Radius of Pertinence

That lapse in seamlessness is perhaps most noticeable in the novel's radius of pertinence, which, linking each episode to yet another antecedent or adjacent episode, making it contingent upon yet another eventuality, must attest at every turn to the infinitude of causal horizons and the infinitude of perceptual limits. More than any other American author, William Dean Howells champions the realist novel,

and champions it for just that radius of pertinence. The novel has the ability to give the world its broadest representation, to "widen the bounds of sympathy." Nothing is extraneous for the realist: "In life he finds nothing insignificant. . . . He cannot look upon human life and declare this thing or that thing unworthy of notice."^[108] But the realist novel is not only inclusive, it also dwells on the connectedness among all that it sees fit to include. Giving primacy to those threads "which unite rather than sever humanity," it everywhere proclaims the "equality of things and the unity of men."^[109] Howells himself was so taken with the idea that he even suggested that, as a writer, he was "merely a working-man," "allied to the great mass of wage-workers." He urged other writers to forge the same alliance, "to feel the tie that binds us to all the toilers of the shop and field, not as a galling chain, but as a mystic bond."^[110]

It was these mystic bonds that made for the abiding sympathies (and the abiding sense of guilt) in a novel like A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890). And it was the same mystic bonds that, just three years earlier, had prompted Howells (virtually alone among his generation of writers) to come to the defense of the Haymarket anarchists, whose trial and conviction he protested not as an abstract problem of justice but as a matter deeply affecting to himself. "The justice or injustice of their sentence was not before the highest tribunal of our law, and unhappily could not be got there. That question must remain for history, which judges the judgment of courts," Howells warned.^[111] Meanwhile, "for many weeks, for months," he had been living with a "heavy heart," for the "impending tragedy" of the anarchists had not "been for one hour out of my waking thoughts; it is the last thing when I lie down, and the first thing when I rise up; it blackens my life."^[112]

Howells's sense of human connectedness has been accepted as one of the central attributes of the realist novel.^[113] But it is important, too, I think, to treat that attribute not simply as an isolated phenomenon but as one cognitive style, one among others, fashioned in a cultural environment in which the question of pertinence is almost always linked to the question of responsibility. Within that context, the novel must be seen as an exceptionally intriguing document, in that its temporal and spatial boundaries are so amorphous, its connections so thick and intricate, its threshold of extraneousness so nearly nonexisting. The boundaries of the novel are everywhere expandable, and,

in placing the scope of responsibility within those uncertain boundaries, it offers a striking counterpoint to the "rational ethics" so endlessly celebrated in the nineteenth century, upsetting its forms of resolution and grounds for redress.

In The Rise of Silas Lapham , the radius of pertinence is so broad as to appear at times to be outside the bounds of plausibility. The book is what Henry James would definitely call a "loose baggy monster." And as loose baggy monsters go, this one is worse than most—primarily because of two subplots, one only marginally related to the main story and the other apparently not related at all.^[114] The first has to do with Milton K. Rogers, a former partner of Lapham's, squeezed out by him when the business began to prosper, who returns to feed on his guilt and to borrow money from him. This borrowing helps to bring about Lapham's downfall, and Rogers in that regard has something to contribute to the plot. His contribution is not strictly necessary, however, since bad investments alone could have ruined Lapham, and the plot hardly depends on this extra help. Even so, Rogers is more integral to the story than Miss Dewey, a typist in Lapham's office and the center of the other subplot. Her only contribution to the story is to provoke Mrs. Lapham into a fit of unfounded jealousy, but otherwise she seems completely superfluous.

In their semidetached state, Rogers and Miss Dewey would seem to confirm our usual view of the novel as an unruly concoction of plot and subplot, intrigues and entanglements. Here, I want to propose a somewhat different account of this phenomenon, beginning with a conception of the plot and subplot as competing lengths of pertinent time, competing widths of pertinent space. The thickly multiplying subplots, in their unwieldy, unwarranted extension, mark the furthest reach of the novel's causal radius, its most thoroughgoing adventure in connectedness. And since that adventure is ultimately not only far-flung but also far-fetched, each subplot represents as well something of an epistemological crisis, which the main plot must try to rectify, contain, counteract. On this view, plot and subplot would seem to be related, not in thematic collaboration but in cognitive contestation. The novel is thus internally divided, propelled by conflicting narrative coordinates, conflicting grounds of intelligibility, conflicting senses of the extraneous. If it ever achieves a structural equilibrium, that is not so much an effortless given as a precarious effect, a generic crisis confronted and averted. And where that equi-

librium falls short, that too is not so much an aberration as a constitutive failing, a return to what appears to be a generic disposition, a return to the claims of the incommensurate.

The tenuous ties linking Rogers and Miss Dewey are important, then, precisely because they are tenuous, because they define a radius of pertinence so wide as to be virtually untenable. In such a world of causal infinitude, human responsibility becomes infinitely problematic. Is Lapham still responsible for the fate of Rogers, after all these years? How long should he keep on making amends, and how far must he go? That is the very question Mrs. Lapham asks, and her answer is unequivocal. "I want you should ask yourself," she urges her husband, "whether Rogers would ever have gone wrong, or got into these ways of his, if it hadn't been for your forcing him out of the business when you did. I want you should think whether you're not responsible for everything he's done since" (262).

Mrs. Lapham has "a woman's passion for fixing responsibility" (277), Howells tells us, and she certainly seems to be indulging it on this occasion. Still, her passion turns out to be not uniform but strategic and sporadic. She has no desire to "fix responsibility," for instance, when the responsibility involves taking care of the widow and child of a dead army buddy. In fact, she is as vehemently opposed, on this point, as she is vehemently insistent on the other. "One of the things she had to fight [Lapham] about was that idea of his that he was bound to take care of Jim Millon's worthless wife and her child because Millon had got the bullet that was meant for him" (340). As far as she is concerned, this is just "willful, wrong-headed kind-heartedness" (341) on Lapham's part, for he has no moral responsibility to speak of in this case and no reason to "look after a couple of worthless women who had no earthly claim on him" (362). Fight as she does, however, she cannot "beat [the ideal out of" his stubborn head, because, on this occasion at least, Lapham is committed to a wider causal circumference than her own. Seeing himself as the cause of Jim Millon's death, he voluntarily puts himself under what seems to be a lifelong obligation toward the dead man's family. That is why Miss Dewey is in his office to begin with: she is Jim Millon's daughter, and Lapham feels "bound to take care of" her and her mother. The subplot revolving around the typist, then, turns out to be exactly analogous to the one revolving around Rogers. In both cases, a distant event generates a network of complications and entanglements, giv-

ing rise to a universe of ever-receding and ever-expanding causation: a universe of unlimited pertinence and unlimited responsibility.

It is the unlimited responsibility, of course, that precipitates Lapham's downfall. The causal universe he inhabits is not only fatally expansive but also fatally expensive. Moral obligations have a way of becoming financial liabilities here, because both Rogers and Miss Dewey (as well as her mother) use their moral claims to exact money: a fact disturbing not only in its own right, but also in the havoc that it wreaks on the very principle of commensurability which elsewhere had seemed so reassuring to the jurists and philanthropists of the nineteenth century. Lapham is speaking both too prophetically and too soon, then, when he says, "I don't think I ever did Rogers any wrong . . . but if I did do it—if I did—I'm willing to call it square, if I never see a cent of my money back again" (132). The money that he will "never see a cent of back again" turns out to be the sum total of his fortune, for Milton K. Rogers, Lapham later discovers, has a way of "let[ting] me in for this thing, and that thing, and [has] bled me every time" (274).

What is striking here, in Howells's narrative universe, a universe of infinite antecedence, is the degree to which the moral and the economic are here not commensurate—or rather, are commensurate only in the most ironic sense, only through the cruellest inversion of their joint agency. Structured as it is by an almost boundless radius of pertinence, Lapham's moral universe is economically disastrous for just that reason. Far from being self-regulating, self-compensating, it has no rational checks and balances to speak of, nothing to save it from utter collapse, utter disaster. Lapham himself suggests as much. All his trouble began with "Rogers in the first place," he says. "It was just like starting a row of bricks. I tried to catch up, and stop 'em from going, but they all tumbled, one after another. It wasn't in the nature of things that they could be stopped till the last brick went" (364).

A morality given over to excess—a radius of pertinence extended beyond prudential limits—can lead only to the worst case predicted by domino theory. But if so, the very nature of the problem already suggests a solution of sorts. For if the trouble here is a morality gone awry, a morality at odds with its economic foundation, the logical thing to do would simply be to repair that breach, to reconstitute the moral domain once again as a balanced proposition, a self-regulating circuit of gains and losses. It is here, I think, that the category of moral

"character" is especially important—important to the novel's attempt to harness its erring morality, to restore it to the fold of the economic—for the "rise" of Silas Lapham, the moral ascent which the novel advertises, is of course purchased by the corresponding financial downfall he is made to endure. The very category of "character," in other words, is based on a kind of internal bookkeeping, which in effect transforms the radius of pertinence into a circumscribed radius, turning Lapham's life itself into a compensatory structure, a trade-off between suffering and edification.

From this perspective, Lapham's beginnings—the assets that initially grace his person—are especially worthy of notice. And "assets" is the right word because, in the first part of the book, Lapham is noticeably well endowed: endowed with bodily parts that are not only conspicuous but downright obtrusive. Over and over again, we hear about his "bulk" (4), his "huge foot" (3), his "No. 10 boots" (6). He is in the habit of "pound[ing] with his great hairy fist" (3), and, instead of closing the door with his hands, he uses "his huge foot" (3). When he talks to Bartley Hubbard, he puts "his huge foot close to Bartley's thigh" (14). Lapham's body is prominently on display in the opening scene, and in the succeeding chapters we continue to hear about his "hairy paws" (84), his "ponderous fore-arms" (202), and his "large fists hang[ing] down . . . like canvased hams" (188).

In short, Lapham comes with a body, a body grossly physical and grossly animal, and that is the sum and measure of who he is. Such a body, not surprisingly, is often linked with his failures to "rise"—failures first literal and then not so literal. When Bartley Hubbard shows up at the office, for instance, Lapham "did not rise from the desk at which he was writing, but he gave Bartley his left hand for welcome, and he rolled his large head in the direction of a vacant chair" (3). Similarly, when he needs to close the door, he does not rise, but "put[s] out his huge foot" to push it shut (4). So far, Lapham's failure to rise is literally just that: he does not get up from his chair, his body stays put. Things become more worrisome, however, when this bodily inertia becomes metaphorical: Lapham's head, we are told, rests on "a short neck, which does not trouble itself to rise far" (4). Some tyranny of physique seems to be keeping him down, and perhaps it is only to be expected that he should have failed to rise on another occasion as well, when it would have behooved his moral character to do so. Years ago, when he had to decide whether to keep Rogers on or to force him

out, Lapham found that he could not "choose the ideal, the unselfish part in such an exigency," he "could not rise to it" (50). This is a fatal mistake, of course, although with a body like his, it is all but a foregone conclusion.

But Lapham does eventually rise and indeed is destined to do so, as the title promises. Between the unrisen Lapham at the beginning of the book and the risen Lapham at the end, some momentous change has taken place. Or perhaps we should say momentous ex change, for Lapham is able to rise only insofar as he is destined to fall in equal measure, only insofar as his fictive career narrativizes a principle of economy into an edifying trajectory. What he possesses at the end is no longer the bodily vitality he once flaunted, but rather "a sort of pensive dignity that . . . sometimes comes to such natures after long sickness, when the animal strength has been taxed and lowered" (349). In short, a gain and a loss seem to have occurred somewhere, "taxing" Lapham's animal strength to raise his moral capital. Suffering ennobles then precisely because, by virtue of the loss that it entails, it is able to bring about a new ratio in one's composition of character, a new balance of attributes, and a gain commensurate with the loss.

Here, then, is Howells's attempt at a compensatory equilibrium, one that puts the realist novel directly in the company of Herbert Spencer and directly in the company of nineteenth-century humanitarianism and tort law. Like these advocates of a functionalist ethics, the novel too tries to imagine a morality within bounds: a morality commensurate with economic reason, a morality premised on internal regulation and internal adequacy. Such a morality is, of course, the sine qua non of a twentieth-century theorist such as Richard Posner. In The Rise of Silas Lapham , it is the Reverend Sewell who is its chief advocate and who, in proposing an "economy of pain," would seem to be gesturing toward just such a rationalized universe, in which every misfortune carries its organic benefit and every suffering its organic anodyne.

And yet—such is the radius of pertinence in the novel, and such its messy complications—it is not Lapham, after all, who would furnish the human illustration to this economy, nor is he even the occasion for its pronouncement. Sewell, in his recommendation, actually has in mind an entirely different problem: not the economy of a pain that compensates for itself, but the economy of a pain that must be ra-

tioned out, a pain that, because it must fall on some particular person, must turn every act of distribution into a crisis of allocation. What Sewell is doing, after all, is to try to single out one recipient of pain, when there are three equally eligible candidates: Tom, Penelope, and Irene. It is this sense of economy—economy as differential distribution rather than adequate compensation—that would emerge as the obsessive concern not only of The Rise of Silas Lapham but of the realist novel as a genre. Since there is no possibility (and indeed no pretense) that this distribution would ever be fully self-justifying, fully equitable to all concerned, "satisfaction" as a novelistic category is not so much realized as it is ironized, not so much affirmed as renounced. And to the extent that there remains a residue—a character uncompensated, an injury unaccounted for—the novel would seem to have smuggled, into the very heart of its crisis of allocation, something like a generic question mark, a generic ground for disagreement. For all its deference toward a rational order that settles everything and amends everything, the novel's narrative medium is not quite a neutralizing agency, not quite an all-purpose solvent. And so, even though the Reverend Sewell is emphatic about the "economy of pain," even though he is emphatic that "one suffer instead of three," the novel nonetheless finds itself perversely asking a question that it is not supposed to ask, namely, "Why this particular one?"