Literary Encyclopedia on Felix Holt, The Radical:
George Eliot's novel, Felix Holt is set against the backdrop of the general election of 1832 as it apparently occurred in the fictional town of Treby Magna.
What is "apparently" doing there? Surely in this case appearances are not deceiving; the elections in Treby Magna appear to take place as they are described in the novel, and that is how they did take place.
I like the bit about how bad legal advice forced Eliot to crate and kill off an entirely superfluous character. (Though the character can't have been entirely superfluous, or Eliot wouldn't have had to create him/her.)
Posted by Matt Weiner at June 11, 2006 10:53 AMSo what is the "entirely" doing there?
The first "entirely", that is.
Posted by: dagger aleph at June 11, 2006 02:20 PMPerhaps I should have put "entirely superfluous" in quotes ("'entirely superfluous'"), to make clear that it is a quote from this sentence:
when Frederic Harrison, a lawyer whose advice she sought, also slipped up, she had to create and then kill off an entirely superfluous character to maintain the strict integrity of this legal argument.
In fact, I should just have quoted that in the original post.
Matt: perhaps "apparently" says something about the narrator and her experiences.
Posted by: Bill at June 11, 2006 06:20 PMI guess the point is that the election was real, but the town is fictional. Like the effect that daylight apparently has on vampires. But then it wrecks the whole thing by saying that the town is fictional.
I hear around the traps you are going to Oz. Where you go?
Would you prefer "supposedly"? And what is the purpose of the comma?
Posted by: WestBerkeleyFlats at June 12, 2006 08:56 PMPresumably the general election of 1832 was a real event, but the town is fictional. "Apparently" is a poor choice of word, but leaving it out leaves us with "the general election of 1832 as it occurred in the fictional town of Treby Magma." Isn't that worse? It implies a real event occurred in a fictional place. How did the event escape into the real world then? It's a bit Six Characters in Search of an Author-ish. Or like the conclusion of "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbus Tertius," where the narrator is undone by the increasingly common physical manifestations of a formerly fictional realm (set in motion by a shadowy secret society).
(I note in passing that Uqbar is said to be a region of Iraq, which perhaps sheds new light on the neocon cabal's ideas about the obsolescence of the reality-based community: "when we act, we create our own reality." Could someone see if the collected works of Borges have been checked out of the AEI and Project for a New American Century's libraries?)
This all could have been avoided if the original sentence had been:
George Eliot's novel Felix Holt is set in the fictional town of Treby Magma, against the backdrop of the general election of 1832.
Ben's revision is better but I think it would be almost fine without "apparently" at all. (And the comma is clearly a mistake.) I don't think there's any more problem with saying that a real event occurred in a fictional place than with saying a fictional event occurred in a real place.
"Holmes chased Irene Adler through the streets of London" is fine even though London is real; Holmes' London inherits many of its properties from the real London, except for the ones that are explicitly or implicitly contradicted by the stories (the existence of 221B Baker St., the existence within it of Holmes and Watson and Inspector Lestrade, etc.). Similarly, the election of 1832 as it takes place in Felix Holt inherits its properties from the actual general election; which parties were running, who won, etc.
Though one more revision is necessary -- it should be "George Eliot's novel, Felix Holt is set against the backdrop of the general election of 1832 as it takes place in the fictional town of Treby Magna." The events of the novel should be described in fictional present; the past tense really does make it sound a bit like the real election took place in the fictional town.
I had a back-and-forth with Brian Weatherson about inherited properties here.
Posted by: Matt Weiner at June 13, 2006 10:26 AMThinking it over, WBF, "supposedly" is OK too; I guess because the fiction supposes that the election takes place there.
Anthony, I'll be in Canberra, in the first place for this and then at the ANU philosophy department for a couple of weeks. Will you be in Oz then or still in Indonesia?
Posted by: Matt Weiner at June 13, 2006 11:30 AMHolmes can chase Irene Adler through the streets of London because that's a fictional event set in a real place. However, the converse, that a real event happens in a fictional place, violates the usual norms of narration. (Not that there's anything wrong with that; if one reads Eliot after Pirandello, it is not impossible to assume that Eliot was influenced by Pirandello, although I think it unlikely in this particular case.) This is as opposed to a real event being instantiated as a fictional version in a fictional place, which is so common as to be unnoticed, but is not what the original quote asserts.
You can write a novel in which a real event happens in a fictional place, but then it isn't the real event anymore, but an extension of it. The prefatory page to Catch-22 says something like "Pianosa is an island in the Mediterranean that is much too small to contain the action described here."
Saying that Catch-22 is set in the semi-fictional island of Pianosa against the backdrop of Allied bombing during World War Two is true (to the point of Cliffs Notes vacuousness). Saying that Catch-22 depicts Allied bombing during World War Two as it happened in the fictional island of Pianosa is like one of those drawings of an impossible object. If something is fiction, it didn't happen, right? (Arguably Catch-22 is a more incisive picture of World War Two than many works of non-fiction, but that's a statement about imaginative power, not about factual testimony.)
Will you be in Oz then or still in Indonesia?
I'll still be here until the end of time.
No, that s/b the end of July. Then straight to London. No trips to Australia for me anytime soon.
You'll have a good time at ANU. I hated Canberra growing up as a teenager, but that was a long time ago, and I think most academic visitors enjoy it.
I do not think there is anything wrong with "the general election of 1832 as it occurred in the fictional town of Treby Magma" or "the Allied bombing campaign as it was conducted from Pianosa." These phrases leave it open as to how closely the fictionalized general election and bombing campaign resemble the real general election and bombing campaign.
Going back to the original sentence... Bearing in mind that the next sentences in the essay are about Eliot's research into actual 1832 polling records, I think the essayist means to suggest that the events in the book are historically accurate (in some sense apart from being placed in a fictional town). The "apparently" is to deprecate the essayist's independent knowledge of what occurred. In other words, "George Eliot did a ton of research on the general election of 1832 for this novel; I assume her research was good."
I agree the juxtaposition with "in the fictional town" is infelicitous.
Would you like it any better with more commas?
George Eliot's novel, Felix Holt, is set against the backdrop of the general election of 1832, as it apparently occurred, in the fictional town of Treby Magna.Posted by: Richard Mason at June 15, 2006 09:43 AM
Richard, I like your explanation for "apparently"; I don't much like the comma'd version of the sentence; but I guess it makes sense if I squint. I also like your first paragraph.
Ben, I don't think "If somehting is fiction it didn't happen" helps here. When we say "Blah-de-blah depicts" we're talking about what happens in the fiction; but real events can be depicted in the fiction, just like real places. "The Demon Lover depicts the effects of the Blitz on its characters" seems sensible to me; these aren't actual-world effects of the Blitz, but within the book they're effects of the Blitz, and the fictional Blitz inherits most of its properties from the real Blitz.
Posted by: Matt Weiner at June 15, 2006 02:44 PMThere's a difference between suspension of disbelief (the real Blitz affecting fictional characters) and actual belief. "The Demon Lover depicts the effects of the Blitz on its characters" is fine. "Gravity's Rainbow depicts the effect of the Blitz on the fictional town of Ick Regis" is also fine. "Gravity's Rainbow depicts the Blitz, which happened in the fictional town of Ick Regis" is clearly not fine (to me at least). "Gravity's Rainbow depicts the Blitz, as it happened in the fictional town of Ick Regis" is stretching it. It's too close to the unacceptable version.
I think that although the meaning of sentences like this is generally clear to the reader, they can always be rephrased to delineate the fiction and the factual backdrop more sharply, and the sentence will be cleaner as a result. The first version of my "Gravity's Rainbow" sentence is superior to the 2nd and 3rd - whether it is an accurate description of Gravity's Rainbow will have to wait for the PhD student brave enough to write a thesis on the typological recapitulation of "Felix Holt" within Section 1 of "Gravity's Rainbow."