The Lifted Veil

 

A few days after the incident of the opal ring, we were paying one of our frequent visits to the Lichtenberg Palace. I could never look at many pictures in succession; for pictures, when they are at all powerful, affect me so strongly that one or two exhaust all my capability of contemplation. This morning I had been looking at Giorgione's picture of the cruel-eyed woman, said to be a likeness of Lucrezia Borgia. I had stood long alone before it, fascinated by the terrible reality of that cunning, relentless face, till I felt a strange poisoned sensation, as if I had long been inhaling a fatal odour, and was just beginning to be conscious of its effects.

Thus the narrator of George Eliot's The Lifted Veil describes a kind of vertigo of images; he who is so able to see so clearly what others cannot is overwhelmed when presented with pictures, whose veiled emotional "odor" is far stronger, though less distinct, than the frighteningly clear visions he has of the actual feelings of living people. Either way, these moments of unwanted synesthesia mark The Lifted Veil as Eliot's most profoundly sensory works, a tale that moves from moment to overwhelming moment with the relentless determination of an alarm clock connected to a bomb. After all, or so we are told, the ending is -- from the narrator's point of view -- already too well-known, but this knowledge brings no sense of mastery, no release. Our narrator is paralyzed by his powers, a position one recognizes at once from reading the works of Poe; a volume of Poe's works was in the personal library of Eliot and her partner Lewes.

Eliot's later career veered strongly away from "sensation" fiction, and there is nothing else in her later oeuvre that approaches it in intensity, a fact for which readers of the time may have been grateful. But as to us today, we are swept away, plunged along with our first-person guide into the terrible clarity of clairvoyance, and it seems perhaps the most modern of Eliot's writings.

p.s. for those who want a fresh "whiff" of the Borgias, Neil Jordan's series may be of interest; it features the genially creepy Jeremy Irons as Pope Alexander VI.