Narrative and ‘Immovable Roots’: Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede

Abstract

‘Memory’, observes George Henry Lewes, ‘may be best comprehended as a reinstatement of Feeling’ (PLM3, 160). The ‘reinstatement’ of the mentality of English rural communities, particularly the mode in which communal feelings formulate and transmit themselves over generations, is a predominant theme in Eliot’s early fictional works. For the characters, memory as process may mean being seized by these feelings and interpreting them, and memory as result the moral meaning of such specific interpretations. Together they constitute an important aspect of Eliot’s study of the natural history of English rural life. Memory in both senses, like memory in general, is now no longer regarded, as Peter Burke summarizes, as ‘the innocent activities they were once taken to be’: ‘[we] are learning to take account of conscious or unconscious selection, interpretation and distortion’.¹ This interpretative and sometimes inventive nature of memory figures prominently in Eliot’s novels and short stories. Yet it is rarely isolated from feelings conceived as an ineradicable link to a past, a past that has been lived through by ancestral and present generations and exerts an inexorable claim on the present. Just as the act of remembering may organize the past, so the formation of happenings in that past — both feelings and events — may shape and condition the process of narrating the past for the present.

The point is not to possess the past, but to understand the force of its claim upon the present without thereby supposing that such a claim is sovereign, or that contemporaneity is simply swamped or displaced by memory.

(Richard Terdiman, Present Past, p. 356; original emphases)