Digesting the eighteenth-century novel.

Abstract

Two primary difficulties attend the teaching of the eighteenth-century novel: the intimidating length of many representative texts and the diversity of the fictional forms that occur during the period. To help make texts both manageable and comparable for students, I recommend a reading process that involves establishing formal analogies between individual narrative elements and appraising the intentional principles of organization that govern the assembly of those elements.

Introduction

Taking on the novel-oriented course invariably presents teachers with organizational challenges. In a quarter or semester, there is only so much students can (or will) read; what they are asked to read, they do not always read carefully (or entirely); and the tools they need to grasp the contexts of their reading may not be among those they already possess (or desire). Moreover, the perspective students formulate from readings and lectures on novels can harden into a discriminatory filter, a rigid scheme for sifting fictions and judging their quality. The collection of narratives legitimized in the classroom may include the last books some students ever will see, and the teacher of the novel must accordingly assemble texts with foresight and circumspection.

In the case of teaching the eighteenth-century novel, these challenges multiply and intensify. Students intimidated by the substantiality of 300-page books may be terrified by the 1,500-page Clarissa; they also may find it difficult to remember narrative details when winding through such mammoths. Unfortunately, the preferred expedients of the teacher of novels, shorter fictions by canonical authors, are not readily available during the period. When substitutions can be made, representative value must often be sacrificed for the sake of brevity. Pamela, Joseph Andrews, or A Sentimental Journey might be used to replace Clarissa, Tom Jones, or Tristram Shandy, for example, and an instructor could thereby trim more than a thousand pages from her reading list. Such an exchange, however, can also make the delineation of the characteristic artistry of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne more difficult for students to apprehend.

Additionally, even if the teacher of the eighteenth-century novel adopts the shortest fictions available, she faces the daunting task of gathering them all beneath the rubric of some unifying period aesthetic. Despite their historical proximity, the immediacy of Richardson's epistolary method scarcely resembles the urbane detachment of Fielding's style or the sportive digressiveness of Sterne's approach. The teacher must also find ways to accommodate competing fictional impulses that emerged during the period--the diaristic accounts of Daniel Defoe, the romanticized intrigues of Eliza Haywood, and the Gothic nail-biters of Horace Walpole--as well as generic oddities like Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Samuel Johnson's Rasselas. The studies that work through this heterogeneity are themselves dauntingly long, and they often require some knowledge of literary theory (Marxism in the case of Michael McKeon's The Origins of the English Novel, for example, or Foucauldian New Historicism in Lennard J. Davis's Factual Fictions) or a more extensive reading background (as is the case with Margaret Anne Doody's The True Story of the Novel or Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction) to be of significant value. The volume and diversity of texts and available support materials often oblige the teacher to cobble together her own means of harmonizing the literature of a maddeningly various period.

Background

My own attempts to develop a method for tackling the eighteenth-century novel found me returning recurrently to Ian Watt's foundational study, The Rise of the Novel. Published in 1957, Watt's reconstruction of the origins of the English novel from the works of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding now seems somewhat antiquated. In the decades since its publication, the litany of its failings has appeared with a brutal sort of persistence in originary studies (see Doody 1, 287; McKeon 1-4; Davis 5, et al). An abbreviated list of the charges leveled at Watt might include his advocacy of unstable, conflicting realisms; his neglect of such realisms as they arose in other times and places; his exclusion of contemporaneous English fiction writers, most notably women, from the Defoe-Richardson-Fielding genealogy; and the expediency of the sociocultural model of origins he describes. Despite such indictments, however, the study resists refutation; as Herbert Lindenberger notes, The Rise of the Novel is foundational, establishing "a discourse where none had existed before" (3). Though apologists such as Robert B. Alter have praised the lucidity of Watt's vision of the novel and excused its limitations (see "A Question of Beginnings"), few scholars engage with his work at length anymore.

Critical resistance to Watt's argument, however, has not diminished its utility and accessibility. Above all its other virtues, The Rise of the Novel remains eminently readable. As W. B. Carnochan notes, Watt's expert craftsmanship creates sentences that "go down with an ease inversely proportional to the pains that went into their composition" (90), and I have found that uncritical acceptance of his views by students can pose greater problems in the classroom than the misapplication of his ideas as a consequence of misreading. Although I have been careful to point out concerns that have been raised about the study, students have been quick to absorb and apply its premises. At the outset of the text, Watt identifies four elements--the individuation of characters, the detailed presentation of space, the emphasis on probability in plot, and the particularization of time--central to the revolution in narrative art represented by the fictions of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (13-18). In the eighteenth century, he argues, these elements changed form, diverging from the emblematic characterization, spatial abstraction, adventitious plotting, and temporal suspension that had formerly typified fiction. In combination, these elements serve as constituents of what Watt calls formal realism. While my students resisted the cultural terms of Watt's argument (that the novel's development might stem in part from the emergence of a socioeconomically diverse reading public, for example), the elements he identifies presented them with features they could monitor and investigate.

More significantly, their recognition of the transformations undergone by these elements prompted them to enter into the critical conversation about novelistic origins. In Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, for example--a fiction that predates Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, the text Watt cites as a landmark in the emergence of formal realism, by about thirty years--my students noted the presence of both realistic and unrealistic characters and settings, a concurrence that would seem to trouble Watt's hypothesis. Upon reading Watt's appraisal of Defoe, however, my students suggested that our discussion of formal realism had been incomplete. According to Watt, the presence of the proper kind of narrative elements alone does not a novel make; these elements must be assembled in reference to a "controlling moral intention," a reflection of the author's ethical perspective and prospective design for his fiction (131). Although my students remained reluctant to admit the cultural assumptions that informed Watt's approach, they conceded that the idea of a controlling moral intention later allowed them to distinguish differences between Oroonoko and Robinson Crusoe more clearly.

In my effort to retain what my students found valuable in Watt and to distance it from what they found problematic, I took a cue from Watt's reflections on The Rise of the Novel in "Flat-Footed and Fly-Blown: The Realities of Realism." Watt suggests that his study was informed by a confluence of theoretical elements, "formalism and phenomenology in a minor way, and Marxism, Freud, and the Frankfurt School in somewhat larger part" (153). Given the resistance of my students to those aspects of Watt's argument indebted to historical materialism, I focused on developing the former, "minor" theoretical elements. Approached in this way--by emphasizing both formal assembly and phenomenological intentionality--The Rise of the Novel may be understood to chart the progress of narrative along two related trajectories.

One trajectory traces the elaboration of narrative components, successive transformations that occur in the representation of character, plot, setting, and time; the other registers differences in the arrangement of those components, noting developments in the way narratives are put together to realize intentional effects. Emphasis in this model falls on differentiation, the analysis of how components and their arrangements change. In generic and pedagogical terms, this argument is, if somewhat crude, at least clear and demonstrable. Students recognized, for example, that in the travelogue primacy must be assigned to setting. Space must be represented in some detail, particularly in those contours a newcomer would find most striking; the characters are not expected to grow, except perhaps in their admiration of the place; time and plot proceed as products of transition between settings, not as sources of interest in their own right. The travelogue, in short, appears different from the novel, both in its formal presentation of setting and in its intentional assignment of setting to a primary narrative position. While attributes of the travelogue may surface in other varieties of prose fiction, such fictions usually involve more than the vivid realization of narrative space. The travelogue's structures are potentially transferable, but translation requires a modification of formal features and their installation in a new hierarchy of relationships.

Although it pursues this basic method, The Rise of the Novel presents difficulties because it makes discriminations on a more limited scale. Watt draws his conclusions from a nucleus of five prose fictions: Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa, and Fielding's Tom Jones. The historical, regional, and technical proximity of these fictions encourages Watt to look for minute, local correspondences between them; to fix them in a short, singular line of elaboration; and to interpret their formal and intentional evolution as a reflection of sociocultural imperatives. For pedagogical purposes, however, emphasizing the translatability and generalizability of the principles derived from his study of these works seems more helpful. If the rules of selection and combination established in The Rise of the Novel may be adapted to other narrative expressions if they can account for the formal relationships between a cluster of comparable works and fictions that predate, coexist with, and succeed them--then Watt's study, precisely because of its argumentative concentration, may act as a radiant center, a plotted point from which a network of affiliations may be traced. By extending the formal and intentional trajectories of the novel of formal realism, it is possible to determine with some precision its relationship to other trajectories, other lineages, and other traditions of narrative fiction.

Application

In the classroom, this reconceptualization of The Rise of the Novel has proven both flexible and useful. As students work through the long, complex fictions the eighteenth century offers, I have found centering our investigation on character, setting, plot, and time enormously helpful. Because the various interests of students usually prompt them to focus on different narrative elements, each individual may find something distinctive to bring to our classroom conversations. When wrestling with texts of several hundred pages, the moderately limited options presented by such preferential selection also establishes an informal boundary for our wanderings. Moreover, since our work focuses on description we attend to how (or if) characters grow and change, how plot episodes are causally or casually linked, how setting meets or exceeds our expectations of an ordinary world--students are less reluctant to venture their opinions than when they suspect I am fishing for obscure details about narrative technique. Because the findings are their own, students also retain more information about the novels and develop their own habits of analyzing and interpreting fiction.

At the undergraduate level, a basic introduction to Watt's core concerns is typically enough to begin the process. For illustrative purposes, I often pair this introduction with a reading of Behn's Oroonoko, a text that mingles the realistic and unrealistic in the representation of all four primary narrative elements. The idealized excellence of the main character, Oroonoko, conflicts with the vulgar existence of historically authentic English colonists; the murky depiction of Coramantien, Oroonoko's African homeland, contrasts sharply with the vivid description of the South American colony of Surinam; the convoluted intrigues of Coramantien clash with the more organic plotting of the Surinamese episodes; the indistinct passage of time in Africa gives way to a more careful reckoning of moments in South America. Despite the apparent equipoise of narrative elements, students are quick to note that Behn's expressed intention (to memorialize the tragic heroism of a virtually superhuman couple) is not compatible with the less compelling vagaries of everyday existence. Armed with this inductive sense of a controlling moral intention--and with a supply of stock characters, narrative elements, and situations to build on--students can venture into the fiction of the eighteenth century proper with a clearer sense of direction.

From this shared foundation, the activity that follows in an undergraduate course can verge on the carnivalesque. Even a brief treatment of formal and intentional renovations of character reveals the generativity of the approach. Students fascinated by the domineering, impetuous King of Coramantien in Oroonoko can find his descendant in Manfred in Walpole's The Castle of Otranto; those engaged by Aboan, Oroonoko's right-hand man, may find his heir in Partridge from Tom Jones. Students may chart the transformation of numberless rakes, villains, virtuous wives, and ladies' maids over the course of the century, and they also can monitor the effects of intentional shifts in the organization of narratives. In The Castle of Otranto, students may find in Bianca, a lady's maid, a narrative functionary who offers only low, contrapunctual comedy; in Mrs. Honour, the maid of the virtuous Sophia in Tom Jones, students may perceive a more complex instrument, a conflicted character who is both loyal and mercenary; and in Richardson's Pamela, students may witness what happens when the ethical career of the lady's maid herself becomes a central source of narrative interest. Rather than obliging students to wait for the instructor to build theoretical or thematic bridges between a motley collection of fictions, the appraisal of elements and intentions invites students to make novel connections of their own.

For graduate students, this elementary methodology can serve as a springboard for more demanding critical questions. While the same benefits of discovery and connectivity still apply, more sophisticated students may also wish to interrogate the assumptions of Watt's approach. Students aware of the New Critical legacy regarding the intentional fallacy may be turned to the phenomenological texts of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger; students curious about Watt's debts to formalism may be directed to the works of Viktor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp, or Roman Jakobson. Additionally, those students interested in Wart's position in the field of novel origins can be steered toward contemporary reconsiderations of his work, J. Paul Hunter's Before Novels, McKeon's The Origins of the English Novel, and Doody's The True Story of the Novel foremost among them. As is the case with the undergraduate version of this reading process, the approach lends itself to a variety of modes of self-directed inquiry.

The presentation of the terms of engagement of this reading process to graduate students may also involve a more thoroughgoing introduction to the terminology of contemporary critical theory. Because Watt argues that the novel of formal realism features a specific selection of elements embedded in a particular kind of ordering structure, I often recruit the structuralist premises of paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations to help students comprehend the potential expansiveness of his theoretical design. The notions of naturalization, codification, the vraisemblable, the lisible, and intertextuality also frequently come into play, making Jonathan Culler's Structuralist Poetics an invaluable complementary text. As a class we may content ourselves with this more elaborate foundation, or we may venture further, engaging with questions raised as a result of post-structuralism in general and deconstruction in particular. The appraisal of forms and intentions lends itself readily to both the analysis of eighteenth-century fictions and the compelling questions that now confront literary studies as a whole.

Conclusion

The analysis of formal elements and authorial intentions may sometimes prove elusive, inexact, or imprecise, but those qualities themselves may be generative in the classroom. For undergraduate students, such investigative latitude can create room for making new connections among, and holding engaged conversations about, novels; for graduate students, the heuristic value of the approach, in light of its theoretical focus, opens up a variety of avenues for further study.

Given the volume and diversity of available texts and support materials, the teacher of the eighteenth-century novel is hard pressed to provide students with a reasonably tidy and manageable package of fiction and criticism that can help them make sense of the period. While the problem of textual length inherent to most canonical eighteenth-century reading lists may be insuperable, the revision of Ian Watt's model of formal realism that I propose and practice can make their contents easier to assemble and digest.

References

Alter, Robert B. "A Question of Beginnings." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 12.2-3 (2000), 213-25.

Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Carnochan, W. B. "The Persistence of the Rise of the Novel." Stanford Humanities Review 8.1 (2000): 86-93.

Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1975.

Davis, Lennard J. Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.

Doody, Margaret Anne. The True Story of the Novel. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1996.

Hunter, J. Paul. Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth Century English Fiction. New York: Norton, 1990.

Lindenberger, Herbert. "The Singular Career of Ian Watt." Stanford Humanities Review 8.1 (2000): 2-9.

McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

Watt, Ian. "Flat-Footed and Fly-Blown: The Realities of Realism." Eighteenth-Century Fiction 12.2-3 (2000), 147-166.

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Second edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

William Wandless, Jacksonville State University 

Wandless, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of English specializing in eighteenth-century literature in general and the novel in particular.