Deborah Jenson
“Part of the problem of defining decadence has to do with the fact that a fully developed movement or school never actually existed,” notes Asti Hustvedt (13). The non-coalescence of decadence as a fin-de-siècle movement is not an accident but an exemplification of its underlying ethos. As Paul Bourget described it in 1883, decadence is the condition of a society when too many individuals resist the work of collective life; the cells of the social organism refuse to subordinate themselves to the whole. The resulting anarchic decline is manifested—and encoded positively—at all levels of the decadent enterprise. It is symbolized by the lone cell or atom working against nature, against the evolutionary success and reproduction of the whole of which it is a part. A decadent style, Bourget notes, is one in which “the unity of the book decomposes to make way for the independence of the page, the page decomposes to make way for the independence of the sentence, and the sentence decomposes to make way for the independence of the word” (25). Yet although the solipsistic and transgressive dimensions of decadence countered the formation of a collective movement, leading to the classification of many examples of the decadent novel, such as Émile Zola's La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret (1875, The Sin of Father Mouret), within the contiguous naturalist or symbolist movements, one novel has had lasting status as a paradoxical “bible” of decadence: Joris-Karl Huysmans's À Rebours (1884, Against Nature).
The protagonist of À Rebours, the esthete Des Esseintes, argues that “Nature has had her day” (20), and that the field of human genius is artifice. This decadent novel, rife with intertexts (see INTERTEXTUALITY) from the poet Charles Baudelaire (who served as a posthumous theoretician of decadence), established dominant decadent motifs featured across diverse media and genres. Salomé, for example, representing both a fear of woman as nature's mystical vector of self-reproduction, as well as a cult of the perverse at the potent crossroads of innocence and of archaic or orientalized style. She reigns not only in Against Nature but in the work of visual artists Aubrey Beardsley (1872–98) and Gustave Moreau (1826–98), writers Gustave Flaubert (1877, “Hérodias”) and Stéphane Mallarmé (1864, “Hérodiade”), and in Oscar Wilde's 1893 play Salomé. Scopophilia, exhibitionism, fetishism, and other disorders emerging in neuropsychiatric and PSYCHOANALYTIC discourses by Alfred Binet (1857–1911), Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–93), Richard Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902), and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) contribute to the rearranging of structures of the narrative “gaze” and of affective investments in the decadent novel, as is particularly evident in Monsieur Vénus (1884, Mr. Venus) and La Jongleuse (1900, The Juggler) by the woman novelist Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery Vallette). Infatuation with artificial animation and new technologies of mimetic reproduction such as the phonograph yields an automated love object in Auguste Villiers de L'Isle-Adam's L'Ève future (1886, Tomorrow's Eve).
The decadent novel was fundamentally the fruit of a decadent aesthetic that flourished in the visual cultures of several Western European nations. It was also connected with fin-de-siècle philosophy at several axes; Arthur Schopenhauer's (1788–1860) earlier paradigm of pessimism, in which willful desire engenders suffering, was influential, as was Max Nordau's (1849–1923) book on degeneration (1895); Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) believed that “Decadence belongs to all epochs of mankind; refuse and decaying matter are found everywhere” (184–85). Internationally, aside from Wilde's 1890 decadent novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, many possible examples of the decadent novel—such as Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), or M. P. Shiel's Shapes in the Fire (1896),—demonstrate points of convergence with decadence, rather than globally decadent aesthetics. Ultimately, a considerable field of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novelistic production puts into play what Charles Bernheimer describes as the conjunction of “medical diagnostics, sexuality, oedipal trauma, the disintegration of the subject and the limits of the human to suggest many unsuspected avatars of the death drive” (6).
SEE ALSO: Censorship, Modernism, Philosophical Novel, Realism, Sexuality.
Decadentismo see Italy
William T. Hendel
“Decorum” refers to the norm of propriety in a literary work, and may be understood in various possible, often overlapping ways. Decorum requires, first, the author to adopt a style and tone appropriate to the work's GENRE and subject matter, and to represent the speech and actions of individual characters in a manner appropriate to their respective stations in life. Just as, for instance, a tragic work requires a serious tone and style, so must a king speak with the grandness of a king, and a peasant act with the simple rusticity of a peasant (see DIALECT). Second, decorum refers more generally to the appropriateness of the literary work for reception by the public. Historically, decorum required that nothing should appear in a literary work that would offend against the given culture's prevailing moral and social norms.
“Verisimilitude” is plausibility, or in other words, the quality of seeming true to life to the work's readers or spectators. In the broad sense, verisimilitude is a key component of REALISM in the novel. In the narrow sense, as a requirement for literary works according to the classical aesthetic doctrines most prominent in Europe from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, verisimilitude often means presenting, not necessarily a vision of ordinary real life, but an idealization of life—whether depicting true-to-life character types (rather than specific individuals), or portraying life as it should be (rather than as it is). Thus, in this narrow sense, verisimilitude may, in fact, be contrasted with realism, which often implies the representation in stark detail of the everyday lives of ordinary people, and which came to define novels after the domination of classical doctrines in Europe had passed. In contrast with realism, verisimilitude does not so much entail the positive demand that authors should actively pursue the imitation of reality in a fictional work, but rather involves the negative requirement that the work should avoid representations of characters, settings, or events that will strike the audience as either clearly unlikely or patently false.
Joined together as a pair of terms, and in reference to prose narrative, decorum and verisimilitude refer, above all, to two of the most prominent demands (la bienséance and la vraisemblance, respectively) made on literature during the period of French Classicism, identified with authors such as novelist Madame de Lafayette, poet Nicolas Boileau (1636–1711), and playwright Jean Racine (1639–99). All the same, these doctrines were significant for French prose narrative earlier in the seventeenth century and continued to have some importance, albeit fairly limited, during the eighteenth century. Although decorum and verisimilitude as a pair governed literary production more widely in early modern Europe, they were applied, in the first place, to dramatic and epic poetry, and were less consistently applied to prose narrative outside France. Prose narratives were not as likely in this period to be considered subject to these classical demands insofar as they were ignored by providers of norms and theories, since the respected ancient theorists of literature, Aristotle and Horace, had not dealt with them (see COMEDY). On the other hand, theorists and authors who sought to dignify the novel did so precisely by envisioning it as the successor to a genre with an ancient pedigree, generally the epic poem.
The concepts of decorum and verisimilitude originate in ancient theories of literature. The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE), in his analysis of tragedy in the Poetics (ca. 335 BCE), claims that “the poet's task is to speak of events which could occur, and are possible by the standards of probability or necessity” (chap. 9). (In the French tradition, Aristotle's term for “probability” is translated as vraisemblance, which, in turn, can be translated into English as verisimilitude. Aristotle's original Greek expression, tò eikòs, permits translation directly into English as either “the probable” or “the true-to-life,” and corresponds to the Latin verisimul.) Distinguishing the dramatic or epic poet from the historian, Aristotle asserts that the latter “speaks of events which have occurred,” whereas the former's task is to represent “the sort of events which could occur” (ibid.). Likewise, says Aristotle, the historian is concerned with the particular, and the poet with the universal. The Poetics, furthermore, treats decorum by asserting that there is diction appropriate to each form of poetry (whether tragedy, comedy, or epic).
In the Ars poetica (ca. 18 BCE), the Roman poet Horace (65–8 BCE) admonishes poets to adhere to decorum, above all avoiding incongruities of tone or diction. In fact, Horace relates decorum to verisimilitude when he forbids dramatic poets from having actors perform horrific or fantastic actions for the audience: “You will remove many incidents from our eyes so that someone who was present might report those incidents; Medea should not slaughter her children in the presence of the people...nor Procne be turned into a bird, Cadmus into a snake. Whatever you show me like this, I detest and refuse to believe” (ll. 182–8). To depict these actions mimetically (by having the actors perform them), rather than diegetically (by having the actors report them), would be improper, as well as strain the bounds of believability (see STORY).
After scholars in Italy had rediscovered Aristotle's Poetics during the Renaissance (first published, in Latin translation, in 1498), authors and commentators began to appeal to both this text as well as Horace's—sometimes to the point of conflating the two, despite essential differences—in order to justify particular approaches to the vernacular literary forms of their day: not only epic and dramatic poetry, but also prose genres. Extended prose narrative in France, the roman (a term that refers to the novel and the romance without distinction), was viewed as subject to the norms of decorum and verisimilitude, as soon as the chivalric prose romance (roman chevaleresque) passed out of vogue towards the beginning of the seventeenth century. Anxious to dispense with the marvels and improbabilities of medieval and Renaissance romans, authors turned more and more to the sentimental novel (roman sentimental), centered on courtship and love, pursuing verisimilitude in their detailed representations of emotion, and appealing to decorum, or les bienséances, in their refinement and nobility of expression.
The reign of Louis XIII (1610–43) saw the rise of the heroic romance (roman héroïque, also called the roman épique), which combined the adventure novel with a historical background, generally ancient, and often exotic. Given the authors' avowals of historical accuracy and respect for the rules governing epic, much discussion ensued about the decorum and verisimilitude of these romans. The authors frequently claimed, on the one hand, to pursue a truthful depiction of the historical facts, while on the other to provide narratives that would follow decorum by instructing the public on good morals. History does not, however, always witness virtue rewarded and vice punished. Consequently, the focus on verisimilitude, allied with mere plausibility, and distinct from strict historical accuracy, furnished the conceptual looseness required to give the appearance of truthfulness to readers, while still permitting illustrations of the moral lessons demanded by decorum.
Among the most famous of the romans héroïques are the excessively lengthy, multivolume romances published under the name of Georges de Scudéry, but in fact mostly written by his sister Madeleine. Georges's preface to Ibrahim (1641) considers verisimilitude “the most necessary” of “all the rules that must be observed in the composition” of romans, but explicitly distinguishes verisimilitude from truth: “For when lies and truth are mixed together by a skilled hand, the mind has trouble untangling them and does not easily bring itself to undermine what pleases it” (Coulet 1, 454–6). In the tenth and final volume of Madeleine de Scudéry's Clélie (1654–61), set in ancient Rome, the characters engage in a discussion of narrative fictions (fables), in which they promote verisimilitude and decorum, both tied together with a concern for pleasing the reader. In pursuit of the audience's pleasure, the author “must stay away from impossible things and from low and common things, and seek out imaginings that are at once marvelous and natural” (55). Authors must thus find a middle ground between the implausible and the pedestrian, all while ensuring that bonnes mœurs (good morals) are preserved and that “vice is blamed and virtue rewarded” (56).
Although the classical period associated with the reign of Louis XIV (1643–1715) is best known for its poetry and non-narrative prose, it provided landmark instances of prose narrative at a time when the doctrines of decorum and verisimilitude had reached the height of their influence. For example, the Lettres portugaises (1669, Portuguese Letters), later attributed to the Comte de Guilleragues, staked a claim to verisimilitude by presenting a series of letters supposedly by a Portuguese nun, and the novel's spontaneous style of representing the narrator's internal life successfully convinced its first readers of its authenticity. The flourishing in this period of novels that were labeled as histoires (histories), memoirs, and accounts of voyages, as well as collections of letters, emphasized the authors' efforts to present plausible narratives that could be mistaken for recountings of true personal experience. In contrast with the Baroque roman héroïque, the classical novel moved away from ancient, exotic settings and brought the represented time period much closer to the present; it likewise shifted the emphasis from the great public exploits of “illustrious” personages in favor of “the particular actions of private persons, or of persons considered in their private capacity,” as the Abbé de Charnes commented in 1679 (Coulet 1, 210). The constraints of decorum, at the same time, kept the representations elegant and chaste, steering away from detailed depiction of the physical and the material, and reserving meticulous attention for the heart and its motivations.
Foremost among classical novels is Madame de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves (1678, The Princess of Cleves), which inspired a lively debate among women and men of letters regarding its decorum and verisimilitude, focusing primarily on the scene in the novel in which the title character confesses to her husband her secret love for the Duc de Nemours. Despite the novel's defenders, many commentators in Lafayette's time faulted the scene for failures in both decorum and verisimilitude, since no woman, they claimed, would ever make such a confession to her spouse, nor was it appropriate to represent such behavior in fiction.
In his evaluation of seventeenth-century criticisms of La Princesse de Clèves, Gérard Genette has famously asserted that decorum and verisimilitude actually amount to two faces of a single imperative, paralleled by the ambiguity of the verb devoir (“should”), which can refer to either “obligation” or “probability” (72). Citing René Rapin's definition of vraisemblance in his 1674 Réflexions sur la poétique, Genette writes: “verisimilitude and decorum are joined together under a single criterion, namely, ‘whatever conforms to public opinion.’ This ‘opinion,’ real or supposed, is almost precisely what today would be called an ideology, that is, a body of maxims and presuppositions that constitutes both a vision of the world and a system of values” (73). According to Genette, this “body of maxims,” most often implicit, underpins what a given public will acknowledge as either plausible or proper, particularly with reference to the literary genre of the work under consideration (see IDEOLOGY).
More recently, scholars have elaborated on the political and sociological dimensions implied by the ideological aspect of the classical doctrines. The codes of decorum and verisimilitude can be seen as attempts to universalize, by appeal to a supposedly all-inclusive “public opinion,” what were in fact the ideas and values of the elite (Kremer). Other scholars have observed that interpretations and applications of the doctrines were heavily influenced by the Académie-Française, founded in 1637 as an instrument of state power over French language and literary convention. Thomas DiPiero has argued, moreover, that participants in the disputes over decorum and verisimilitude adopted views based on their political affiliations.
To a certain extent, the classical doctrines continued to exert an influence on literary production and discussions of it well into the eighteenth century in France. Sometimes called the last great advocate of classical norms, commentator Jean-François Marmontel (1723–99), for instance, upheld the doctrines of decorum and verisimilitude as late as his Éléments de littérature (1787, Elements of literature). More widely, however, the terms in which the novel was discussed gradually shifted over the course of the century. Although, on occasion, commentators would invoke decorum, sometimes in praise of particular Baroque romans héroïques—as did Antoine-François Prévost in his periodical Pour et contre (For and against) in 1738—the appeal to decorum began to yield to a broadly framed concern for morality, articulated independently of the classical dictate (May).
In addition, the later seventeenth-century interest in novels that alleged to be real-life documents became even more firmly established—most notably, with instances of the memoir-novel, such as Prévost's Manon Lescaut (1731), Pierre de Marivaux's La Vie de Marianne (1731–41, The life of Marianne), and Claude Crébillon's Les Égarements du cœur et de l'esprit (1736–38, The Wayward Head and Heart), as well as with examples of the epistolary novel, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761, Julie, or the New Héloïse) and Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782, Dangerous Liaisons). In this way, justification of the novel in terms of le vraisemblable (“the true to life”) was giving way to a concern simply for le vrai (“the true”), as even non-comic fiction became less idealized, more contemporary in its settings, increasingly centered on private life, and less focused on royalty and aristocracy (see DOMESTIC). For these reasons, in their discussion of a great many eighteenth-century French novels, scholars generally refer not to the novels' verisimilitude, but rather to their realism, allied with middle-class interests, and revealing the cultural exchanges with realist fiction elsewhere in Europe, especially England (Barguillet; DiPiero; Mylne; Showalter).
SEE ALSO: Censorship, Domestic Novel, Epistolary Novel.
William B. Warner
How does one define the novel? Does it consist of a story of love, sex, and romance, or is it centrally concerned with adventure, travel, and tests of strength? Does it happen in the private spaces of the boudoir and the drawing room, or in the public spaces of the tavern and the road? Does it have a gender? Is it written in prose (as most agree), or should we include some verse romances in the category of the novel? Does its relatively late arrival in the literary canon, when compared to poetry and drama, make the novel a distinctly modern genre, or does the novel have a crucial ancient pedigree? Does the novel have a distinct repertoire of forms and genres, or is it, as Mikhail bakhtin has famously claimed, a kind of anti-formalistic non-genre, which subverts, with its protean fecundity, any effort at generic stability or purity? Should the novel be defined according to its long and unruly popularity (which extends from pornography and the GOTHIC to DETECTIVE fiction and SCIENCE FICTION), or should we define it so that we can take the measure of the most ambitious achievements of novelistic art? Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, how should we define the purpose of the novel? Is it supposed to enchant or to inform, to entertain or to improve, to allow readers to know, or to escape from, reality? Confronted with this set of alternatives, I would like to begin this entry's effort at definition by saying, with a certain dogmatic pluralism, that the novel is “all of the above.” However, I would immediately add that the writers and readers of novels, over the long history of novels, have had strongly divergent opinions on what the novel is. Indeed, the history of the effort to define what the novel is and the history of the novel are inextricably entangled. For this reason, my strategy is to describe how a prominent thread of the novel's long history—its rise from a form of entertainment to a kind of literature—involves authors, critics, and readers of the novel in efforts to define what it is.
While critical paradigms have been developed for interpreting both individual novels and the novel as a genre—the concepts of dialogism and heteroglossia (Bakhtin), mythic archetypes (Northrop Frye), the rhetoric of fiction (Wayne C. Booth), and reader response (Wolfgang Iser), to name only a few of the most influential—none of these approaches engage the distinct two-hundred-and-fifty-year history of the novel's elevation into cultural centrality, and they thus fail to come to terms with our culture's investment in the novel. One of the grand narratives of British literary studies might be entitled “The Progress of the Novel” (see HISTORY). It tells the story of the novel's “rise” in the eighteenth century (with Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding), its achievement of classical solidity of form in the nineteenth century (with Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, the early Henry James, and Joseph Conrad), and its culmination in a modernist experimentation and self-reflection (with the late James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett) that paradoxically fulfills and surpasses “the novel” in one blow. The eighteenth-century segment of this narrative was consolidated in 1957 with the publication of Ian Watt's enormously influential book, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Watt's study correlates the middle-CLASS provenance of the eighteenth-century British novel with a realism said to be distinctively modern for the way it features a complex, “deep” reading subject. Precisely because of the way that history flows into and through Watt's book, The Rise of the Novel functions as a watershed in the consolidation of the story of the novel's rise.
Where and when and why does the story of the novel's rise begin to be told? This history of the British novel's beginnings turns out to have a history. In order to grasp the complex diversity of earlier understandings of the novel, one must defer the question that haunts and hurries too many literary histories of the novel: what is “the first real novel?” There are several reasons we should be skeptical of the efforts of those novelists and literary critics who hasten to designate the first real novel. First, the absence of an authoritative Greek or Latin precursor for the modern novel—i.e., there is no “Homer” or “Sophocles” for the modern novel—has encouraged the wishful performative of claiming that position for a range of different novels, within different national settings: e.g., in Spain, Don Quixote (1605), in France, La Princesse de Clèves (1678, The Princess of Cleves); or, in England, the “new species” of writing of Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding. When one watches how literary critics have sought to adjudicate these claims, one inevitably finds a suspicious feedback loop that Cathy Davidson has noted in efforts to designate the first American novel: the general minimal criteria for being a “true” novel are elucidated through a first paradigmatic instance, which then confirms the initial criteria (Davidson, 83–85).
Any literary history focused around designating the “first” “real” novel—with its restless intention to promote and demote, and designate winners and losers—can't stand outside, but instead inhabits the terms of that culturally improving, Enlightenment narrative that tradition has dubbed “the rise of the novel.” Before the emergence of the novel into literary studies and literary pedagogy, novels played a subsidiary role in several crucial cultural episodes—the debate, over the course of the eighteenth century, about the pleasures and moral dangers of novel reading; the adjudication of the novel's role in articulating distinct NATIONAL cultures; and finally, the shifting terms for claiming that a certain representation of modern life is “realistic.” It is through these three articulations that the novel secures its place as a type of literature. By briefly surveying these three episodes in the cultural institutionalization of the British novel, I will jump back before the sedimentation and consolidation of the idea of the legitimate, valued, modern novel, which can then be given its lead role in “the rise of the novel,” and assume its secure place as a genre of literature.
Novels have been a respectable component of culture for so long that it is difficult for twentieth-century observers to grasp the unease produced by novel reading in the eighteenth century. During the decades following 1700, a quantum leap in the number, variety, and popularity of novels led many to see novels as a catastrophe to book-centered culture. Although the novel was not clearly defined or conceptualized, the object of the early anti-novel discourse was quite precise: seventeenth-century RO-MANCES and novellas of continental origin, as well as the “novels” and “secret histories“ written by Aphra Behn, Delariviere Manley, and Eliza Haywood in the decades following the early 1680s. Any who would defend novels had to cope with the aura of sexual scandal that clung to them, and respond to the accusation that they corrupted their enthusiastic readers.
From the vantage point of the late twentieth century, the alarm provoked by novel reading may seem hyperbolic, or even quaint. Sometimes it is difficult to credit the specific object of the alarm of the eighteenth-century critics of novels: after all, we recommend to students some of the very novels these early modern critics inveighed against. But, at least since Plato's attack on the poets, philosophers, and cultural critics had worried about the effects of an audience's absorption in fictional entertainments that may be little more than beautiful lies. During the early eighteenth century the circulation of novels on the market gave this old cultural issue new urgency. Often published anonymously, by parvenu authors supported by no patron of rank, novels seemed irresponsible creations, conceived with only one guiding intention: to pander to any desire that would produce a sale (see PUBLISHING). Many of the vices attributed to the novel are also attributes of the market: both breed imitation, incite desire, are oblivious to their moral effects, and reach into every corner of the kingdom. Rampant production allows bad imitations to proliferate, and develops and uses new institutions to deliver novels indiscriminately into the hands of every reader.
But why was novel reading considered so dangerous? The power and danger of novels, especially to young women not exposed to classical education, is supposed to arise from the pleasures novels induce. Clara Reeve's The Progress of Romance (1785) ends with a staged debate between the book's protagonist, the woman scholar Euphrasia, and a high cultural snob named Hortensius. Hortensius develops a wide-ranging indictment of novel reading. First, novels turn the reader's taste against serious reading: “A person used to this kind of reading will be disgusted with everything serious or solid, as a weakened and depraved stomach rejects plain and wholesome food.” (2.78). Second, novels incite the heart with false emotions: “The seeds of vice and folly are sown in the heart,—the passions are awakened,—false expectations are raised.—A young woman is taught to expect adventures and intrigues...If a plain man addresses her in rational terms and pays her the greatest of compliments,—that of desiring to spend his life with her,—that is not sufficient, her vanity is disappointed, she expects to meet a Hero in Romance” (2.78). Finally, novels induce a dangerous autonomy from parents and guardians: “From this kind of reading, young people fancy themselves capable of judging of men and manners, and...believe themselves wiser than their parents and guardians, whom they treat with contempt and ridicule” (2.79). Hortensius indicts novels for transforming the cultural function of reading from solid nourishment to exotic tastes; from preparing a woman for the ordinary rational address of a plain good man to romance fantasies of a “hero”; from reliance upon parents and guardians to a belief in the reader's autonomy. Taken together, novels have disfigured their reader's body: the taste, passions, and judgment of stomach, heart, and mind. Here, as so often in the polemics around novels, the novel reader is characterized as a susceptible female, whose moral life is at risk. By strong implication, she is most responsible for transmitting the media virus of novel reading.
The debate about the dangers of novel reading changed the kind of novels that were written. First, cultural critics sketched the first profile of the culture-destroying pleasure-seeker who haunts the modern era: the obsessive, unrestrained consumer of fantasy. Novelists like Manley and Haywood included this figure of the pleasure-seeking reader within their novels, as a moral warning to their readers (see Warner, 88–127). Then, novelists like Richardson and Fielding, assuming the cogency of this critique, developed replacement fictions as a cure for the novel-addicted reader. In doing so, they aimed to deflect and reform, improve and justify novelistic entertainment. Thanks to the success of Richardson's Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747–48) and Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1742), and Tom Jones (1749), the terms of the debate about the dangers of novel reading shifted. Those critics who stepped forward after the mid-eighteenth century to describe the salient features and communicable virtues of these two author's works offered an unprecedented countersigning of the cultural value of their novels. Between uncritical surrender to novel reading, and a wholesale rejection of novels in favor of “serious” reading, Richardson and Fielding's novels seemed to be a third pathway for the novel. Clara Reeve described the strategy in these terms: to “write an antidote to the bad effects” of novels “under the disguise” of being novels (85). For Samuel Johnson, a critical intervention on behalf of the new novel meant arguing in favor of the “exemplary” characters of Richardson, over the more true-to-life “mixed” characters of Fielding or Tobias Smollett (Rambler 4) By contrast, Francis Coventry, in a pamphlet published anonymously, “An Essay on the New Species of Writing Founded by Mr. Fielding” (1751), follows the basic procedure Fielding had devised in the many interpolated prefaces of Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones: he applies the critical terms and ideas developed earlier for poetry, epic, and drama to the novel.
Because Italy, Spain, and France provided the most influential models for romance and novel writing in England, in the eighteenth century, novels were considered a species of entertainment most likely to move easily across linguistic and national boundaries. Both the opponents and proponents of novel reading read the novels of different nations off the same shelves. But by the nineteenth century, the novel was gradually nationalized. Influential critics like William Hazlitt (1778–1830) and Walter Scott came to understand novels as a type of writing particularly suited to representing the character, mores, landscape, and “spirit” of particular nations. In a different but no less complete way than poetry, the novel is reinterpreted as a distinct expression of the nation. However, this articulation of nation and novel has a rich prehistory. Over the course of the eighteenth-century debate about novels there develops a correlation that would inflect the idea of a distinctly English novel. Repeatedly it is claimed that England is to France as the novel is to the romance, as fact is to fantasy, as morality is to sensuality, as men are to women. (Terms can be added to this series: genuine and counterfeit, simple and frothy, substantial and sophisticated.) Grounded in a caricature of France as effeminate and England as manly, this loaded set of oppositions is simultaneously nationalist and sexist. These correlations weave themselves like a gaudy thread through all the subsequent nineteenth-century literary histories of the novel's rise.
Novel reading is assumed to have the power to create an imagined community of English readers (see Anderson). For Hazlitt and Scott the idea of the novel as a vehicle for expressing cultural difference becomes folded into an historicism that assumes a people and their culture are an organic totality, essentially different from one another in every aspect of their identity. Within this romantic literary history, the nation, people, or RACE becomes the truth that particular genres, authors, and periods disclose. Now, bracing new questions about the historical causes of the ebb and flow of national genius can be posed within a literary history of the novel. Thus, in his Lectures on the Comic Writers (1819), Hazlitt speculates why the four great novelists of the mid-eighteenth century emerged at the same time. This enables him to develop the thesis that the novel's rise can be attributed to one of the bywords of English identity: the idea of English liberty.
It is remarkable that our four best novel-writers belong nearly to the same age [the reign of George II]...If I were called upon to account for this coincidence, I should waive the consideration of more general causes, and ascribe it at once to the establishment of the Protestant ascendancy, and the succession of the House of Hanover. These great events appear to have given a more popular turn to our literature and genius, as well as to our government. It was found high time that the people should be represented in books as well as in Parliament. They wished to see some account of themselves in what they read; and not to be confined always to the vices, the miseries, and frivolities of the great. ... [In France] the canaille are objects rather of disgust than curiosity; and there are no middle classes. The works of Racine and Molière are either imitations of the verbiage of the court, before which they were represented, or fanciful caricatures of the manners of the lowest people. But in the period of our history in question, a security of person and property, and a freedom of opinion had been established, which made every man feel of some consequence to himself, and appear an object of some curiosity to his neighbours: our manners became more domesticated; there was a general spirit of sturdiness and independence, which made the English character more truly English than perhaps at any other period—that is, more tenacious of its own opinions and purposes. The whole surface of society appeared cut out into square enclosures and sharp angles, which extended to the dresses of the time, their gravel-walks, and clipped hedges. Each individual had a certain ground-plot of his own to cultivate his particular humours in, and let them shoot out at pleasure; and a most plentiful crop they have produced accordingly. The reign of George II was, in a word, the age of hobby-horses: but, since that period, things have taken a different turn. (143–44)
After these words, Hazlitt goes on to regret the way the constant wars of the previous fifty years have driven out this “domestic” interest, and made the king's and nation's actions central, even up to the point of restoring “the divine right of kings.”
There are several remarkable features to the way Hazlitt explains the comparatively sudden, and regrettably temporary, effulgence of British genius in the early (by now, canonical) novel writers of the period of George II (1727–60: Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Laurence Sterne. First, Hazlitt offers an early rendering of what is by now the classic explanation for the rise of the novel: a correlation of the rise of the middle class (with its Protestantism, individualism and domesticity, or in other words, its subjectivity) with the rise of the novel. But here, that thesis is not an abstract sociological correlation, applicable to all societies undergoing modern economic development. It is interwoven, at every point, with the central myths of English national identity—its idea of what separates French “despotism” from English liberty. Thus the political upheaval that brought the House of Hanover to the throne is said to have given “a more popular turn to our literature and genius.” How does this “turn” come about? Although Hazlitt blurs the agency for this change through the use of a passive construction (“It was found high time”), he aligns the cultural and political demands for representation as they express themselves “in books as well as Parliament.” This brings into existence a new species of culturally enfranchised reader: one who demands a turn away from representations of the “vices, miseries, and frivolities of the great” to “an account of themselves.” This break from cultural despotism (as expressed in the continental romance and novella) is grounded in the flowering of English liberty, which wins for each “a security of person and property, and freedom of opinion.” Since this turn toward a more popular and “domestic” culture wins the English reader a certain “life” and “liberty,” he (not she) becomes propertied—“each individual had a certain ground-plot of his own to cultivate his particular humours in.” The novel—in the epoch of its flowering—thus allows every English citizen to realize a claim to the Lockean trinity of life, liberty, and property. English novels put English readers of a certain epoch in possession of a self.
Hazlitt's Whig interpretation of the free Golden Age of the mid-eighteenth century, written from the vantage point of his conception of English democratic identity, is embedded in many subsequent understandings of what the novel is and does. Because of the novel's celebrated grasp of ordinary life, its use of detailed description, its incorporation of social DIALOGUE and inner thoughts, at least since the nineteenth century, the novel has served as the royal road to identity. If one is a writer from a certain region, ethnic group, or nation, it is assumed that writing a novel will help to define it, e.g., the American South, blackness, or Nigeria (see REGIONAL). And if you, as a member of one of those groups (or as a curious reader), want to absorb the deep truth of those identities, it is assumed that reading William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, or Chinua Achebe will take you closer to that special flavor of human identity. The global dissemination of novel reading and novel writing has made the novel a privileged discursive site for brokering the relations among nations and peoples (Lynch and Warner, 3). This has also given the novel a starring role in today's multicultural curriculum.
Novels, which are at their simplest level lively stories about people who never existed, have no necessary relation to moral life or national identity. The articulations between these different cultural terms—novels, morality, nationhood—are the contingent effect of the institutionalization of the novel carried out by writers, critics, and readers. Both these articulations lend support to and are grounded in a third, equally important connection—that between the “novel” and “real life”. The idea that the novel effects a particularly compelling imitation of “real life” is as old as seventeenth-century critical claims on behalf of the novella against the romance. Similar claims were made on behalf of the anti-romance of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. But since the eighteenth century, the claim to represent “real” life and manners has never been merely descriptive; it has also been normative see DECORUM). To represent “real” life is to attain a more valuable species of writing. Making this claim on behalf of the novel and against romance was a way critics promoted the surpassing of the old romance, with its fabulous elements and its extravagant codes of honor, in favor of a rational modern taste in entertainment.
Any systematic effort to deal with the many theoretical and historical horizons of “realism” is beyond the scope of this entry. My concern is to understand how the “realist claim” so frequently made for novels operates as a third criterion for defining the novel and rationalizing its rise. Ever since critics and novelists have been making this claim for the novel, there have been compelling reasons for critical skepticism. First, any claim that the novel re-presents the real runs up against a systematic obstacle arising from its linguistic medium. No text, whether it is history, science, or fiction, once transported from the SPACE or TIME of its production, and no matter how earnest its aspirations to truth, can bear a mark in its own language that verifies its relation to something outside itself. The tenuousness of the novel's realist claim is evident from the wide historical vacillations in accepted critical wisdom as to what constitutes the most truthful representation of “real” life. There are several reasons why the concept of mimesis, or imitation, becomes inevitable within formulations of the role of novels: a mimetic relation is implicit in the structure of the sign, in every effort at narrative, in the attempt to bring truth into the presence of consciousness through language (Derrida, 186–87). As realist claims begin to be made in the mid-eighteenth century, there are certain background axioms operating within such a claim. First, this claim does not establish a naively empirical relationship between word and thing, but unfolds within an understanding that the novel has a mediated aesthetic relation to what it represents (McKeon, 118–28). Thus for example, a dialogue in a tavern is not, whatever its verisimilitude, the same as a transcript of an actual dialogue. Second, the realist claim is founded upon, and therefore limited by, a judgment made at a particular time among a social network of readers who produce, consume, and criticize.
For the readers who experience the “realist effect” (Barthes, 182) of a particular novel's alignment of language and referent, the judgment that this or that novel is intrinsically realistic is a pleasing consensus. Its being shared by a community of readers encourages the critical consolidation of a certain specific form of writing as a prescribed form of realism: e.g., in the history of novels, “writing to the moment” (Richardson), “formal realism” (Watt), omniscient narrative, stream-of-consciousness writing, etc. But the repeated use of a particular form of fiction wears away its realist effect, until it appears to be a mechanical, formula fiction referring to nothing so much as itself. The decay of the realist effect of old realisms incites practices and manifestoes which promote new species of realism. In the over three-hundred years of novel criticism in English, one question—“Is it realistic?”—has served as the most generally accepted criterion of value. But while critics have at times sought to regularize novelistic production around the goal of representing real life, and advocated the novel as the most powerful literary technology for representing reality, readers, and the authors who write for them, have happily indulged periodic returns to romance, whether through the development of the gothic novel (Horace Walpole, 1764, The Castle of Otranto), the novel of fantasy, or the novel of adolescent action and adventure (see Glazener, in Lynch and Warner).
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the novel's realism is complicated and enriched by novelists such as Gustave Flaubert and Henry James, who aestheticize the novel. While it may seem that such a movement would vitiate the novel's realist claims, in fact it aligns the novel with a critical tradition that goes back to Aristotle, whereby art's power to represent nature is dependent on its acceptance of inherited aesthetic forms and types like tragedy, epic, and the pastoral. In James's prefaces to the New York edition of his novels, later gathered by R. P. Blackmur into The Art of the Novel (1934), a new demand is made of novels that would accede to the condition of art: they must have “form.” James develops this term through analogies to drama, painting, and sculpture in order to make the case for the novel's having a graspable contour, shape, or structure. Because James is so protective of the novelist's prerogatives, it is often difficult to be sure what is meant by the novel's “form.” For James a novel has “form” if it achieves a unified and economic commingling of plot, character, and idea. It is clear which novels lack form: those “loose baggy monsters” that James mocks and Victorian novel readers had been all too ready to indulge (1908, x).
The successful articulation of the novel and art has several important effects upon the novel's cultural placement. First, a new sophistication and irony attend critical considerations of the novel's realist claims. It is assumed that the novel's claim to realism depends upon the novel's position as a kind of art, and its claim to represent the real unfolds not in opposition to the artificial, but through the illusion-engendering resources of art. There is a consensus among academic critics of the twentieth century that successful realism is grounded in a reciprocal interplay between literary form and mimetic function.
The expectation that the best and most significant novels possess “form” helps transform the literary history of the novel, and the imagination of its rise. As long as the novel seemed free of the critical constraints that framed the cultural acceptance of epic, drama, and poetry, and its signal feature was the atavistic pleasures it afforded its readers, literary historians could trace the many interconnections between the modern novel and the romances of earlier epochs. As long as the moral function or national telos of novelistic writing guided literary histories, the affinities of early English novels with Shakespeare's characters, Geoffrey Chaucer's stories, Cervantes's anti-romance, and the modern French novel seemed plausible, and open to exploration. But once the novel's generic identity was understood to depend upon realist claims achieved through a particular form, the arrival of the modern novel appeared unheralded and contingent (see MODERNIS). Its first instance could now be sought. The emergence of the modern novel comes to be represented as dependent upon an abrupt invention of new and more powerful techniques for representing reality.
The wide influence of The Rise of the Novel results in part from the way Watt adds an important new dimension to the story of the novel's rise, by updating its realist claim. By aligning Richardson's “writing to the moment” with the distinctly modern turn toward a rendering of private experience and subjective intensities, Watt redefines the object of novelistic mimesis from the social surface to the PSYCHOLOGICAL interior. Watt's argument ends up redefining the novel—and the “formal realism” it is built upon—so as to revalue Richardson at Fielding's expense. How and why does the novel shift the terrain of its realist claims from the social surface to the ineluctable psychological interior? Here is my speculation. By the turn of the twentieth century, novelistic writing is but one of several kinds of representation within culture claiming to represent reality. Over the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, PHOTOGRAPHY and cinema co-opt the sort of social description and precise verisimilitude of the visible surface most characteristic of nineteenth-century novelistic realism. To sustain its realist claims, novel writers locate a more obscure object, one inaccessible to the camera lens, by turning inward. Now the most advanced novels, those, for example, of Joyce, Marcel Proust, Woolf, and Faulkner, are claimed by critics to affect a mimesis of the inner consciousness. The old aesthetic demand that art have a certain “form” receives a technological spin in the invention of a narrative of the mind. Just as the new media of photography and the phonograph and their merger into cinema enable a new set of realist claims, so the novel is reinterpreted as the medium uniquely suited to representing the inner life. Within Watt's literary history, Richardson's “writing to the moment” can be revalued as the early modern precursor of the stream-of-consciousness writing attributed to some late modern novelists.
This highly selective historical overview of various definitions of the novel demonstrates how history works on, with, and through the novel, so that we might say of the novel what is said of Cleopatra: “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale/Her infinite variety” (Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, II.ii).
Cynthia Wall
In the late seventeenth through the early eighteenth century, description consisted largely of brief tags, all-purpose adjectives, the naming of things well known to the reader: a chamber, a beautiful woman, a window, a pot, a castle. By the nineteenth century, visual detail was virtually comprehensive, penciling in a complete portrait of space, of TIME, of physiognomy, of surface. Although forms of description had been classified and used since classical times, from the seventeenth century on, prose fiction adapted “the crafth of descrypcyoun” (O. Bokenham, 1447, qtd. in OED) to its particular extended spaces, spacious tempos, and representations of the ordinary. By 1884, Henry James would assert that “the air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel—the merit on which all its other merits...depend.” Description changed from what was more or less a pointing index finger, a bare floor for action and dialogue, to a fully carpeted, thickly detailed space, from a “figure” for the novel to be wary of, to a necessary condition for its art.
Novelistic description has its roots in the rules of classical poetry and rhetoric, where, according to Aristotle, poetic “statements” are “of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars” ca. 335 BCE, (Poetics 2323; §1451b) and the end is vividness (enargeia) and probability: “the poet should remember to put the actual scenes as far as possible before his eyes. In this way, seeing everything with the vividness of an eye-witness as it were, he will devise what is appropriate, and be least likely to overlook incongruities” (Poetics 2328–29; §1455a). What we know as “description” developed out of the exercise of “ekphrasis” in the Greek Progymnasmata (“School Exercises”): “an expository speech which vividly (enargos) brings the subject before our eyes” (Theon, second century CE; qtd. in Race).
Ekphrasis has long been entangled with description. The Oxford Classical Dictionary defines it as “the rhetorical description of a work of art.” Certainly since the Renaissance the term—or the concept—has been employed to describe descriptions of paintings or tapestries or statues or other objets d'art, as in Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1516, 1532, Mad Orlando), Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra's Don Quixote (1605, 1615), or Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Idiot (1868, The Idiot). Jean Hagstrum calls it “giving voice and language to the otherwise mute art object,” and Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1820) is usually held up as an iconic example, linking the tradition back to Homer's description of Achilles's shield in the Iliad. But in classical rhetoric ekphrasis was just as often a scene unfolding in time—the crafting of that shield, for example, or a battle (see Webb). Epics were always happy to pause for long displays of objects, and vivid depictions of persons, times, places, and actions were equally part of the classical ekphrastic tradition. Often the vividness in the description—the enargeia in the ekphrasis—would spring from the smallest word choice: Aristotle recommended using verbs of motion, especially present participles, and adverbial phrases in creating vivid representation: “By ‘making them see things’ I mean using expressions that represent things as in a state of activity ... [as in] ‘Thereat up sprang the Hellenes to their feet,’ where ‘up sprang’ gives us activity as well as metaphor, for it at once suggests swiftness” (Rhetoric §§1411b–1412a). Ekphrasis in the classical tradition embraced a moving world of things; ekphrasis in the modern tradition focuses on the “speaking picture.”
In the medieval period, description was a form of rewriting Greek and Latin imagery for a new context; much as Virgil's tempest in the Aeneid is rewritten from Homer, so medieval description works with what is already there—not only in the literature itself, but in the literary memories and experiences of their new readers. It might be said to evoke images rather than represent them. Description in the Renaissance was modeled largely on the classical tradition, and comprised several kinds: pragmatographia (description of things), topographia (description of place), prosopopeia (description of a person), prosopographia, (“the fainyng of a person”, as Richard Sherry's 1550 A Treatise of Schemes & Tropes puts it, or characterization), pathopeia (description of emotions), chronographia (the description of time—night and day, the seasons), and a host of other aides-de-camp: similitude, icon or image, dialogue, amplification, hyperbole, paralepsis, distinctions between “feignings” of real persons or animals and feignings of myth, and division within division, subcategory beneath subcategory, or all of the above. Henry Peacham, in The Garden of Eloquence (1577), defines pragmatographia as “a description of thinges, wherby we do as plainly describe any thing by gathering togeather all the circumstances belonging unto it, as if it were moste liuely paynted out in colloures, and set forth to be seene.”
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a division entered between description and narration that would become outright opposition. Figures of speech—metaphors, similes, tropes—which were all readily employed in descriptions of persons, places, and things, became a matter for stylistic wariness (see RHETORIC). John Smith, in The Mysterie of Rhetorique Unvail'd (1657), makes a favorite Renaissance trope explicit: “A Figure in the Greek...signifies principally habitum, vestitu, & ornatum corporis, in English, the apparel and ornament of the body; which by a Metaphor is transferred to signifie the habit and ornament of words of speech.” But as George Puttenham warns, “the Poet or makers of speech becomes vicious and vnpleasant by nothing more than by vsing too much surplusage” (Arte of English Poesie, 1589). As ekphrasis was beginning to pull away from the classical meaning of a vivid representation of something toward a work of art, so description in general was pulling away from its energized status as part of narrative (with springing verbs and scenes of action or the actual crafting of the work of art) to become something of an object in itself—a heavy robe, a burden, extra baggage, the drone of a bagpipe—a fixture of stasis that interrupted narrative.
The Renaissance accounts of description apply mostly to poetry, but were generally absorbed by the growing genre of prose fiction that was to become the novel. The early English novel could rarely be attacked as having “too much surplusage,” in Peacham's terms; faces, rooms, landscapes were rarely described. Daniel Defoe's novels are noted for their things or their addresses—visual boundaries appear, rather as in the classical tradition, when narrative requires them, as in this scene of topographia from Moll Flanders (1722) when the young heroine is pounced upon by the elder brother of the house she lives in:
It happen'd one Day that he came running up Stairs, towards the Room where his Sisters us'd to sit and Work, as he often us'd to do; and calling to them before he came in, as was his way too, I being there alone, step'd to the Door, and said, Sir, the Ladies are not here, they are Walk'd down the Garden; as I step'd forward, to say this towards the Door, he was just got to the Door, and clasping me in his Arms, as if it had been by Chance, O! Mrs. Betty, says he, are you here? That's better still; I want to speak with you, more than I do with them, and then having me in his Arms he Kiss'd me three or four times.
We have a set of stairs, a sitting room, a garden gestured, a door which captures the elder brother capturing Moll (or Mistress Betty, as she is known in her pre-criminal days), but no full drawing of any interior space. In general in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century novels, the persons and spaces are designated by general terms, closer to the conventions of playwrighting, which leave the blanks of a “Chamber” to be filled in by the performance; in the novel, by the reader's imagination.
Contrast a nineteenth-century moment of topographia, when Charlotte Brontë's heroine Jane Eyre describes the “red room” where her aunt has banished her:
The red-room was a spare chamber, very seldom slept in...yet it was one of the largest and stateliest chambers in the mansion. A bed supported on massive pillars of mahogany, hung with curtains of deep red damask, stood out like a tabernacle in the centre; the two large windows, with their blinds always drawn down, were half shrouded in festoons and falls of similar drapery; the carpet was red; the table at the foot of the bed was covered with a crimson cloth; the walls were a soft fawn colour, with a blush of pink in it; the wardrobe, the toilet-table, the chairs were of darkly-polished old mahogany. (1847, Jane Eyre, Chap. 2)
Here the eye sweeps the room, noting colors and textures, lighting and reflections, and precise spatial coordinates. The visual picture is complete; there is little to be filled in. Early novels depend, classically, on universals rather than particulars; Irvin Ehrenpreis has argued that when detailed description enters, it does so as “negative particularity”—the phenomenon of detailed description relegated to the low, vicious, or comic in the Augustan world: “What had to be rendered in bright detail was what did not belong to the familiar things of their world”; “truth” and “beauty” and “virtue” were shared, familiar, public, matters of common standard.
Yet even from the beginning, the novel as a genre was more interested than poetry in numbering the streaks of the tulip (Samuel Johnson, 1759, Rasselas). In eighteenth-century prosopopeia, or the description of a person, for example, heroes and heroines of early novels are typically cast in the general mode: “‘Her face and person answer my most refined ideas of complete beauty,’” says Lady Howard of the young Evelina in Frances Burney's Evelina (1778); says one Lady Brooks of Samuel Richardson's Pamela: “See that Shape! I never saw such a Face and Shape in my Life” (1740, Pamela). But there are notable exceptions of positive particularity, such as the Narrator's loving description of Sophia Western in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749): “Her eyebrows were full, even, and arched beyond the power of art to imitate. Her black eyes had a lustre in them, which all her softness could not extinguish. Her nose was exactly regular.... Her cheeks were of the oval kind; and in her right she had a dimple, which the least smile discovered” (4.2). John Graham notes a sharp rise in the use of pathognomy (the “passing expression” and/or signs of the passions) in the novel from about 1760 until, by the late eighteenth century, the particulars of face and expression became “an essential part of character revelation” and “dramatic conflict was expressed through complete and subtle readings of passing expressions.” Frances Burney can pour a world of descriptive meaning in the small spaces between words and actions, as when the languid libertine, Lord Merton, responds to his affected fiancée with Aristotelian precision: “‘You have been, as you always are,’ said he, twisting his whip with his fingers, ‘all sweetness.’” In George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876), the hero's attention is caught by Gwendolyn Harleth at the gaming table: “The sylph was a winner; and as her taper fingers, delicately gloved in pale-grey, were adjusting the coins which had been pushed towards her in order to pass them back again to the winning point, she looked round her with a survey too markedly cold and neutral not to have in it a little of that nature which we call art concealing an inward exultation”(1.1). Deronda's scrutiny catches her attention, and the rest of the scene plays out the contrast between how they think and how they look, each reading the glance and gesture of the other as code.
Chronographia, or the description of time, also emerges differently in different centuries. Defoe's narrators famously mark time by recycling it: “It was about the Beginning of September 1664,” the narrator of A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) begins, “that I, among the Rest of my Neighbours, heard in ordinary Discourse, that the Plague was return'd again in Holland;...but all agreed, it was come into Holland again.” The narrative then ebbs and flows with the movements of the plague, as the narrator circles back to its beginnings and forward to its end in a series of digressions that scuttle away from and then return to moments of horror: “But I come back to the Case of Families infected”; “But I am now talking of the Time, when the Plague rag'd at the Easter-most Part of the Town”; the death of the narrator himself is embedded in a note towards the end of the narrative: “N.B. The Author of this Journal, lyes buried in that very Ground, being at his own Desire, his Sister having been buried there a few years before.”
Where time curls up in Defoe, it stretches out luxuriously in Mark Twain's nineteenth-century chronograph in Huckleberry Finn (1884–5):
It was a monstrous big river down there—sometimes a mile and a half wide....Not a sound, anywheres—perfectly still—just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bull-frogs a-cluttering, maybe. The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line—that was the woods on t'other side—you couldn't make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness, spreading around; then the river softened up, away off, and warn't black any more, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along, ever so far away—trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks—rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by-and-by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there's a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off of the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t'other side of the river, being a wood-yard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh, and sweet to smell, on account of the woods and the flowers; but sometimes not that way, because they've left dead fish laying around, gars, and such, and they do get pretty rank; and next you've got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it! (Chap. 19)
This is a long, slow, dreamy progress down the Mississippi and into the day; from “The first thing to see” to the “full day,” the narrative is a single sentence, collecting its clauses in the wake of its easy motion, pulling light and color and sound and scent along its own approach toward approaching events. Although the visual or sensual contents of chronographia might change quite perceptibly over time, the handling of time is always a function of narrative itself, a way of wielding words and meting punctuation to deliver a temporal experience.
Forms of description do not change much—writers always push for vivid representations of time and space, faces and emotions, things and events. But what constitutes a vivid representation changes across time and culture. For the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a more universally shared warehouse of literature, as well as of goods, meant that a brief phrase or even a single word could swell instantly into rich meaning for a contemporary reader: “if thou wilt open and set abroade those thinges whiche were included in one word” (Peacham, 1577). We can see this cultural rehydration operating in the nineteenth-century critic Thomas Babington Macaulay as he reviews the seventeenth-century John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress in 1830:
There is no ascent, no declivity, no resting place, no turn-stile, with which we are not perfectly acquainted. The wicket-gate and the desolate swamp which separates it from the City of Destruction, the long line of road, as straight as a rule can make it, the Interpreter's house and all its fair shows, the prisoner in the iron cage, the palace, at the doors of which armed men kept guard, and on the battlements of which walked persons clothed all in gold, the cross and the sepulchre, the steep hill and the pleasant arbour, the stately front of the House Beautiful by the wayside, the low green valley of Humiliation, rich with grass and covered with flocks, all are as well known to us as the sights of our own street.
Bunyan does not, in fact, fill in the details of these sites, but Macaulay sees them; his “perfect acquaintance” is triggered by a specific familiarity with general terms rather than through a new encountering of specific terms. It is the nineteenth century that filled in the details of visual space, that crawled lovingly over the minute surfaces of things and found meaning in difference rather than universality.
In the mid-eighteenth century, Jean-François Marmontel had complained in the Encyclopédie (1751–72): “What we call today, in Poetry, the descriptive genre was not known by the Ancients. It is a modern invention, of which, it seems to me, neither reason nor taste approve” (qtd. in Hamon). He was voicing the distrust of detail, of surface, of surplusage. Yet by the late eighteenth century in England the rhetorician Hugh Blair was addressing the “considerable place” that description now did and should occupy in poetry and literature more generally, and that description depended on the precision and connection of its details: “No description, that rests in Generals, can be good. For we can conceive nothing clearly in the abstract; all distinct ideas are formed upon particulars” (Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 1783). William Blake (1727–1857), rather more bluntly, declared: “To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit....Singular & Particular Detail is the Foundation of the Sublime” (from Blake's copy of Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds). In the early nineteenth century, William Hazlitt declared that “the greatest grandeur may co-exist with the most perfect, nay with a microscopic accuracy of detail” (“On Certain Inconsistencies in Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses,” in Collected Works, 1903). For Henry James, it is the surface which is the substance, and “to ‘render’ the simplest surface” is the complicated artistic obligation of the writer.
This shift in attitude toward description, from “surplusage” and “ornament” to a faith in particulars as renderings of reality, emerged from a century devoted to developing and polishing detailed descriptions in venues outside the literary. As travel in Britain became easier and cheaper in eighteenth-century Britain, country houses, such as Mr. Darcy's Pemberley in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1797), became tour destinations, and house guides were written and sold detailing their gardens, artwork, rooms, and furniture. Increased trade from an expanding empire poured all kinds of new goods into the market. Auctions—art and household—became hugely popular, and their catalogues necessarily marked “recognizable features and characteristic marks,” as the Oxford English Dictionary would say, of the objects for sale. Furniture and porcelain makers, such as Thomas Chippendale (1718–79) and Josiah Wedgwood (1730–95) produced detailed catalogues for their wares. Newspaper advertisements grew more fulsome. And the rise of empirical science generated a new interest in surfaces and subsurfaces; scientific description accompanied detailed engravings to render the macro- and microscopic worlds visible. All such nonliterary description nonetheless invited imaginative habitation, or picturing other worlds: someone else's house; my house with new things; the life of a louse (as in Robert Hooke's 1665 Micrographia). And so the novel, with a history of ingesting any neighboring genres for increased energy and pulse, gradually incorporated detailed visual description into its spaces.
It is perhaps not surprising, then, that that which received most descriptive attention in eighteenth-century novels were things; pragmatographia would be the dominant descriptive form. Clothes, for example, feature largely in early novels as signifiers of status, real or assumed. In Defoe's Roxana (1724), this “fortunate mistress,” for example, lavishly details the Turkish costume (replete with faux diamonds) she dons at a ball she hosts, in which she displays her “Man-Woman” power and earns her sobriquet (her real name, we learn, is Susan). Samuel Richardson, in his third novel Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54), has his heroine Harriet detail with delight her new surroundings as Lady Grandison: “The best bed chamber adjoining, is hung with fine tapestry. The bed is of crimson velvet, lined with white silk; chairs and curtains of the same.” She goes on for pages about fabrics and colors and textures and furniture. It's not surprising that some critics have compared the novel to a country house guide (Kelsall). But Richardson, always with a key eye toward the reading market, was simply among the first to absorb the precisely visual into novelistic narrative.
Nineteenth-century novels tended to fasten even more familiarly and fully on the particulars, the surfaces, the visual detail in comprehensive context. The representation of experience became more consciously, sensuously whole; the narrator rather than the reader supplied the missing bits of sight or sound or texture or scent or a fine register of emotion—what Roland Barthes has called “the ‘coenesthesia’ of substance—its undifferentiated mass of organic sensation” “(1965, “Objective Literature,” in Two Novels By Robbe-Grillet, trans. R. Howard, 15). Gustave Flaubert in Madame Bovary (1857) famously merges Emma's body into the landscape after her first lovemaking with Rodolphe:
The shades of night were falling; the horizontal sun passing between the branches dazzled the eyes. Here and there around her, in the leaves or on the ground, trembled luminous patches, as if humming-birds flying about had scattered their feathers. Silence was everywhere; something sweet seemed to come forth from the trees. She felt her heartbeat return, and the blood coursing through her flesh like a river of milk. Then far away, beyond the wood, on the other hills, she heard a vague prolonged cry, a voice which lingered, and in silence she heard it mingling like music with the last pulsations of her throbbing nerves. Rodolphe, a cigar between his lips, was mending with his penknife one of the two broken bridles. (1965, trans. Paul de Man, 2:9)
It is as if silence itself is made visible, tactile. And into the early twentieth century, the “modernist” Virginia Woolf stretches this synesthetic description to collapse more fully the boundaries between consciousness and world, between inside and outside, between thought and sensation, between past and present, as in Clarissa Dalloway's moment in a flower shop:
There were flowers: delphiniums, sweet peas, bunches of lilac; and carnations, masses of carnations. There were roses; there were irises. Ah yes—so she breathed in the earthy garden sweet smell as she stood talking to Miss Pym who owed her help, and thought her kind, for kind she had been years ago; very kind, but she looked older, this year; turning her head from side to side among the irises and roses and nodding tufts of lilac with her eyes half closed, snuffing in, after the street uproar, the delicious scent, the exquisite coolness. (1925, Mrs. Dalloway Pt. 1)
Woolf's long, fresh sentences, rather like Twain's, draw on the physical senses of sight, sound, scent, touch to infuse the present with the past, the inanimate flowers with animate images, the repetition of lists with the energy of motion.
But later in the twentieth century a sort of revulsion against thick description choked the critics. Georg Lukács, in “Narrate or Describe?,” found the surface-obsessed literature of the late nineteenth century a bourgeois compensation for “the epic significance that has been lost”; while narration “establishes proportions” and events reveal character, “description merely levels.” José Manuel Lopes notes that the Russian formalists paid little attention to the matter, nor did the Anglo-American New Critics, while the discourse linguists of the 1970s and 1980s, by grouping narrative with “foreground” and description with “background” on the figure-ground opposition of gestalt theory, tended to “perpetuate the notion of literary description as mere background” (9–10, 3). Many twentieth-century American novelists in particular were known for their spare prose, their almost seventeenth-century evocations, such as J. D. Salinger in The Catcher in the Rye (1958): “Anyway, it was December and all, and it was cold as a witch's teat, especially on top of that stupid hill”; or William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury (1929): “We went along the fence and came to the garden fence, where our shadows were. My shadow was higher than Luster's on the fence. We came to the broken place and went through it.”
Of course, novelists often don't pay any attention to critics, and surfaces resurfaced—almost violently in their very stasis—in the nouveau roman of Alain Robbe-Grillet and others. Robbe-Grillet, rather like Samuel Richardson two hundred years earlier, was ridiculed for his exhaustively precise descriptions that seemed to rival the French record books of county property lines: “Starting from this clump of trees, the patch runs downhill with a slight divergence (toward the left) from the greatest angle of slope. There are thirty-two banana trees in the row, down to the lower edge of the patch” (1957, Jealousy, trans. R. Howard). But Robbe-Grillet, unlike Richardson (or Bunyan, or Defoe, or Eliot, or Flaubert), does not see the detail as flush with meaning. As Barthes explains: “The scrupulosity with which Robbe-Grillet describes an object has nothing to do with such doctrinal matters: instead he establishes the existence of an object so that once its appearance is described it will be quite drained, consumed, used up” “Objective Literature,” (13) In the nouveau roman, the lavish supply of surfaces is meant less to heighten significance than to disintegrate coherence.
Novelistic description regained critical and practical popularity in the late twentieth century, featuring prominently in the work of contemporary novelists such as Nicholson Baker and David Foster Wallace. In the 1980s, Gérard Genette and Philippe Hamon, among others, brought description back to the center of critical interest, Genette arguing that description is in fact more indispensable than narration because it is easier to describe without narrating events than to narrate without description. Description regained some of its nineteenth-century glamour—yet with a very much postmodern glamour, more heroin-chic than velvet elegance.
It is, of course, virtually impossible to successfully generalize about novelists, each of whose work constitutes a separately run universe. The differences between early eighteenth-century writers can be as vast as between a seventeenth- and a nineteenth-century novelist. But whether the description is spare or lush, generated by verbs or settling across paragraphs, the intent is the same. In the words of Macaulay (1830, “John Bunyan”): “This is the highest miracle of genius,—that things which are not should be as though they were,—that the imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another.”
Stephen Rachman
The detective novel emerged from the U.S., France, and Great Britain in the mid-nineteenth century out of a number of generic forerunners—some of long standing, others of more recent invention. As a popular form derived from the short stories of the American Edgar Allan Poe featuring the first fictional amateur detective, the Parisian C. Auguste Dupin, who first appeared in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), its development in the English-speaking world throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century coincided with the rise of the short story and was intimately connected to the growth of mass-circulation magazines, especially in connection with the international success of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle (see SERIALIZATION). It also contributed to the streamlining of the sprawling three-volume novels of the Victorian era into more compact, single-volume narratives. In the twentieth century the development of inexpensive mass circulation (pulp) paperbacks further expanded the market for detective novels (see PUBLISHING). While stage, film, and television adaptations have generally replaced the audience once served by the various forms of short fiction, the demand for the detective novel has grown into a global phenomenon, and detective shows of one variety or another are a staple of television worldwide (see ADAPTATION). The dissemination of the detective genre can be traced through translations of English-language classics, and by the early twenty-first century virtually every major nation and language with developed publishing industries enjoys a popular detective series in translation and produced by indigenous writers.
As Poe first described his tales as “ratiocinative,” emphasizing the analytical and empirical aspects of detective fiction, “that moral activity which disentangles,” scholars of the genre have connected it to the rise of scientific methodology. In its classic form, the crime narrative that functions as an intellectual puzzle challenging the reader to solve the crime along with a superhuman detective has been viewed alternatively as either a superficial or profound invention of modern literature. But whether championed or disparaged as a popular genre, the detective novel has proven itself to be highly adaptable. Often dismissed as overly formulaic (the fussy, idiosyncratic detective, the red herring-laden plot of suspicious characters, the explanation in which all is revealed or theatrical confession is extracted), these very features have made the genre fundamental to contemporary Western cultures and readily exportable from one culture and language to another. If its nineteenth- and twentieth-century precedents featured elite, leisured, masculine (and typically) Caucasian detectives, then the last decades of the twentieth century saw a proliferation of ethnic, class, and sexual diversity (see RACE, SEXUALITY). A number of related genres also developed, including but not limited to hardboiled novels, spy novels, police procedurals, true-crime novels, and roman noir (which, like its more familiar cousin film noir, uses a highly stylized vocabulary of dark and light). Detective fiction has attracted many serious novelists as well, creating sophisticated variants that paradoxically promote and call into question the conventions of the genre. It has been adapted to all major literary trends (realism, modernism, postmodernism, magical realism) and genres (adventure, horror, fantasy (see SCIENCE FICTION), historical fiction, romance, and young adult).
In addition to studies of the genre, the detective novel has also been the subject of, or impetus for, significant literary theorization, ranging from the metafictional writings of Jorge Luis Borges (see METAFICTION) to the literary psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan (1901–81), the deconstructive theories of Jacques Derrida (1925–2007), and the postmodern fiction and theorizing of Carlo Ginzburg, Umberto Eco, and Donna Haraway.
Critics have found the constitutive elements of the genre in ancient and diverse sources such as the Bible, Chinese “magistrate tales,” and Sophocles's Oedipus Rex in which the protagonist is a great solver of enigmas and also the perpetrator of the central crime. Renaissance tales of crime and criminals, known as rogues' tales, and eighteenth-century forms of the same attracted wider audiences through the publication of accounts of the sessions of criminal courts and the so-called gallows confessions of the condemned found in The Newgate Calendar (seventeenth—nineteenth centuries). With the establishment of metropolitan police departments from the second decade of the nineteenth century (chiefly in London and Paris), crime narratives were routinely reported in the newspapers and the memoirs of notorious criminals became more commonplace. Though detectives and the “science of detection” had yet to be invented, gothic fictions, advertising themselves as mysteries by Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto, 1781), Ann Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794), and Matthew Lewis (The Monk) emerged in the late eighteenth century and often featured criminal subplots and individuals unwittingly thrust into the role of investigator. William Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794), with its title character being framed for theft and its plot of suspicion and retribution, is frequently noted as a harbinger of the form, as are the early American novels of Charles Brockden Brown, especially Arthur Mervyn (1799). In France Zadig, ou le Destinée (1748, Zadig, or Destiny) by Voltaire (pseud. of François-Marie Arouet) is often cited as a precursor for the way in which its title character uses techniques of empiricism and logical inference in tracking down a missing horse. Mystery-oriented English and French novels featuring criminal plots became more commonplace during the first half of the nineteenth century. Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (1838), set in London's criminal underworld, and Bleak House (1856) derive in many ways from his reportage often focused on London courts and prisons, and led to the form of mystery termed “sensation” fiction pioneered by Dickens's associate Wilkie Collins in The Moonstone (1867).
The appearance of the Memoirs (1828) of Eugène-François Vidocq, a one-time criminal mastermind who became the first chief of the SÛreté, the metropolitan police force of Paris, led to the development of the roman policier, novels of policing told from the point of view of the inspector. Le Père Goriot (1835, Old Goriot) by Honoré de Balzac features Vautrin, a character based on Vidocq. Exploiting similar terrain, Les mystères de Paris (1845, The Mysteries of Paris) by Eugène Sue offered readers serialized narratives of byzantine complexity threading their way through metropolitan criminal labyrinths, a template that was soon emulated in Great Britain by George Reynolds and in the U.S. by George Lippard. Victor Hugo's Les Misérables (1867) explored this figure also, in the character of the relentless Inspector Javert.
In creating Dupin, Poe incorporated many of these elements into the first detective fiction: the metropolitan setting, the violent crime scene in an apparently locked room, the vain, befuddled law-enforcement official, the wronged suspect, the confession, the cleverly convoluted solution with an exotic perpetrator, the class antagonisms implicit in the genteel detective's apprehension of the violent working-class criminal, and the masculine camaraderie of a supercilious gentleman mastermind and his credulous companion/narrator. By the second tale, “The Mystery of Marie Roget” (1843), Poe had Dupin attempting to solve an actual mystery—the disappearance of Mary Rogers from New York City—in fictional guise. By the third tale, “The Purloined Letter” (1845), pipe-smoking and an uncanny antagonist made their appearance. In these three stories, Poe offered, in Terence Whalen's estimation, “a genre in miniature” (226). Poe had given the form its initial shape and created its first great detective. These elements found in Poe were picked up most swiftly in France, chiefly through Émile Gaboriau, whose Monsieur Lecoq (1868) represents the first instance of the full-length detective narrative, and as such the invention of the detective novel proper. In the U.S. during the 1870s, “Old Sleuth” began to appear as a detective figure in dime novels catering to working-class audiences. Allan Pinkerton, the founder of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, began to publish ghostwritten “real-life” detective novels, and with The Leavenworth Case (1878), Anna Katherine Green established a more melodramatic form of the detective novel, in which the analytical frame serves to cast suspicion in all directions on a broad array of suspects, a technique that would influence many authors, notably Agatha Christie, giving rise to the “whodunit.”
But the features of Poe's tales of ratiocination were most thoroughly absorbed and generally expanded upon by Conan Doyle in creating Sherlock Holmes, Dr. John H. Watson, and his arch-nemesis, Professor Moriarty, during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. From A Study in Scarlet (1887) to The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901) and the shorter adventures published in The Strand Magazine, Doyle popularized the idiosyncratic detective as no one had before. Where Poe shrewdly observed that there was more “air of method than method” in the Dupin stories, Doyle, through the figure of Holmes, gave that air of method an unprecedented fictional depth. Holmes personified the “scientific method” of detection in his lean, angular form, his mastery of chemistry, forensics, disguise, and his exhaustive knowledge of Victorian criminology. If Dupin was associated with Parisian mystery, then Holmes doubly intensified his association with London, making fictional locations (e.g. 221B Baker Street) part of London's actual geography. In the Sherlock Holmes stories, Doyle achieved a formulaic model of detection in which the analytical, deductive, and puzzle aspects of the detective novel combined with adventure (often accompanied by a sidekick) so successfully that it superseded other forms of mystery and crime fiction, inaugurating what is generally referred to as the “Golden Age” of detective fiction, and influencing the spy novel and virtually any other kind of narratives involving investigative pairs. Legions of imitators and innovators followed, notably R. Austin Freeman and his detective, the forensically obsessed Dr. Thorndyke, as well as G.K. Chesterton and his detective, the empirically minded Father Brown. Subsequent generations produced many notable sleuths in this mold: John Dickson Carr's Dr. Fell, Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe, Dorothy L. Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey, and Christie's Hercule Poirot, to name but a few.
Just as Poe found it convenient to adapt the culture of detection to a fictional Paris, the detective novel proved itself equally flexible, producing a number of significant generic innovations. In 1896, Mark Twain (pseud. of Samuel L. Clemens) produced one of the earliest juvenile detective novels, Tom Sawyer, Detective. While Twain also satirized the violence of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes in “A Double-Barreled Detective Story” (1902), he readily adapted the form to his juvenile heroes, reprising Huckleberry Finn from his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), now in the narratological guise of a Mississippi Dr. Watson, chronicling the deductive feats of Tom Sawyer. Twain prefaced the story with a note implying that his detective novel was adapted from older reports of a Swedish criminal trial, suggesting how the form could be easily translated from one culture, country, and genre to another (see INTERTEXTUALITY). German children's author, Erich Kästner, whose popular Emil und die Detektive (1928, Emil and the Detectives), the Hardy Boys Mysteries series (1927–) and the female counterpart, the Nancy Drew Mystery Series (1930–) continued in this genre, often emphasizing themes of childhood, adolescence, and the relation of children to corruption and an awareness of the adult world.
In the U.S., the development of the “hardboiled” detective novel or crime fiction after WWI was, as Charles J. Rzepka has noted, “conceived in part as a direct challenge to the Anglo-American classical tradition inspired by Holmes,” but like its forerunners, it was pioneered in short fiction formats (179). Rejecting the genteel diction and milieu of its predecessors, the hardboiled detective novel frequently featured morally ambiguous “tough-guy” detectives who tended to subsume the puzzle/deductive aspects of their cases in tense, adventure-filled situations. Popular inexpensive story magazines known as “pulps,” directed at the working classes, had largely replaced dime novels and gained wide readership. Black Mask, founded in 1920, became the chief organ for the hardboiled style, featuring such contributors as Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Cornell Woolrich. Hammett, whose five detective novels include The Maltese Falcon (1930), featuring Sam Spade, also created the Continental Op and the sophisticated Nick and Nora Charles, and did more than any other author to establish the hardboiled genre. Raymond Chandler, whose detective, Philip Marlowe, first appeared in The Big Sleep (1939), offered a version of the hardboiled detective as a modern knight errant. In “The Simple Art of Murder” (1945), an essay on hardboiled detective fiction, Chandler explained in an oft-quoted statement, “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.” The impact of hardboiled can hardly be overstated. Its idioms and conventions have been adapted globally and have in many ways supplanted the classical detective form.
After WWII, Mickey Spillane, whose popular, sadistic detective Mike Hammer, and Ross MacDonald (pseud. of Kenneth Millar), whose gentler, more psychologically subtle detective, Lew Archer, seemed to embody the poles of conservative and liberal consciences in the Cold-War Era, achieved new levels of popularity. Inspector Maigret, created by the Belgian author writing in French, Georges Simenon, also reflected an intensifying interest in criminal psychology and the psychological in general.
Since the 1970s the development of ethnically diverse detectives has marked the detective novel. Where once ethnicity was a stereotypical or racist mark of difference (e.g. Charlie Chan or Mr. Moto), contemporary detectives such as the black detective Ezekiel “Easy” Rollins, who first appeared in Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress, navigates the African American terrain of South-Central Los Angeles from within. Hardboiled female detectives from Sara Paretsky's Polish American daughter of a Chicago cop, V. I. Warshowski to Sue Grafton's weightlifting “tough-girl” Kinsey Millhone have proliferated. Tony Hillerman's Navajo detectives and C. Q. Yarbro's Ojibway investigator, Charlie Spotted Moon, reflect the way this trend has extended the detective novel beyond its original terrain. The postmodern detective novel, exemplified by Paul Auster in his New York Trilogy and Umberto Eco in Il nome della rosa (1983, The Name of the Rose), has inverted the genre by calling into question the very conventions of detection, analysis, and imaginative reconstruction, offering readers the mystery of solutions rather than mere solutions to mysteries.
SEE ALSO: Censorship, Decorum/Verisimilitude, Dialect, Frame, Melodrama, Naturalism.
Determinism see Naturalism
Development, Novel of see Bildungsroman/Künstlerroman
Erik Redling
As subdivisions of a language, different dialects (e.g., Cockney) are to a large extent mutually intelligible, but different languages such as English and French usually are not. However, originally, a standard language was often just one of the dialects that happened to be institutionalized as the standard or national language for a number of political and social reasons and thus became more prestigious than the other dialects. But once a dialect is institutionalized, it loses its regional connotations because it is spread throughout the whole country and becomes the language taught in school, which is used for practically all scholarly, scientific, and literary writing and general public communication because of its non-regional basis (Baugh/Cable; Trudgill). At certain times or in certain communities where there never was such a written standard language, texts were written in the dialect spoken by the writer and usually displayed variable spellings of words: for instance, the noun “candle” was spelled as “kandel,” “candel,” and “candell” in the Middle English period (“Candle”). The rise of written standard languages created a challenge for dialect writers because they had to motivate or even justify their use of writing in a dialect, either by specifically limiting their addressees to dialect speakers or by insinuating that what they were trying to express could not be expressed equally through the standard language. “Writtenness” thus became the main distinguishing factor between a dialect and a national language in their literary use. In an effort to render the “orality” of a dialect variety in writing, dialect writers were not able to resort to an established dialect orthography but had to rely on an orthography derived from the standard language and transform conventionally spelled words via respellings (e.g., “lafft” for “laughed” and “kyared” for “carried”), or via the use of the apostrophe (e.g., “eve'ybody” for “everybody” and “sump'n” for “something”), and nonstandard grammatical features (e.g., “I is”). Also, the specific meaning of dialect vocabulary often had to be guessed from the context.
Over time dialect writers have assembled a number of techniques in order to create what can be called a “dialect effect”: some authors use a few common dialect features (e.g., “de” for “the”) to indicate a dialect; others simply mix a number of dialect features without having a specific dialect in mind; while some authors carefully devise a systematic written dialect even though they know that such an effort is ultimately doomed to failure since a conventional orthography is not an accurate phonetic system in the same way as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Frequently dialect authors juxtapose a written standard with a dialect within their writing to indicate differing or contrasting social, linguistic, geographic, and ethnic backgrounds of their characters. One specific feature of dialect writing that can be traced back to the early Middle Ages has been the use of dialect as a comic device (Blake). Authors furthermore employed standard-dialect juxtapositions as a literary method to portray dialect speakers as exhibiting a sense of community and companionship, intimacy, special charm or humor, and traditional knowledge and ways of thinking, but also of backwardness, provinciality, and intellectual narrowmindedness (Goetsch, 11).
A more recent use of the dialect vs. standard confrontation arose in the depiction of colonial situations in which authors regard a national language as an official language imposed on their culture and discourse by a dominant (foreign) power. Instead of accepting the linguistic supremacy uncritically, they “write back” (Ashcroft et al.) in their own postcolonial dialect voice (e.g., Haitian Creole). The experience of linguistic imperialism inspires them to establish a contrast, confrontation, or clash between the uniform spellings of a national language and the nonstandard orthography of a dialect language in order to insinuate different views, ethnicities, individuality, and a self-reliant spirit in the face of a hegemonic and homogenous language, and to reject submission to foreign views and norms or disprove prejudices against dialect speakers (see LINGUISTICS).
In all of these cases the written dialect produced by a dialect writer will be an individual mixture of elements of the standard language and “transcribed” dialect words. The reader thus will have to interpret whether the mixture is used to introduce a regional perspective into a literary work with which authors intend to reaffirm or criticize the hierarchical relation between a prestigious and culturally dominant standard orthography and a written dialect. Some of the issues mentioned above have been present from the beginnings of dialect writing; others have been added more recently. I shall only be able to touch on them from a historical and a thematic perspective and discuss significant literary functions of dialect in terms of society or community, i.e., the societal impact of “visual alterity” between a written standard and a written dialect language, and shall not concentrate on dialectal accuracy with regard to the regional speech, which was the objective of linguistic approaches to dialect (cf. Ives; Wolfram and Schilling-Estes). While not being able to include examples from many languages, I shall illustrate the spectrum of dialect use instead of aiming at completeness in representation.
As mentioned above, early dialect writers mainly used dialect as a comic device (see COMEDY). Haller reports on the function of dialect in the Italian city-states as a variety of literary endeavors during the Renaissance and baroque periods, but primarily in the function of parody and humor. He mentions that Ruzante parodied the manners of country folk in his Renaissance plays, but adds that such humorous plays in fact paved the way for the fixation of characters in the later national tradition of commedia dell'arte (Haller, 17). During the English Renaissance period, dialect authors, who could already rely on a national language, also used the contrast between a written standard and a literary dialect for humorous purposes. Renaissance dialect writing in Britain, for instance, offered “jokes” that were usually based on the juxtaposition of a rural English dialect and a King's English speaker or on a provincial speaker (or foreigner) who could not properly pronounce Standard English (Blank, 3).
Subsequently, dialect writing gained influence during the nineteenth century. American writers of the “Southwestern Humor” tradition in the pre-Civil War and post-Civil War U.S. (1861–65) expanded the dialect-standard opposition into a framing narrative device (standard-dialect-standard) that allowed them to lock a long dialect section—the visual “other”—within two framing standard-English sections (see FRAME). Typically, the standard-speaking narrator is an educated upper-class person who closely observes and reports on the “humorous” ways and practices of the uneducated rustic frontier characters in the “Old Southwest” (present-day Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri). A pioneer and influential representative of this genre of dialect writing is Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, from Georgia, whose collection Georgia Scenes (1835) featured sketches such as “The Horseswap,” “The Gander Pulling,” and “The Shooting Match,” which exhibited frontier themes as well as caricatures of the stereotypical frontiersman and yeoman and illustrated the writer's attempts at realistic depictions of rural American landscapes (Minnick, 4–5). Other writers of this dialect humor genre were William Tappan Thompson, George Washington Harris, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, and Johnson Jones Hooper. Following in their footsteps, Mark Twain developed his humorous sketches and short stories (e.g., 1865, “The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”) and explored the use of dialect as a REALISM device in his literary works of art (e.g., the Black English spoken by Jim in Huckleberry Finn, 1885).
The framing narrative device additionally enabled white dialect writers to enforce racist attitudes against African Americans through dialect fiction. The Southern writers of the so-called “plantation school” yearned for the good old days “befo' de wah” and employed the genre to promote a romantic portrait of the Old South. In Thomas N. Page's story “Marse Chan” collected in In Ole Virginia (1887), a standard-speaking genteel narrator rides on a horse and meets the dialect-speaking ex-slave Sam who tells him a story about the heroic and honorable deeds of his “marster” before and during the Civil War. The dialect consists of a hodgepodge of bizarre misspellings (e.g., “ev'vywhere”), linguistic irregularities (e.g., two different spellings of “nothing” that indicate a difference in phonology: “nuthin'” and “nuffin'”), and visually disjointed words (e.g., “ev'y'where”) and represents a “strange talk,” i.e., an English spoken by illiterate African Americans who literally disfigure the English language and thus threaten the “purity” of the standard (Jones). In contrast, the African American writer Charles W. Chesnutt redefined the same conventional framing device as the coexistence of the notions “polarity” (standard vs. dialect, racial hierarchy) and “hybridity” (mixed dialect, ethnic mixture) and subverted the repressive mechanism of the framing device by favoring “mixture” and perceiving dialect as a symbol of hybridity, not as corrupted Standard English (Redling).
During the period of literary realism, dialect writing played an important role in advancing “realism” in literature by paying attention to the evolving ethnic and linguistic diversity in Europe and America. In the U.S., the rise of local color stories coincided with the rise of women dialect writers in a previously male-dominated genre. Women writers portrayed different localities and dialects in their fiction: e.g., Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Rose Terry Cooke's New England dialect, Kate Chopin's Creole patois, and Harriet Beecher Stowe's black vernacular (Minnick, 7–8). Other representatives of the trend toward a “realistic” depiction of regional speech are George Washington Cable, whose “polygraphic” New Orleans novel Dr. Sevier (1883) manifests at least five different language varieties or “grapholects” such as Louisiana Creole French and English with a strong German accent; Mark Twain's portrayal of Southern and black dialects in Huckleberry Finn; and Stephen Crane's rendering of uneducated, low-class New York dialect speech in Maggie: Life in the Streets (1893). A similar rise of regional dialects in late nineteenth-century literature occurred in European countries such as England, France, Germany, and Italy, especially with the emergence of social realism in which authors enhanced their descriptions of the hard lot of industrial workers and the migration of poor country people into the cities with “realistic” depictions of their local dialects (e.g., the French working-class dialect in Émile Zola's Germinal, 1885, and the Silesian dialect in Gerhart Hauptmann's play Die Weber (1893, The Weavers).
A prioritization of regional vernacular speech rather than the national standard language occurred in Germany during the so-called Heimatkunstbewegung (“homeland art movement”) between 1890 and 1918. It displayed an anti-urban, anti-modern, anti-rational, and anti-intellectual tenor and achieved its anti-industrialization impact by sentimentalizing the Heimat (“homeland”) or the provincial life through dialects in prose and poetry as well as in plays, such as in the social-critical Low German plays written by Fritz Stavenhagen (e.g., Mudder Mews, 1904) and Hermann Boßdorf (e.g., De Fährkrog, 1918) or in Artur Dinter's Alsatian comedy d'Schmuggler (1905,). With its emphasis on the virtues of rural life and language, the Heimatliteratur (“homeland literature”) prepared the stage for the anti-Semitic Blut und Boden (“blood and soil”) literature popularized by writers such as Richard Walther Darré (Neuadel aus Blut und Boden, 1930) during the period of National Socialism (1933–45 Dohnke 1996).
The post-WWII rise of liberation movements in Africa and Asia and in the Caribbean allowed these new nations to establish their own language, but the choice was difficult because the political territory included many ethnic groups and languages so that frequently the language of the former colonial power—English, French, or Portuguese—served as an umbrella language. The dialect writers' new task was often to rewrite colonial history from the colonized people's point of view (a good example of an anti-imperialist rewriting is the Dominica-born Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966, which is a pseudo-prequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre) and represent their own culture through their dialect or in a dialect-official language mix. Some writers use a standard language throughout their work and insert single words, phrases, and perhaps short passages in a different linguistic variety (e.g., African languages). Others use a standard language for the narrative and vernacular language for the dialogue, and again others use a modified vernacular in the whole work (e.g. V. S. Reid's use of the Jamaican vernacular in the first two parts of his novel New Day, 1949). Dialect-standard writers have often received international reputations, such as V. S. Naipaul (of Indo-Trinidadian ancestry), who embeds regional speech and people within an easily understandable Standard English narrative (Blake). The trend is toward using the standard language throughout a literary work and inserting variants from local dialects in order to achieve easy readability and still incorporate a sensitivity to the dialect and the portrayal of local people. Examples of this tendency in contemporary literature are the English-writing Zimbabwean writers such as Yvonne Vera, Edward Chinhanu, and Shimmer Chinodya.
The fact that Standard English is the language variety of most educated people within the English-speaking world promotes such a preferred use of Standard English (in its various standard varieties) in literature to achieve a worldwide readership, but dialect writers frequently enrich it with local dialect words or phrases. Contemporary African American writers such as Toni Morrison, for instance, have reduced the initially strong reliance on dialect speech (e.g., Paul Laurence Dunbar and Zora Neale Hurston) and opt instead for interspersed tonal, verbal, and grammatical adjustments within a by and large written standard in order to draw attention to the black oral tradition and their different ethnic background. In other languages in which dialect is still regionally strong, such as German or Italian, it is still used for humor and local color in the presentation of regional cultural traditions. There the standard language is still felt to address differing realms than the dialect, which retains its literary niches (e.g., local “oral” poetry). Overall, dialect has served literature for many centuries as an important way to advance linguistic and cultural diversity and voice the concerns of people, their resistance to foreign powers, their demands for ethnic and religious and cultural recognition, and their contribution to their national culture through new ideas, new genres and literary trends, typically by demonstrating their different views through literary dialects.
SEE ALSO: Class, Dialogue, Discourse, Editing, Naturalism, Reading Aloud
Dialogism see Bakhtin, Mikhail
Bronwen Thomas
Most novels feature scenes of interaction between characters where the role of the narrator as a controlling presence is at a minimum. Such scenes are vital for characterization and building a sense of the relationships between characters. They also help to advance the plot, set the scene for the reader, and break up the tempo and pace of the narrative (see NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE). The direct representation of character speech has been crucial in opening up the novel to new voices, e.g., regional DIALECT and working-class speech in the nineteenth-century novel, or creoles and pidgins in postcolonial fictions. Studies of speech in the novel have provided exhaustive accounts of the sheer number of linguistic varieties that have been incorporated into the novel, and have raised important questions about the extent to which such representations aim for realism. Studies of fictional dialogue draw more explicitly on linguistic (see LINGUISTICS) models of conversational interaction to focus on the interplay and power dynamics between participants, and to evaluate how far such representations may be described as dialogic in Mikhail bakhtin's sense of the word. Analysis of speech-in-interaction in the novel increasingly engages with philosophical and ideological notions of dialogue in an attempt to understand how far “the idea of dialogue” may be both normative and culturally inscribed.
In the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novel, the conventions for representing character speech were not yet fully stabilized (Ree). Quotation marks could be used for both indirect and direct representations (Sternberg), while in the novels of Jane Austen it is common to find that what appears to be a single speech event bounded by quotation marks is in fact a conflation of several utterances (Page). It is not until the Victorian novel that the conventions become more “fussy” (Ree), helping to perpetuate a notion of the speech of an individual as his or her private property (see TYPOGRAPHY).
Later novelists continued to chafe against some of these conventions: the modernist writer James Joyce rejected quotation marks as an “eyesore,” preferring more unobtrusive dashes instead, while Portugese author José Saramago dispenses both with quotation marks and line breaks, making it even more difficult to distinguish between character speech and the surrounding narrative. Such techniques work against the notion that character speech is separated off from the narrative discourse as though by some impermeable border, and that direct speech offers the reader privileged access to the words of the characters untainted by the narrator's interventions.
Many of the conventions for the representation of speech in the early novel were influenced by theatrical practices and traditions. Daniel Defoe set out his dialogue in dramatic form, while many other early novelists in the English tradition, such as Henry Fielding, made their names writing for the stage before they turned to prose fiction. Conventions for the representation of speech in the novel have thus been influenced by the need to compensate for the absence of paralinguistic cues and the physical presence of the actors. Dialogue in the novel is thus accompanied by various kinds of “stage directions” (Page) which help to orient the reader in terms of body language, intonation, aspects of the physical environment, and so on.
In the nineteenth century, social and technological changes bringing greater mobility and speed of communication meant an increased interest in accurately charting social and regional varieties of speech. The practice of serializing novels in this period also meant a reliance on dialogue as a means of fixing characters in readers' minds, and of updating them on plot developments (see SERIALIZATION). Few studies of speech in the novel neglect to mention the role of Charles Dickens in providing a rich array of speech varieties for the reader to enjoy, and the fact that Dickens engaged in public performances of his work only serves to reinforce how much fictional dialogue owes to theatrical conventions and traditions.
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, dialogue in the novel has been influenced by the emergence of other media, notably radio, television, and film. Many novelists have written for these other media, e.g., the English comic novelist P. G. Wodehouse wrote extensively for stage and screen. The contemporary novel continues to be fascinated by and influenced by new media, with new forms of writing such as hypertext fiction posing interesting questions for our understanding of the relationship between speech and context, where the context of utterances may be ever shifting and dependent on choices made by readers in their interactions with these texts.
Cultural histories of conversation and dialogue (Burke) remind us how far novelistic representations are shaped by, but also in turn may help shape, the norms and practices of a particular time and place (see SPACE). In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, an obvious illustration of this is the practice of using “token speech” (Page) for taboo words and obscenities, which in turn spawned its own parodies and attempts at subversion (see CENSORSHOP, PARODY). In the early twentieth century, psychoanalytic theories and the relationship between the said and the unsaid impacted the way in which modernist writers in particular experimented with the boundaries between speech and thought (see MODERNIS). However, novelists of the period also reacted against the Freudian notion of the “talking cure,” expressing instead a suspicion of talk (Mepham), focusing on the ways in which talk could be deceptive and opaque, rather than illuminating or transparent.
During the same period, novelists such as P. G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh made comic capital from foregrounding the clichés and banalities of the speech of the “Bright Young Things” of their day, in strong contrast to the kind of earnest debates and philosophical discussions of the characters in novels by their contemporaries. In this regard, the comic novel has provided an invaluable insight into, and playful subversion of, cultural norms in conversational interaction which might otherwise be taken for granted.
While dialogue as a narrative device has been recognized as a defining feature of certain fictional genres, notably the detective novel/thriller and the comic novel, the term “dialogue novel” or “novel of conversation” has emerged to account for fictions in which narrative framing is kept to an absolute minimum (see FRAME). The term may be loosely applied to any novel in which there is a high ratio of dialogue, but is usually reserved for novels where the author relies almost entirely on character speech for the “action,” and where the reader usually has to work quite hard to decipher what is going on, deprived as they are of any contextualizing cues or guidance from the narrator. In some respects the dialogue novel may appear to be aiming for greater realism by foregrounding the routine, the repetitive, and the downright banal aspects of everyday talk that may nevertheless be crucial in facilitating and maintaining communication. However, the attention to detail only seems to highlight how artificial and stylized any such representation must be, so that dialogue novels tend to be highly self-conscious and reflexive affairs.
In the English tradition, this genre is most associated with the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett and Henry Green in the early to mid-twentieth century. In the work of these writers, the reader is thrust into scenes of dialogue with little or no orientation, while the speech of the characters and the narrative technique are often highly stylized and artificial, adding to the disconcerting effect. While such novels are concerned with exploring scenes of talk as potentially rich sources of interpersonal drama and tension, they are just as interested in experimenting with NARRATIVE STRUCTUREs based on repetition and counterpoint, rather than on causal logic and progression.
In the modernist and postmodern novel, foregrounding speech and dialogue has come to be seen as a key way for the novel to embrace new voices, and to resist closure. In this respect, even the merest hint of narratorial influence and control may be suspect. The French novelist and critic Nathalie Sarraute railed against speech tags or inquits such as “he said,” “she said,” calling them “symbols of the old regime” for their potential to weigh down the reader and direct interpretation in a particular direction (see DISCOURSE).
The dialogue novel continues to flourish, particularly in the contemporary American novel, with writers such as William Gaddis and Philip Roth experimenting with the form. Many critics have noted that the contemporary novel has come to rely increasingly on dialogue, and that it has almost become a badge of honor for contemporary novelists to hone their technique in this direction.
Typically, the dialogue novel focuses on interactions between a closed set of characters, where the claustrophobic atmosphere evoked produces scenes of high tension. In Manuel Puig's El beso de la mujer araña (1976, Kiss of the Spider Woman), conversations between two prisoners locked in a cell together comprise much of the action, while Nicholson Baker's Counterpoint (2004) consists of a series of conversations between two men in a hotel room, as one of them tries to talk the other out of assassinating President George Bush.
There are good reasons why this kind of intimate duologue continues to dominate. Techniques for representing overlaps and interruptions in conversation remain rather crude and intrusive, and where a reader's attention is dispersed among a group of characters, engagement with those characters may lack the intensity generated by the duologue. Nevertheless, some novelists have experimented with group talk or multi-party talk (Thomas), or have disrupted the notion that conversations operate as ‘events’ which are bounded and discrete, rather than ongoing and fuzzy around the edges.
Studies of speech in the novel have provided invaluable inventories of the emergence and prevalence of linguistic varieties in the English-language novel. However, such studies rarely concern themselves with the mechanics of verbal interactions, but focus instead on describing speech varieties found within the utterances of individual characters. The analysis of speech-as-interaction in the novel owes a great deal to studies of dramatic dialogue, and to stylistic approaches which draw on tools and methods derived from the field of linguistics for the analysis of literary texts (see SPEECH ACT). Notably, such studies approach fictional dialogue as sequences and stretches of verbal interaction in which communication is jointly negotiated and achieved, and can be measured against certain expectations and assumptions about how conversations typically should proceed.
Such approaches have been accused of treating fictional dialogue as though it were no different from naturally occurring, or “real” speech. Debates about how far fictional dialogue should be evaluated in terms of its realism have dominated stylistic and narratological studies. To some extent, this is inevitable, as the representation of direct speech appears to present us with unmediated access to the characters' words, to show rather than tell. However, claims about the REALISM of direct speech ignore both the fact that the speech is no less artificial or mediated than any other part of the narrative discourse, and that writers shape and design these stretches of talk according to their artistic vision and design.
Mikhail BAKHTIN's studies of discourse in the novel demonstrated that it is possible to combine an exploration of the range of different languages represented within a novel (heteroglossia) with an analysis of the social and ideological conditions in which those languages are produced and with which they intersect. Furthermore, his theories challenged the idea that character speech is somehow subordinate to, and separable from, the narrative discourse. His “dialogic principle” demonstrated that novelistic discourse is suffused with a multiplicity of competing voices, which he saw as engaging in dialogic relation with one another. Bakhtin himself was dismissive of scenes of pure dialogue, as his analysis tended to focus much more on passages where the seemingly monologic discourse of the narrator is colored by the voices and perspectives of others. Nevertheless, many of the terms and ideas that he introduced have been crucial in determining both how we conceive of “dialogue” and how we understand the ways in which character speech and narratorial discourse interpenetrate at every point.
However, some theorists have taken issue with what they see as an idealizing tendency in the work of Bakhtin and others. Drawing on philosophical and ideological conceptualizations and debates, such work aims to demonstrate how forms of representation may help construct rather than simply reflect our “idea of dialogue.” Thus it is claimed that fictional dialogues help perpetuate the notion that civilized debate and discussion always produces some kind of truth, that all participants have equal access to the conversational floor, and that observing norms of politeness and rationality will always ensure communicative success. For some theorists, it is necessary instead to foreground the role of coercion in dialogue (Fogel), and to contest the privileging of some forms of talk over others (Davis), or a naïve conception of dialogue which ignores its incipient politics (Middleton).
Though there are fundamental oppositions between these various approaches to fictional dialogue, they all highlight in their own way both the extent to which this aspect of novelistic technique has been neglected, and the many fascinating and important questions that remain to be fully explored and debated.
SEE ALSO: Adaptation/Appropriation, Decorum/Verisimilitude, Ideology, Philosophical Novel.
Daniel Balderston
The long series of novels about Latin American dictators is initiated by the Spanish writer Ramón María del Valle-Inclán's 1926 novel Tirano Banderas (The Tyrant), about an imaginary dictator named Santos Banderas, whose country is an amalgam of various parts of Latin America. However, some claim Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's 1845 biography of Juan Facundo Quiroga (1788–1835), Facundo: Civilización y barbarie (Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism), as the most important Latin American antecedent. The next major texts of the subgenre are the hallucinatory El señor Presidente (1946, The President) by the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias, based on the life of Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1857–1924), and El gran Burundún-Burundá ha muerto (1952, The Great Burundún-Burundá is Dead) by the Colombian Jorge Zalamea. However, the most important group of novels is a trio from the 1970s: Yo el Supremo (1974, I the Supreme) by the Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos, El recurso del método (1975, Reasons of State) by the Cuban Alejo Carpentier, and El otoño del patriarca (1975, The Autumn of the Patriarch) by the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez. As Roberto González Echevarría suggests, the exploration of total power in these three texts is also an exploration of the possibilities of the totalizing novel, in which a strange identification takes hold between the novelist and his subject. This marked the end of the triumphant period of the Latin American “Boom” novel of the 1960s.
Of the three texts, Yo el Supremo is, as Gerald Martin notes, the most radical, both in terms of its literary project and in its politics. A searing critique of Latin American history since independence, the novel is narrated largely by the Paraguayan dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia (1766–1840), mostly after his death. It looks back at his twenty-six years in power as Supreme Dictator of Paraguay as well as forward at the century and a half to come. Roa Bastos makes abundant use of historical sources, many transcribed almost verbatim, though often mischievously rewritten or recast. Responding to an invitation in “Dr. Francia” (1841), an essay by the British writer Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), Roa Bastos re-creates the Paraguayan dictator in all of his complexity: as a Jacobin (see BRITISH ISLES 19TH C.), a son of the Enlightenment, an intellectual who distrusts the people he has chosen to guide, and in a bizarre flash forward, as a Leninist or Maoist popular leader. Finally, the narrative shifts to the dictator's dog Sultán, who delivers a final devastating critique of Francia's alienation from his people. Roa Bastos's novel is the most radical of the dictatorship novels because it hews closest to the historical documents associated with a real dictator, yet at the same time manages to be many-voiced, allowing other subjects of that history to be heard.
Other dictatorship novels are sometimes set on a local, rather than national, scale. Examples include Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo (1955), set during the Mexican Revolution (1910–20) and the Cristero War (1926–29), and the much earlier Doña Bárbara (1929) by the Venezuelan Rómulo Gallegos. A recent example of the subgenre is Mario Vargas Llosa's La fiesta del chivo (2000, The Feast of the Goat), in which the Peruvian novelist re-creates the days leading up to the assassination of the Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (1891–1961).
SEE ALSO: Genre Theory, National Literature, Regional Novel.
Diegesis see Narrator; Story/Discourse
Direct Discourse see Discourse
Christopher Krentz
Like feminist theory, race theory, and queer theory, disability theory calls attention to the ways that literature relates to a historically oppressed and marginalized group. The field of disability studies started to gain traction toward the end of the twentieth century, when people with bodily differences began to see themselves as an allied minority and lobbied for civil-rights legislation. It builds upon the work of earlier scholars of the body, including Erving Goffman on stigma (1963, Stigma), Leslie Fiedler on freaks (1978, Freaks), and Michel Foucault on disease, madness, and biopower. It also draws upon and complicates feminist, racial, marxist, queer, postcolonial, and postmodern approaches (see MODERNIS). Disability theory emphasizes a shift away from medical discourse to how the cultures around disabled people determine what physical differences mean; it particularly focuses on language and social values.
One aim of disability theory has been to explore the functions of the countless disabled figures in literature. From Mary Shelley's deformed creature in Frankenstein (1818) to Charles Dickens's blind Bertha Plummer, in The Cricket on the Hearth (1846); from the one-legged Ahab, in Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851), to the deaf John Singer, in Carson McCuller's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940); from Okonkwo's stutter, in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958), to the shrinking Senator Trueba, in Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits (1985), disability appears in novels from every tradition. Critics have pointed out that disabled characters frequently have symbolic or metaphoric significance; they serve as figures of evil or innocence, function as empty receptacles for the human emotions of non-disabled characters, appear inscrutable or ineffable, or offer some kind of insight. However, they typically reveal little about the lived experience of disabled people.
Disability theory also illuminates how disabled characters contribute to the formation of normalcy. Lennard J. Davis asserts that nineteenth- and twentieth-century realist novels consistently uphold middle-class norms and use disabled figures or tropes to buttress this hegemonic ideology (1995). Adding to these ideas, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder point out that disabled characters in literature sometimes present a problem that both initiates the narrative and demands to be redressed, usually through a cure, rehabilitation, or extermination, so that normal order is restored (53–54).
In addition, disability theory seeks to encourage and retrieve disabled writing. For example, scholars have explored how the disabilities of canonical authors, like Flannery O'Connor (Mitchell and Snyder)and Samuel Beckett (Quayson), shaped their work. They also recover lesser-known disabled writers whose output provides a valuable counterpoint to dominant narratives (see, e.g., C. Krentz, 2007, Writing Deafness).
Disability theory addresses questions of how disability should be defined, sheds new light on the conflict between biological essentialism and social constructionism, and considers intriguing intersections between disability and race, gender, class, sexuality, and nationality. As Ato Quayson notes, disability resonates on “a multiplicity of levels simultaneously” in novels (28). By revealing these levels, disability theory adds to the understanding of literature and literary theory, resists ableism, and promotes social equality.
Markku LehtimÄki and and Pekka Tammi
A notoriously fluid concept, discourse may be used to designate the linguistic strategies available for rendering the speech, verbal interaction, or verbalized thought processes of fictional characters in novels (see LINGUISTICS). On the other hand, as Mikhail bakhtin(1973) has famously stated, “dialogic relationships [involving discourse in the novel]...are extra linguistic 2 phenomena.” It was Bakhtin who also affirmed that “verbal discourse is a social phenomenon—social throughout its entire range and in each and every of its factors, from the sound image to the furthest reaches of abstract meaning” (1981, 259), urging subsequent novel criticism toward the deep waters of exploring discursive formations (in the Foucauldian sense), the construction of subjectivity in narrative, and the role narrative discourse plays in propping up—or in subverting—the prevailing social order (see Lodge).
This entry focuses on the formal categories for rendering speech and thought in fiction, though with due acknowledgment of the Bakhtinian insight that discursive strategies always involve more than just linguistic parameters. In this regard every novel emerges as a combination of what may be termed the narrator's discourse and the character's discourse. These categories encompass, besides the more obvious verbalized instances, the vast area of the fictional mind, including “dispositions, beliefs, attitudes, judgments, skills, knowledge, imagination, intellect, volition, character traits, and habits of thought” (Palmer, 58). Such occurrences may be rendered via a variety of narrative modes, thoroughly typologized by students of classical as well as contemporary narratology (Cohn, 1978,1978 Fludernik, 1993, 19961993, 1996). While often considered the province of properly fictional writing, these possibilities for discourse presentation also extend to the nonfiction novel, historiography, and journalism (Cohn, 19991999).
Direct discourse (DD) represents a character's speech or thought in an ostensibly mimetic fashion (Leech and Short). It may be framed by quotation marks and is often accompanied by a tag clause which qualifies the nature of the utterance (see below). Taking its cue from drama, dialogue in fiction renders directly the verbal exchange between characters, serving the narrative functions of characterization and plotting. In free direct speech, characters appear to be speaking immediately without the narrator as an intermediary, a technique much favored in Ernest Hemingway's prose:
“What are you thinking about now?”
“Nothing.”
“Yes you were. Tell me.”
“I was wondering whether Rinaldi had the syphilis.”
“Was that all?”
“Yes.”
“Has he the syphilis?”
“I don't know.”
“I'm glad you haven't. Did you ever have anything like that?”
“I had gonorrhea.” (1929, A Farewell to Arms)
Directly quoted dialogue effects an illusion of realism and authentic speech acts. In fiction, however, DD cannot but be a stylized invention. The narrator is quoting the character's discourse, setting apart and foregrounding its given features (vernacular traits, sociolect, idiom). In the following example, the characters' spoken dialect is overtly juxtaposed with the narrative voice, highlighting the fact that transcription is never neutral:
“We're divorced.” Rahel hoped to shock him into silence.
“Die-vorced?” His voice rose to such a high register that it cracked on the question mark. He even pronounced the word as though it were a form of death.
“That is most unfortunate,” he said, when he had recovered. For some reason resorting to uncharacteristic, bookish language. “Most-unfortunate.” Arundhati Roy, 1997, God's Own Country.
While the illusion of authentic speech may still be sustained in DD, in many cases of direct thought the illusion of authenticity becomes much more difficult to maintain. Direct thought is a narrative convention allowing the narrator to present a verbal transcription that merely passes as the reproduction of the fictional characters' thought processes (see Palmer). In modernist fiction, direct speech can fluently transform into thought: “‘I dont even know what they are saying to her,’ he thought, thinking I dont even know that what they are saying to her is something that men do not say to a passing child” (1932, William Faulkner, Light in August). Direct thought is also known as quoted monologue and private speech. Free direct discourse corresponds to interior monologue and stream of consciousness and is typical of the associative and spontaneous flow of thought in modernist fiction (see PSYCHOLOGICAL).
In indirect discourse (ID), the character's reported speech or thought is integrated into the narrator's reporting discourse, commonly by backshifting the tenses and shifting from the first to the third person (“She wondered where she was”). ID paraphrases the content of the “original” speech act or thought without reproducing the verbal traits of speech. Such a transformation can be manifested in highly formalized and literary language deriving from the narrator, as in the well-known opening of Henry James's novel:
She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. It was at this point, however, that she remained; changing her place, moving from the shabby sofa to the armchair upholstered in a glazed cloth that gave at once—she had tried it—the sense of the slippery and of the sticky. (1902, The Wings of the Dove, Chap. 1)
ID, as thought report, can be further used to present various mental events (perceptions, emotions, visual images, memories, and dreams); latent states of the mind; combinations of thought processes with surface descriptions of the physical storyworld; interpretation, analysis, commentary, and judgment. In fiction, ID can express the view of a collective in the sense of intermental, joint, or shared thought; so in George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871–72) it is the voice of the town of Middlemarch that is evoked by the narrator (Lodge; Palmer). In this regard thought report is the most versatile of modes available for discourse presentation, showing characters' minds responding to their social context.
ID is also known as psycho-narration (Cohn, 19781978), presenting a character's consciousness rather than verbalized thought. In dissonant psycho-narration, the narrator is distanced from the character's discourse (as in the classic novel); in consonant psycho-narration, the language of figural narration is more or less “colored” by the character's idiom (in the realist and the modernist novel). There is an overlap between this kind of colored ID and free indirect discourse (FID; see below). ID can also take the form of omniscient description, which focuses on consciousness as well as on the physical surface of the storyworld:
In the mountains, the snow was iron gray and purple in the hollows, and glowed like gold on every slope that faced the sun. The clouds over the mountains were lifting with light. Brenda took a good look into [Gary Gilmore's] eyes and felt full of sadness again. (Norman Mailer, 1979, The Executioner's Song, Chap. 1)
This excerpt from a nonfiction novel first creates an illusion of an objective vision, but then introduces a focalizer present in the scene (see JOURNALISM).
Tagged discourse identifies the speaking or thinking agent and qualifies the utterance as either verbal or mental activity (“she said/reflected”), or as perception. Dialogue in the novel is conventionally accompanied by tags originating in the narrator's discourse, specifying the style of the speech act and characterizing the scene in which the spoken exchange occurs: “‘Is something happening?’ I inquired innocently. ‘You mean to say you don't know?’ said Miss Baker, honestly surprised” (F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925, The Great Gatsby, Chap. 1).
On occasion, parentheticals and introductory tags, commonly attributed to the narrator, can be attached to the character through contextual interpretation (see Jahn). In the following, ambiguity prevails concerning the use of the parenthetical: “‘Armenians,’ he said: or perhaps it was ‘Albanians’” (Virginia Woolf, 1925, Mrs. Dalloway, Sec. 7). The parenthetical may represent the narrator's indecision regarding the character's speech, or it may originate in the character's hesitation, conveying information about his personality. Consider also the use of an introductory tag such as: “He either thought or said: ‘Well, tomorrow perhaps I'll drink beer only’” (Malcolm Lowry, 1947, Under the Volcano). Here it seems that the narrator may not be altogether sure whether the protagonist thinks or speaks, but the narrative context informs us that the indecision belongs to the protagonist (who is drunk). Tags can accompany direct as well as ID, but in free direct or FID they are commonly omitted.
The narrative mode bringing together traits of DD and ID has been variously termed style indirect libre, erlebte Rede, dual voice, narrated monologue, represented speech and thought, or FID. (For classical narrative theoretical approaches, see studies by Pascal; Cohn, 1978; Banfield; McHale, 1978, 19831978, 1983.) Literary historians have traced occurrences of FID to medieval or even earlier texts, but it did not begin to prosper in the European novel until the formal innovations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the wake of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It has since become a principal mode for representing speech acts as well as mental states in fiction. The incidence of FID in oral narratives and other text types besides the novel has been discussed by Monika Fludernik, whose 1993 study remains the fullest exposition of the topic to date. Along with the work of Alan Palmer, Fludernik also needs to be credited for her challenges to the “speech-category” approach to discourse. Palmer and Fludernik have raised questions about drawing the lines among speech, thought, perceptions, and other modes of consciousness, while drawing lines between consciousness and action. According to the standard linguistic definition, FID is distinguished by a unique combination of grammatical features derived from the narrator's discourse and the directly quoted discourse of the character. While some of these features are language-specific, the present remarks concern English usage only (for contrastive approaches see Tammi and Tommola). Hence the third person and the past tense belonging to ID, and the deictic references of place or time deriving from direct discourse, are combined in FID: “He was falling in love with Emma here and now.” There may occur additional traits of the character's discourse, like lexical fillers (“Yes, he was falling in love...”), interrogatives, interjections, or other signs of subjective syntax. Fictional practice often displays swift alternation between these modes, as in the following:
[ID] [Mr. Bingley] sat with them above an hour, and was in remarkably good spirits. Mrs. Bennet invited him to dine with them; but with many expressions of concern, he confessed himself engaged elsewhere.
[tag] “Next time you call,” said she, “I hope we shall be more lucky.”
[FID, with narrator's ellipsis] He should be particularly happy at any time, etc., etc.; and if she would give him leave, would take an early opportunity of waiting on them.
[DD] “Can you come tomorrow?”
[FID] Yes, he had no engagement at all for to-morrow... (Jane Austen, 1813, Pride and Prejudice, Chap. 55)
The grammatical description has been mostly applied to third-person, past-tense (“omniscient”) narration, but it also covers features in first-person novels, where narrators may either transmit their own past thoughts, or speech acts addressed to themselves, as here:
[ID] It was big Frank. He remained framed in the opened door, one hand on its jamb, leaning forward a little.
[FID] Howdy. Nurse Lore was on the telephone. She wanted to know was I better and would I come today? (Vladimir Nabokov, 1955, Lolita, Sec. 16)
Recent research has identified a mounting trend toward present-tense narration in contemporary fiction. With the waning of the back-shift of the tenses formerly undescribed hybrid forms of discourse presentation tend to emerge. In the following, the narration drifts into metafictional commentary (either by the narrator or the character), frustrating attempts to determine the mode of discourse employed on the basis of standard criteria (see METAFICTION). A rich repertoire of such forms is currently displayed in the novel.
[FID] He should never have come here . . . . A wrong move. He ought to get up at once, steal out. But he does not. Why? Because he does not want to be alone. And because he wants to sleep. [tag] Sleep, he thinks, that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care. [Narrator's or character's discourse?] What an extraordinary way of putting it! Not all the monkeys in the world picking away at typewriters would come up with those words in that arrangement. (J. M. Coetzee, 2003, Elizabeth Costello, 27)
While valid to a point, the linguistic approach has been shown to cover only inadequately the range of discourse presentation in the novel. What is also at stake, narrative theorists argue, is the Bakhtinian notion of “two voices, two meanings and two expressions” (Bakhtin, 1981, 324) which the reader infers from the narrative context. Consider a famous episode from Austen:
[ID] [Frank Churchill] stopped again, rose again, and seemed quite embarrassed.—[FID] He was more in love with her than Emma had supposed. (1815, Emma, Chap. 12)
From the grammatical standpoint, the second sentence could also be read as ID, reporting the actual state of affairs in the world of Emma. But as Austen's readers know, it is not, though the reader can reach this decision only retrospectively when it later turns out what Churchill's true feelings were. What is encountered is still FID—a false hypothesis in the heroine's mind—but to interpret this correctly the reader needs the context of the novel.
A related argument is again put forth by those theorists who warn against the “overestimation of the verbal component of thought” in studying fiction (Palmer, 57). In other terms, it is also the property of fiction to transmit inarticulate sensations or mental processes remaining on the threshold of verbalization (see Cohn, 1978, 103). These include moments of unreflective physical perception, overlapping with ID: “He looked out. Drops of rain were falling.” But fiction can play with the reflecting mind in more elaborate ways. In the following excerpt from Toni Morrison it is indicated that the character did not utter or consciously think what the novel nevertheless represents as a turbulent stream of consciousness, impulse, action, and inchoate purpose, which nevertheless comes across with all the formal traits the reader is accustomed to associating with FID:
And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nonono. Simple. She just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them. Over there. Outside this place, where they would be safe. (1987, Beloved)
A dilemma for the theorist, such ambivalence also underlines the distinctive quality of reading fiction. Thought once to enhance psychological realism in novels, FID in its protean manifestations turns out to have the opposite effect as well—laying bare the non-natural attributes of discourse presentation in the novel, where the range for innovative formal variation remains potentially infinite.
SEE ALSO: Narrative Technique.
Distance see Narrative Technique; Space
Distant Reading see History of the Novel
Lori Merish
Given what Ian Watt long ago identified as the novel's generic emphasis on personal relationships and “private” life, almost all fiction might in some respect be classified as domestic (1957, The Rise of the Novel). But the term refers to a prominent subgenre, largely Anglo-American (with cultural roots in evangelical Protestantism), which emerged in the eighteenth century with Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) and came to full flowering in the mid-nineteenth century. Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Louisa May Alcott are well-known domestic authors; domestic fictions by these and a host of lesser-known writers were published in book form and proliferated, as serial and short fiction, in numerous widely read periodicals (see SERIALIZATION). Associated with the rise of female authorship (although male writers, e.g., Nathaniel Hawthorne, also wrote domestic fiction) and a female literary readership as well as the increasing respectability of the novel as literary form, domestic transforms domestic incident into plot, centering on the home and family—not only as the sphere that launches the hero, as in the bildungsroman or picaresque novel, but as the locus of significant narrative action; domestic fiction invests the seeming “trifles” of daily domestic life with profound emotional and cultural value (Tompkins, chap. 6). Giving fictional form to the culturally- and historically-specific organization of personal life known as “domesticity” (a particular model of the privatized, middle-class, nuclear family) and to the gendered spatial and social divisions between public and private that defined Victorian society, domestic fiction centered on women; indeed, this literature's emergence coincided with the “rise of the domestic woman,” a moral exemplar and embodiment of “feminine” domestic virtues of modesty, chastity, frugality, sympathy, and selfless devotion to family (Armstrong, chap. 2; see GENDER). While domestic texts could be comic, even satiric, in tone, many were strongly inflected by evangelical Protestantism's vision of the special moral authority and “influence” of middle-class women; domestic fiction of this type (often called “sentimental fiction”) played a key role in abolitionism and other early nineteenth-century movements for social reform. While most accounts identify the waning of domestic fiction after 1870, scholars have traced its sustained relevance within the modernist era and beyond (see MODERNIS), especially among a diverse group of women writers in Britain and America; others detect its imprint on postcolonial novelists' politically charged portrayals of “home.”
The 1970s feminist recovery and reevaluation of women's literary texts launched a lively critical discourse about domestic fiction, one that, in particular, placed a tradition of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century U.S. women's fiction on the literary-historical map. Many (e.g., Armstrong, Brodhead) draw on Michel Foucault to situate domestic novels among other disciplinary discourses (e.g., conduct books) that constitute normative (middle-class, white) configurations of subjectivity and desire; for these scholars, the belief that home is a realm outside power facilitates the ideological efficacy of domestic fiction, by masking its “signification of the sociopolitical within the realm of private experience” (McKeon, chap. 15). This literature's explicit, rich emotionality has also generated important readings by cultural studies scholars examining the affective dimensions of political life and national affiliation, and by scholars of the history of sexuality, who locate in domestic fiction non-normative expressions of kinship, affect, and desire.
SEE ALSO: Genre Theory, Gothic Novel, Historical Novel, Race, Regional Novel, Space.
Dystopian Novel see Science Fiction/ Fantasy