Thackeray's Skeptical Narrative and the "Perilous Trade" of Authorship (review)

Judith L. Fisher, associate professor at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, contributes a fascinating book that encompasses Thackeray's familiar texts, Vanity Fair, The History of Pendennis, and Henry Esmond, as well as the later novels, The Newcomes, The Adventures of Phillip and The Virginians. Fisher asserts that Thackeray's narrative technique represents a deliberate "hermeneutic of skepticism" (1). Where Thackeray's contemporary critics read these works as a failure of narrative control, Fisher notes in them "deliberate attempts to disrupt the reading process in order to thwart any stable interpretation" (1).

These failings have particularly been leveled at The Adventures of Phillip; however, Fisher argues persuasively that the narrator, Pen, is actually "a narratorial triumph; Thackeray used language so dexterously that he created the illusion of a consciousness in the act of creating" (247). Fisher notes that "Pen's shifting narrative stances, his manipulation of his identity, and the structural games within the novel disassociate Pen from Thackeray and, instead, ask us to recognize that language is not a static product from a writer outside the text but an activity that creates an illusion of a consciousness by means of our reading" (246).

Of great interest is the chapter "'The Right Line I': Narratorial Collusion and the Perils of 'Sternism.'" The persona of art critic Michael Angelo Titmarsh, Fisher argues, allowed Thackeray to use "personal narration as his critical voice to dramatize critical judgements and his method of reading and seeing without sermonizing" (47). Thackeray accomplishes multiple purposes with this narrative voice; he creates the illusion of intimacy by deliberately using "I" to establish a relationship with his reader, simultaneously maintaining a distance in order to "manipulate the semantic conventions of intimacy and self-exposure" (46). The narrative voice accomplishes this, fully aware of the risk of falling into "Sternism: when the artist becomes the performer without even recognizing his falsity" (46). The syntax and structure of Titmarsh's commentary reveals Thackeray's conception of the relationship of the artist to the work of art and of the author to the text, creating an illusion that seems real, but one that requires distance in order to maintain and control the illusion.

Chapter Four, "The Rebellious Text and the Resisting Reader," draws attention to "the narcissistic seduction of art for artist and audience" (135) by considering Thackeray's many sirens. Thackeray's "linguistically and sexually seductive women are metaphors for literary texts and explorations into the delicate balance between using conventions of representation for selfish effect or to strengthen the bond of an interpretive community" (137). Fisher amplifies Thackeray's concern with women who "embody necessity, the driving power of desire which overrides selfcontrol and the awareness of others" (164) by connecting them to Spenser's Duessa from The Faerie Queen and to commodified art objects. The reader, who may be seduced, must therefore navigate between "attraction and repulsion, admiration and triviality" (164), and maintain throughout a skeptical stance. One question that naturally arises from the numerous sirens, Becky, Emily, Blanche, Beatrix, Ethel, Maria, and Agnes, and from Fisher's solid reading, is for some wider context concerning Thackeray's complex relationship with women. As Fisher concludes, Thackeray "does not kill his seductresses, even the most fatal," nor are these women "depicted as any more miserable than respectable counterparts such as Amelia" (165).

Other chapters of the book cover specific novels. Fisher observes that in Pendennis the narrative technique "sophisticates the critical method of Vanity Fair" (96) and employs close attention to the pictorial initial letters. The History of Henry Esmond displays a different narrative strategy, one that "denies the heroic vision of self in the act of creating a character who pursues and seems to achieve that vision" (177). Thackeray's art criticism is used to suggest that Henry is unable to recognize the story he actually creates; his "narrative choices and language hide or disguise his own exertion of power and manipulation...