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Heidegger’s Bicycle
Interfering with Victorian Texts

In the series:
Critical Inventions

Roger Ebbatson
Roger Ebbatson is visiting professor at Loughborough University, having taught previously at the University of Sokoto, Nigeria and University College Worcester. His publications include Lawrence and the Nature Tradition (1980), The Evolutionary Self (1982), Hardy: Margin of the Unexpressed (1992) and An Imaginary England (2005).

“In this startling new book Roger Ebbatson adopts the unusual strategy of recycling Victorian writing through the bone-crunching machine of Germanic thought. The results are dramatic, as it quickly becomes clear that
Nietzsche is not the only German to ‘philosophise with a hammer’; it turns out that to reread Victorian literature via Germanic thought is to take a hammer to that literature, to do a kind of a violence to it. Make no mistake, Ebbatson’s school of criticism is the school of hard knocks.” John Schad, Series Editor of Critical Inventions

“As someone fascinated by A Laodicean’s obsession with radical indeterminancy, occlusion and the ‘blankness’ which for Ebbatson typifies ‘the entire action’ (p. 60), I have been disappointed by the tendency of some recent commentators to pass over the novel in faintly embarrassed silence. Ebbatson by contrast scrutinises the myriad moments of ‘undecidability’ not only in this unjustly neglected text but also in works by Tennyson, Richard Jefferies, Wilkie Collins (The Guilty River), Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Louis Stevenson (The Ebb-Tide) and Conan Doyle…. This is a richly rewarding book whose stringent analysis of Hardy is matched by its subtle ability to tease out the difference and disjunction inhabiting the Victorian text generally. Recommended.” The Hardy Society Journal

“The theoretical premise of Roger Ebbatson’s latest book is designedly a disorientating one: to read works of various canonical Victorian writers – Collins, Hardy, Tennyson, Stevenson, Hopkins, Conan Doyle – for moments where their imaginative scenarios echo or prefigure the cultural preoccupations of some of the most formidable and austere of twentieth-century Germanic thinkers. Adorno, Heidegger, and Benjamin are the presiding spirits of Heidegger’s Bicycle, but other European figures (in particular Gadamer, Arendt, Derrida and de Man) are less overt but important influences throughout. Such a description could not, though, capture the singular and radical thrust of a book that takes these familiar literary texts not as illustrations of later modes of reading but as exemplary anticipations, works which encompass later conceptual routes or paths, and which are ever-full of all kinds of strange historical intimation. Ebbatson’s aim, in the process, is to hammer open the false identity-effects, ‘the marmoreally institutionalized’ surfaces, of these texts, ‘in a strategy of critical “interference” based mainly in German critical thinking.’ As John Schad puts it in his scintillating foreword, this is a book in which ‘Victorian England’ can turn ‘quite bizarrely, into twentieth-century Germany’.

Accordingly, the reader can appear to find him/herself in a disconcerting looking-glass world, or between worlds: for instance, when ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ is read as a paradigm of a genre of nineteenth-century shipwreck poetry whose proper historical perspective would appear to be located in the work of Adorno and Horkheimer. Ebbatson takes Hopkins’s text as a proleptic kind of double-poem, one that combines a critique of capitalist materialism and modernity with a dwindling, evaporating, sense of spiritual redemption. John Schad probes the furthest historical horizon of this logic, when he suggests that the wrecks of ‘twentieth-century Deutschland’, and ‘the thought of twentieth-century Deutschland’ can be heard in Hopkins’s poem. By such modes of reading texts through and with other texts, as Ebbatson says, ‘the poem or novel becomes alien to itself’, though one could add that it becomes also from one aspect identical with something else entirely, as if it were echoing uncannily in advance. So, ‘Sherlock Holmes’s forensic skills on an English moorside ineluctably call up and foreshadow the evil of the Final Solution’, or ‘the passage-ways, turrets and crypts of Hardy’s Somerset castle [in A Laodicean] implicates seminal isssues of middle-European modernism’. Another chapter deals with Stevenson’s prophetic vision of imperial criminality and disintegration in The Ebb-Tide, and another digs up a homosocial subtextual network – personal and linguistic – in Tennyson’s ‘In the Garden at Swainston.’

Audacious though the book may sound, and is, it is perpetually stimulating, invigorating, and revealing to read, and its untimely procedures certainly fulfill Ebbatson’s aim of making the two traditions of writing mutually illuminating. Ebbatson is also the most congenial companion one could wish for, at once lucid and knowledgeable in his command of a huge range of texts and contexts, and ludic in his awareness of the risks he takes. At times, I confess, I found the densely connective texture of some of the discussions challenging, but Ebbatson’s rhizomatic pursuit of uncanny correspondences and transfers is an index of the book’s openness to the power of literature to confound logic and history, and to mean more than it might seem to say.” British Association for Victorian Studies


In the 1990s it was the French theorists such as Derrida, Lacan and Foucault who, with their stress on linguistic play and undecidability, took Victorian Studies by storm; now, it seems, it is the Germans who are coming. In Roger Ebbatson’s new book, Marx, Simmel, Benjamin and, above all, Heidegger are unleashed on a range of Victorian texts – some unsuspecting, some all too suspecting.

The results are alarming: Ebbatson begins with Tennyson overshadowed by empire and homosocial tensions and ends with Conan Doyle writing about a bicycle belonging to a character called Heidegger. In between, he makes bone-shaking progress over a Victorian terrain marked out by Thomas Hardy, Richard Jefferies, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Robert Louis Stevenson; along the way, Ebbatson considers shipwrecks, money, nature, the South Seas Mission, and ‘final solutions’. Tennyson, we discover, was afraid of his own shadow, Hopkins’s greatest poem was created by erratic compasses, Hardy wrote like Kafka, Stevenson was drawn to murderous missionaries, and Conan Doyle applauded the concentration camp. Ebbatson shows us that what the Germans bring to our understanding of the nineteenth century is a terrible awareness of the darkest moments of the darkest moments of the twentieth century.

Introduction 1. Tennysonian Shadows: ‘In the Garden at Swainston’ 2. Fair Ships: A Victorian Poetic Chronotope 3. A Laodicean: Hardy and the Philosophy of Money 4. Sensations of Earth: Thomas Hardy and Richard Jefferies 5 The Guilty River: Wilkie Collins’s Gothic Deafness 6. Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide: Missionary Endeavour in the Islands of Light 7. Dr Doyle’s Uncanny Prognosis: Sherlock Holmes and The Final Solution 116 Index

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