The Physiology of the Novel

Reviewed by: The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction Richard Menke (bio) The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction, by Nicholas Dames; pp. x + 277. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, £50.00, $110.00. In Amnesiac Selves (2001), Nicholas Dames drew on nineteenth-century medical theory to demonstrate how deeply the dynamics of forgetting-by characters, readers, and texts themselves-marks the British novel from Jane Austen to the mid-Victorians. With his fascinating and innovative The Physiology of Reading, Dames now redresses a kind of literary-historical amnesia: why do we think the Victorians had no coherent theoretical approach to the novel? And what kinds of things would we notice about their novels if we recognized that they did, if we understood that their approach was often grounded in the principles and language of nineteenth-century physiology, and if we took their physiological novel theories seriously? The Physiology of Reading outlines a wide and varied strain of Victorian criticism and theory of the novel that focused on the nervous system of the novel reader, a reader more liable to distraction than to immersion, and one for whom the length, variety, and sequential temporality of nineteenth-century fiction could replicate the essential conditions of consciousness itself. In contrast to the modern treatment of novel-reading as a mode of thoughtful inwardness endangered by electronic media (a view typified by Sven Birkerts's maudlin Gutenberg Elegies [1994]), physiological theorists of the novel treated it as "a training ground for industrialized consciousness, not a refuge from it," writes Dames; in their view, "the novel of the nineteenth century trained a reader able to consume texts at an ever faster rate, with a rhythmic alternation of heightened attention and distracted inattention locking onto ever smaller units of comprehension" (7). Some of these critics' attempts to work from experiments on consciousness or sensation to an understanding of [End Page 196] the novel might seem odd, but in Dames's view, physiological critics were essentially trying to understand the responses of a mass audience based on solitary reading. Moreover, as Dames demonstrates, Victorian novel theory's proto-cognitive focus marks not only the expressly physiological work of Alexander Bain or George Henry Lewes but also approaches as diverse as the literary aesthetics of E. S. Dallas, the criticism of R. H. Hutton, and even the workaday reviewing of Geraldine Jewsbury. One of the triumphs of Dames's broad and synthesizing view is the resonance it adds to Victorian treatments of the novel that have seemed flat or peculiar to critics after Henry James. For instance, if Jewsbury's assessments of the hundreds of novels she reviewed again and again hail "readability" as the basic criterion, such a term now emerges as not a lazy celebration of easily consumable texts but a keyword that reveals her emphasis on the "comfort zone[s]" (in Dames's phrase) where the formal elements of fiction and readers' mental capacities could productively come together (61). After an introduction that sets the intellectual stakes, Dames divides The Physiology of Reading into a first chapter that outlines the physiological strain of Victorian novel theory, and then a quartet of chapters that draw on this theory to analyze physiological issues raised by reading four canonical authors, as realized in some of their most celebrated novels. The four practical "cases" (as the table of contents calls them) are uniformly impressive: Dames gives us William Makepeace Thackeray as a champion of mental distraction (especially in Vanity Fair [1847-48] and The Newcomes [1855]); George Eliot as a post-Wagnerian explorer of the possibilities for coherence across extended temporalities (most notably in Daniel Deronda [1876]); George Meredith as the exponent of fragmented form in a print-oriented era of discontinuous consciousness (The Egoist [1879]); and George Gissing as the epitome of the Victorian novelist unsettled by a nascent age of speed-reading (New Grub Street [1891]), an age that the hoary three-decker both seemed to oppose and-with the spacious, legible layout generally needed to carry the work into three volumes-inadvertently to embody. Part of the excitement

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