George Eliot and the fetish of realism

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 2002 by Logan, Peter Melville

As if to acknowledge this problem, the most frequent metaphorical vehicle used in representing fetishism is the image of the object that comes to life. Karl Marx explains, for example, that fetishism occurs when "the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own" (Capital 165). In commodity fetishism, products appear transformed by their entry into exchange relations. A wooden table is just a table:

But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will. (163-164)

Using the same metaphor, Comte represents fetishism as if the material world were alive in every tree and rock. Similarly, Tylor illustrates fetishism with a story (originally from Charles Darwin) of "two Malay women in Keeling Island who held a wooden spoon dressed in clothes like a doll; this spoon had been carried to the grave of a dead man, and becoming inspired at full moon, in fact lunatic, it danced about convulsively like a table or a hat at a modern spirit-seance" (2: 152).21 All of these are examples of what Zizek, in "Fetishism and Its Vicissitudes," calls the "paradox of moving statues, of dead objects coming alive and/or of petrified living objects" that comes into play when "the barrier which separates the living from the dead is transgressed" (Plague 89, 88). And both sides of that paradox are evident in Mill on the Floss in its juxtaposition of the immobile Mr. Tulliver with Mrs. Tulliver's vibrant household objects.

While fetishism and representation are essentially inimical to one another, this opposition can magically evaporate when representation ceases to be pure representation-a disembodied set of abstractions-and begins to take on the quality and status of an object in its own right. An ornate book, finely bound in kid leather and gold-stamped, contains its representation within an object of insistent materiality. And, to a lesser degree, all books in circulation are similar objects. Were such a representation-as-object imagined to be alive, the triumph of fetishism in its rivalry with representation would be complete.

Such is the case in the realist novel. The rise of realism in philosophy is a familiar story in which classical generality yields to realist particularity.28 In the epistemology of realism, particulars are significant in their relation to an assumed overarching general design, and so particulars become meaningful as a way to access that larger general truth. Ian Watt's definition of formal realism, for example, holds that the novel "works by exhaustive presentation" in order to "make the words bring [the] object home to us in all its concrete particularity" (30, 29). Through this generous heaping of particulars, fiction produces the illusion that "the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience" (32). The realist use of particularity thus encourages the reader to attribute a kind of life to the narrative, to imagine that behind or within this inert body of words resides a living spirit. Major critics of realism in Watt's generation insisted that the critical assessment of realism hinged on the extent to which a novel succeeds at becoming "an imitation of life" (Hardy 5). Novels "must give us a sense that what is being conveyed across to us by the words on the page is life ..." (Kettle 13). Such phrases refer to the mimetic capabilities of representation, but the same words describe an object that succeeds only by coming to life. Thus, Harvey, whose criticism centers on "the question of mimetic adequacy," writes that "Dreiser ... still has the power of deeply moving the reader because the life he has imagined is indeed alive" (28, 30). As an aesthetic criterion of evaluation, this requirement ties the success or failure of the object to a form of hypostasis. Critics avoid the problem of fetishism by retaining the distinction between representation and represented object. But it is the business of realism in the novel to obscure that distinction, through its heaping of particulars, so that a "report of human experience" can become "full and authentic," even when there is no historical experience to report. Realism in the novel thus works by creating an illusion of life, and in this function we can say that the realist object always strives to attain the status of the fetish.