A modern odyssey: Realism, the masses, and nationalism in George Eliot's Felix Holt

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 1996 by Lesjak, Carolyn

Even within this potentially disruptive framework of change, however, there is a unifying force for Eliot, embodied in the figure of the coachman. That force is narrative. For what he can do-and the modern train conductor cannot-is gather stories. Because of the slow pace with which he, unlike the train, moves through the landscape the old coachman is able to gather knowledge of the landscape and its people and this, for Eliot, is the raw material of "fine stories" (83). Indeed, as Eliot assures us, there are enough stories of English life, "enough of English labours in town and country, enough aspects of earth and sky, to make episodes for a modern Odyssey" (76).

And yet already within the space of Eliot's introduction, the threat to this kind of integrated storytelling is all too evident, creeping into even the coachman's relationship to the landscape. Embittered by the railroad's invasive presence on the landscape-materialized in a vision of the countryside "strewn with shattered limbs"-the coachman lapses momentarily into his own form of apoplexy; he is rendered speechless: "[he] looked before him with the blank gaze of one who had driven his coach to the outermost edge of the universe, and saw his leaders plunging into the abyss" (81). Where once there was something to relate, now there is momentarily only blankness and silence, the inability to narrate: the "high prophetic strain" briefly takes the place of the "familiar one of narrative" (81). This "prophetic strain" is both potent and cataclysmic, foretelling a certain future of shattered limbs and destroyed inns which leads our coachman to the brink of the abyss and, significantly, the end of narrative. Represented by the railroad and its sure path of destruction, the prophetic mode is thus intimately connected to modernity itself. It figures for Eliot as all that is counter to narrative, and like the coachman's stories, Eliot's own narrative is susceptible to its powers. Threatened as it is by new forms of technology and new social forces coming into being with that technology, Eliot's story is precariously located in the interstices between two modes of storytelling: the prophetic and the narrative. As I will argue later, when Eliot, in the face of the destructive forces of industrialism, invokes her recuperative vision of national unity she ironically succumbs to the very mode of prophecy she is at such pains to forestall.

Within the context of this fast-disappearing "old-fashioned" storytelling Eliot will attempt to tell us the story of Felix Holt. Like the coach journey, Felix's story is already on the cusp, located somewhere between an old-fashioned narratability and an increasingly destabilized state of modern indeterminacy and speed. On the one hand, this is not new terrain for Eliot. Throughout her oeuvre she grapples with how to recover and draw the right connections between the past and the present; to understand the present as unfolding and evolving from the past in order to adequately see the relationship of each minute part to the whole, no matter how obscure each individual part may at first seem. On the other hand, Felix Holt breaks new ground precisely because the industrial novel's project necessarily requires the introduction of new forces existing very much in the present, namely the newly created phenomena of industrial workers and their labor.