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Semi-detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens

2019; Duke University Press; Volume: 80; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00267929-7569688

1527-1943

Stephen Arata,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

“For the whole of life is really like that,” wrote Ford Madox Ford in 1913. “We are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite another” (quoted on 3). Ford’s striking image for this divided state is of standing before a pane of glass, perceiving through it the landscape before you. At the same time, you see reflected in it the face of the person behind you, all the while remaining steadily aware of the surface of the glass itself. As Ford suggests, this is a familiar experience: during any day we often find ourselves at once engaged in our immediate surroundings and absorbed in some psychic elsewhere. And the pane of glass? That too becomes part of the experience as soon as you notice that it is precisely a property of this medium that it enables you to look before and behind simultaneously.Ford's is one of the many arresting images John Plotz offers of the experience of “semi-detachment”: being where you are and somewhere else at the same time. For Plotz, this is a state of being—in fact, a cluster of related states of being—that some art forms are good at both inducing and reflecting on. Realist novels, for instance, seem designed to encourage “losing yourself” in the represented world. Yet a part of you is always left behind, conscious of the real world and conscious too of that part of you lost in the book. In an analogous way, certain paintings insist on being perceived at once as “representations of a virtual world” and as “material objects” made from paint (9). The effect is heightened when the virtual world appears to spill over into ours, as in Hans Memling’s Christ Blessing (1481), in which Christ’s gaze meets the viewer’s and the fingers of his left hand are shown resting on the frame of the painting. Comparable effects characterize film, a medium that seems always to be calling attention to its techniques of mediation even as we are absorbed into the field of representation.A work that stimulates a sense of semi-detachment in its audience, Plotz argues, “is in some ways replicating and holding up for examination an experience familiar to the real world” (2). Such real-world experiences are in turn often represented in works of art. As the many and varied examples in Semi-detached show, novelists, painters, and filmmakers have used the resources of their media to explore with great subtlety those curious, unexpectedly fecund states in which absorption and detachment coexist.The excitement and energy of this book are contagious. Every chapter is filled with insight and generative suggestion as Plotz pursues semi-detachment across an expansive range of settings and situations. To say that the force of his arguments is centrifugal is not a criticism but simply an observation. While the book hangs together in flexible, loose-jointed ways, the family resemblance of the experiences it gathers under the heading of semi-detachment is occasionally faint. Plotz writes that his “aim is unitary: to examine across genres, decades, and disciplines a single phenomenon, albeit one with fuzzy borders” (16). We can be thankful that those borders are no sharper, since one of the book’s very strengths is to keep moving out to annex new territory. (Similarly, the book’s explorations are unconstrained by the parameters of its subtitle. Since Dickens is misleading in several respects. Writers and painters prior to Dickens figure importantly, and those who come later are not put in a genealogy that derives from him.) If I was not in the end persuaded that what the book deals with is a single phenomenon, I was also not persuaded that it needed to be for the local arguments to gain purchase.Those arguments offer abundant riches. There are fine pages on the characters in George Eliot’s novels whose “capacity to hypothesize about future outcomes” for themselves and others is finally “a mechanism that in fact returns the solitary dreamer to a social world” (132); on the characters in Henry James’s novels who are “acutely interested” in what it may mean “to be aware . . . that one’s life is as much virtual as it is actual” (141); on the characters in Margaret Oliphant’s novels, “sustained and trapped by their milieu,” who “strive for a ‘life elsewhere’ even as they are surrounded by those things, those blocky objects, that make life real” (116); on H. G. Wells’s scientific romances, which continually situate us in “the gap between what we perceive and what is actually out there” in the world (180); and on Willa Cather’s practice of “overlaying” one image or sound on top of another to “encapsulate the problem, as well as the promise, involved in turning one’s readers simultaneously into participants and critical witnesses to one’s story” (14). In each case Plotz deftly knits together the novels’ thematic explorations of semi-detachment with their formal and stylistic innovations, as when Dickens, Eliot, and others use free indirect discourse to make vivid how consciousness can exist in more than one place at a time.The dexterous entwining of form and theme is likewise a mark of a stimulating chapter tracking the development of short fiction in Britain from the 1810s to the 1870s. Plotz argues for the importance to the later history of the novel of the experiments in short fiction conducted by James Hogg and John Galt. As he shows, those fictions not only dramatize but enact experiences of semi-detachment. Thus Hogg cultivates “the reader’s own doubts about the plausibility of the fictional world” in large part “by staging the intersection of profoundly disjunctive belief systems within that world itself” (23).Semi-detached toggles between chapters on narrative fiction and chapters on the visual arts. The brightest threads in the sections on painting and film are those that outline the capacities of those media to absorb us into represented worlds even as we stand apart and reflect on our absorption while it happens. Again, though, Plotz keeps the borders of what counts as semi-detachment fuzzy, and again I am happy that he does, since it gives him license to explore expansively and always to good effect. He shows us John Everett Millais trying to capture what, in a nice phrase, he calls “durable ephemerality” (82): single instants snatched from time’s flow and memorialized in paint. He suggests that Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s paintings “aspire to failure” (94) when they depict scenes of music making whose sensory pleasures can be experienced only in the represented world, not in ours. A stunning chapter on Buster Keaton shows that great comic returning over and again to moments when “overlapping, conceptually incompatible worlds” are suddenly brought within the same frame of reference (230).There is yet more. Chapters on John Stuart Mill’s social and aesthetic theories and on the “strategic anachronism” built into William Morris’s book designs for the Kelmscott Press (154) pursue the adventures of semi-detachment in other settings but with the same rigor and critical imagination. Plotz somehow finds space, too, to offer illuminating accounts of aspects of the work of Scott, Dickens, Trollope, and Hardy, among others. This is a learned book and at the same time an exuberant one. Indeed, what comes through most strongly is the sheer delight of intellectual inquiry.