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  • Lost Causes: Historical Consciousness in Victorian Literature
  • Rick Rylance (bio)
Lost Causes: Historical Consciousness in Victorian Literature, by Jason B. Jones; pp. xii + 134. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2006, $59.95, $22.95 paper, $9.95 audio CD.

Jason B. Jones has written a concise, judicious, and lucid book with a forceful argument. The argument is that despite commitments to historicism, many Victorian writers faced challenges to their assumptions because the past is irretrievable. Empirically, this irretrievability is because there are inevitable gaps in the historical record; epistemologically, because the past cannot be understood thoroughly enough; and representationally, because realism cannot provide depictions adequate to the complexities of life and circumstance. Jones's question therefore is: what did Victorian writers with historicist [End Page 310] inclinations do with the gaps in knowledge, thought, and representation that arise inevitably from this scenario? It is a good question.

Jones's answer draws on post-Lacanian psychoanalysis and Friedrich Nietzche's trenchant attacks on positivist historicism in the 1870s. Nietzsche deplored historicism because it created falsehoods: whether heroic, iconic, celebratory, or mordantly bleak, such history was written with contemporary purposes in mind. Assertions of historical causality are similarly flawed, especially in deterministic form, and serve to legitimate the present by picturing outcomes as inevitable. Jones's clever title therefore articulates a double sense of "lost causes." Victorian historicism is doomed by empirical malfunction. It is also doomed because claims to identify causation cannot be sustained: establishing "true" causation, like "true" history, will always be a lost as well as a self-interested cause. This land of lost causes may sound an unhappy place to be, but for Jones, following Nietzsche, it is a realm of relative emancipation.

For Jones, Nietzsche's question as to why anyone should invest in deterministic history is, in psychoanalytic terms, an issue of fantasy. Though we now regard determinism as rather fatalistic, it can also support a cheery belief in progress. Nietzsche sneered that such beliefs encourage complacency and flatter illusory intellectual mastery, but, asks Jones, isn't this the point? For Jones, the past, shaped in a certain way, seductively masks the vertigo induced by our ungrounded psychoanalytic being. Psychoanalytic method is not about the identification of hidden (or lost) causation, but the exposure of the inevitable gap between representation and the Lacanian "real," that impish category that always corrodes any formulation given to reality. Thus, historicist-minded Victorians found their aspirations continually thwarted in the act of depicting the events of the past.

Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot occupy most of Jones's attention. In their work, he argues, we discover the "conceptual advantages" of the ambiguities entailed in historical representation and, through their exploration of the "factors that elude discursive elaboration" in historical narratives, gain a refreshed approach to history and causality (17). Carlyle's The French Revolution (1837), for instance, overwhelms the reader with its rhetorical density and releases a vision of history as possibility rather than "what happened." The book's well-known imagistic ambiguities—are events depicted as purification or nightmare?—create, Jones asserts in an intriguing if rather puzzling phrase, a "thermodynamic approach to causality" (28), presumably an enriching but entropic end to determining meaning.

Similar arguments are made elsewhere. The chapter on Dickens focuses on Barnaby Rudge (1841) and A Tale of Two Cities (1859), selecting the parts "that seem enigmatic or perverse" (39). In these novels, Jones argues, the social and subjective come apart, releasing writer and reader from troubling about how the one might determine the other. "For Dickens," he claims, "the revolutionary impulse fundamentally is not for change, or even for retribution; rather . . . it is an epistemological vainglory" (45). Again, I'm not sure of the truth of this, but I respond to the vigour of the phrasing. The best chapter in my view is that on Brontë's Shirley (1849), which takes a genuinely under-explored novel and emphasises how Brontë examines causal indeterminacy and how difficult it is in her world to know right action or belief. Jones may pitch it a bit high in writing of the "press of modernity: a recognition of the way traditional...

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