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Literary Review
Literary fag ends
FICTIONAL eavesdropping might strike some as little more than a melodramatic plot device for the revelation of secrets and mysteries, but in Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust, Ann Gaylin turns it into a highly suggestive paradigm that lets her explore her own project: "how and why novels work and work on us". With impressive versatility, she presents a century of literary eavesdroppers, whose busy listening either prolongs or provokes closure of the narratives in which they participate.
Gaylin's central question is "why do we wish to read about other people's — imaginary people's — private lives?" Human curiosity seems the obvious answer, and eavesdropping creates that narrative lack which provokes curiosity. When half a conversation is overheard, we need to learn the rest. When one character knows more than another, the balance of knowledge must be restored. When Heathcliff doesn't wait to hear the end of Cathy's speech, the whole of Wuthering Heights is set in motion. By propelling narrative, "eavesdropping gives concrete form to readerly desire". As the 19th Century progresses, its fictional works dwell longer on the psychological meanings of location, and the eavesdropper — lover, servant, rival, whoever — originally placed beneath the eavesdrop, encroaches further into the private spaces of the individual being listened to.
While stressing the frequent precedence of aural over visual knowledge-seeking in these scenes, Gaylin's definition of eavesdropping sometimes stretches to any kind of gossip, conversation or listening. Beginning with Jane Austen's use of conversation in defining the separate spheres of Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, "ideologies of domestic space" are further explored in a chapter on Balzac and Dickens. In Balzac's Les Parents Pauvres, intimate spaces are less private than they seem, and the complex use of eavesdropping and domestic interiors, which Gaylin reinforces with sociological context, "registers the instability of families, their homes, and their secrets". Meanwhile, we readers "hold a privileged position of legitimate eavesdroppers, safe from punishment". Not so for those within these stories — Dickens in particular, as one might expect, metes out moral judgement to the good (accidental) and bad (deliberate) over-hearers.
Gaylin writes convincingly of the appropriation of female words by male narrators in The Women in White by Wilkie Collins. Here, eavesdropping involves the simultaneous transfer of information from speaker to listener and from writer to reader. It "dramatises the struggle for the control and dissemination of a story". Through scenes of eavesdropping, characters become narrators or readers of each other's fictions. Marian's writing and eavesdropping defies the traditional ascription of maleness to narrative agency, although it is later re-established. Gaylin shows how some authors draw attention to our complicity in these conventions. As readers of private documents, listeners to private stories, Collins "makes us recognise the potentially transgressive nature of all reading". Proust's examination of private spaces — literal or psychological — via scenes of sexual illicitness "extends the space of eavesdropping from the backstairs to the psyche' and throws a modernist light on Gaylin's observations about 19th-Century authors. Balzac, Austen and Dickens were as knowledgeable about "the psyche" as Proust was, and concerns about the "relation between reader and narrator" are already present in much 19th-Century fiction, where they are flirted with and offered suggestively, while modernism and postmodernism have made them explicit.
Eavesdropping, as the transmission and interception of information, is a fertile subject for epistemological theory, for it involves an alertness to the incompleteness and inaccuracy of our interpretation of knowledge. The real skill in Gaylin's intriguing book, aside from the many astute close readings, and the many new ways of looking at old scenes, is in making clear the relationship between subject and reader in these works. The act of eavesdropping can make both readers and characters suddenly aware of the discrepancies between the way they see themselves and the perception of them by others.
Because "Eavesdropping figures the everyday experience of knowledge acquisition: partial, incomplete, imperfect", it highlights our own vulnerability, the possibility that aspects of ourselves might be overheard and misconstrued, or — perhaps worse — understood, but in a light which shows us sides of ourselves we do not wish to see. Ann Gaylin's explicit regard for what she calls the "double entendre" between what goes on in the novel and while reading is present throughout this elegantly written and thought-provoking study.
Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust, Ann Gaylin, Cambridge University Press, £40. 0 521 81585 1
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