Incomplete Rationalization

In its less than convincing answer to that question, its less than convincing attempts to justify its distributive effects, the novel is less of an "economy" than we may think, less fortified by that long tradition of presumptive and indeed prescriptive commensurability. To honor the novel in its dissent from that tradition, to honor the persistent sense of injury that it manages to keep alive, we need a theory, I think, about its structures of failed resolution, about the range of satisfactions it refuses to claim, let alone to grant. We need a theory, that is, about the "incomplete rationalization" of the novel, about the narrative form itself as an imperfect form of closure, an imperfect form of justification. Along those lines the novel would appear to be less summarizable by any single line of reasoning and less exhausted by any single adducible logic. By the same token, its distributive relations too might turn out to fall only partially within the domain of rational

explanation, which is to say, they might turn out simply to obtain, but might not necessarily be justified as such, and might not even claim justification as a premise.

Some such distributive relation, in any case, is what Tom Corey notices as The Rise of Silas Lapham draws to a close. And, whether justified or not, it certainly gives him hope, as he watches the synchronized gain and loss being meted out to himself and to the man who, he hopes, will one day be his father-in-law. "Lapham's potential ruin," for Tom, is nothing short of a windfall, because this is a case where "another's disaster would befriend him, and give him the opportunity to prove the unselfishness of his constancy" (272). This is not just wishful thinking either. It actually comes to pass: Lapham's trouble does indeed "befriend" Tom, and his marriage to Penelope does indeed take place, to the tune of his father-in-law's financial downfall. In some mysterious fashion, the two events seem to have compensated for each other in a kind of cosmic trade-off, a cosmic exchange of fortunes. Here then, once again, are the familiar motions of a compensatory equilibrium. And yet the terms of the equilibrium are such as to provoke questions in turn. In what sense, and by what calculus, is the marital bliss of Tom and Penelope a fit compensation for Lapham's financial disaster (not to mention the elder Coreys's afflicted sensibility)? What rate of exchange—to put the question most crudely—measures these occurrences and certifies their commensurability?

That such questions can be asked, that some of them can even be answered, is a tribute to the economized ethics of the novel, its dream of a rational order resolvable into matching terms. This is its hoped-for foundation, its hoped-for justificatory ground, from which it derives a sequence, a circumference, a principle of economy doubling as a principle of narration. And yet the shakiness of such a foundation—its lapses not only in coverage but also in guarantee—suggests that the novel is, after all, both more complex and more vulnerable than the concept of an "economy" would make of it. There can be no full adequation here. Instead, what the novel registers, over and over again, is something like the traces of an insoluble residue: a residue offered up to us, unhappily but also quite unsparingly, as the limits of commensurability and the limits of any justice founded upon its image.

In The Rise of Silas Lapham , the limits of justice begin with a trou-

bling mismatch, a troubling lack of commensurability, among the characters. Unexplained but also quite unmistakable, it manifests itself not only in a disparity of intelligence but also in a nonreciprocity of affections. This creates a headache for all concerned, and none is more aware of it than Mrs. Lapham. "She isn't really equal to him" (109), she announces with palpable misgivings, when she first toys with the idea of a romance between Tom and Irene. Many pages later, when that romance has become no more than a monstrous illusion, this is the theme she comes back to: "But she never was equal to him. I saw that from the start" (226). Against that brute fact of inequality, Penelope's marriage to Tom, an equal match in all respects, would seem to stand both in contrast and in remedy. But if so, that remedial equality turns out to be a kind of differential effect, generated out of inequalities and rendered intelligible only by that contrary phenomenon. It is this mind-boggling logic—and the mind-boggling "justice" predicated on its terms—that Howells would wrestle with, not only in The Rise of Silas Lapham but also in an essay entitled "Equality as the Basis of Good Society" (1895), published ten years later.

"Humanity is always seeking equality," Howells writes. "The patrician wishes to be with his equals because his inferiors make him uneasy; the plebeian wishes to be with his equals because his superiors make him unhappy. This fact accounts for inequality itself, for classes." The desire for equality turns out, in short, to be the basis for inequality. This is certainly a discouraging prospect, although (if it is any consolation) the inverse turns out to be true as well. Equality, as it happens, can also be born out of a desire for its antithesis. "People often wish to get into good society because they hope to be the superiors of those who remain out of it; but when they are once in it, the ideal of their behavior is equality." This is so because "if you are asked to a house, the theory is that you are the equal of every person you meet there, and if you behave otherwise, you are vulgar." Such behavior can be kept up "only on a very partial and restricted scale, and of course the result is an effect of equality, and not equality itself, or equality merely for the moment." Still, this is better than nothing, and Howells offers the dubious advice that "good society," "though it is the stronghold of the prejudices which foster inequality, yet it is the very home of equality."^[115]

In its self-confounding logic, "Equality as the Basis of Good Society" stands as a kind of remote coda to The Rise of Silas Lapham . In

the dubiousness of its advice (not to say the dubiousness of its consolation), it also echoes the novel's curious reluctance to claim for itself anything like full satisfaction. "The marriage came after so much sorrow and trouble," Howells tells us, "and the fact was received with so much misgiving for the past and future, that it brought Lapham none of the triumph" (358–359). As for the Coreys, "the differences remained uneffaced, if not uneffaceable, between [them] and Tom Corey's wife" (359). "That was the end of their son and brother for them; they felt that"; and, with so much "blank misgiving," such a "recurring sense of disappointment," all Mrs. Corey could do was to "say bravely that she was sure they all got on very pleasantly as it was, and that she was perfectly satisfied if Tom was" (360–361).

By the force of convention, the marriage between Penelope and Tom counts as a happy ending; and yet what Howells chooses to dwell on is the manifest un happiness it occasions, to which the supposedly happy ending attaches itself almost as an afterthought. The intrusive shades of disappointment certainly seem striking in The Rise of Silas Lapham . But the same might also be said of numerous other nineteenth-century novels as well. To cite only the most obvious examples, the best-known (and most-lamented) marriages in the novels of George Eliot—between Dinah Morris and Adam Bede, between Dorothea Brooke and Will Ladislaw, between Daniel Deronda and Mirah Lapidoth—are "happy endings" only in name; in every other respect they bring a disconcerting inflection to that label. Within this context, the famous last line of The Bostonians (1886) might serve as an epigraph for the entire genre. When Verena goes off with Basil Ransom, she is discovered, James tells us, to be "in tears." And he goes on, "It is to be feared that with the union, so far from brilliant, into which she was about to enter, these were not the last she was destined to shed."^[116]

Howells does not say that about Penelope, of course, and we have every hope that she will fare better than Verena Tarrant. Still, even in The Rise of Silas Lapham , a book that otherwise has little in common with The Bostonians , the happily married heroine is not allowed to go off without shedding some tears of her own.^[117] When Penelope finally departs with Tom, she too is seen "cry[ing] on his shoulder" (361). That activity is perhaps more appropriate to Verena, but it is not entirely out of place even here, for Penelope's marriage too carries with it something like a generic signature of the novel, a generic

sense of the unappeased. The ending, then, is not so much a full resolution as a problematization of that very concept. Inadequate to all that has gone on before and inadequate, above all, to the phenomenon of pain which the novel foregrounds as its subject, the ending marks not the passing of its crisis of allocation, but the rewriting of that crisis into a generic condition for residue.

It is Irene, of course, who stands out, as the most unyielding and most inconvenient of residues, in the crisis of allocation which animates and confounds The Rise of Silas Lapham . Significantly, Howells does not choose to supply Irene with a suitor, a figure of commensurability, someone who would have rectified her mismatch with Tom, even though there are certainly available candidates, including her cousin Will and the young West Virginian who has taken over her father's business. Irene is uncompensated in her marital fortunes, and she is uncompensated, as well, in her moral bookkeeping. For even though she is indeed educated by her suffering—"toughened and hardened" by it, as a host of nineteenth-century scientists and philanthropists would have predicted—it is not at all clear that her account is truly balanced, that her pain is truly its own reward. If anything, the emphasis here is on the discrepancy between suffering and edification, between the injury sustained and the recompense received. Irene has "necessarily lost much," Howells writes. "Perhaps what she had lost was not worth keeping; but at any rate she had lost it" (347). At the end of the book, we see her treating "both Corey and Penelope with the justice which their innocence of voluntary offense deserved. It was a difficult part, and she kept away from them as much as she could" (347).

The transformation of sister and lover into recipients of "justice"—recipients of some generalized "desert"—marks the logical outcome as well as the logical limit of an economized ethics, an ethics respectfully invoked in The Rise of Silas Lapham but, I would argue, also respectfully contested, if not quite rejected out of hand. For Irene as for Howells, justice is defensible (and indeed practicable) only when it is recognized for what it is, which is to say, an attempt to map our reason onto the world, an attempt which in the end can be no more than that, an attempt. Irene is just to Tom and Penelope; she cannot stay far enough away from them. In the necessary proximity—and necessary dissonance—of those two attitudes, we see the shadows haunting the cognitive domain of the novel, a domain that, while informed by the

dream of a commensurate order, is nonetheless not fully integrated into it. In all those moments (and they are numerous) when things refuse to tally, when injuries go uncompensated, when resolutions fall short, the novel offers itself as the most eloquent of failures: a failure in the economics of justice.