Bad Logic: Reasoning about Desire in the Victorian Novel by Daniel Wright (review)

It is hard enough to put erotic desire into words. Reasoning about it would seem nearly impossible. Yet in Bad Logic: Reasoning about Desire in the Victorian Novel, Daniel Wright shows that this is precisely what Victorian novelists, in their own odd ways, tried to do. Deploying a confident command of philosophical logic alongside an ear well attuned to moments of textual vulnerability, Wright offers a compelling account of the ways we twist the language of reason when "we're called up to make our erotic impulses intelligible to others or to ourselves" (12).

Bad Logic argues that the sorts of logical mishaps that we tend to associate with banality or absurdity offered, for Victorian novelists, a "vocabulary of . . . erotic life" (184). Through examinations of contradiction (in Charlotte and Emily Brontë), tautology (in Anthony Trollope and George Meredith), vagueness (in George Eliot), and generality (in Henry James), Wright locates the places where a lack of logical clarity becomes an enabling language for sharing and understanding the most personal and guarded of experiences. Patient and illuminating close readings are set against analyses of philosophical logic (the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, George Boole, John Stuart Mill, and G. W. F. Hegel, to name a few). The relations among philosophers, critics, and novelists are unusually giving: none offers a template into which the others must fit. Rather, the effect is accumulative. Over its chapters, Bad Logic builds a lexicon and teaches a sensitivity toward a literary language of desire. Bad Logic is not a book that will teach much about erotic experience, as such. And, other than its philosophical touchstones, it does not offer much in the way of historicization. It is instead a book about the ways in which Victorians tried to communicate and think through their experiences and identities. Bad Logic is, at its core, a book of deep generosity. Where I had often seen stammer and bluster, or overly pat aphorism, Wright hears searching, and scared, attempts to communicate. Beyond just offering readings, Bad Logic teaches how to listen.

Though Wright speaks about logic in fairly general terms, there does seem to be one figure that is given priority: tautology. Wright in his introduction offers tautology as the seed of his thought on the subject. The book ends with tautology as well: "Whether one hears me or not, whether one acknowledges the self-evidence of my claim . . . I am what I am" (184). Both of these moments are emblematic of the book's refreshing critical honesty: the author always seems present, not directing but rather thinking with us. Just as importantly, though, they suggest that logic, as it develops in this argument, is intimately related with this sort of subjective tautology, the relation of "I" as subject and "I" as predicate. Wright suggests that his thinking on tautology "led . . . to its opposite: contradiction" (5). Though the chapter on contradiction comes before the chapter on tautology, it does seem to develop out of it. "I am not what I am" lies at the heart of his interest in contradiction, as exemplified by Catherine Earnshaw's famous exclamation, "Nelly, I am Heathcliff" (Brontë qtd. in Wright 33). This is all to say that contradiction and tautology come to seem two sides of the same coin: the relation between the self as subject of knowledge and the self as object of knowledge. The discussion of "vagueness" in Eliot touches on the fuzzy limits of definition and categories, but it is most concerned with "the difficult relationship between formal reflection and embodied immediacy" (120). It offers, in other words, another version of the difficulties of thinking with certainty about our own uncertain selves.

One of the most unexpectedly rewarding features of Bad Logic is the mirror it holds up to the current post-critical turn in literary studies. Wright, though often writing with a disarmingly personal touch, is never overbearingly reflexive about the nature of literary criticism. Yet the axes that...