GEORGE ELIOT PRIZE

 

 

Link :  http://www.georgeeliot.org

 

THE PROMPT

In 1929, the other, later, Eliot asserted “Dante & Shakespeare divide the modern world between them: there is no third.”. On 22 November 2014, one of the speakers at the splendid George Eliot  Conference  said "Middlemarch is the greatest English novel. Some, and I too, would say it is the greatest novel, surpassing Tolstoy."  [gist].

I am not a literature scholar but I do affirm these two judgements. Though I know only a little of her work,  I have long been persuaded of her moral courage and her absolute entitlement to the various ascriptions: writer of the greatest English novel,  the most intellectually accomplished woman of the 19C world, a high-mark of being few men or women have reached since....

A few weeks earlier, I had come across a remark in the journal Radical Philosophy :

"Marian Evans, another nineteenth-century woman who adopted a male soubriquet (George Eliot) in print (Macfarlane’s was ‘Howard Morton’), is revered as a novelist, but if you explore her critical relationship to Christianity (translator of David Strauss’s scandalous The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined) parallels with Macfarlane foam forth. Macfarlane’s commitment to the Chartist cause has a clarity, a conviction and historical grasp which can make a bid for George Eliot’s place at the moral centre of Victorian letters."

[ Helen Macfarlane : Independent Object  : David Black & Ben Watson : (No 187 :Sep/Oct 2014)  ]

Given my limited reading, I was not surprised that I did not know of Macfarlane. But I was intrigued and exhilarated by the astonishing similarities with George Eliot - from age to to love of German philosophy to highly wrought prose  - and Black & Watson's closing judgement.

I wondered what these great women thought of each other, the seeming mind-twin, if they had met: and/or if subsequent writers had imagined their meeting in some joyous literary fiction: like Amanda Prantera's Conversations With Lord Byron On Perversion, 163 Years After His Lordship's Death : or  Stoppard's Travesties.

I decided to give a small benefaction to The George Eliot Fellowship.

(The prize also honours my late Mother, Jit Kaur: her maiden name was Dhaliwal.)

 

Recently I had the great pleasure of being received cordially and shown around Nuneaton by John Burton and John Rignall.

 

I do not wish to be part of the group of scholars judging the work submitted for the prizes. During my recent reading of Middlemarch in the 21st Century,  I paused longest at two remarks : "Even exactly what kind of action should be performed in a given  situation remains not wholly clear. How would I ever know that I was correctly imitating Dorothea?  [J.Hillis-Miller: p.139]  and later, "The benefactor had to give up not only her time and money but also her complacency" [D.Siegel:p.159]

 

FINALLY

My favourite passage in Eliot is one of the greatest definitions of maturation ever written:

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr. Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling—an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects—that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.

For forty years it was the concept of  "equivalent centre" that most impressed me. It still does. But lately, I have been more in awe of the criterion of  "an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects".  This  beautifully challenges one's complacency in merely intellectual understanding : asserting that genuine knowledge changes one's physical landscape : unlike Konrad Lorenz's geese, one ought to keep bumping into the new truth.