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The Impassive Novel: “Brain-Building” in Walter Pater's Mari us the Epicurean

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Michael Tondre
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Abstract

Walter Pater's writings advance an affective historicism: an embodied experience of the past that Pater conceived in dialogue with Victorian neuroscience. Pater theorized art's freedom from the present by drawing on insights into reaction time, the subject of influential scientific studies in nineteenth-century culture. His slow-moving prose lifts readers out of the now, while simultaneously binding them to material realities. These tendencies fueled charges of sexual deviance against The Renaissance (1873) insofar as medical and religious writers understood belated reactions as a symptom of effeminate ennui. But in Marius the Epicurean (1885), Pater reinscribes religious sentiments in terms of postponement. Its hero's sensory education, set in late classical culture, aligns the feeling of postponement with nascent doctrines of resurrection and temporal returns. After elaborating this account, the essay revises Georg Lukács's observations on weak secular heroes, extending queer scholarship to show how, through the feltness of the past, Pater's hero learns to resist incorporation into modern social forms.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 133 , Issue 2 , March 2018 , pp. 329 - 346
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2018

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