Abstract
For Stanley Cavell, John Milton’s seventeenth-century description of “a meet and happy conversation” as the goal of marriage hints at the intellectual reciprocity enacted in good conversation that Cavell terms “acknowledgment.” George Meredith’s 1879 novel The Egoist simultaneously evokes and disrupts this implicit association between conversation and intimate partnership, contextualizing romantic aspirations with a prescient dramatization of what twentieth-century philosophers would call “speech performativity.” The Egoist reverses the familiar nineteenth-century marriage plot, exposing the intersection of social power, intimacy, and language use in the Victorian institution of marriage by depicting a woman’s efforts to escape from the consequences of her promise to marry. Reading The Egoist in dialogue with J.L. Austin and against the backdrop of Cavell and Milton, this chapter articulates the historical and material conditions governing the “happiness” of both conversation and the “forms of life” it may index.
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Notes
- 1.
John Milton, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and the Judgement of Martin Bucer; Tetrachordon; & An Abridgment of Colasterion (London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1820), p. 27; Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 87. Hereafter abbreviated Pursuits.
- 2.
Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 22. Hereafter abbreviated Contesting.
- 3.
For Cavell’s reading of Austen and Eliot, see Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 119–31.
- 4.
Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 333. Hereafter abbreviated MWM.
- 5.
George Meredith, The Egoist (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), pp. 66, 159.
- 6.
Jamie Bartlett, “Meredith & Ends,” ELH 76, no. 3 (2009): 547–76, p. 547. Bartlett offers a summary of the critical disdain for Meredith and an exemplary reading that takes Meredith more seriously. Like the present chapter, Bartlett’s founds its reading on resonances between Meredith’s work and “the philosophy of language,” focusing specifically on the philosophy implicit in the “granular descriptions” that, as she finds, tend to take the place of plot development.
- 7.
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. JH Bernard (New York: Hafner Press, 1951), §15, p. 62. Kant includes conversation among the “pleasant arts,” which “are directed merely to enjoyment” (§44, p. 148). For the present chapter, this conception of conversation as a quotidian “pleasant art” suffices, but for a fuller investigation of the relation between aesthetics and conversation, see my article “A Many-Sided Substance: the Philosophy of Conversation in Woolf, Russell, and Kant” in the Journal of Modern Literature (Spring 2017).
- 8.
Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 324. Hereafter abbreviated MWM.
- 9.
Austin terms the more psychological effects of utterances their “perlocutionary” consequences, as opposed to the performative consequences achieved by linguistic convention; like all of Austin’s categories, however, this distinction between perlocutionary and illocutionary is blurry. Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 101.
- 10.
As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has pointed out with characteristic wit, “The marriage ceremony is, indeed, so central to the origins of ‘performativity’ (given the strange, disavowed but unattenuated persistence of the exemplary in this work) that a more accurate name for How to Do Things with Words might have been How to say (or write) ‘I do,’ about twenty million times without winding up any more married than you started out. (Short title: I Do-Not!).” See Eve Sedgwick, “Queer performativity: Henry Jamesʼs The art of the novel,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1, no. 1 (1993): 1–16, p. 3. What Sedgwick is directing attention to is the (queer) way in which Austin’s own work “performatively” voids performative utterances of their illocutionary force. Austin writes a great deal about the necessity of particular circumstances in order to grant performative utterances effective force, and the various ways in which such utterances can be “infelicitous.” For instance, reciting the marriage vow to your partner outside of the presence of an official of the state or church will not effect your marriage; nor will reciting “I do” accomplish a union if, like Rochester in Jane Eyre, one happens to have a wife already, locked in his attic; nor will it accomplish a marriage if the words are exchanged between two men, or two women, in a dwindling number of US states. But performative utterances are also “infelicitous” when offered in philosophy, just as in literature: when “it is as examples they are offered in the first place—hence as, performatively, voided in advance” (p. 3). In consequence, Sedgwick proposes a view of How to Do Things with Words that attends to its queerness: “How to Do Things with Words thus performs at least a triple gesture with respect to marriage: installing monogamous heterosexual dyadic church- and state-sanctioned marriage at the definitional center of an entire philosophical edifice, it yet posits as the first heuristic device of that philosophy the class of things (for instance, personal characteristics or object choices) that can preclude or vitiate marriage; and it constructs the philosopher himself, the modern Socrates, as a man—presented as highly comic—whose relation to the marriage vow will be one of compulsive, apparently apotropaic repetition and yet of ultimate exemption” (p. 3).
- 11.
For a thoughtful synopsis of Austin’s initial theorization of performativity and a thorough review of the ways that performativity has been picked up by theorists following Austin, see Jonathan Culler, “Philosophy and Literature: The Fortunes of the Performative,” Poetics Today 21, no. 3 (2000): 503–19.
- 12.
Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 11.
- 13.
Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 18.
- 14.
Derrida , and those following in his legacy, would insist that the “brisure” hinted at by citationality does not disappear simply with the sociological empowerment of speakers to mean what they say. Language only means because its meanings have been sketched in advance of our use of it. This advance sketching of language, the very foundation by which anything has meaning, indicates that the agency and intentionality of any speaker of language is restricted. It is not, in other words, a problem unique to the “subaltern” of a society. The Egoist does not insist upon the same absolutist approach to language, and the novel’s attitude seems much closer to that of “ordinary language philosophy” and specifically of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose decoupling of language from the “metaphysical” realm returns agency to human speakers. For Wittgenstein, it is language use which determines language meaning , a view that corresponds to The Egoist’s portrayal of Willoughby’s insistence upon the “binding” uses of language.
- 15.
Stanley Cavell elaborates upon the interrelation of theatricality and acknowledgment in his reading of King Lear , describing a tendency to deny acknowledgment by “convert[ing] the other into a character and mak[ing] the world a stage for him” (MWM, p. 333). In this scene, the situation is reversed, and Willoughby converts the others into an audience. As we will see, the consequence is that he feels himself morphing into a “juggler” and finally “a machine.”
- 16.
As numerous linguists, philosophers, and sociologists have noted, “conversational implicature” plays a significant role in verbal communication. See, for instance, Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), especially “Replies and Responses”; Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); and H. P. Grice, Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), especially “Logic and Conversation” and “Presupposition and conversational implicature.”
- 17.
For recent work on the ways novels have taken up the philosophical problem of vagueness, see Megan Quigley, “Modern Novels and Vagueness,” Modernism/modernity 15, no. 1 (2008): 101–29, and Daniel Wright, “George Eliot’s Vagueness,” Victorian Studies 56, no. 4 (2014): 625–48. Quigley generally associates literary inquiry into vagueness with the “linguistic turn” evident in Modernism, whereas Wright argues that nineteenth-century literary realism was not strictly “realist” when it came to linguistic philosophy, and that numerous Victorian novelists were engaging in similar inquiry as their contemporary philosophers. My argument about Meredith’s own “linguistic turn” and its invocation of vagueness tends to support Wright’s historical claims.
- 18.
R. M. Sainsbury and Timothy Williamson, “Sorites,” A Companion to the Philosophy of Language (Ed. Bob Hale and Crispin Wright, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 466.
- 19.
Erwin Schrödinger, “The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics: A Translation of Schrödingerʼs ‘Cat Paradoxʼ Paper,” trans. John D. Trimmer, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124 (1980): 323–38. In a bit more detail, Schrödinger’s story (which he put forward in 1935) describes a cat placed in a steel box along with a glass tube of acid that, if released, will kill the cat. A hammer rests against the tube. Whether or not the hammer shifts and cracks the tube depends upon the state of a radioactive substance in a Geiger counter. According to quantum theory, the state of that substance would be represented by a wave function: it is equally probable that an atom of the substance decays and sets off the hammer, as it is probable that no atoms decay and the cat survives, and in fact, according to an interpretation of data showing that unobserved particles distribute their positions as a kind of “smear” across possible states, the atoms both decay and retain their integrity. But as soon as we peak into the box in which a cat’s life depends upon an atom that can be in two positions at once, the atom has a position, and the cat proves to be alive or dead. Before we peak into that box, at least hypothetically speaking, the cat must be both alive and dead. The atom must be both in the state that would crack the glass of acid, and in the state that would leave the hammer unmoved. Schrödinger offers this parable in order to show that a moderately acceptable hypothesis about the superpositionality of microparticles becomes absurd when extrapolated to the case of macroforms, like cats.
- 20.
Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 64–65.
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Greer, E. (2018). Must We Do What We Say? The Plight of Marriage and Conversation in George Meredith’s The Egoist. In: Hagberg, G. (eds) Stanley Cavell on Aesthetic Understanding. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97466-8_11
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