George Eliot and the fetish of realism

That sum of truth is directly associated with the spirit world. Ruskin defines truth as fidelity to nature, so that details can be true or false, "while the picture is considered as a statement of facts" (57n). But Ruskin's nature is a providential one rather than a sheer materiality. Objects in the natural world have meaning as signs-however unclear-of the hidden providential design.31 The value, then, of incorporating the greatest amount of detail in art is that the artist represents a providential text, and the more of that text that can be included, the greater the possibility of getting it right. In this sense, Ruskin's call for the "largest possible quantity of Truth" is a prescription for the greatest potency of the spirit in the realist object.

What happens, then, when the viewer or reader comes into contact with this object? In defining the technical qualities of greatness in art, Ruskin explains "why the word 'Great' is used of this art. It is literally great. It compasses and calls forth the entire human spirit, whereas any other kind of art, being more or less small or narrow, compasses and calls forth only part of the human spirit" (67-68). This doctrine centers on a universal spirit, unlike the ancestral spirits of West-African religious beliefs, and yet the relationship he asserts between spirit and object is similar. The fetishistic quality of the object is evident first in the claim that the object "compasses" the spirit so that it becomes a residence for a spirit that is now "in" the object. But that fetishism is also implicit in the active power Ruskin attributes to the object: as able to "call forth" a spirit within the viewer. In the interaction between viewer and object, the providential spirit of nature acts directly on the viewer, whose inner spirit reacts in a kind of ethereal vibration to the greater spirit contained, in varying potency, within the object. This language suggests an object that actually radiates a supernatural force, as if through a halo-effect that influences all who come in contact with its great spirit. To an African out of Comte's book, one might imagine, Ruskin's "great art" is a powerful fetish, indeed.

This hypostatization is widespread in George Eliot's writing on realism, and it becomes most pronounced when she comments on the effect of art on its audience. In these remarks, the value of realism is routinely premised on its ability to transform the artifact into an object of quasi-- supernatural powers.32 Her 1849 review of J. A. Froude's novel, The Nemesis of Faith, describes this function dramatically:

On certain red-letter days of our existence, it happens to us to discover among the spawn of the press, a book which, as we read, seems to undergo a sort of transfiguration before us. We no longer hold heavily in our hands an octavo of some hundred pages...: but we seem to be in companionship with a spirit, who is transfusing himself into our souls, and is vitalizing them by his superior energy.... (Selected Critical Writings 15)