Writing Place: Mimesis, Subjectivity and Imagination in the Works of George Gissing by Rebecca Hutcheon (review)

Midway through Veranilda (1904), George Gissing's unfinished novel about Rome in the sixth century, we learn about the hero Basil's roots and how poorly his privileged position had prepared him for his beloved Veranilda's disappearance and for the war between the Roman emperor Justinian and the Gothic king Totila. Gissing explains how Basil's "dispirited idleness" is occasioned by want of a bath: "for all the Roman's exercises and amusements were associated with the practice of luxurious bathing, and without that refreshment the gymnasium, the tennis-court, the lounge, no longer charmed as before" ([The Harvester Press, 1987], 153). Once responsible for the cleanliness of the Romans and for promoting social interaction, the bath is now a relic, and vanishing with it is a way of life to which Basil had grown accustomed: "Now, to enter the Thermae was to hear one's footsteps resound in a marble wilderness; to have statues for companions and a sense of ruin for one's solace" (153). Places, as we see here, serve multiple rhetorical functions: the Thermae enables Basil (and Gissing) to reminisce about earlier and better times. Its abandonment leads to the changes in Basil's appearance and colors his current views.

Basil's lament for, and internalization of, such losses—he "thought more than the average Roman about these changes" (153)—liken him to the cast of sensitive and conscientious figures that people Gissing's fiction, characters who, like Edwin Reardon and Henry Ryecroft, have felt the weight of the world on their shoulders. This episode would have been at home in Rebecca Hutcheon's rich and insightful study, Writing Place: Mimesis, Subjectivity and Imagination in the Works of George Gissing, which attends to some of the ways in which Gissing resists clear spatial demarcations and which illuminates some of the nuances in his writing. "In Gissing," Hutcheon argues, "sites are subject to shifts and fluxes that challenge the reader's preset expectations" (2). Gissing ruminated on these dynamics throughout his career. In the essay "On Battersea Bridge," which appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette (30 November 1883) many years before he wrote Veranilda, he describes pedestrians heading home, "too weary to spend one thought upon the noble picture to be seen for a turning of the head" (Collected Essays, edited by Pierre Coustillas [Grayswood Press, 2015], 102). The first-person narrator finds company in a working man, who "was more awake to leisurely sympathies than his fellows" (104). The narrator projects his own interests onto his neighbor, imagining him to be of like mind. The conceit, of course, is that no two people can see the same thing in the same way. When the man notices the narrator's appeal, he nods downward, and observes, "Throws up a deal o'mud don't it?" (104). Identification does not necessarily mean consensus, and Gissing, even in this early essay, suggests dialogic relationships between literature and geography, between seeing and reading.

Scholarship by Michelle Elizabeth Allen, Richard Dennis, Jason Finch, Jeremy Tambling, David Welsh, Julian Wolfreys, Tim Youngs, and others has opened new ways of reading Gissing geographically. Yet, as Hutcheon suggests, criticism has routinely revolved around three dominant strands—biography, the urban, and chronology—all of which imply mimesis. These narrow foci may spur us to overlook some of the imaginative aspects of Gissing's fiction and to concentrate on a select number of texts and locations. Writing Place contributes to scholarship by canvasing larger literary and geographical terrains. The four chapters assembled here examine Gissing's treatment of the North and the South, London in the 1880s, the country, and the Mediterranean. The conclusion offers a spatial chronology by considering representative works from three phases of Gissing's career. The rewards of this study lie in Hutcheon's ability to extract every drop of meaning from different passages, the poetic quality of her own...