Abstract
A man foresees his own death. He begins by expecting an ending, and, later, interrupts himself as the end begins or appears at least on the verge of beginning. As he awaits the scene during the final month of his life, with which his mind has confronted him repeatedly, he recalls the appearance and development of his telepathic powers, narrating to the reader scenes from his past wherein he has had instances of both insight and foresight.
Optical signal processing in real time remains a thing of the future.
Friedrich A. Kittler
My inward representation of … faces … is so vivid as to make portraits … unsatisfactory to me.
George Eliot
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Notes
Fredric Jameson, ‘Marx’s Purloined Letter’, in Michael Sprinker (ed.), Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (London: Verso, 1999), 26–67; 38.
Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 213. Hereafter MB. Derrida works through these ideas, in part as a critical response to and extension of the work of
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968).
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological study of visibility and invisibility has proved invaluable in recent studies of Victorian photography, particularly those by Lindsay Smith, Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry: The Enigma of Visibility in Ruskin, Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
Carol Mavor, Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). Mavor’s discussion of the concept of invisibility also incorporates Lacan’s response to Merleau- Ponty (80–4), and is particularly useful in thinking through the possible relationship between invisibility and spectrality. Also of particular interest is Luce Irigaray’s critical reworking of the question of the invisible, in ‘The Invisible of the Flesh: A Reading of Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, “The Intertwining — The Chiasm”’, in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Caroline Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 151–84.
Athena Vrettos, Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 110.
Charles Swann, ‘Déjà Vu: Déjà Lu: “The Lifted Veil” as an Experiment in Art’, in Literature and History, 5:1 (1979), 40–57; 43, 40. Elsewhere, Swann suggests that ‘Eliot uses “The Lifted Veil” to dramatize an enquiry into the nature of artistic production and narrative method’ (46).
Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 78.
Nicholas Royle, Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 110. Hereafter TL.
Terry Eagleton, ‘Power and Knowledge in “The Lifted Veil”’, in Literature and History, 9:1 (1983), 52–61; 58. The question of science and pseudo-science occupies several of the commentators on Eliot’s novella. Judith Siford comments on the story’s emphasis ‘on the supernatural, on bizarre pseudo-scientific experiments, attempted murder and gothic horror’ as those elements which most persistently ‘interrupt and fragment’ the narrative and its realist conventions
Judith Siford, ‘“Dismal Loneliness”: George Eliot, Auguste Comte and “The Lifted Veil”’ in The George Eliot Review, 26 (1995), 46–52; 46.
B. M. Gray, ‘Pseudoscience and George Eliot’s “The Lifted Veil”, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 36:4 (1981), 407–23 places Eliot’s novella in ‘the social milieu to which she immediately belonged’ before living with George Henry Lewes, which ‘embraced the now debunked, intrinsically Victorian phenomena of phrenology, mesmerism and clairvoyance’ (409). There is of course, in the story’s interest in phrenology, telepathy, clairvoyance and mesmerism a somewhat supernaturalized manifestation of other nineteenth-century interests in contemporary psychological debates which traverse the boundaries between science and pseudo-science, particularly as these pertain to matters of the individual’s heightened sensibility and nervous disorders, as these are given expression through Latimer’s narration of his own pathological condition and the symptoms thereof. For a study of the Victorian fascination with mesmerism, see Winter, Mesmerized.
Kate Flint, ‘Blood, Bodies, and The Lifted Veil’, in Nineteenth-Century Literature, 51:4 (1997), 455–73; 456.
George Eliot, ‘The Natural History of German Life’, in Thomas Pinney (ed.), Essays of George Eliot (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 433.
George Eliot, Janet’s Repentance (245–412) in Scenes of Clerical Life, ed. David Lodge (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 364.
Of the phantasm in the text of Freud, Althusser remarks that it ‘... designates something other than objective reality, an other — no less objective — reality, although it does not appear to the senses... The phantasm is thus a reality sui generis. The phantasm is linked to desire. The phantasm is unconscious. The phantasm is a kind of “fantasy”, of “scenario”, of “mise en scène”, in which something serious happens and in which nothing happens, for all transpires in an extreme affective tension (the affect) that literally congeals the characters (the “imagos”), which are also phantasms, in their reciprocal positions of desire or interdiction. One thus sees that the phantasm is contradictory, since something occurs in it, but nothing happens; that everything is immobile, but in an intense form of tension that is the very opposite of immobility, in which everything is desire and all is interdiction; and finally, one sees that the phantasm is a totality composed of phantasms, that is, of itself, of its own null repetition… The concept of the phantasm is nothing other, in Freud, than the concept of the unconscious in all its extension and all its comprehension. … in the phantasm Freud designates something extremely precise, an existent — though nonmaterial — reality … that is the very existence of its object: the unconscious. But we are also obliged to observe that the name Freud gives to that reality, in other words, the name Freud gives to the unconscious when he attains the zenith of his theory in order to think it is the name of a metaphor: phantasm.’ Louis Althusser, Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan, trans. Jeffrey Melhman, ed. Olivier Corpet and François Matheron (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 103–4.
Jacques Derrida, ‘Sending: On Representation’, trans. Peter and Mary Ann Caws, Social Research (Summer 1982), 294–326; 314.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan, int. David Macey (London: Penguin, 1994), 72.
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, cit. Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth- Century Fiction (London: Ark Press, 1983), 167. Beer comments that ‘web imagery is found everywhere in Victorian writing’, citing not only Darwin but also Hardy, Lewes and Tyndall (168). The metaphor is picked up by Elizabeth Deeds Ermath, for whom George Eliot’s fictional world is structured as ‘a web of relationships, a network of crossing and recrossing pathways that has immense mutual resonance across space and centuries … Her historical narrative is a perspective system made up of perspective systems … Every narrative moment in George Eliot belongs to an entire … system of awareness’
Ermath, The English Novel in History (London: Routledge, 1997), 159–60. Royle cautions against getting caught in the skein of ‘intratextuality and all the metaphors, motifs, concepts, representations of webs and weaving in Eliot’ (TL 87).
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© 2002 Julian Wolfreys
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Wolfreys, J. (2002). Phantom Optics: George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil. In: Victorian Hauntings. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-1358-6_4
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