John Richetti - The Columbia History of the British Novel

The novel presupposes that clash, even if it often records an eventual reconciliation or reintegration of the individual with the surrounding society. The novel thus implies, as the literary and cultural critic Edward Said has remarked, a universe that is necessarily unresolved or incomplete, a universe in a process of development, evolving or progressing toward a more nearly complete or more complex form of consciousness as it records the multiplicity and infinite diversity of individuals. Such a view is distinctively Western or JudeoChristian, since, as Said points out, there are no novels in Islamic culture until it comes into contact with the literary culture of the modern West. For Islam, the world is complete, created by God as a plenum, full of every conceivable entity such a world could have. But for the Judeo-Christian tradition, the fallen and sinful world (along with the individuals who compose it) is radically incomplete and yearning, in a religious sense, for individual salvation and for the transfiguring judgment day when human history shall end. In the thoroughly secular and psychologized context of the novel, this world is viewed rather more optimistically and is conceived as a process of progressive human development, reaching for higher or more complex forms of development for individuals and for their communities, for personal fulfillment and social utopia. In other words, the novel articulates the central, selfdefining characteristics of Western religious and secular culture. If approached analytically and critically, say its defenders, it provides an unparalleled opportunity for self-knowledge for those within that tra — xii- dition. For those outside that tradition or on the margins of Western culture and its privileged classes, members of colonized non-Western societies or members of minority groups or culturally deprived social classes within them, the novel in its three-hundred-year sweep just might provide access to a liberating understanding of the cultural forms that oppress them. Whatever else it may be, the novel is a vividly informative record of Western consciousness during the last three hundred years.

That Western individualism is the recurring subject matter of the novel is not in dispute, but just about everything else about the novel is. Where did it come from? How and why did it take form? How does the novel differ from the long prose fictions that preceded it from classical antiquity onward? How exactly is it distinct from long narratives in verse, from classical epic and medieval romance? At its best in the works of acknowledged masters like the great nineteenth-century realists such as Austen, Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Stendhal, George Eliot, James, Manzoni, Galdó s, and Dostoevsky, does the novel communicate a truth about modern European humanity that is otherwise unavailable? Is the novel, in the hands of such masters of the form, an unsurpassed instrument of moral and historical knowledge? Or is it, as some academic critics have increasingly come to claim, actually a subtle means for the repression and regulation of individuals that only masquerades as an impartial rendering of the way things are? Is the novel really, as much modern criticism would have it, the imposition of an ideological view of the world, forcing upon its readers notions of linear development and of a stable external reality that are at best fairly recent cultural constructions? Does novelistic realism represent the naturalizing of a view of the world and of personal identity peculiar to postEnlightenment European thought and especially to white males with cultural power and economic privilege?

These are cogent and disturbing accusations that many of the chapters in this volume will present and even endorse in one way or another. But a traditional and alternative «humanist» view at least in part survives, even among the most politically sensitive critics. Should we hold fast, many wonder, to an older and much more hopeful view that the novel somehow records a struggle against imposed ideological and cultural limitations and points the way to personal liberation and self-fulfillment? Is the novel both a record of authentic individual consciousness separating itself from history and communal ideologies (insofar as-xiii-that is possible) and an impetus for its readers to achieve a similar liberation? Is the novelist an artistic visionary whose imagination, intelligence, and craft can render social and historical relations with a fullness that allows readers to understand the worm they live in?

For a history of the British novel, this last is the most important critical question these days, especially since the emergence of feminist criticism during the past quarter-century. A number of the chapters in this volume will argue that the British novel begins as a profoundly female form in several senses of the term. Even though the most familiar examples (the «canonical» works, as critics say nowadays) of British eighteenth-century fiction were written by men, the bulk of fiction produced throughout the eighteen century was written by women. Although we cannot be certain that the audience for this fiction was predominantly female, women seem to have been perceived as the core audience for much British fiction. Moreover, the early British novel, whether written by a man or by a woman, presents domestic life as its recurring central subject and, with its focus on the interior and private lives of characters, moves dramatically away from the traditional concerns of literature with public life and masculine heroism in love, war, and politics. Indeed, some feminist critics have extended this argument, finding in the emerging British novel the establishment of a new modern self that is, they argue, gendered female. For such critics, the novel articulates a consciousness whose sensitivity and interior self-awareness were, and to some extent still are, recognized as feminine rather than masculine personality traits. The individual that the eighteenth- century novel imagines and bequeaths to subsequent British fiction as the ideal moral and social personality is characteristically feminized, since (so goes the argument) its male heroes define themselves as such by acquiring certain feminine qualifies that include a self-effacing sensitivity and an empathic understanding of others in place of the dominance, self-possession, and control that typify conventional masculine heroism.

Certainly, the British novel in its eighteenth-century phase tends to deal mostly with domestic and private experience rather than public or political life, and marriage and courtship provide its crucial focus. Another strain of fiction, however, initiated in 1719 by Defoe's Robinson Crusoe , offers masculine adventure in exotic places; its subject is the exploration and conquest of the non-European world by male European adventurers. Although it is sometimes the vehicle for serious and-xiv-complex imagining, such adventure fiction has tended, since Defoe's novel appeared, to be restricted to children's stories. As some critics have suggested, this relegation to the nursery of life in the external world of action and military conquest may point to European culture's deep uneasiness with its own recent history. By these lights, the novel's emphasis on domestic intensities and private or personal quests may be the culture's instinctive masking of the patriarchal domination of women's lives and of the economic domination and even imperialistic exploitation of the rest of the world-forces that lie at the heart of the modern Western history in which we still live.

The early British novel is not only for the most part domestic in its settings; it is also intensely parochial, attentive to the complex local networks of social and linguistic stratifications that to this day characterize British life. In trying to do justice to the diversity of local manners and dialects among the people of their island nation, British novelists, it can be argued, have helped to create something like a national personality by promoting an image of eccentric distinctiveness as the peculiar sign of the inhabitants of Great Britain. From Defoe's vividly individual rogues and whores to Fielding's and Smollett's portrait galleries of memorable country squires, innkeepers, servants, aristocrats, and petty criminals to Sterne's zany and self-obsessed narrators, there is a clear progression to the memorable quirkiness of many of the inhabitants of the British nineteenth-century novel-to Dickens's and Trollope's characters, for example, many of whom have come to represent for the rest of the world (for better or worse) the essence of Britishness in their comically mannered self-enclosure. But there is a more significant aspect to the eighteenth-century British novel's focus on quirky individuality. Perhaps more so than its French and German and Spanish counterparts, British fiction is in this representation of eccentricity notably alert to a modernity of personal expressiveness that emerges within new and more efficient systems of social organization.

Читать дальше