque narrative that provides a testing ground for different forms of the carnivalesque blurring of boundaries, in particular in its treatment of the issues of vocation or of sympathy, is associated with a hesitancy in the novel's ultimately middle-ground moral vision. Narratives in which the carnivalesque flights and lapses of the human spirit are present in a limited or selective way often tend to negotiate the relationship between utilitarian and deontological criteria for attributing moral credit. Whereas the plots of both Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda create, in the words used by Robert Polhemus in application to Jane Austen, versions “of individual integrity in which self-interest and morality coincide” (39), sacrifices made to personal integrity in these novels are clearly distinguished from supererogatory impulses. Yet the novel's caution about idealistic supererogation is not characterized by an Aristotelian preference for the middle way in the practice of any virtue.¹³

Rather, it stages a dialectics between a commitment to future-oriented social goals and emotionally alert sympathy for individual human beings. This here-and-now sympathy may impede the service of those goals and, if unhedged, may produce an alternative form of Bouddha-like supererogagion for the sake of fat tigers. In its absence, however (as is amply demonstrated in Dostoevsky's novels, especially The Possessed), supererogation threatens to transform into nihilism (cf. Wolf).¹⁴

In Daniel Deronda, despite the rationalist individualism suggested by the balance between the agenda of self-perfection and that of service to causes outside the self, idealistic supererogation is nevertheless not devoid of glamour. Boundaries of the self are repeatedly transcended or transgressed – eventually to be redrawn; but they are redrawn in order to be opened up again – for a sympathetic seepage of affect in interpersonal relationship and for exchange of creative energy between the self and a larger whole.