Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Fictional Experience by Timothy Gao (review)

Reviewed by: Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Fictional Experience by Timothy Gao Valerie Purton (bio) Timothy Gao. Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Fictional Experience. Cambridge UP, 2021. Pp. vi + 222. £75.00. ISBN 978-1-108-83716-3 (hb). No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. … Whence did it come? What did it mean? End Page 413 How could I seize and apprehend it? … And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea. (Marcel Proust, Swann's Way) Marcel Proust's sensory memory of the Madeleine biscuit is a telling image in this rich and challenging book, which sets out to analyze the concept of virtuality, "that which is real but not actual, ideal but not abstract" (4, quoting Giles Deleuze). The Introduction ambitiously aspires to place the virtual world of the novel "within Enlightenment and Romantic ideas about the second-order realities of the senses (Hume and Kant), of social fictions (Burke and Paine), and of poetic imagination (Coleridge and Wordsworth)" (4). Gao's aim is to look both back and forward in time: to reorientate our sense of the novel's literary functions in the modern world of video-gaming and cyber realities, "while also recovering a Victorian legacy of ongoing questions about the relation between material and imagined lives" (5). Sometimes in this endeavour Gao appears to be making a mountain out of a molehill, as when he struggles for several pages to characterise the novel's distinctive capacity "for purveying explicitly artificial realities" (6). S. T. Coleridge cut through such pages of verbiage in 1817 with his concept of the "willing suspension of disbelief" (Coleridge 191) – the contract silently established between novel-writer and reader as the reading process begins. Gao struggles on, agonizing (with many other recent critics cited) about the potential confusion of fact and fiction, until he lights upon his own version of Coleridge's dictum, the reader's acceptance of "the playful doubleness of a form that renders openly non-existent things with extravagant verisimilitude" (6). His aim is to shift the emphasis in novel criticism from reading for "symbolic meaning or historical representations" (10) to reading for the pleasures of the novel's sheer fictionality – for the delights of imaginative play. This sense of play being at the heart of the aesthetic experience has long been part of critical theorists' vocabulary, of course, in discussions of the "ludic," especially in relation to Derrida and postmodernism. One is tempted to ask, what is new in Gao's presentation of the idea? As always in such works the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and it is in four succeeding chapters on Charlotte Brontë, Anthony Trollope, W. M. Thackeray and Charles Dickens that the usefulness of Gao's new thinking End Page 414 can be tested. Before they are reached, however, the reader has to negotiate the first chapter, entitled "Virtual, Paracosmic, Fictional," in which Gao draws connections between a history of play and the development of fiction by studying the childhood play of Trollope and the Brontës. In the Charles Dickens chapter, "Description, Projection and Charles Dickens," he at last...