Essays on Gissing

ELT 46 : 4 2003 Essays on Gissing Bouwe Postmus, ed. A Garland for Gissing. New York: Rodopi, 2001. vi + 290 pp. Paper $56.00 THIS IS A COLLECTION of papers from a Gissing conference held in Amsterdam in 1999. As part of Rodopi's Costerus New Series it possesses the virtues and limitations of its genre: a reasonably wide range of topic and approach, but on the other hand rather brief papers; a wide range of quality in both thought and expression, but on the other hand the less good are blessedly short, and the best offer the clear distilled essence of a single idea. It often also happens, as it does in this collection , that one of the chief benefits to be gleaned by a relative newcomer to the author concerned is the wide range of references in the papers to other critics and books, so that a short but thoroughly annotated and contextualised bibliography of Gissing criticism might be built through a reading of the volume. I was particularly impressed by the frequent reference to David Grylls's The Paradox of'Gissing, an indication of the importance of an issue that often surfaces in these essays —the problem of knowing what Gissing really wants us to believe about a given subject. Both within arguments and across papers there is a sense of uneasiness about Gissing^ indeterminacy, about inconsistencies in the narrative voice. To some degree such uncertainty is endemic to fiction, or language, but it seems particularly urgent in relation to novelists struggling, as Gissing and Hardy both were, with a growing distaste for the constraints of realism. John Sloan quotes a relevant fragment of a Gissing letter: "I am able to look at both sides, & to laugh at the weaknesses of both," but it is disappointing that the contribution that addresses this issue directly, L. R. Leavis's "Gissing in Context," offers more gossip than analysis. The collection has some recurrent themes: Gissing's presentation of independently minded urban women, his version of, or reaction against, late nineteenth-century realism, or his perception of class issues; Darwin is also a pervasive presence, as author both of The Origin of Species and of The Descent of Man. Gissing, as we all know, deals with issues of first significance to understanding the period during which he wrote—it is a primary reason why he is now so highly regarded. Two of the most interesting essays discuss the implications of commercialism in In the Year of the Jubilee, David Glover's "This Spectacle of a World's Wonder" and William Greenslade's "Writing Against Him448 BOOK REVIEWS self." Glover raises a number of concerns that might usefully have formed the centre of a paper—indeed several of them do so elsewhere in the volume, like the idea of the woman-about-town (see Maria Teresa Chialant's "The Feminization of the City in Gissing's Fiction"), or the marriage-question for the new woman ( see Emma Liggins's "Idiot Heroines and Worthless Women") or the sexual double standard (passim)— and consequently the energy of his main idea is rather dispersed and his argument obscured; and yet he does provoke valuable speculation about the relationships among science, advertising and rampant paper capitalism (see also here Raymond Baubles's welcome comparison of Meredith's One of Our Conquerors and The Whirlpool, though his concluding moral homily is surely a misjudgment). Greenslade's piece is more accomplished, indeed in my judgement the best in the collection. He too raises subjects he has not space to handle, like Gissing's realism (see Simon James's "Experiments in Realism" and Michael Cronin's "Gissing's Criticism of Dickens"—though many other writers glance at the question in passing), but his argument about Gissing's ability to embody with intensity what he particularly hated about his time, about the "combination of ideological combativeness and sociological insight" in the novel, is cogent and convincing (in this context , Simon James quotes from a letter Gissing wrote to H. G. Wells: "I have a conviction that all I love & believe in is going to the devil; at the same time I try to watch with interest this process of destruction...