like a ghost in its old home
“The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something in his life experience that makes him take the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it. This holds true for all creative people to a greater or lesser extent, but it is especially obvious with the artist. Existence becomes a problem that needs an ideal answer; but when you no longer accept the collective solution to the problem of existence, then you must fashion your own. The work of art is, then, the ideal answer of the creative type to the problem of existence as he takes it in —not only the existence of the external world, but especially his own: who he is as a painfully separate person with nothing shared to lean on. He has to answer to the burden of his extreme individuation, his so painful isolation… His creative work is at the same time the expression of his heroism and the justification of it. It is his “private religion,” as [Otto] Rank put it.”
– Ernest Becker in ‘The Denial of Death’, via an excellent post by mills.
I finished reading ‘Middlemarch’ last night. Until recently the only other Eliot I’d read was ‘The Mill on the Floss’, which I enjoyed very much but didn’t quite adore. ‘Middlemarch’, though, is something else. Even though it’s sometimes seen as the uber-novel of Victorian England, it’s quite unlike anything else I’ve read from that period. In fact what it most frequently brought to mind was ‘Moby-Dick’, not only in terms of its sheer length but in its digressive and discursive style: an endlessly reflective psychological narrative orbiting around the key lodestones of a plot defined by an almost paralytic lack of action, combined with a narrative insistence on seeing each character from every possible empathetic angle. I enjoyed it very much!
Anyway, the above quote from Ernest Becker reminded me of Edward Casaubon in ‘Middlemarch’. The Encycopedia Britannica describes him as a ‘pompous and ineffectual middle-aged scholar’, a rather cruel description which will suffice for a superficial reading, but which to me seems at least unfair and at most factually untrue (ultimately he is nothing if not ‘effective’). In the novel, Casaubon is struggling to complete a magnum opus of classical scholarship that will prove ‘The Key to All Mythologies’. As much as he attempts to objectify his work in terms of academic achievement, it becomes very much his own ‘private religion’, his own personal solution to the unresolved problem of his existence. But soon after his marriage to the idealistic Dorothea Brooke, it becomes clear that his great work is never to be finished:
‘…there are some kinds of authorship in which by far the largest result is the uneasy susceptibility accumulated in the consciousness of the author — one knows of the river by a few streaks amid a long-gathered deposit of uncomfortable mud. That was the way with Mr. Casaubon’s hard intellectual labors. Their most characteristic result was not the “Key to all Mythologies,” but a morbid consciousness that others did not give him the place which he had not demonstrably merited — a perpetual suspicious conjecture that the views entertained of him were not to his advantage — a melancholy absence of passion in his efforts at achievement, and a passionate resistance to the confession that he had achieved nothing.’
In the immediate world of the novel, Casaubon is something of a dry character. Compared to the youthful, romantic glow of Dorothea’s other admirers, he is one who ‘stood rayless’. He is bookish and reserved, his words enveloped in a labyrinth of sub-clauses and apocrypha. His marriage becomes unhappy through his neglect, and it is left to the reader to infer that he and Dorothea never have sex. He would surely fit Becker’s description of a neurotic, one who has: ‘more trouble with their lies than others. The world is too much with them, and the techniques they have developed for holding it at bay and cutting it down to size finally begin to choke the person himself. This is neurosis in a nutshell: the miscarriage of clumsy lies about reality.’
Or, as Eliot describes him:
‘It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self – never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted…Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our poor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less under anxious control.’
And yet while Casaubon could be read as a model for Becker’s neurotic (‘one [who] simply cannot justify his own heroism in his own inner symbolic fantasy’) there’s a key difference between Eliot’s portrait and Becker’s ideas of character. Put simply, Becker’s instinct is to compartmentalise, whereas Eliot seeks to universalise. Eliot never renders Casaubon’s inadequacy as anything other than an ordinary human failure. Those poor little eyes, those timorous lips – they are our own features, not unique to this strange individual. ‘Instead of wondering at this result of misery in Mr. Casaubon, I think it quite ordinary,’ comments the novel’s narrator: ‘Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.’
Becker’s insistence on distinguishing between ‘normal’, ‘neurotic’ and ‘creative’ modes of personality seems to me to be arbitrary, and ultimately unhelpful. Part of his thesis in the passages quoted rests on the assumption that there is something approaching the extraordinary about possessing a heightened sense of awareness that allows one to start ‘sniffing at eternal problems like life and death’. He suggests that if taken too far, this tendency leads to the neurotic or creative type, or both. But why should it? Perhaps Becker doesn’t mean for his types to be exclusive, but I find something deluded in this insistence on setting such people apart from the rest of humanity. Kierkegaard may have said that the majority ‘tranquilise themselves with the trivial,’ but until we know what precisely counts as ‘trivial’ and what it would mean to be ‘awakened’, this hardly seems a useful distinction.
Moreover, to read a character like Casaubon as purely ‘neurotic’ would be to cast his life solely in the convenient light of retrospection. Is there really nothing to be redeemed from his type? Was he always ‘neurotic’, even as a child? Could he not have been truly ‘creative’ once? Can we not allow a neurotic or a creative the liberty of being ‘normal’ from time to time? Surely Casaubon was talented once – or at least he was perceived as having talent, which is really all that counts – he only seems a failure to us because we find him in the twilight of his days, when the narrator is inclined to draw his personality as dwarfed by a marriage spoiled by his dedication to academia. But at least Eliot has the self-awareness to sense that Casaubon’s fate never seemed inevitable:
‘For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardor in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardor of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual change! In the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly: you and I may have sent some of our breath towards infecting them, when we uttered our conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions: or perhaps it came with the vibrations from a woman’s glance.’
