Lourenço Motta Veiga
Starting with the title sentence: the semantics of the word ‘otherwise’ as an adverb[1], within the syntax, can mean both ‘differently’ in the sense of imagining in a totally different way and imagining in a subtly different way than we do. “Otherwise” is a word that only makes sense in the English language, thought of in an integrated way within its context: it is used as an ‘if’ or an ‘else’; it brings to mind the hypothetical question ‘and if?’ and the more peremptory assertion ‘I think differently than that’. Debra Gettelman argues that to think differently, for Austen, Dickens, Woolf and especially George Eliot (the book is divided into five chapters and three of them are dedicated to three novels by Eliot) is a matter of specific stylistic tension. A tension between the reader thinking his own thoughts regarding the novel’s described scenery and plot, and the same reader not thinking differently than the author does or wants the reader to. This is the main crux of the book: the tension between our “subjective” and sometimes outward fancies while reading a novel and the author’s otherwise subtle and sometimes richly reflected patterned intention.
What I just called “the richly reflected patterned intention” of the author is, by its pseudo-baroque imagery, to go against the opinion that “authorial control” limits us readers to the imagery confines of just one person, the artist’s vision. That opinion, which I would argue has a precise Cartesian philosophical ground to it (change the “pense” in “Je pense, donc je suis” to “imagine” and negate it: “Je n’imagine pas, donc je ne suis pas”) is in itself limited and, from what I took from the reading of this book, unrealistic.
Realism (of a kind) is the main goal of the portrayed Victorian novelists, and there are some strategies that enhance it without omitting the character’s and especially the reader’s imagination. Or, to put it another way: emphasizing those impulsive imaginations so that, by contrast, at the end of the descriptions that bring them to the fore, we are brought back down to earth, to what actually happens. Imagination often misses the target, even existentially: the case of Austen, especially with future life plots concerning marriage (in this case, Elinor of Sense and Sensibility), is paradigmatic.
Gettelman emphasizes Austen’s use of the contrast between hypothetical and “real” plots through her character’s rational but in the end wishful thinking. What is the purpose of showing something that could but didn’t happen through meticulous description in the text’s space? That is precisely what happens at the end of Mansfield Park: we get the “real” end and then an alternative ending which was imagined by its main character, Fanny. Gettelman says this makes for an unsettling and even painful reading experience but otherwise giving us the “salutary pain of realistic imagining” (p. 46). So, the purpose of showing us what didn’t but could happen is as much a characterization of wishful thinking of a human tendency for this “play of mind” (realistically); but also, importantly, as a moral antidote for that “play of mind” grip on (un)reality.
Imagination, then, is stimulated for alternative purposes and plot endings. This strategy teaches the reader to see the narrative dimension of what we do in everyday life (or what we have done). And, in case a critique of this realist style reminded us that bringing unrealized possibilities to mind is quite conservative, limited, or painful, Gettelman encapsulates the crux of it in an extraordinary moral precept which I would paraphrase as follows: unrealized possibilities need not be a cause for resentment.
Again, and on the other hand, resentment is one of the reader’s reactions to “having to” conform to the author’s “control” if they want to enter the novel’s scenery. But, from what I gathered as the strongest argument against that reactive opinion, the potentially limited readers (in both the sense of being “controlled” and of imagining otherwise than the author’s richly reflected patterned intention) are deluded if they (we?) think that by wishing for a different outcome they would (sort of) exist more, to use the Cartesian motive I mentioned above.
Deluded in what way? In more than one of Eliot’s novels (at least Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda), there are characters that read in just this kind of way that I described: they imagine differently from what is on paper (and not as a result from what is on paper as an exhortation to think your own thoughts – a tension also present in Eliot’s novels which I’ll not describe here), thinking that they’ll save themselves from imitation and keep in the confines of “relatability”, one of the concepts most used and abused in recent literary theory and attacked and redeemed by Gettelman until the end: the idea that, even if a novel’s plot does not conform to our wishes, and in spite of this, we readers can fulfill them by adapting and conforming the novel’s pattern to something we might otherwise relate to.
But the reflection already happened: these potential readers are already described in the book from which they try to escape, something which connects internally to an assumed question which follows Gettleman’s book title: “Imagining otherwise” …from what? From the text itself or from unbridled imagination, which is connected to “relatability”? If the former, the problem is that, in Eliot’s novel, we were already characterized reflexively in the text from which we aimed to escape. And this state itself is described through what Gettelman calls “negations” in Middlemarch (outcomes and scenarios that do not happen, for they are in the character’s minds) and the use of the word “we” in Daniel Deronda (the subtle meaning of ‘we’: it can be “everyone” – a very real fiction; or a specific group, like the non-Jews in the novel; or even us prejudiced readers).
This is a metanarrative point which, as we can see, doesn’t leave out a sense of broader and more communal self-awareness. We find ourselves already more a part of the writer’s style than we otherwise could imagine or wish for: something which, in that regard, is comparable with the Bible.
Again, and concluding this small reflection on Gettleman’s penetrating book, apart from resenting self-confinements, a positive and transcendent sense we could take from Victorian Realist books is wonderfully and importantly exhorted by the author in the following way: “What the novel does create space for is turning the temptation to imagine otherwise toward the more achievable aim of altering what is repulsive in ourselves.” (p. 166)
[1] OED: “In another way or ways; in a different manner; by other means; in other words; differently.”
REFERÊNCIA:
Gettelman, Debra. Imagining Otherwise: How Readers Help to Write Nineteenth-Century Novels. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.