Views from Above and Below: George Eliot and Fakir Mohan Senapati

Abstract

I begin with one of the most famous passages in English fiction in order to define from the start what generations of readers have taken as George Eliot’s moral vision in Middlemarch—a vision exemplified not just in eloquent authorial asides like this one, but in the novel’s design, subject, and expanded point of view. The sentences contain several hallmarks of European literary realism: a bold reversal of the classical hierarchy of genres in order to favor the ordinary and humble; an intellectually serious focus on everyday life; an ironic conjunction of romantic expectation and mundane disappointment. The famous figure of the squirrel’s heartbeat similarly refigures the traditional object of sublime response, not as a spectacle vast, grand, and rare, but as “all ordinary human life.” No novelist could embrace such a totality, no person could endure such awareness; but by providing an image for what lies beyond the reach of human vision and feeling, the narrator hints at our highest duty as ethical beings—and suggests for literature, if not an attainable goal, something like an ultimate horizon.