The Happy Historian

PETER GAY 451 abyss (the mise en abime) his first novel opened up, and began to assert value, character, the value ofcharacter and role models. Abbott seems to argue thatwhen Bellow confronted Nothing, he made a choice - just as Abbott made a choice by backing away from the complexities of exploring the implications for reading of 'formal referentiality.' The choice appears to be an existential one, a free choice of values that flow from choosing. Why then, one wonders, the strained attempt to put Sartre in his place in the lengthy chapter on Nausea? By the time we reach the very last chapter on Beckett, Abbott has exhausted his ingenuity. The argument that Malone Dies is such a dead end (as diary fiction) that The Unnameable marks a radical break for Beckett (from writing to the voice) is totally unconvincing. Abbott's insistence that the writing of the final novel is not really writing but voicing again seems to want to draw some kind of line around the (disruptive) force of writing by trying to ignore that the voice of the novel is, after all, writing. Abbott's practice, then, somewhat disappoints, after his clarity ofreasoning has promised so much. On the one hand we have some critics practising inadequate reasoning, and therefore inadequate in practice, because they want to be able to ignore the challenges ofcurrent literary critical debate. On the other hand we have a powerfully logical critic unwilling to take that last step and ask Derrida's simple question: why not reasonably use reason to put the question to reason itself? What might we then not be capable of? The Happy Historian MICHAEL LYNCH Peter Gay. The Tender Passion. Volume II of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud New York: Oxford University Press. 490. $34.95 In case the first volume of Peter Gay's study of bourgeois culture from Victoria to Freud did not, his second volume establishes The Bourgeois Experience as a remarkable contribution to social history. 'I am working to revise current views of the Victorian age, including some of Freud's,' he wrote in Education of the Senses (1984), 'not for the sake of revision but in an attempt to recapture the conflicts, the ambivalence, the diversity of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture.I The Tender Passion continues the agenda of the earlier volume, examining sexuality and love; future volumes will deal with conflict and aggression, since Gay assumes 'love, aggression, and conflict' as 'the fundamental building blocks of the human experience.' His revisionism, like that of most recent sodal histories of the Victorians, claims for them a complex knowledge of sexuality that simpler earlier versions denied. But he outdistances his contemporaries by mountingadefence of the nineteenth-century middling classes against charges of hypocrisy, repression, and prudery. Gay has set his sights on 'the bourgeoisophobes' diagnosis of prevalent UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 56, NUMDER 3, SPRING 1987 452 MICHAEL LYNCH bourgeois attitudes.' The century of Victoria, he argues, 'was at heart more profoundly erotic than ages more casual about theircarnal desires and consummations .' He takes his leitmotif - over against the hypocrite-hunting of Flaubert, Ibsen, Bloomsbury. Steven Marcus, whoever - from a comment Eliza Wilson made in a letter to her fiance, Walter Bagehot: 'Happy marriages are not uncommon, ' The claim itself is no less remarkable than his canvas is enormous. Gay ranges over personal relationships and public movements such as suffragism and moral reform and labour organization; he draws from prescriptive literature, from medical writing, from the popular press; he studies the visual arts and Wagnerian opera; he considers the art of cooking and the impact of express trains; he knows many novels, the history of prostitution, Kingsley's Glandular Christianity, gardening, and the poetry of Coventry Patmore. An elegant. lubricious style carries this diversity ofmaterialsand provides immensely pleasurable reading. His praise of Bagehot might be evoked as his own aim: 'no vulgar reductionist, but, rather, supremely attuned to the inexplicable in things. ' The Bourgeois Experience undertakes a methodological goal as well: Gay offers not psychohistory, he says, but 'history informed by psychoanalysis.' He will grant what a psychohistorian does not: 'the conspicuous share of the social world in the making of minds...