Chase 1978

Cynthia Chase. "The Decomposition of the Elephants: Double-Reading Daniel Deronda." PMLA 93.2 (Mar 1978), 215-227.

• intensely De Man-ian deconstruction that close reads Hans's letter in order to get at the mise-en-abyme of representation but with interest in how it experiments with narrative representation of causality. I wouldn't go as far as she does but take the point about its experimentation. Published while she was a grad student at Yale.
• 215 Focusing attention on the narrative process, these lines [in Meyrick's letter 544ff] suggest that the novel presents itself to be read in two conflicting ways: not only as a history of the effects of causes but also as a story of "the present causes of past effects."
• 216 Thesis: As we shall see, it offers a deconstruction of the narrator's story and, by implication, of story in general -- both of history with its system of assumptions about teleological and representational structures, and of discourse, with its intrinsic need to constitute meaning through sequence and reference.
  • Shuttleworth 1984 usefully fleshes out how this system is developed in social and psychological terms
• DD, of course, is not merely a fictional "history": it is patently about history. It focuses on the causes at work in the personal destinies of D and G and finally on the "cause" taken up by Deronda as his destined mission.
• 217 Larger conceptual stakes: Narrative operates, indeed, by flattering our "judicious opinion": to read a sequence of events as a narrative is to expect that sequence to become intelligible. By the almost irresistible pressure of this expectation, the temporal sequence is conflated with a causal sequence. post hoc is interpreted as propter hoc. A novel evokes the passage of time, which is itself presented to show the "effects" of "causes" and thereby to reveal the events' significance. The formulation in Meyrick's letter satirizes this assumption as a kind of mental sloth, a withholding of judgment that is an evasion of interpretive effort. It would not be irrelevant to refer this criticism to D's attitude toward learning his parentage, which he postpones indefinitely until he receives his mother's summons. What the narrator would wish us to interpret as a "wise passiveness," the text of the letter ironizes as the banal creed of "time will show." The remainder of the passage suggests that the passive trustfulness of protagonist and reader -- their trust in the revelatory power of sheer sequence -- is fundamentally misplaced.
• What a reader feels, on the basis of the narrative presentation, is that it is because D has developed a strong affinity for Judaism that he turns out to be of Jewish parentage.... Meyrick's letter, however, names what is vitally at issue: not a violation of genre conventions or of vraisemblance but a deconstruction of the concept of cause.
• 218 In naming Deronda's revealed Jewish parentage as the "present cause" of his demonstrated vocation for Jewishness, its "past effects," Meyrick's letter is naming the cause as an effect of its effects, and the effects as the cause of their cause, and is therein identifying the contradictory relationship between the claims of the realistic fiction and the narrative strategy actually employed.
  • I dunno... doesn't the intelligent reader suspect that DD is Jewish earlier, making it more of a question of the somewhat mystical question of his genes "determining" his interest in Judaism, or inclining him toward it?
• 219 In renaming hte novel's central issue as a matter of a substitution of terms [metalepsis, metonymic chain], Meyrick's deconstructive gesture reconceives the significant action of human subjects as the purposeless play of signifiers. Meyrick's letter marks what classical rhetoric called a parabasis, a shifting of attention from the level of operation of the narrator, the reconstruction of the sequence of events in an imaginary human life, to the level of operation of the text or narrative as such, the construction of a discourse and a history. [It comes from the chorus addressing the audience in Greek Old Comedy]
• 222 interesting about the similarity in establishing DD's parentage and Oliver Twist's but the public negative reaction to the former not the latter
• 224 A truth that reveals itself as a rhetorical structure, La Rouchefoucauld's aphorism resembles the narrative structure of DD. The authority of a prior text is being invoked to ratify not only the message but also the rhetorical usage favored by the narrator.
  • the performance of literacy and of rhetorical construction