John Richetti - The Columbia History of the British Novel

That is to say, in its attention to radical particularity the early British novel records the characteristic stresses and strains of the momentous transition from traditional hierarchical modes of life to those rationalized and regularized forms of social organization that characterize the modern nation-state. As it develops in the early eighteenth century in Britain, realistic narrative comes to involve the ventriloquizing of particular individuals who by definition do not fit neatly into didactic or general categories. The difference between John Bunyan's Pilgrim's — xv- Progress (1678) and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) lies precisely in Crusoe's historically and psychologically particularized identity that is never wholly contained by moral allegory as that of Bunyan's hero is. Committed, usually, to didactic intentions for their fictions, novelists like Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding modify or even subvert those intentions by imagining characters who, as their stories progress, tend to move beyond the general and the typical into identities quite their own. Such eccentric individuality is obviously a kind of resistance to old moral and psychological categories, but it also entails precisely the isolation of identity into discrete units that allows for a new, more abstract and efficient ordering of individuals apart from their complex positioning in communal history and moral tradition.

As the most advanced country in eighteenth-century Europe, Great Britain was widely admired at the time as the nation with the most flexible and stable political and economic institutions (for example, the most efficient tax-gathering apparatus of any European state) and the largest, most prosperous middle class. From its beginnings in the work of Defoe and Richardson, as many of the chapters that follow will show, the British novel focuses intensely upon the blurring of lines between those traditional status divisions whereby society had been organized for centuries. More than other European fiction, eighteenth-century British novels depict and dramatize the emergence of recognizably modern kinds of individuality wherein persons acquire worth, status, or power either by luck, by redefined and expanded economic opportunity, or by the exercise of extraordinary moral virtue. To some extent, the nineteenth-century British novel retains this singular, perhaps insular, focus on particularized characters, with their local surroundings and peculiar institutional circumstances, but it also acquires a more complex sense of history and society. After Sir Walter Scott more or less invented the historical novel at the beginning of the nineteenth century, novelists were necessarily more acutely aware of a broader, encompassing world of time and space. In the novels of George Eliot or Dickens or Thackeray, for example, individual destiny plays itself out in provincial British places that are thrown into relief against the backdrop of the larger world. More and more, the Victorian novelist embodies an overseeing or supervising intelligence that places individuals within those immense, controlling forces that we attempt to understand by labeling them history and society. The British novel opens up to include more of the historically changing and expanding world and is itself subject to — xvi- foreign influences, becoming part of a world literature written in English in America and other new English-speaking countries as well as in Great Britain. And the influence also works in the other direction. With the exercise of cultural and political hegemony first by the British Empire in the nineteenth century and then by the United States in the mid-twentieth century, English has become a world language whose literature occupies a dominant position in an emerging global culture that parallels the global economy we hear so much of these days.

But whatever the British novel's origins or its ideological role since the eighteenth century in forming or reflecting an important corner of Western consciousness, the pivotal place of the novel in modern contemporary literary culture in Great Britain and in America is indisputable. Since the early twentieth century, the novel along with other literary kinds has tended to split more dramatically than ever into selfconsciously artistic and popular forms, as mass commercial culture has become a vast industry and as literary modernism and so-called postmodernism have fostered a separate realm of writing read by a tiny minority and kept alive by academic attention. But in spite of the gulf between the tradition established by writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and the books that make up the vigorous trade in popular best-sellers, the novel in numerous guises continues to flourish. Librarians and best-seller lists testify to the novel's centrality by dividing the world of writing into fiction and nonfiction. With glossy and colorful covers, in categories ranging from reprints of the classics to lurid bestsellers and sensational thrillers, from science fiction to romances, westerns, and gothics, novels in the broad sense of the word crowd the bookshelves of supermarkets, drugstores, airport souvenir shops, chain bookstores in shopping malls, and gas stations and truck stops on interstate highways. And yet for all its popular vigor, the novel still carries a stigma of frivolity and artistic inferiority, partly because it is, after all, merely a false story, a set of imaginary happenings that is by its very nature inferior in the eyes of many readers to, say, history or biography.

Perhaps the British novel has always been sustained by its perennial battle with its detractors, who have tended to view it with suspicion as a popular form and as something of a waste of time for readers who could be more profitably employed with true and useful things. In Northanger Abbey (1818), Jane Austen imagines a young lady apologizing for her reading by saying it is "only a novel," and then Austen herself supplies a defense of fiction quite as impassioned as Lawrence's, — xvii- calling it "only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language." For the coyly ironic Austen, this is an extraordinary statement, one that the English critic Frank Kermode recently quoted as he reviewed some contemporary novels in the London Review of Books. Kermode is moved in his review to defend what he sees as an embattled literary institution: "And yet it can be argued that even in the present state of things the novel may be the best available instrument of ethical inquiry; that its own extraordinary variety of means equips it as our best recorder of human variety, even at a time when biography is challenging that position; and that its capacity for wit and humour and poetry continues to exist and even to expand."

Kermode's eloquent defense of the novel seems to be a perennial necessity, and "Is the novel dead?" is a predictable theme when panels of novelists are convened to discuss the state of modern culture. Always in crisis and seemingly aware of its own fragility and moral and cultural ambiguity, the novel has been since its beginnings more of an occasion for modern narration to question its own purposes than a stable narrative institution. Paradoxically, that instability seems to be the essence of the novel's strength and endurance, and the collaborative history of the British novel that this volume attempts to provide will highlight for readers just that fruitful instability. Modern literary history is a stern and unforgiving taskmaster, in many cases nowadays interrogating the past (as critics like to say) to reveal its hidden complicity with power and privilege. Some of the chapters in this history of the British novel, collectively written by many contributors, will trace the roots of the novel's insecurity by pointing to the hidden-or at least obscured-cultural or ideological agendas of novels and novelists; other chapters will seek to contextualize novelistic production as inseparable from the demands of the literary marketplace or in some cases from the psychosexual pathologies of particular authors. But whatever the scandalous charge, ideological or personal, most novels can take it, since at their best they themselves are about their own shortcomings. The novel dramatizes the very failures critics attribute to it. Novelists deliver deep meditations on human complicity in social injustice; they point by their own lack of final answers and their tendency toward multifarious explorations of the moral world around us, — xviii- to the biggest social and moral questions. By shaping imaginary lives, the novel may thus illuminate what a culture most desires or fears. In reading a novel we can hear, as Bakhtin would say, the dialogue among competing versions of truth that is the novel's uniquely dynamic version of the truth itself.