10.13125/2039-6597/5065
application/pdf
2039-6597
5065
23
en
urn:nbn:it:unica-28300
Roberta Gefter Wondrich
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Between
Gaze
«Until the past was lost in the centre»: (Neo-)Victorian Stony Estrangements
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
12
Essays
2022-05-31
2022-01-10
2022-05-31
2022-06-23
203-224
1
Roberta Gefter Wondrich
2022/05/31
10.13125/2039-6597/5065
203
Università di Trieste
2039-6597
23
Gaze
224
urn:nbn:it:unica-28300
«Until the past was lost in the centre»: (Neo-)Victorian Stony Estrangements
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/5065/5122
12
                       «Until the past
                    was lost in the centre»:
                    (Neo-)Victorian Stony
                       Estrangements

                          Roberta Gefter Wondrich,

Abstract
     Starting from a very brief introduction to Shklovsky’s concept in the
context of English literature, this article considers two main aspects of liter-
ary estrangements in neo-Victorian fiction. The first part examines the struc-
tural use of defamiliarization and the foregrounding of innovative narrative
strategies John Fowles made use of in his seminal The French Lieutenant’s
Woman. Fowles ‘made strange’ the Victorian novel by reinventing its form,
promoting a renovation of realism and a reconsideration of the great themes
of Victorian fiction through a creative use of narrative distance and of the
narratorial voice.
     The second part of the article focuses on the ‘restoration’ of the object
mentioned by Shklovsky, referring to a specific material and cultural object
– the fossil – connoted by a deep epistemic tension, analyzed by Foucault and
Mitchell. This is examined as a catalyst of estrangement in some neo-Victori-
an novels of the last fifty years.

Keywords
     Shklovsky; Neo-Victorian fiction; Cultural object; Fossil; Gaze




Between, vol. XII, n. 23 (maggio/May 2022)
issn: 2039-6597
doi: 10.13125/2039-6597/5065
Roberta Gefter Wondrich, , «Until the past was lost in the centre»: (Neo-)Victorian Stony Estrangements




  «Until the past was lost in the centre»:
  (Neo-)Victorian Stony Estrangements

                             Roberta Gefter Wondrich



      Shklovsky’s «Art as device» and English literature:
                      a sketchy outline
      Translated in English in 1965, Shklovsky’s «Art as Device» earned
his author a long-lasting reputation, probably and partly enhanced by the
diffusion of that language. As Alexandra Berlina reminds, «today, he is
perhaps better known in the Anglophone world than he ever was.» (Ber-
lina 2017: 27-8) Evidently, Shklovsy’s idea of defamiliarizing the habitual
was not entirely original, drawing from a time-honoured literary tradition
starting from Aristotle, including Cervantes, but particularly prominent in
English literature, from Sterne’s early anti-novel, Tristram Shandy, to the Ro-
mantics’ achievement. Wordsworth’s renovation of poetic language from
«the film of familiarity» and Coleridge’s idea of the «willing suspension of
disbelief” required by poetry, with its capacity of “awakening the mind’s
attention from the lethargy of custom» and restore the capacity of vision
obfuscated «in consequence of the film of familiarity” (Coleridge 2006:478-
9), were, in fact, Romantic experiments in strategies of defamiliarization as
foundational components of their revolutionary ars poetica. The rejection of
the habitual is also to be found in Shelley’s belief that poetry could «lift the
veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and make(s) familiar objects be
as if they were not familiar» (Shelley 2006: 844). Cursory as they may read
in relation to the complexity of the inherently defamiliarizing quality of
poetic language, these references to the long nineteenth century are worth
mentioning, in order to outline the specific receptiveness of the English
literary imagination to the question of defamiliarisation.
      A great part of Shklovsy’s most renowned and influential conception
of ostranenie, as is well known, is largely to be ascribed to his monograph
on Sterne (Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: Stylistic Commentary, 1921), where he
focusses on foregrounded metanarrativity as the chief estranging device



204
                                                Between, vol. XII, n. 23 (maggio/May 2022)



which identified narrative art «as technique». Sterne’s formalistically rev-
olutionary experimentation as it was characteristic of him to ‘lay bare’ his
technique» (Shklovsky 2006: 32) constitutes the essence of a reception of
the concept that primarily identifies with the ‘violation’ and ‘awareness’ of
the (narrative) form, which Shklovsky epitomized as such: «In general, he
(Sterne) accentuates the very structure of the novel. By violating the form, he
forces us to attend to it; and, for him, this awareness of the form through its
violation constitutes the content of the novel» (ibid.: 34). The foregrounding
of narrative/formal violation was therefore to become one of the most iden-
tifiable models and examples of «art as device» and of defamiliarization as
an artistic aim and effect related to the placing of a textual object «outside
the habitual sequence», in which art could restore an ‘object’ by replacing
a void which had fostered the development of an automatic response. Such
a reception of the concept1 inevitably seems to postulate all experimental
literary art as instrinsically and potentially defamiliarizing. This would be
certainly the case with much modernist writing, from Conrad’s delayed
decoding (which valorised the protracted presentation of the perception
and verbal treatment of thoughts), from Eliot’s historical and mythical
anachronisms to Joyce’s many ruses, among which his use of montage in
devising narrative simultaneity in Ulysses (as in «Wandering Rocks»), to
Beckett’s characters’ alienated predicament and confinement into extreme
situations, just to name some of the most conspicuous examples in what
would be a far richer repertoire.
      More specifically, Cannon Schmidt suggestively remarks the essential
Victorianism of Viktor Shklovsky - or, alternately, the essential Russian
Formalism of (some of) the Victorians (Schmidt 2018:191), providing ex-
amples from Browning, Pater and Conrad, and pointing to how frequently
elements of this version of ostranenie recur in other theorists such as Benja-
min and Adorno.
      It would be interesting, therefore, at this stage, to probe into the perva-
siveness of forms and versions of defamiliarization in the engagement with
Victorian literature and culture of neo-Victorianism. Variously defined over
the past two decades as a trend or mode that renews and revisits the modes
of Victorian literature - mostly fiction - from a self-conscious contemporary


    1
        I will use as the prevailing English translation of the original the word ‘es-
trangement’, without excluding defamiliarisation, for its more spacious semantic
field, while neglecting the nonetheless suggestive and more recent “enstrange-
ment” of Benjamin Sher’s translation.


                                                                                     205
Roberta Gefter Wondrich, , «Until the past was lost in the centre»: (Neo-)Victorian Stony Estrangements



perspective consistently marked by a self-critical stance, neo-Victorianism
can no longer be considered a recent strain popularized by the proliferat-
ing transmedial fashion for Victoriana. It is widely accepted, for instance,
that the foundational novel of neo-Victorianism, John Fowles’ The French
Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), is also the seminal work of British postmodern-
ism, which has now reached a half-century of critical reputation.
      If, according to Shklovsky, in order to achieve estrangement the writer
must consciously violate the conventional ways of producing meaning, then
a whole line of development of British fiction appears to have intentionally
(and further) pursued defamiliarization in the steps of Fowles’ trailblais-
ing novel. By foregrounding his literary and critical agenda through the
voice and presence of an intrusive and almost narcissistic authorial narra-
tor, Fowles ‘made strange’ the Victorian novel reworking and refunctional-
ising its form, promoting a renovation of realism and a reconsideration of
the great themes of Victorian fiction through an inventive use of narrative
distance and of the narratorial voice. A useful way to subsume Fowles’
influential model of defamiliarization of the Victorian novel, and particu-
larly his narratological ‘estrangement-cum-reviving’ of some fundamental
realist modes, may look back to Amy J.Elias’ idea of late twentieth-century
British fiction as exploring the realm of a «meta-mimesis», a «paradoxical
achievement» (Elias 1993: 25), which preserved realism in postmodernism
«as mimesis with an ontological dominant» (ibid.:12).

   Defamiliarization, estrangement, Postmodernism and
             neo-Victorianism: a continuity?
      This brief contextualisation of Shklovsky’s concept regarding some
artistic strategies adopted in English literature from Romanticism to late
Modernism aims to introduce the first section of this article, which ex-
amines the structural use of defamiliarization and the foregrounding of
narrative strategies in neo-Victorian fiction, inaugurated by John Fowles’
seminal novel. The second part of the article focusses on the ‘restoration’
of the role of the object mentioned by Shklovsky in his essay, referring to
a specific case study of the estranging object in Victorian and neo-Victori-
an fiction, which symbolises both the remote distance of the past and its
presence: the material and cultural object constituted by the fossil, which
is connoted by a deep epistemic tension.
      A consideration of the mimetic strategies of postmodernist British fic-
tion would certainly exceed the limits of the present context; however, in



206
                                              Between, vol. XII, n. 23 (maggio/May 2022)



narrowing my focus on neo-Victorian strategies of estrangement, I would
like to point out the essential role played precisely by distance – cultural,
chronological, critical – in the process of renewing and revitalizing Victorian
literary culture through a recognition that entails, in fact, a new vision. Ann
Heilman and Mark Llewellyn, in their important 2010 study, define neo-Vic-
torian fiction as works that re-engage with the Victorian age with a marked
«self-analytic drive» (Heilman and Llewellyn 2010: 6, 5). In other words,
as literary works that «must in some respect be self-consciously engaged
with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning
the Victorians» (ibid.:5). Both the concepts of distance (distancing) and vi-
sion (re-visioning, so prominent in the original theory but all the more so
in Carlo Ginzburg’s fundamental reading of Shklovsky’s essay (Ginzburg
1998), are at play in the neo-Victorian project. Moreover, this specific clas-
sification traces a clear distinction and distancing from twentieth or twenti-
eth-first fiction set in the Victorian age or which simply ‘re-writes’ Victorian
texts. Neo-Victorian works are, rather, «texts about the metahistorical and
metacultural ramifications of such historical engagement» (Heilman and
Llewellyn 2010: 6). Of the numerous definitions of this important trend of
contemporary British and Anglophone writing, none, in fact, is entirely sat-
isfactory: earlier and less established versions like retro-Victorian, Victori-
ana, Victoriographies, revisionary or post-Victorian novels2, still presume
a relationship of the present with the Victorian past based on a retrospec-
tive gaze of distance that is far from being remote. What has been largely
subscribed to, actually, is that «the Victorian era projected by neo-Victorian
fiction and its academic commentators seem largely constructed in our own
image, in its uncanny anticipation of contemporary obsessions» (Robinson
2011: 120). This ongoing achievement of cultural and literary «aftering» in
Ann Humphrey’s suggestive formula (Humphrey 2004: 232), highlights the
crucial role played by distance: a distance that is primarily chronological
and cultural, but which aims at an act of re-visioning that is also a renewed
form of insight into the complexities, contradictions, and ambivalences of
the literary culture of the long nineteenth century.
      I would argue that in Neo Victorianism «the concept of ostranenie, of
making the habitual strange in order to re-experience it» (Berlina 2015:24)
is at work precisely in the re-immersions and revisitations in Victorian lit-
erature3 which never merely reproduce the source text and the possible


    2
        See Kirchknopf 2008: 59.
    3
        I refer to Boehm-Schnitker - Gruss 2014.


                                                                                   207
Roberta Gefter Wondrich, , «Until the past was lost in the centre»: (Neo-)Victorian Stony Estrangements



models, as in the case of numerous rewritings. Nor does this concept aim
to the replica effect, but somehow deviates the way we look at the histori-
cal and cultural referent in order to ‘queer’ that gaze and revive it through
an act and process of critical and creative engagement and interpretation.
As Wolf Schmit points out, «the device of defamiliarization provides the
formalist basis of the concept of deviation, which rejects the ideas of imita-
tion, reproduction and mimesis» (Schmit 2005: 98). The neo-Victorian novel
(or text, if one prefers to consider the generic variety of neo-Victorianism)
should not be subjected to the reductive reading of Shklovsky’s idea that a
new form does not appear so as to express a new content, but to replace an
older form which has already lost its artistic value. Rather, neo-Victorian
fiction has been pursuing a project of reassessment and re-evaluation of
Victorian writing through its forms of creative engagement with it, and
even seemed to cherish canonicity4, especially in the early decades.
      In this respect, Fowles seminal novel once again serves as a paradigm
of how neo-Victorianism resorted to defamiliarization as deliberate devi-
ation and violation of the readers’ expectations from the outset. It became
itself a central hypotext for further neo-Victorian novels, soon to constitute
a proper canon, which received critical consolidation over the past two
decades. Two famous examples should suffice to illustrate this function-
al, strategical use of the device of defamiliarization and estrangement: the
famous intrusive self-introduction of the authorial and narratorial voice
in the thirteenth chapter of The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Michael
Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White’s displacing incipit. The former
inaugurates chapter thirteen and gratifies the reader’s prior trial with a
succession of epigraphs and dense literary and cultural allusions to the
Victorian era with a puzzling, yet somehow rewarding revelation which
literally de-constructs the status of text and author:

             I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These
          characters I create never existed outside my own mind. If I have
          pretended until now to know my characters’ minds and innermost
          thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I have assumed some
          of the vocabulary and ‘voice’ of) a convention universally accepted
          at the time of my story: that the novelist stands next to God. He may
          not know all, yet he tries to pretend he does. But I live in the age of


      4
       As Jessica Cox remarks «The focus on the ‘highbrow’ in the formative years
of neo-Victorian studies suggests a regressive attitude towards literary criticism:
certain authors and genres are privileged over and above others» (Cox 2017: 4).


208
                                               Between, vol. XII, n. 23 (maggio/May 2022)



     Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes; if this is a novel, it cannot be
     a novel in the modern sense of the world.
        So perhaps I am writing a transposed autobiography; perhaps I now
     live in one of the houses I have brought into the fiction; perhaps Charles
     is myself disguised. Perhaps it is only a game. (Fowles 1996: 97)

     The second quote engages with Fowles’ model through what Chris-
tian Gutleben defined «a poetics of irreverence” (Gutleben 2015: 231), and
playfully and knowingly lays bare the direct involvement of the reader in
the game of temporal and cultural ‘distance’ that has been identified as
a key component of estrangement, as both reader and narrator are posi-
tioned at the twenty-first-century vantage point, «alien from another time
and place»:

        Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need
     them. This city I am bringing you to is vast and intricate, and you
     have not been here before. You may imagine, from other stories
     you’ve read, that you know it well, but those stories flattered you,
     welcoming you as a friend, treating you as if you belonged. The
     truth is that you are an alien from another time and place altogether.
     When I first caught your eye and you decided to come with me, you
     were probably thinking you would simply arrive and make yourself
     at home. Now that you’re actually here, the air is bitterly cold, and
     you find yourself being led along in complete darkness, stumbling on
     uneven ground, recognising nothing. Looking left and right, blinking
     against an icy wind, you realize you have entered an unknown street
     of unlit houses full of unknown people. (Faber 2003 13)

       The most knowing and critically discerning reader would probably
give for granted the relevant use of defamiliarization in these examples;
still, my point is, rather, that the emphasis on the reiteration of defamil-
iarization-as-device in neo-Victorianism should be reconsidered in its rel-
evance to the genealogy and the current significance of defamiliarization
in contemporary and postmodern writing’s engagement with the past, its
‘presentification’ and the refusal of master narratives. On the whole, then,
I would argue that Fowles’ neo-Victorian inaugural and seminal use of de-
familiarization was to be followed and renewed by many other novelists,
and that it radically changed the perception – and the appropriation – of
the Victorian novel in the late twentieth and early twentieth-first century.
That use of defamiliarization and estrangement – stemming from the Swif-
tian and Sternean tradition – was in fact to foster a new understanding and


                                                                                    209
Roberta Gefter Wondrich, , «Until the past was lost in the centre»: (Neo-)Victorian Stony Estrangements



revisitation of the artistic and cultural form of the Victorian novel. Distance
and estrangement actually produced new perceptions, and a significant
revitalization of this genre, which has progressively expanded through the
decades into ‘global’ versions of neo-Victorian writing.

              The estranging object: a ‘stony’ case study
     If defamiliarization/estrangement asserted the idea of art «as device»
and was also famously aimed at restoring the intensity of perception as a
way of ‘seeing’ life and the world, (Shklovsky 2015: 162), in the essay the
focus on the text also originally lies in the attribution of some transforma-
tive power to an ‘object’ in the narrative.

          this thing we call art exists in order to restore the sensation of
      life, in order to make us feel things, in order to make a stone stony.
      The goal of art is to create the sensation of seeing, and not merely
      recognizing, things; the device of art is the “enstrangement” of things
      and the complication of the form, which increases the duration and
      complexity of perception, as the process of perception is, in art, an end
      in itself and must be prolonged. Art is the means to live through the
      making of a thing; what has been made does not matter in art. (Ibid.)

      The object, the object as ‘thing’, and the ‘cultural object’ often appear
centre stage in the dynamics of narrative and fictional estrangement, as
they are invested with an essential epistemological and aesthetic relevance.
It would be impossible to insert even a cursory list of the most important
objects of estrangement of nineteenth and twentieth-century English lit-
erary imagination, from Keats’ urn to Jane Eyre’s cheval glass to Jagger’s
coffin-like chair in Great Expectations, to Stevenson and Wilde’s portraits,
Woolf’s «Solid Objects», Joyce’s Bloom’s bar of soap and potato, without
expanding way beyond the allotted space of this context. Still, considering
that for Shklovsky art ‘restores’ the object, filling that void created by the
automatism of perception, it is to this ‘restoration’ of the object that the
second part of this article will then turn, with the aim of considering the
relevance of a specific material and cultural object as a catalyst of estrange-
ment in some (postmodern) neo-Victorian novels of the last fifty years.
      As Louisa Hadley resumes, «a common concern in neo-Victorian
fiction is the way in which the Victorian past is mediated to the present
through its textual remains» (Hadley 2010:117), as well as by other ma-
terial traces: it would be interesting, then, to relate Shklovsky’s original


210
                                             Between, vol. XII, n. 23 (maggio/May 2022)



idea of art as an experience of the artistry of the object as one that under-
scores that conspicuous interest of neo-Victorian fiction (and postmodern
fiction at large) for the material trace of the past as a potential chrono-
tope, an embodiment of time which comes alive in the spatial entity of a
text. British fiction of the last fifty years or so has constantly been relying
on that «archival dimension» that defines modern memory, in which the
“materiality of the trace” (Nora 1989:13) is paramount. As early as 1984,
David Leon Higdon was noticing the increasing number of British novels
featuring professional researchers of the past as protagonists, whose «res-
torations, excavations, journeys, and research into a culture’s past parallel
their search for individual identities and utilize the culture’s artefacts as
complex metaphors for complex inner processes» (Higdon 1984:12). This
trend was to gain further momentum and increasing complexity in the
following decades, to the extent that a whole fictional genre of contempo-
rary English fiction was classified by Suzanne Keen as «romances of the
archive» (2001). In fact, material artefacts and documentary traces, mostly
textual, have always inhabited literary works, and increasingly so since the
mid-Victorian novel, as signifiers of a preoccupation with history and cul-
tural memory that has further expanded to the production of memory-cul-
ture in neo-Victorianism5. In their diversity, even when fictive, or spectral,
these material relics and testimonies embody both the power exerted by
the sense of the past – the desire for a recovered historical past - and its
morphing, elusive, ‘estranging’ nature. More specifically, after the para-
digmatic pattern of the dual chronological level conceived by Fowles, the
semantics of estrangement has remained central to neo-Victorian fiction
and has been further extended to other narrative features, among which
the object features prominently.
      As a consideration of these ‘literary’ objects in neo-Victorian novels
would be too extensive, a narrower focus will be aimed at what is per-
haps the most ‘natural’ and ancient of these non-human material entities
endowed with the power of estrangement: the fossil. This choice may, in
fact, seem a sort of paradoxical tribute to Shklovsky’s own words, as it is
not casual that he should mention, of all the non-human objects, the stone


    5
       «Cultural» (or, if you will, «collective», «social») memory is certainly a
multifarious notion, a term often used in an ambiguous and vague way. Media,
practices, and structures as diverse as myth, monuments, historiography, ritual,
conversational remembering, configurations of cultural knowledge, and neuronal
networks are nowadays subsumed under this wide umbrella term» (Erll 2008: 41).


                                                                                  211
Roberta Gefter Wondrich, , «Until the past was lost in the centre»: (Neo-)Victorian Stony Estrangements



- and art as being capable of making «the stone stony» - as a synecdoche of
the material world and the world at large. The case of the fossil as both a
natural and a cultural object6, the significance and impact of which became
even more resonant in the course of the Victorian age, further to Charles
Lyell’s foundation of modern geology, appears as an interesting example
of that imagery, that, in Shklovsky’s words, «is intended to bring together
heterogonous acts and objects, explaining the unknown via the known»
(Shklovsky 2015: 173).
      In the history of human sciences, the fossil, «with its mixed animal
and mineral nature, is the privileged locus of a resemblance required by
the historian of the continuum» (Foucault 2005: 171) and holds a crucial
role, as Foucault argued in The Order of Things, in relation to the notion of
identity: «The fossil is what permits resemblances to subsist throughout all
the deviations traversed by nature; it functions as a distant and approxima-
tive form of identity; it marks a quasi-character in the shift of time» (ibid.)
Drawing from Foucault, W.J.T Mitchell identifies fossils and ‘totems’- both
‘discovered’ in the 1790s - as the two most ground-breaking material traces
of the past (a «deep time» and a «dream time» respectively) which would
bring about an epistemic revolution in which natural history became truly
historical for the first time (Mitchell 1999: 178).
      Ruins, fossils and archaeologic findings, all figure in the complex
cluster of cultural objects which had been invested with epistemic anxiet-
ies and imaginative projections across centuries. More specifically, English
writers responded to the fin de siècle anxieties about pessimistic readings
of Darwinism, the fear of atavism and invasion with what Stephen Arata
defined as «fictions of loss», as well as with an increasing fascination for
the uncanny and often destructive power of objects, troves, collections and
monsters. The collectible thus became connoted with a disturbing power,
especially in those fictions which combined the theme of collecting with



      6
        I refer to the definition of cultural object by Wendy Griswold, as what
«may be defined as shared significance embodied in form. It is a socially mean-
ingful expression that is audible, visible, or tangible or that can be articulated.
A cultural object, moreover, tells a story, and that story may be sung, told, set
in stone, enacted, or painted on the body. Examples range widely» (Griswold
1986: 11). Of paramount importance in Griswold’s definition, however, is not so
much the ‘expansive’ quality of the notion of ‘cultural’ object, as its narrative po-
tential: this is, après Griswold, my conception of the cultural object as something
that tells a story.


212
                                                Between, vol. XII, n. 23 (maggio/May 2022)



‘post-Darwinian Nature’7. Among these, the fossil, as remarked, in pre-
serving traces of life in the inert matter of the stone, unfolds the extraor-
dinary combination of a unique wonder and what of would progressively
become a scientific (cultural) commodity. If Foucault «makes the fossil the
centrepiece of his history of epistemic transformations», W.J.T Mitchell
considers it the principal example of this new «historicity of things» that
is independent of human history (W.T. Mitchell 1999: 176), and asserts the
physical as a thoroughly metaphysical concept (ibid.: 171). The fossil thus
became an object the new meaning of which quickly provided a metaphor
for human as well as natural history, and specifically for the human relics
left behind by the French Revolution. For Mitchell, «fossilism is a way,
in short, of revolutionizing natural history and naturalizing revolutionary
human history» (ibid.: 176).
      It is upon this conceptual grounding that neo-Victorian fiction in par-
ticular has made use of the fossil as a specific kind of embodied trace of the
past, which, connoted by a deep epistemic tension, is also endowed with a
strong power of estrangement.
      Shklovsky’s conception of the image as a gateway to a proper vision
of the object interestingly illuminates the semantic import of the fossil as
a cultural and epistemic object, when he states that the goal of an image is
not to bring its meaning closer to our understanding, but to create a special
way of experiencing an object, to make one not «recognize» but «see» it
(Shklovsky 2015: 88),
      This specific aspect of the literary representation of the fossil in the
Victorian novel, which has Thomas Hardy’s famous page in A Pair of Blue
Eyes (1873) as its matrix (Glendening 2013), and which will be repeatedly
revived by neo-Victorian novels, entails the question of the gaze of the ob-
ject and the role of the visual in the aesthetic and conceptual engagement of
estrangement, as will be illustrated. In a climactic page, the protagonist, an
amateur geologist, literally finds himself cliff-hanging after slipping from
a rocky Dorset slope, staring into a trilobite, suspended into the void, both
spatially and inwardly, face to face with the sense of his irrelevant nothing-
ness in the mystery of the vast and indifferent Hardyesque universe:

          By one of those familiar conjunctions in which the inanimate world
        baits the mind of man when he pauses in moments of suspense,
        opposite Knight’s eyes was an imbedded fossil, standing forth in low


    7
         See Daly 1999, Goetsch 2007, Parlati 2012.


                                                                                     213
Roberta Gefter Wondrich, , «Until the past was lost in the centre»: (Neo-)Victorian Stony Estrangements



      relief from the rock. It was a creature with eyes. The eyes, dead and
      turned to stone, were even now regarding him. It was one of the early
      crustaceans called Trilobites. Separated by millions of years in their
      lives, Knight and this underling seemed to have met in their death. It
      was the single instance within reach of his vision of anything that had
      ever been alive and had had a body to save, as he himself had now.
         Time closed up like a fan before him. He saw himself at one extremity
      of the years, face to face with the beginning and all the intermediate
      centuries simultaneously […] and so, till the life-time scenes of the
      fossil confronting him were a present and modern condition of things.
      (Hardy 1998: 213-4)

       With Hardy’s paradigm, the fossils, Tennyson’s «cunning casts in
clay» (Tennyson 1991: 213), became a recognizable ‘cultural’ object and
an enigma at the same time in the imagination of the Victorian novel.
An opaque, resisting object that impacts on human consciousness in its
non-human, inert agency, addressing the present though the trace of its
unfathomable past, the ‘deep time’ conceived by James Hutton at the end
of the eighteenth century.
       This literary referent emphasizes the semantics of the visual and the
gaze as quite central to any consideration of the estrangement of the object.
It is significant, in this context, that the ‘literary’ fossil should actually have
eyes, stony eyes that arrest and petrify, transfix consciousness, as the fol-
lowing textual examples will show. Eyes that recall Carlo Ginzburg’s idea
of the disturbing, perturbing power of Pinocchio’s «wooden eyes», that
enact estrangement (Ginzburg 2001). The fossil could thus be considered
as a Victorian and neo-Victorian estranging object which signals both the
remote distance of the past and its presence. This «double signification»
can also be related to the idea to “use the past without being fossilized by
it», as several novels show, notably The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Glen-
dening 2013: 51). The problematic specularity between the unfathomable
deep time and the uncertain present embodied by the fossil recurs, after
Hardy, in John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), Peter Carey’s
Oscar and Lucinda (1988), A.S.Byatt’s Possession (1990), Penelope Lively’s
City of the Mind (1991), Graham Swift’s Ever After (1992), Tracy Chevalier’s
Remarkable Creatures (2010), Joan Thomas’ Curiosity (2010).
       Dinosaur fossils, particularly, played a key role in the scientific and
epistemological imagination of the Victorian age before and after the shat-
tering impact of Darwinism, and thus provide to neo-Victorian writing
a highly functional trope, figuring out both the irretrievable pastness of



214
                                               Between, vol. XII, n. 23 (maggio/May 2022)



the past and its abiding presence in the context of the dramatic nexus that
joined the discourses of science and religion in the Victorian age.
      In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, for example, fossils and fossil hunt-
ing are introduced through a defamiliarizing effect of irony as a commodi-
fied reality of mid-nineteenth century Dorset coast, only to take on a more
poignant significance in relation to the protagonist:

         But Lyme is situated in the center of one of the rare outcrops of a
     stone known as blue lias. (…) It is also treacherous, since its strata are
     brittle and have a tendency to slide, with the consequence that this
     little stretch of twelve miles or so of blue lias coast has lost more land
     to the sea in the course of history than almost any other in England.
     But its highly fossiliferous nature and its mobility make it a Mecca
     for the British paleontologist. These last hundred years or more the
     commonest animal on its shores has been man—wielding a geologist’s
     hammer. (Fowles 1996: 50)

      Charles Smithson, a gentleman who is an amateur geologist, realizes
his own sense of loss and displacement and his epistemic doubts as they
are reverberated through the agency of the non-human, estranging fossils
he is contemplating:

        There was no doubt. He was one of life’s victims, one more ammonite
     caught in the vast movements of history, stranded now for eternity, a
     potential turned to a fossil.
        That was the vicious circle that haunted him; that was the failure,
     the weakness, the cancer, the vital flaw that had brought him to what
     he was: more an indecision than a reality, more a dream than a man,
     more a silence than a word, a bone than an action. And fossils! He had
     become, while still alive, as if dead. It was like coming to a bottomless
     brink. (Ibid.: 321)

     The protagonist is dubbed “poor living fossil» by the omniscient nar-
rator, since the fossil turns out to represent a sense of lifeless opacity, and
provides a graphic picture of the man’s deterministic fragility, rather than
the embodied trace of life that connects the present with the living past.
The annihilating power of the fossil’s gaze, so openly dramatized by Har-
dy, was then weaved by Fowles into the sophisticated intertextual fabric
of the novel, providing an ironic, nuanced continuity of imagery with its
Victorian model that would become a recognizable and recurrent trope, as
will be evident from the following examples.


                                                                                    215
Roberta Gefter Wondrich, , «Until the past was lost in the centre»: (Neo-)Victorian Stony Estrangements



      I would now like to dwell further on a key question that defines the
relevance of this object to the aesthetics of estrangement, that is, the ques-
tion of the gaze, central to the appreciation not only of this novel but of
the literary treatment of the fossil as both word-image and cultural object.
Quite simply, as from Hardy’s archetype onwards, the fossil stares into
the human, the gaze is reciprocated and ‘tamed’, it estranges, disorients,
with a defamiliarizing, disturbing effect that questions both individual
self-identity and a vaster sense of the natural and human past. The radical
otherness of the fossil as estranging object and ‘thing’ that is seen ultimate-
ly masters the eye that sees it, inducing the self-awareness of being just
another object in the world of ‘reality’, an awareness that determines a
state of radical defamiliarization. This implication of the gaze recalls two
examples from Seminar IV of Jacques Lacan’s The Four Fundamental Concept
of Psychoanalysis8, which «reflect our own nothingness» (Lacan 1998: 92):
Holbein’s “The Ambassadors”’ anamorphic skull, which hauls the subject
into the picture, and the can of sardines which the young Lacan saw float-
ing on the waves in Brittany, and which he was made to realise - much
to his shock - would not ‘see’ him (Lacan 1998). The unseeing eyes of the
formerly organic, then inanimate canned sardines are thus mementoes of
that “nothingness” which is similarly released by the fossil’s gaze, staring
into the subject’s eyes and mind.
      The fossil as a cultural and epistemic object is thus endowed with the
gaze, in all these novels, regardless of how central their role may appear in
their narrative economy: this component greatly enhances its significance
in the aesthetics of estrangement through the teasing power that evades
the controlling aim of the subject’s vision, and remains fundamentally and
irreducibly other, the thing, «the thing itself», as we read in Graham Swift’s
Ever After.
      The fossils of the texts I refer to in these pages, in other words, re-
spond to the idea of an object that «remains irrevocably other than that
which attempts to think it» (Schwenger 2002: 56), like pictures of nature
that have a relation to the gaze and involve its taming, its laying down, in
Lacanian terms9.
      While A.S.Byatt’s 1990 neo-Victorian masterpiece Possession features
the fossil as a typical Victorian vestige of the past, Graham Swift’s Ever



     I am indebted to Sergia Adamo for reminding me this Lacanian reference
      8

when discussing this paper in its earliest stage.
   9
     See Lacan about the painting, 1998: 101.


216
                                                Between, vol. XII, n. 23 (maggio/May 2022)



After (1992) foregrounds the question of the ‘estranging’ gaze of the fossil
as the entity which triggers an irreversible progress of disorientation and
an epistemological, religious and existential crisis in Matthew Pearce, the
Victorian protagonist. Pearce, the contemporary narrator Bill Unwin’s an-
cestor - himself emotionally in pain and struggling with a broken sense of
identity, who reads and edits the man’s retrieved notebooks - whose faith
wavers painfully after the loss of a two-year-old son, has a life-changing
encounter «face-to-face with an ichthyosaur, on the cliffs of Dorset in the
summer of 1844» (Swift 1992: 89). The predicament in which he finds him-
self when he sees it, when simultaneously a young woman has slipped
off the path, in Lyme, and he does not run to her aid, but rather chooses
«to stare into the eye of a monster», is so unlike the artificial safety of a
museum, where he might have first seen a fossil specimen, as the narrator
speculates (ibid.: 100). His contemplation of the ichthyosaur in that natural
and unexpected context brings forth an experience of existential estrange-
ment bound to change his life ‘ever after’: it is the encounter with «the
thing itself» in its utter, ineradicable alterity:

        [t]he long, toothed jaw; the massive eye that stares through millions
     of years. He is the creature; the creature in him. He feels something open
     up inside him, so that he is vaster and emptier than he ever imagined,
     and feels himself starting to fall, and fall, through himself”. (Ibid.: 112)

      The gaze of the ichthyosaur engenders a ghastly estrangement and dis-
placement from his own sense of self, of reality, of faith and control of the real.
It produces a negative epiphany that will reveal the protagonist his «personal
inauthenticity» (Glendening 2013: 66), as it constitutes what he calls in his
journal «the moment of my unbelief» and «the beginning of my make-belief»
(Swift 1992: 112). The revelation of the irreversibility of his crisis of faith mir-
rors the creeping doubt brought by the new science that after the middle of
the century had begun to affect the self-confidence of the Victorian age.
      The sense of annihilation related to the crisis of faith induced by the
new scientific discoveries that affected the Victorians is, instead, less rele-
vant in what is the most important and successful novel to recently focus on
the fossil as a cultural object, Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures (2009),
a biofiction on the life of Mary Anning, the famous English fossil-hunter
and amateur palaeontologist whose findings were essential to the develop-
ment of palaeontology and Georges Cuvier’s theory. The novel privileges
the exploration of the protagonist’s gendered identity and masterly depicts
her sense of belonging to the natural environment of Lyme Regis. The fos-


                                                                                     217
Roberta Gefter Wondrich, , «Until the past was lost in the centre»: (Neo-)Victorian Stony Estrangements



sil is the centrepiece of that «revised story of earth and human history that
Anning helped produce» (Glendening 2013: 55); the semantics of sight, vi-
sion and the question of gaze are given prominence from the beginning,
and sustain some of the most climactic scenes from, through the narration
of the older co-protagonist, the Austenian character of Elizabeth Philpot.

         Mary Anning leads with her eyes. That was clear even the first
      time we met, when she was but a girl. Her eyes are button brown, and
      bright, and she has a fossil hunter’s tendency always to be looking
      for something, even when on the street or in a house where there is
      no possibility of finding anything of interest. It makes her appear
      vigorous, even when she is still. (Chevalier 2014:13)

         I have always admired most those who lead with their eyes, like
      Mary Anning, for they seem more aware of the world and its workings.
      (Ibid.:14)

      The fossil in Remarkable Creatures, then, is an epistemic object of desire
and knowledge, the focus of an obsession that will guide the naïve but
extraordinary young woman to her own understanding of reality. It is the
estranging revelation of mortality and permanence, purpose and orienta-
tion, in the midst of the great mystery of life, investigated by the innocent,
ignorant but knowing and searching eyes of a woman who made history,
though long unacknowledged. The eyes of the dinosaur fossil stare back
and displace, and the unmeasurable distance of time, once more, comes
alive and makes everything «strange»:

         Were we going to die out too? Looking at that skull with its huge,
      ringed eyes, I felt as if I were standing on the edge of a cliff. (Ibid.: 98)

         I felt for a moment that I was being sucked into its spiral, farther and
      farther back in time, until the past was lost in the center (Ibid.: 107).

      Here, the spatial imagery recalls both the hypotext of Hardy’s
cliff-hanging scene, the fear of annihilation of Fowles’ character («the croc
eye watched us both. Captain Curry and I are going to be like the croc, I
thought. We will become fossils, trapped upon beach forever», ibid.: 144),
as well as the entropic displacement dramatized in Ever After. What is all
the more significant, though, is Mary’s naïveté, the ‘natural’ drive of her
searching eyes and her marginality as a poor, uneducated women of early



218
                                                 Between, vol. XII, n. 23 (maggio/May 2022)



nineteenth-century England, all of which make her a figure capable of see-
ing reality ‘for the first time’, aware of the infinite mystery of creation and
life, and still confident in her faith.

        I stared at that socket and got the feeling it was staring back[...] I
     shuddered, one of them shivers that come over you when you’re not
     even cold but you can’t stop yourself[...] It made me feel odd looking
     at that eye[...] Sometimes I got that hollowed-out feeling too when
     looking at a sky full of stars or into the deep water[...] It was as if the
     world were too strange for me ever to understand it. (Ibid.: 72)

     The eye of the dinosaur fossil, the ichtyosaur first and the plesiosaur
then, once again looks back and arrests, as in the climactic scene where a
landslide of shale occurs and nearly kills the protagonist:

        my eyes flicked over the stones near to me and come to rest on a
     familiar shape about four feet from me: a ring of overlapping bony
     scales the size of my fist. A croc’s eye. It were like it was staring straight
     at me. I cried out with the surprise of seeing it. [...] Then, several feet
     past the eye, there was a movement. (Ibid.)

      The centrality of the fossil to this last novel clearly draws from its
historical grounding10, but also offers further suggestions for a final con-
sideration of this ‘estranging’ object as a facet of what Peter Schwenger
calls «the uncanny agency of solid objects» (2005:84). Albeit primordial
and originally uncompromised by human social and economic dynamics
(though soon to become a curiosity, a collectible, hence a sort of commodi-
ty), the fossils of the literary imagination are far from inert, but rather seem
to respond to the features of Jane Bennett’s «vibrant matter»: «so-called
inanimate things have a life of their own, [...] deep within them is an inex-
plicable vitality or energy, a moment of independence from and resistance
to us and to other things. A kind of thing-power» (Bennett 2004: 358). The
conjunction of organic and inorganic, of non-human and aesthetic appre-
hension, of existential angst and epistemic value that are all inscribed in
this fascinating, ‘gazing’ cultural object may thus be illuminated by the
enduring of resonance of Shklovsky’s original concept.


    10
       Athough the main narrative is set during Regency time, the novel can be
broadly considered as neo-Victorian, given the critical extension of Victorianism
to early 19th century that has become quite customary.


                                                                                      219
Roberta Gefter Wondrich, , «Until the past was lost in the centre»: (Neo-)Victorian Stony Estrangements



      A tentative closing reflection – though necessarily inconclusive, given
the otherness of the object - on what Ginzburg defines the «cognitive impli-
cations of defamiliarization» (Ginzburg 2001:22) examined through these
literary fictions could thus engage with an expanded notion of Shklovsky’s
(and Ginzburg’s) critical distance that challenges the ideological assump-
tions and discursive formations that have defined and shaped notions of
the inanimate and the material. The potential of this notion could well be
related to Rosi Braidotti’s idea of a renewed critical ‘distance’ from the
self-centredness of the anthropocentric vision:

         the post-anthropocentric shift away from the hierarchical relations
      that had privileged ‘Man’ requires a form of estrangement and a
      radical repositioning on the part of the subject. The best method to
      accomplish this is through the strategy of de-familiarization or critical
      distance from the dominant vision of the subject. (Braidotti 2013:88)

      The importance of defamiliarisation has, for Braidotti, a key meth-
odological role in posthuman theory for the Humanities, as it «shifts the
relationship to the nonhuman others and requires dis-identification from
century-old habits of anthropocentric thought and humanist arrogance,
which is likely to test the ability and willingness of the Humanities»
(ibid.: 168).
      Thus, in these literary fossils, the gaze of the pre-human reaches out
from the deep past to interrogate the present, the future and its posts, with
stony eyes that absorb and displace our own, who have never really pos-
sessed its centre.




220
                                             Between, vol. XII, n. 23 (maggio/May 2022)



                               Works Cited
Arata, Stephen, Fictions of Loss Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle.
     Identity and Empire, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Berlina, Alexandra, “Translating ‘Art as Device’”, pp. 151-156, part of “‘Art
     as Device’, translated and introduced by Alexandra Berlina”, Poetics
     Today, 36, 2, (2015): 151-174.
Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter. A political Ecology of Things, Durham and Lon-
     don, Duke University Press, 2010.
Bodei, Remo, (2009) The Life of Things. The Love of Things, tr. M. Baca, New
     York, Fordham University Press, 2015.
Boehm-Schnitker, Nadine - Susanne Gruss (eds.), Neo-Victorian Literature
     and Culture. Immersions and Revisitations, New York, Routdlege, 2014.
Braidotti, Rosi, The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.
Chevalier, Tracy, Remarkable Creatures, London, Harper Collins, (2009), 2014.
Coleridge, Samuel T., Biographia Literaria, The Norton Anthology of En-
     glish Literature vol. 2, (8th ed.) Eds. S. Greenblatt - M.H. Abrams, New
     York-London, Norton & Company, 2006, ch. XIV: 478-82.
Cox, Jessica, “Canonization, Colonization, and the Rise of Neo-Victorian-
     ism”, English: Journal of the English Association, (2017): 1-24.
Erll, Astrid, “Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction”, in Cultural Mem-
     ory Studies, An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, Eds. Astrid
     Erll - Ansgar Nünning, Berlin and New York, de Gruyter 2008: 1-18.
Daly, Nicholas, Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and
     British Culture, 1880-1914, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Foucault, Michel, (1966) The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human
     Sciences, London and New York, Routledge, 2002.
Fowles, John, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), London, Vintage 1998.
Ginzburg, Carlo (1998), Wooden Eyes. Nine Reflections on Distance, tr. by
     M.Ryle and K.Soper, New York, Columbia University Press, 2001.
Glendening, John. Science and Religion in Neo-Victorian Novels: Eye of the Ich-
     thyosaur Abingdon, Routledge, 2013.
Goetsch, Paul, “Uncanny Collectors and Collections in late Victorian Fic-
     tion”, Magical Objects: Things and Beyond, Eds. Elmar Schenkel - Stefan
     Welz - Leipzig, Galda & Wilch Verlag, 2007: 67-90.
Griswold, Wendy, Cultures and Society in a Changing World, Los Angeles,
     Sage 2013 (4th edition).
Gutleben, Christian, “Whither Postmodernism? Four Tentative Neo-Victo-
     rian Answers”, Etudes Anglaises 2015/2, 68: 224-36.




                                                                                  221
Roberta Gefter Wondrich, , «Until the past was lost in the centre»: (Neo-)Victorian Stony Estrangements



Hadley, Louisa, Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative. The Victorians
     and Us. Basingstoke-New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Hardy, Thomas, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), Ed. Pamela Dalziel, London,
     Penguin, 1998.
Heilmann, Ann - Llewellyn, Mark Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the
     Twenty-First Century, 1999–2009, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Higdon, David Leon, Shadows of the Past in Contemporary British Fiction,
     London, Macmillan, 1984.
Humphereys, Anne, “The Afterlife of the Victorian Novel: Novels about
     Novels”, in P. Brantlinger and W. Thesing (eds.), A Companion to the
     Victorian Novel, Oxford, Blackwell, 2004: 442-57.
Keen, Suzanne, Romances of the Archive Romances of the Archive in Contempo-
     rary British Fiction, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2001.
Kirchknopf, Andrea, “(Re)Workings of Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Defi-
     nitions, Terminology, Contexts”, Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies, 1:1
     (Autumn 2008): 53-80.
Lacan, Jacques, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. The Semi-
     nar of Jacques Lacan Book XI, ed. J.A. Miller, tr. A. Sheridan, New York
     and London, Norton & Co.1998.
Mitchell, W.J.T. “Romanticism and the Life of Things: Fossils, Totems, and
     Images”, Critical Inquiry, 28, 1, Things (Autumn 2001):167-84.
Nora, Pierre, “Between Memoryand History: Les Lieux de Mémoire”, tr.
     M. Roudebusch, Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7-24.
Parlati, Marilena, Oltre il Moderno. Orrori e Tesori del lungo Ottocento inglese,
     Milano, Mimesis, 2012.
Robinson, Alan, Narrating the Past: Historiography, Memory and the Contem-
     porary Novel, London, Palgrave Macmillan (2011).
Schwenger, Peter, “Red Cannas, Sardines Cans and the Gaze of the Ob-
     ject”, Mosaic, 35.3, (September 2002): 55-71.
Id., The Tears of Things. Melancholy and Physical Objects, Minneapolis, Uni-
     versity of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Schmid, Wolf, “Defamiliarisation”, in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narra-
     tive Theory, London and New York, Routledge 2005: 98.
Schmitt, Cannon, “Refamiliarising Viktor Shklovsky”, Victorian Literature
     and Culture, 47.1, 2018: 187-201.
Shelley, Percy B., “A Defence of Poetry”, in The Norton Anthology of English
     Literature vol. 2, Eds. S. Greenblatt, M.H. Abrams, New York-London,
     Norton & Company, 2006 (8th ed.), ch. XIV: 837-49.




222
                                            Between, vol. XII, n. 23 (maggio/May 2022)



Shklovsky, Viktor, “Sterne’s Tristram Shandy”, in The Novel: An Antholo-
     gy of Criticism and Theory 1900-2000, ed. D. J. Hale, Oxford, Blackwell,
     2006: 31-53.
Id., “Art, as Device”, translated and introduced by Alexandra Berlina, Poet-
     ics Today, 36.2, (2015): 151-174.
Id., A Reader, ed. and tr. Alexandra Berlina, New York and London, Blooms-
     bury Academic, 2017.
Swift, Graham, Ever After, London, Picador, 1992.
Thomas, Joan, Curiosity. A Love Story, Toronto, Penguin Random House,
     2010.
Tennyson, Lord, Alfred, In Memoriam, Selected Poems, ed. A.Day, London,
     Penguin 1991.



                               The Author
Roberta Gefter Wondrich

       Roberta Gefter Wondrich is Associate Professor of English Literature
at the University of Trieste. Her field of interests includes the contempo-
rary English and Irish novel, neo-Victorianism, biofiction, James Joyce, J.
M. Coetzee, thing theory. Recent relevant publications include chapters in
Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-present (ed. C.Mathiessen,
Palgrave 2016), in Neo-Victorian Biofictions (eds. M.L.Kholke e C.Gutleben,
Brill Rodopi, 2020), in Cosmopolitan Italy (ed. E.Tortarolo, in press, Rout-
ledge 2022), an article in The European Journal of English Studies (2021). She
is co-editing a volume on peripheral modernisms (with K. Pizzi, Palgrave,
2023) and writing a monograph on the cultural object in contemporary fic-
tion in English.

Email: gefter@units.it



                               The Article
     Date sent: 30/10/2021
     Date accepted: 31/03/2022
     Date published: 30/05/2022




                                                                                 223
Roberta Gefter Wondrich, , «Until the past was lost in the centre»: (Neo-)Victorian Stony Estrangements



                               How to cite this article
     Gfter Wondrich, Roberta, “«Until the past was lost in the centre»:
(Neo-)Victorian Stony Estrangements”, Straniamenti, Eds. S. Adamo - N.
Scaffai - M. Pusterla - D. Watkins, Between, XII.23 (2022): 203-224, www.
betweenjournal.it




224
