Impressions of Theophrastus Such

Written two years before her death, this is Eliot’s summing up, her distillation of her atheistically yet humanly ethical philosophy, her ultimate meditations on the nature of life and writing, her analysis of character without the need to create plot to help the reader along. Couched as a series of reflections on the nature of his friends by the narrator called Theophrastus, the book thus situates itself into the genre of character writing, invented by the eponymous Greek philosopher. However, the book signals its intention to be taken as a meditation on human character generally by the strangeness of the character’s names, which ostensibly hide the identities of the originals and at the same time awake echoes of Medieval morality show more literature and Latin literature: Ganymede for the writer who was famous when young, Sir Gavial Mantrap for the immoral swindler, Mixtus, Scintilla, Lentullus etc. About half way through the book, in the essay called ‘Debasing the Moral Currency’ it seems as if Eliot herself hijacks the narrative voice, and Theophrastus is lost. It’s not so much a stridency of tone, but rather an intensifying of the intellectual argument without the illustration of character: Eliot decides to make no concessions to her readers, and discontinues her attempts to illustrate her arguments by fictional character studies. The book thus swerves from fictional literature to expository literature. The text bristles with erudition in a host of European languages, both living and dead, and there are constant references to contemporary cutting edge scientific and geographical knowledge. This shift in the narrative voice effectively shifts the book into a new genre, that of the humanistic essayist: in her attempts to understand and get to the bottom of her individual relationship with the reality of life and the perception of it by consciousness, Eliot joins Montaigne, Marcus Aurelius and Bacon in a tradition that ultimately descended from Socrates's dictum: the unexamined life is not worth living....

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http://thelectern.blogspot.com/2006/08/impressions-of-theophrastus-such_14.html show less

This book has a bad reputation. It suffers from two things: it is not a dense novel with sociological sweep and thematic depth (that is, it is not make the major statement that both "Silas Marner" and "Middlemarch" so obviously did, with success); and it is utterly readable.

It is also very odd, almost its own genre. These are essays written by a fictional character, Theophrastus Such. The name means something, and his philosophical preoccupations are apparently the author's. But, did I detect a level of irony here? The author hid herself behind a pseudonym; here she hides philosophical ruminations behind a fictional character, another male. There are times when reading these serious reflective essays that one gets the notion, however show more faint, that the author realized an element of fussiness, an element of pretense, an element limiting her philosophy.

Or maybe not. This is a book worth reading and then reading again, to decide such questions.

I is a treasure. Forget questions of its greatness. Just read it. You may enjoy it. show less

An interesting coda to George Eliot's literary career and one not often read these days. Impressions crosses the boundaries between fiction and fact, as Eliot espouses her views on life through a narrator 'Theophrastus Such', an obscure scholar. It's not essential Eliot by any means and there is little here which is not fully developed in the novels, although there is a passionate attack on anti-Semitism which goes far beyond even Daniel Deronda.

Some of the best writing is contained in the chapter 'Looking Backward' as she vividly brings to life her beloved Midlands countryside with echoes of Loamshire from her first novel, Adam Bede. Truly lump-in-the throat stuff.