John Richetti - The Columbia History of the British Novel

By narrowing the vortex of the novel's formation, a nationalist British literary history produces a new object of cultural value now dubbed "the English novel." The English novel becomes the subject and eponymous protagonist in a series of literary histories written by Walter Raleigh (1894), George Saintsbury (1913), and Walter Allen (1954). The phrase appears again in the titles of William Lyon Phelps's Advance of the English Novel (1916), Ernest Baker History of the English Novel (1924–1936), and Arnold Kettle Introduction to the English Novel (1951). Within these literary histories, Richardson and Fielding and Smollett and Sterne become the "dream team" of eighteenth-century fiction, and, in Saintsbury's famous metaphor, they are the four wheels of that carriage of English fiction that, with its full modern development into a repeatable «formula» by Austen and Scott, is "set a-going to travel through the centuries." After Saintsbury, Defoe is added as a fifth early master of the English novel. With Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel (1957), the modifier «English» is implied but erased. Now the rise of "the English novel" marks the rise of «the» novel, that is, all novels. A synecdoche wags the dog. In this way a national literary history overcomes what has always worried the earliest promoters and elevators of the novel in Britain: the belatedness and indebtedness of English fiction. -20-

The claim for the priority of the English novel made by this group of literary historians involves a shift in the novel's distinct identity: instead of consisting in its moral coherence, the novel's identity comes to derive from its adherence to some sort of realism. Although the kernel of this thesis is at least as old as the distinction between romance and novella defined by Congreve, Reeve, and others, the nineteenth century contributes an arduous and subtle development to the idea of what constitutes realism. With the development of the idea of society as an organic totality, the novel becomes-for Balzac, Dickens, and Eliot-uniquely appropriate for its study and analysis. Novelistic realism is complicated and enriched by those novelists-especially Flaubert and James-who undertake to aestheticize the novel. As art, the novel realizes its equality with poetry, and prepares itself for entrance into the "Great Tradition" (Leavis's 1948 title) of Western literature. The idea of the novel as art means that novel studies, and literary histories of the novel, come to privilege the novel's "form." Claims for the novel's formal coherence are not fatal to the idea of the novel's realistic imitation of social or psychic life. Instead the two ideas work together in literary histories from Ernest Baker's ten-volume History of the English Novel to Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel (1957). For Ian Watt "formal realism" becomes the distinctive characteristic of the novel and the crucial invention necessary for its «rise» to being the most influential linguistic vehicle of subjective experience.

With the idea of the novel's nationalism, its realism, and its power to express a personal interiority emerge three questions that have preoccupied scholarly study of the early British novel for at least one hundred years. Out of the concept of the novel's Englishness emerges a new question: how, where, and why does the English novel begin, originate, arise? This question is framed so as to assure that its answer will come from within the study of British culture. Once the novel is given a modern, relatively scientific epistemological mission-to be realistic in its representation of social and psychological life-one must ask, what constitutes realism? What form of writing should serve as the paradigm for novelistic mimesis? These are not so much questions that can be answered as a terrain for interminable negotiation and invention. Finally, how is the Englishness and realism of the novel implicated in the invention of the modern subject? With Watt, and those many critics and literary historians who have followed in his wake, the notion that the novel is a fully actualized form of a nation's literature, characterized -21- by realism, is brought into alignment with two relatively new ideas about the novel's beginnings: its sudden birth and its distinctive modernity. Recently, new work on the novel's rise, influenced by Marxism, feminism, and poststructuralism, has sought to contest and complicate this classic interpretation of the rise of the novel. Instead of trying to summarize this rich vein of work, I will close with an observation. The themes of the novel's modernity and sudden birth, its realism and aesthetic greatness, its expression of nationhood or moral guidance to the reader-whether formulated early or late in the novel's "progress"-all these themes serve to update the cultural project that unfolded in the eight decades after 1740, and that this essay has explored: the impulse to elevate the novel and to sublimate the pleasures it incites.

William Warner

Baker Ernest . The History of the English Novel. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1924.

Coventry Francis . "An Essay on the New Species of Writing Founded by Mr. Fielding". London, 1751. Los Angeles: Augustan Reprint No. 95, 1962.

Dunlop John Colin . The History of Fiction. 3 vols. London, 1814.

Frow John . Marxism and Literary History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.

Perkins David . Is Literary History Possible? Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Raleigh Sir Walter . The English Novel: A Short Sketch of Its History from the Earliest Times to the Appearance of "Waverley." London: John Murray, 1894.

Reeve Clara . The Progress of Romance. Colchester, 1785.

Saintsbury George . The English Novel. London: Dent, 1913.

Taine Hippolyte A . History of English Literature. 1863. Trans. H. Van Laun. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1965.

Watt Ian . The Rise of the Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957.

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NOaccount of the rise or origin of the English novel can neglect the prose narratives of Daniel Defoe. Most critics recognize that Defoe's plots are not often formally coherent or satisfying. But few major accounts of Defoe's narratives have explained their workings by emphasizing the extent to which they defy ordinary novelistic categories. Of Defoe's seven major narratives- Robinson Crusoe (1719), Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720), Captain Singleton (1720), Moll Flanders (1722), A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Colonel Jack (1722), and Roxana (1724) — only Memoirs of a Cavalier can be described as formally controlled throughout. Otherwise, Defoe's narratives are marked by an episodic and apparently arbitrary narrative arrangement.

Ian Watt's analysis of Defoe in The Rise of the Novel , for example, reflects a preference for what he calls "formal realism" and an appreciation of psychological characterization (Watt recognizes, however, that these critical conventions have been invented since Defoe). Thus by categorizing Robinson Crusoe as a romance and Moll Flanders as, in effect, a novel, Watt articulates a standard distinction between two texts that are in many ways remarkably alike. By calling Robinson Crusoe an example of possessive individualism at work, Watt also adheres to a forreal criterion for what constitutes a novel: the appeal to a certain economic motive explains the coherence of the story and gives it a formal meaning. Other critics have emphasized the extent to which Defoe -23- used certain Puritan conventions, like the spiritual autobiography. Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders , and Roxana, all in their various ways, learn to spiritualize their otherwise mundane and secular existence. According to this model, Robinson learns, in the course of his exile on his island, increasingly to ascribe providential meanings to his experiences; Moll, having repented of her life of crime when faced with the gallows in Newgate, rediscovers wealth, her son, and her happiness in Virginia before she returns to England. And although Roxana's tale records the success of a life as mistress and courtesan that earns her substantial material wealth, the threatening reappearance of her longabandoned daughter toward the end, and the final paragraph of the book, in which Roxana is seen paying for her sins in a life of poverty, can be taken as peculiar inversions of the same master plot.