Versions of Reality

My recent posts have been a sort of rough draft of my project on narrative world building. The basis of this project is a three-part framework I’ve derived from ideas first developed by James Phelan. Phelan doesn’t agree with the way I use his ideas—if you’re interested, see our collaborative book “Debating Rhetorical Narratology” (Ohio State University Press). The framework, as I see it, suggests that a narrative can be seen from three aspects—the synthetic, the mimetic, and the thematic. Synthetic analysis asks “How is it put together?”; mimetic analysis asks “What does it represent?”; and thematic analysis asks “What does it mean?” These three aspects are three ways of looking at the same thing; for analytic convenience they can be distinguished, but fundamentally they are simultaneous and interdependent, and the analysis of any one aspect can lead to the other two. In my previous work, I have tended to emphasize the synthetic aspect, though I have by no means ignored the mimetic and the thematic. In this project, however, I’m trying to emphasize the mimetic aspect.

The word “mimetic” is complicated, and some of the complications I’ve examined in earlier work, so I won’t go into detail here. I will just say that some critics and theorists, but not all, have tended to assume that mimesis, as the great Erich Auerbach puts it, is “the representation of reality”. My conception of mimesis is broader. First it includes various kinds of irreality, various kinds of non-realistic narrative representation, such as fantasy. There are several different kinds of irreal representation, and in this project I spend some time examining some of these. But realism is also various. One might think that there is just one real world, and all representations of reality, of this world, must therefore be alike. From a philosophic perspective that may (or may not) be true. But I’m not a philosopher, and I will leave philosophic questions alone. In literature there are many different kinds of reality, and many different ways of representing reality. In this post I want to look at two different kinds of representation of reality, two kinds of realistic mimesis. Representations can differ in what they represent, and, perhaps more fundamentally, they can differ in how they represent.

Consider the different worlds of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (first published in 1813) and A. S. Byatt’s Morpho Eugenia (1992). Pride and Prejudice is, I suppose, as realistic a novel as you can find. Morpho Eugenia is realistic, though it includes a fairy story written by one of the characters; since this is a story within the story it doesn’t break the realistic illusion. Both novels begin with the arrival of a young man—two young men in Pride and Prejudice; both novels are concerned with class; both end with a romantic pairing, though the mechanisms of the resolution are different: in Pride and Prejudice the marriage comes at the end; in Morpho Eugenia, the hero marries half way though the story; that marriage falls apart, quite dramatically, and the hero departs with another romantic partner. Pride and Prejudice is set in the early 1790s, during the Napoleonic wars; Morpho Eugenia is set in the early 1860s, after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. The hero of Morpho Eugenia is a professional entomologist, and the story includes extensive descriptions of butterflies, moths, beetles, and ants.

In Pride and Prejudice the arrival of Mr. Bingley is announced at the very beginning, but the initial meetings—of Mr. Bingley and Jane, of Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth—don’t occur until Chapter III of Volume I. Quite a lot happens before the meetings. After the famous opening sentences, Mrs. and Mr. Bennet have a conversation about the new arrival and Mrs. Bennet’s hopes that Mr. Bingley will marry one of their daughters. This conversation opens the actions that lead to the eventual denouement, and it also tells us something about the personalities of Mrs. and Mr. Bennet and their relationship. The chapter ends with a summary description of Mr. Bennet (he was an “odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice”) and Mrs. Bennet (“She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper”).

In Chapter II, Mr. Bennet sees that his daughter Elizabeth is trimming a hat; this hat is not described, but it allows Mr. Bennet to surprise his wife and daughters with the news that he has visited Mr. Bingley; its function is more synthetic than mimetic. The chapter includes more banter between Mr. and Mrs. Bennet as well as conversation with Elizabeth, Mary, Kitty, and Lydia. Mrs. Bennet also mentions their neighbor Mrs. Long and her nieces.

In Chapter Three Mr. Bingley returns Mr. Bennet’s call, but Mrs. Bennet and her daughters see him only from an upstairs window. Mrs. Bennet sends him an invitation to dinner, which he declines because of business in London. Mrs. Bennet’s friend Lady Lucas consoles her disappointment with the prospect of his attendance at the upcoming ball. The rest of the chapter is taken up with the ball, where the reader meets Mr. Bingley and his friend Mr. Darcy. (The passage is long, so I will have to omit some parts and summarize others.)

Mr. Bingley was good looking and gentlemanlike; he had a pleasant countenance, and easy, unaffected manners. . . . [H]is friend Mr. Darcy soon drew the attention of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien, and the report which was in general circulation within five minutes after his entrance, of his having ten thousand a year. (7–8).

Austen’s description is general: we learn that Mr. Bingley is good looking, that he has a pleasant countenance, but we don’t learn, for instance, the color of his eyes or hair or even his height. Mr. Darcy is tall and handsome, but again we learn nothing specific about his features. We also learn that he has not simply a large income but specifically ten thousand a year, at least if general report can be trusted. His manner, however, soon turns opinion against him.

Mr. Bingley had soon made himself acquainted with all the principal people in the room; he was lively and unreserved, danced every dance, was angry that the ball closed so early, and talked of giving one himself at Netherfield. Such amiable qualities must speak for themselves. What a contrast between him and his friend! Mr. Darcy danced only once with Mrs. Hurst and once with Miss Bingley, declined being introduced to any other lady, and spent the rest of the evening in walking about the room, speaking occasionally to one of his own party. His character was decided. He was the proudest, most disagreeable man in the world, and everybody hoped that he would never come there again.

Mr. Bingley is lively and unreserved and he dances every dance; Mr. Darcy, however, dances only twice, with two of Mr. Bingley’s sisters, and he declines even to be introduced to any of the local ladies. Austen notes the general judgement: “everybody hoped that he would never come there again”.

Elizabeth overhears as Mr. Bingley urges Mr. Darcy to pick a partner and dance:

“Come, Darcy,” said he, “I must have you dance. I hate to see you standing about by yourself in this stupid manner. You had much better dance.”

“I certainly shall not. You know how I detest it, unless I am particularly acquainted with my partner. At such an assembly as this, it would be insupportable. Your sisters are engaged, and there is not another woman in the room, whom it would not be a punishment for me to stand up with.”

“I would not be so fastidious as you are,” cried Bingley, for a kingdom! Upon my honour, I never met with so many pleasant girls in my life, as I have this evening, and there are several of them you see uncommonly pretty.”

“You are dancing with the only handsome girl in the room,” said Mr. Darcy, looking at the eldest Miss Bennet.

“Oh! she is the most beautiful creature I ever beheld! But there is one of her sisters sitting down just behind you, who is very pretty, and I dare say, very agreeable. Do let me ask my partner to introduce you.”

“Which do you mean?” and turning round, he looked for a moment at Elizabeth, till catching her eye, he withdrew his own and coldly said, “She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me, and I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men. You had better return to your partner and enjoy her smiles, for you are wasting your time with me.”

Mr. Bingley followed his advice. Mr. Darcy walked off, and Elizabeth remained with no very cordial feelings towards him. She told the story however with great spirit among her friends, for she had a lively, playful disposition, which delighted her in any thing ridiculous. (8–9)

Austen’s mimetic technique here is hardly concerned with things or even the details of personal appearance; what matters is behaviour and judgement. Compare now a passage from the beginning of A. S. Byatt’s novella Morpho Eugenia. The narrator plunges the reader directly into the episode and the novel with no preparation:

“You must dance, Mr. Adamson,” said Lady Alabaster from her sofa. “It is very kind of you to sit by me, and fetch glasses of lemonade, but I really do think you must dance. Our young ladies have made themselves beautiful in your honour, and I hope their efforts will not have been in vain.”

“I think they are all delightful,” said William Adamson, “but I am out of practice in ballroom dancing.”

Again we see one character urge another to dance. Mr. Adamson declines, but with a compliment to the ladies.

“Not much dancing in the jungle,” stated Mr. Edgar Alabaster.

“On the contrary. There was a great deal of dancing. There are religious festivals — Christian festivals, which occupy weeks together with communal dancing. And in the interior there are Indian dances where you must imitate the hops of woodpeckers, or the wriggle of armadillos, for hour after hour.” William opened his mouth to say more, and closed it again. Didactic rushes of information were a great shortcoming in returning travellers.

The narrator of Pride and Prejudice explains the arrival of Bingley and Darcy; the reader of Morpho Eugenia must deduce that Adamson has only recently arrived from some exotic locale. Adamson’s didactic rush of information provides an abundance of exotic detail; the world of Pride and Prejudice does not include jungles, even by report; nor dancers who imitate the hops of woodpeckers or the wriggle of armadillos.

Lady Alabaster moved some of her black silk rolls of flesh on the rosy satin of her sofa. She persisted. “I shall ask Matty to find you a pretty partner, unless you can pick one out for yourself.”

The narrator does not tell us that Lady Alabaster is fat; she directs our attention to her “black silk rolls of flesh”. In Pride and Prejudice her quirks and foibles would have supplied the material for a comic portrait, but in Morpho Eugenia she disappears from the story. The incidental introduction of Matty at the beginning of the story is strategic. We note that Lady Alabaster does not consider Matty to be a possible dance partner—but the reader will have to wait to understand her importance to the plot.

The shimmering girls whirled past in the candlelight, shell-pink and sky-blue, silver and citron, gauze and tulle. A small orchestra, two fiddles, a flute, a bassoon and a cello scraped and shrilled and boomed in the minstrel’s gallery.

Austen does not tell us anything about the music or the musicians.

William Adamson felt constricted, but composed, inside a dress suit borrowed from Lionel Alabaster. He remembered a festa on the Rio Manaquiry, lit  by lamps made of half an orange-skin filled with turtle oil. He had danced with the Juiza, the lady of the revels, barefoot and in his shirtsleeves. There, his whiteness itself had given him automatic precedence at table. Here he seemed sultry-skinned, with jaundice-gold mixed into sun-toasting. He was tall and naturally bony, almost cadaverous after his terrible experiences at sea.

We learn not only what Adamson is wearing but also how he feels in his borrowed suit. His memories provide hints of the backstory and add more mimetic detail, such as the lamps made of orange-skin and turtle oil. We learn something about Adamson’s appearance: dark, “with jaundice-gold mixed into sun-toasting”; he is tall, bony, and almost cadaverous—and we learn that he has had some terrible experience at sea.

Now the focus turns away from Adamson to the other people at the ball, and particularly to the three Alabaster daughters.

The pale people in the soft light polka’d past, murmuring to each other. The music stopped, the partners walked away from the floor, clapping and laughing. All three Alabaster daughters were being conducted back to the group round their mother. Eugenia, Rowena, and Enid.

They were all three pale-gold and ivory creatures, with large blue eyes and long pale silky lashes visible only in certain lights and shadows. Enid was the youngest, still with a trace of childish plumpness, wearing blush-pink organdie trimmed with white rosebuds, and a wreath of rosebuds and a net of rosy ribbons in her hair. Rowena was the tallest, the one who laughed, with richer colour in her cheeks and lips, with the coil of hair in the nape of her neck studded with pearls and blush-tipped daisies. The eldest, Eugenia, wore a white tarlatan over a lilac silk underskirt, and had a cluster of violets at her breast, and more violets at her waist, and violets and ivy woven in and out of her sleek golden head. Their brothers, too, had the gold and white colouring. They made a charming and homogeneous group. (3–4)

The Alabaster daughters are described with some attention, but they all—except for Eugenia—nearly disappear from the story. The Bennet daughters are hardy described; Mary, however, has a continuing comic role from start to finish, and Lydia becomes a crucial figure in the plot.

Austen spends no time describing the clothing of the ladies at the ball; Mr. Bennet (who has stayed home from the ball) cuts short his wife’s description of Mr. Bingley’s sisters; he protests against “any description of finery” (10). Byatt, however, describes the finery of each Alabaster daughter in detail. A notable feature of Byatt’s mimetic technique is the specification of colors and fabrics and flowers: “black rolls of flesh”, “rosy satin”, “shell-pink and sky-blue”, “silver and citron”, “gauze and tulle”, “sultry-skinned, with jaundice-gold mixed into sun-toasting”, “pale-gold and ivory”, “large blue eyes”, “pale silky lashes”, “bluish-pink organdie”, “white rosebuds”, “rosy ribbons”, “bluish-tipped daisies”, “white tarlatan”, “lilac silk”, “violets”, “violets”, “violets”, “ivy”, “golden”, “gold and white”. All of these occur in the first half page or so of Byatt’s novel. Byatt’s attention to color continues throughout. Here, for instance, is the penultimate paragraph, after Adamson and Matilda (Matty) have left England on their way to the Amazon:

Imagine the strong little ship Calypso, rushing through the mid-Atlantic night, as far from land as she will be at any point on this voyage. The sky is a profound blue-black, spattered with the flowing, spangled river of the Milky Way, glittering and slippery with suns and moons and worlds, greater and smaller, like spattered seed. The sea is a deep blue-black, ribbed with green, crested as it turns, with silver spray and crinkled crests of airy salt water. It too is swarming, with phosphorescent animalcules, the Medusae, swimming with tiny hairs, presenting a kind of reverse image of the lavish star-soup. William and Matilda are standing on deck, leaning over the rails, watching the ship’s nose plunge down and on. She is wearing a crimson shawl, and a striped scarf in her hair, and the wind stirs her skirts around her ankles. William’s brown hand grips her brown wrist on the rail. They breathe salt air, and hope, and their blood swims with the excitement of the future, and this is a good place to leave them, on the crest of a wave, between the ordered green fields and hedgerows, and the coiling, striving mass of forest along the Amazon shore.” (160)

I cannot find any comparable passage in Pride and Prejudice. In Chapter II, as we have seen, Elizabeth trims a hat, but the hat is not described. In Chapter III, Mr. Bingley pays a visit to Mr. Bennet: “The ladies [. . .] had the advantage of ascertaining from an upper window that he wore a blue coat and rode a black horse” (7). This chapter also includes the ball; we have seen that the descriptions lack detail; no colors are mentioned. In Chapter V we learn that Mr. Darcy found that Elizabeth’s face “was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes” (16)—I suppose that “dark eyes” counts as a color. In Chapter VII Mrs. Bennet tells her husband that when she was young she liked a “red coat”—that is, a man in a military uniform (21). Also in Chapter VII Mr. Darcy admires “the brilliancy which exercise had given” to Elizabeth’s complexion (23). In Chapter VIII, Miss Bingley and her sister remark on Elizabeth’s muddy petticoat, but neither the color nor the fabric is described. Also in Chapter VIII Miss Bingley teases Mr. Darcy for his admiration of Elizabeth’s fine eyes (25). Chapter IX ends with a reference to Miss Bingley’s “witticisms” on Elizabeth’s fine eyes (32). In Chapter X Miss Bingley, in a bitter tease, asks Mr. Darcy “what painter could do justice” to Elizabeth’s “beautiful eyes”; he replies “It would not be easy, indeed, to catch their expression, but their colour and shape, and the eye-lashes, so remarkably fine, might be copied” (36). By rather stretching the idea of color we can gather half-dozen or so references in the first ten chapters, about thirty pages of the novel. The world of Morpho Eugenia is vividly colored; Pride and Prejudice is not.

Nor is vision the only sense vividly noted in Morpho Eugenia. The following passage describes the birth of the twin daughters of William and Eugenia:

In due course the waiting came to an end, the doctor was summoned, and Eugenia retired to her bedroom in a crowd of nurses and chambermaids, one of whom, after a period of almost eighteen hours, announced to William that he was the happy father of not one, but two living infants, both female, both doing well. Busy women slid past William as he took in this information, carrying buckets of unidentifiable slops, and baskets of soiled linen. When he went in to see Eugenia, she was lying back on freshly starched pillows, her hair dressed with a soft blue ribbon, her body below the chin hidden under pristine coverlets. His daughters lay beside her in a basket, like two eggs in a box, bound up like tiny mummies, small faces with fleeting stains of red and ivory and slate-blue crumpled under pinned hoods. There was a smell of lavender, from the sheets, and all sorts of suppressed, furtive-seeming birth-smells, milky and bloody, still lingering. (70)

Odors, and especially bodily odors, have no place in Pride and Prejudice.

Adamson, the hero of Morpho Eugenia, is a professional entomologist, and Matty shares his interest. In the following passage Adamson and Matty are examining two groups of ants as they battle. He says:

“Have you observed how they can sever antennae and legs and cut each other in half so very quickly? And have you observed how many of the combatants advance to meet an adversary with several helpers clinging to their legs?” [. . . .]

She was wearing a brown cotton skirt, and a striped shirt, the sleeves rolled up to her elbow. Her face was shadowed by a rather ragged straw hat, with a limp crimson ribbon, which were her usual ant-watching garments. He knew all her wardrobe by now; it was not extensive; two cotton skirts, a Sunday dress, in summer, in navy poplin, with a choice of starched collars, and perhaps four different shirts, in various fawns and grey. [. . .] William found himself suddenly sharply inhaling what must have been her peculiar smell, a slightly acid armpit smell, inside the cotton sleeves in the sunlight, mixed with a tincture of what might be lemon verbena, and a whiff of lavender, either from her soap, or from the herbs in the drawer where her shirts were laid up. (95–96)

In this passage we find insects, fabrics, colors, and bodily odors, none of which belong in the world of Pride and Prejudice.

Both Pride and Prejudice and Morpho Eugenia are realistic—imitations of the real world—but the worlds they represent are not the same. I have not exhausted their differences here. It would also be interesting to bring in other narratives for comparison—Jane Eyre, for instance. But this essay is long enough, and I will save further discussion for another time.