Narrative Middles: Navigating the Nineteenth-Century British Novel edited by Caroline Levine and Mario Ortiz-Robles (review)

“Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning,” writes George Eliot in a tone of coolly sophisticated self-consciousness in the epigraph at the start of Daniel Deronda (1876) (edited by Graham Handley [Oxford, 1988], 3). Men and women in the nineteenth century, intellectual ones at least, were intensely interested in beginnings; and this interest, as Edward Said once stated, was no doubt “the corollary result of not believing that any beginning can be located” (Beginnings: Intention and Method [Granta, 1985], 5). When Charles Darwin formulated his theory of evolution by natural selection he effectively demonstrated that, in spite of the title of his celebrated book, organic life didn’t have an origin, only beginnings. To put it simplistically, he took a theological concept and replaced it with a philosophical and scientific one. This had far-reaching implications for narrative, as literary historians have amply testified. Beginnings, as novelists like Charles Dickens and Eliot conceded, in part because they learned from ingenious predecessors such as Laurence Sterne, seemed increasingly arbitrary. So did endings. In the nineteenth-century novel, an ending constitutes an irreducible aporia, as J. Hillis Miller has pointed out, because “it is impossible ever to tell whether a given narrative is complete” (“The Problematic of Ending in Narrative,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 33.1 [1978], 5–6). Like beginnings, endings are a matter of make-believe.

It is the conviction of Caroline Levine, Mario Ortiz-Robles, and the other contributors to this collection of essays that, in contrast to beginnings and endings, scholars have overlooked narrative middles. “In our postmillennial moment,” the editors announce in their introduction, “there seems to be a strong sense among academics in the humanities that arguments over origins and culminations have played themselves out”; and that, as “fictions fraught with meaning,” beginnings and endings “no longer seem to be a terribly useful heuristic for those eager to debate politics, philosophy, and the future of humanities” (2). I don’t share this assumption; at least, I believe that, so long as beginnings and endings are not collapsed into “origins and culminations,” thinking about them as for example Said did in his odd but inspired book Beginnings (1975) remains a productive means of posing relevant ideological and narratological problems. Levine and Ortiz-Robles seem to concede as much when, in a discreet footnote, they emphasise the value of Narrative Beginnings (2008), Brian Richardson’s excellent collection of essays (the title of which Narrative Middles obviously echoes). But they are certainly onto something. Partly perhaps for pedagogical reasons—in a classroom it is easier to persuade fifteen or even fifty students to discuss the same passage if it is comprised of the text’s opening or concluding paragraphs—middles have been neglected. Academics tend not to meddle with middles.

In epistemological as well as pedagogical terms, this is not especially surprising. Narrative middles are even harder to define than narrative beginnings and endings. For heuristic purposes, it is generally possible to identify the beginning of a beginning, if not its ending; and the ending of an ending, if not its beginning. Identifying the beginning or ending of a middle, let alone the middle of a middle, is rather more difficult. Indeed, it is particularly problematic in relation to the nineteenth-century novel, which in its dominant, three-decker form is famously pot-bellied: great rolls or folds of redundant, fleshy matter tend to envelop and conceal the narrative equivalent of its navel. Levine and Ortiz-Robles are acutely conscious of the challenges entailed in redirecting scholars’ attention to this faintly embarrassing section of the nineteenth-century novel’s anatomy. They even admit that “it might seem politically worrying to embrace the middle, since it so clearly lacks drama and conviction—calling to mind such humdrum states as the middle-of-theroad, the middle class, middling quality, and the jadedness of midlife.” But...