6 CONJECTURE

Jonathan Lamb

In the history of representation—in which philosophy, experimental science, art, fiction, his­tory, and its reenactment have all played their parts—the relation of conjecture to the production of knowledge has been complicated by the rivalry between Platonic and empirical approaches to finding things out.

Since reenactment supposes an action or model prior to the performance intended to cor­roborate it, there ought to be no need for conjecture, which supposes what is not yet known, or still to be experienced, in order to approach it as if it were a fact. The one looks to the past, the other to the future. Moreover, reenactment makes its bid for attention on the basis of a deci­sive and impressive resemblance to whatever scenes it reproduces: this is what it was like, this is being there, what happened then is happening now.

History began to find its way forward as an impartial mode of enquiry by narrowing the range of its speculations. Immanuel Kant said that reading accounts of the original contract was like reading a novel, and just as insubstantial (Kant, 1991, p. 221). So historians such as Lord Kames in his Sketches of the History of Man (1778) and William Robertson in his History of America (1778) tried to specify the links between the tribal structures recently discovered in the Americas, Caribbean, and the South Seas, and the growth of European civil society.

In this respect, the alignment of conjecture with historical reenactment becomes much closer, for if the aim of the latter is to make the veil between the real past and the present performance as immediate and transparent as possible, no less does the former seek to obliterate the difference between the fiction of“what if” and what is presently the case. If everything can be represented as a fiction, as Hobbes claims, then there is no part of the real that is not exempt from being merely probable, the semblance of the truth. This is especially true of historical conjecture aimed at the future, either as counterfactual history, such as Philip Roth's novel, The Plot Against America, or in a more sinister fashion, T. R. Malthus's statistical exercise, An Essay on the Principle of Population as it affects the Future Improvement of Society (1798—1806). Just as the Trump presidency confirms much of what Roth foretold in his rewriting of the history of Roosevelt's presidency, news of methods of population control in the Pacific brought home by 18th-century British and French reporters— by means of war, expulsion, and infanticide—corroborated Malthus's speculation that the pursuit of happiness leads inevitably to its opposite: depravity, famine, and death (Bashford and Chaplin, 2016).

In the early novel, conjecture had an important function, but different from that which cor­roborates stadial theory or the increase in population. In the latter cases, the eyewitness confronts what is inevitably experienced as a reenactment—of past time in a present space, of the sacrifice of the effigies of gifts, of the social cost of the lavish displays of histrionic skill—and may even be confounded with the performance itself, as it was when Captain Cook fatally inserted himself into the Makahiki festival at Kealakekua Bay in Hawai'i (Sahlins 1985). But the point of the sight of the performance was to confirm what historians had imagined about the origin and growth of civil society. It is a moment in that series plucked from the past and experienced as a current event.

In Samuel Johnson's fourth Rambler paper, he set out a program for novelists which is still largely cognate with theories of fiction today. Johnson was aware that an increasing number of novels were being written by women for a female audience, the bulk of which was largely ignorant of literature and the world. So it was the job of the novelist to present these readers with hypothetical situations not remote from the ones they might encounter in real life, lend­ing them experience on tick, so to speak, and thus aligning a fictional knowledge with a real competence; or, as Johnson put it, “to initiate youth by mock encounters in the art of necessary defense, and to increase prudence without impairing virtue.” What seems like reenactment in reverse—“I shall imaginatively perform what hereafter I shall actually do”—is in fact a laminate of two conjectures and a corroboration: the fiction of the story, the fiction of the reader's imaginative identification with it, and the real vindication of both in the subsequent life of the reader-heroine.

What ought to have been a perfect exemplification of this scheme in Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen's contribution to Cervantine fiction, comes unstuck because the heroine is hopeless at conjecture and uneasy with the subjunctive. Henry Tilney encourages her to employ sup­positions and surmises, either by way of pleasant analogy (dancing and marriage) or rational suspicion (Isabella Thorpe never had a heart to lose). But he has a bad pupil. For example, when trying to teach Catherine a lesson about conjecture—“How is such a one likely to be influenced. What is the inducement most likely to act upon such a person's feelings, age, situa­tion, and probable habits of life considered?”—she is blank: “What do you mean?... I do not understand you” (Austen, 1995, p. 126). What a rich vein of speculative grief she ignores when she takes Henry's sudden disappearance from Bath at face value: “Not seeing him anywhere, I thought he must be gone” (70). She has failed to understand how novels were read then, but she reveals how we understand them now. Catherine Gallagher points out that readers were urged “to make suppositional predictions. to speculate upon the action, entertaining various hypotheses” until it becomes clear that “the reality of the story itself [is] a kind of suppositional speculation” (2006, p. 346). As opposed to Catherine's unsubtle absorption in the immediacies of The Mysteries of Udolpho, this kind of split attention to fiction as a mirror of the real and as a product of the imagination constitutes the full extent of reality—of the story, of the characters, and eventually of life itself.

But the unconditional reading that Austen's Catherine exemplifies has a relation to reenact­ment much closer than Gallagher's “cognitive provisionally.

Possibly the most famous poem of the 18th century, Grey's Elegy in a Country Churchyard, was composed of layered conjectures about the past, one on top of another. What if the unlettered poor buried in unmarked graves had enjoyed the opportunities of their betters and become eminent? What if we could see the unnumbered treasures concealed in the dark caverns of the ocean? What if we could have communion with people who no longer exist? (realism). The poet posing these hypotheses dies in the course of the poem, leaving nothing but these lines and his epitaph behind him, and placing the reader in the same position vis-a-vis his corpse that he adopted toward the dead during his evening in the churchyard—and initiating a cult of graveside meditation that was prominent throughout the Romantic age. Adam Smith explains how conjecture works when we feel sympathy for the dead. The imagination carries the mind beyond the illusion that reading is seeing, beyond Smith's first assumption about sympathy, namely that you can never really feel someone else's agony, and into the zone of feelings much more terrible:

It is from this very illusion of the imagination, that the foresight of our dissolution is so terrible to us, and that the idea of those circumstances, which undoubtedly can give us no pain when we are dead, makes us miserable while we are alive.

(Smith, 1979 [1759], p. 13)

This is when we realize that the poet who speculated about the lives and talents of the village dead has now joined them, subject to speculations in his turn, and that we shall be next. There is an equally terrible example of negative Malthusian conjecture in Dickens's Great Expectations when Jaggers deploys a series of hypotheses to disclose secrets of a past that make the happy future Pip promised himself utterly impossible.

I'll put a case to you... Put the case that a woman held her child concealed... Put the case that [her legal adviser] held a trust to find a child for an eccentric rich lady to adopt and bring up. Put the case that he lived in an atmosphere of evil. put the case that pretty nigh all the children he saw in his daily business life, he had reason to look upon as so much spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his net. put the case, Pip, that here was one pretty little child out of the heap who could be saved. Do you comprehend the imaginary case?

(Dickens, 2002, p. 377)

Kames admits he finds it hard to explain the dynamics of ideal presence, concluding simply that “Of all the means for making an impression of ideal presence, theatrical representation is the most powerful” (2005, vol. I, p. 71). However, between them, Smith and Austen show how disruption—either of a narrative based on conjecture or one on the passive spectatorship of reverie—provoked by an intrusion of the imagination that implicates the subject in the pre­dicaments of the object, causes a reaction that neither fiction nor history can manage on their own. In a novel about the ambience of the theater and techniques of acting entitled At Freddie's, Penelope Fitzgerald (2014) shows how accidentally this disruption can occur, and what a sur­prising effect it sustains. Boney Lewis is a middle-aged actor, very competent but given to drink and not at all fond of children. Mattie Stewart is a precocious child actor, showy but shallow, and given to practical jokes. He is playing the part of Prince Arthur in Shakespeare's King John, whose eyes must be put out with hot irons by Hubert, played by Boney. Prior to the first night, Boney has been given some advice by a colleague about cutting down his intake of alcohol in a note he has crumpled up and thrown away. Retrieved by Mattie, the note reappears on the first night in the warrant when Hubert holds it out to the Prince, “Can you not read it?” Well Boney can, and what it says is as follows: “Just a little hint on Cutting Down. Today, have your first drink ten minutes later; tomorrow, twenty minutes later, and so on. Every day will be a little easier.” Then we read: “Boney Lewis... achieved the moment of electrifying contact with the audience in front of him which may only once or twice in a lifetime be the actor's reward.” The critics are rapturous: “As Lewis first produces and later tears up the crucial document which orders the blinding of an innocent child totally at his mercy, the dialogue between unthinking political obedience and human decency springs to dramatic life.” Mattie's speculative theft of the scene and Boney's fit of pure exasperation are both recruited for a moment neither was try­ing to achieve, but which keeps an audience of 1700 people rivetted for three minutes: “The quality of the attention, even the texture of the silence, changed. The theatre had bound its spell upon them” (Fitzgerald, 2014, p. 175). This sort of conjuration, no matter how fortuitous, brings the audience into touch with an experience it has not yet enjoyed—a challenge reenactment is always rising to meet.

Is there is a stadial model applicable to the various forms of conjecture rehearsed here? First there is conjectural history where a private observation (often of an anthropological slant) con­firms an imagined case of social development as credible, even if it is not true; for the confirma­tion itself may come in the shape of a ritual performance, and the eyewitness may greet it as an absorbed spectator rather than a critical inspector. Thus, the degree of imagination involved in the original speculation is matched by the imaginative participation of the beholder in the per­formance. Conjectural fiction offers the public access to virtual experience whose vindication is entirely private and lodged in the future; here imagination encourages a temporary identifica­tion between (say) the heroine and the female reader, but it promotes the growth of a probable case into an ultimate experience of whose reality only the reader will be aware. Ideal presence is purely private with no direct public value at all: it is purely a work of the imagination, close to reverie and dreaming, in which probability exerts no influence and no margin exists for conjecture. Finally, there is the negative conjecture, which removes the sensory component of experience in order to expose the illusion that pleasure taken in light, color, textures, odors, and sounds has any bearing on the “future improvement of society,” as Malthus puts it. The dead are the only vindicators of these conjectures, and conversations with them offer no promise except that of closer communion with them some time in the future. Here, imagination has nothing to perform but the dismal task of picturing annihilation.

Further reading

Gallagher, C., 2006; Kahn, V, 2004; Kant, I., 1991; Poovey, M., 1998; Sahlins, M., 1985; Shapin, S., and Schaffer, S., 1985; Vaihinger, H., 1925.