Chapter 1
The World That Made the Novel
This book is about reading the English novel during the “long eighteenth century,” a stretch of time that, in the generally accepted ways of breaking up British literary history into discrete periods for university courses, begins some time after the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660 and ends around 1830, before the reign of Queen Victoria. At the beginning of this period, the novel can hardly be said to exist, and writing prose fiction is a mildly disreputable literary activity. Around 1720, Daniel Defoe’s fictional autobiographies spark continuations and imitations, and in the 1740s, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding’s novels begin what is perceived as “a new kind of writing.” By the end of the period, with Jane Austen and Walter Scott, the novel has not only come into existence, it has developed into a more‐or‐less respectable genre, and in fact publishers have begun to issue series of novels (edited by Walter Scott and by Anna Barbauld, among others) that establish for that time, if not necessarily for ours, a canon of the English novel. With the decline of the English drama and the almost complete eclipse of the epic,1 the novel has become by default the serious literary long form, on its way to becoming by the mid‐nineteenth century, with Dickens, Thackeray, and Eliot, the pre‐eminent genre of literature. This chapter will consider how and why the novel came to be when it did.
The Novel before the Novel
But before we get to that story, we need to make sure that it’s the right story to be telling. Margaret Doody argues on the first page of her provocatively titled The True Story of the Novel that “the Novel as a form of literature in the West has a continuous history of about two thousand years.” She is certainly right that long form prose fiction goes back to the Greek romances of the first through fourth centuries CE: the earliest is probably Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe and the best‐known Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe. These were tales of lovers, usually nobly born, beautiful and chaste, whose flight from parental opposition leads them into incredible dangers surmounted by unbelievable artifices. For example, in Leucippe and Clitophon (second‐century romance by Achilles Tatius) the lovers are shipwrecked, then captured by bandits, who proceed to sacrifice Leucippe and, after disemboweling her, to eat her liver; Clitophon, who has observed this from afar, wants to commit suicide until he is informed by his clever servant that Leucippe is alive, thanks to a wandering actor who impersonated the priest and used a retractable dagger – a theatrical prop he happened to have with him—along with some animal’s blood and entrails, to simulate the sacrifice.
Doody’s claim that “Romance and the Novel are one” (15) has generally been found unconvincing. Although Doody can point to a group of “tropes” (general plot points and themes, like erotic desire and generational conflict) that one can find in both the Greek romances and the English novel of the eighteenth century, this is a very weak claim, since they can be found without looking very hard pretty much everywhere else in literature. Her stronger claim – that these “tropes” are moments in the worship‐service of the Mother Goddess, which continues in the novel into our own day – has generally been met with ridicule. But the genre of romance was certainly around and being read in the eighteenth century. It was viewed as the competition, though: many of the most important eighteenth‐century novelists insisted on defining their work in opposition to, rather than within, the genre of romance.
The other genre of prose fiction current during this late classical period is the Menippean satire, exemplified by Apuleius’ Golden Ass, and Petronius’ Satyricon (both first‐century CE). These were episodic tales primarily ridiculing the behavior and pretensions of wealthy middle‐class citizens of the Roman empire. Here’s a sample from the Satyricon; the narrator is a guest at an over‐the‐top dinner in the mansion of a parvenu ex‐slave named Trimalchio:
Both romance and fictional satire, prose versions of tragedy and comedy, continue into the high middle ages and the Renaissance in different forms. In the Middle Ages the dominant form was the chivalric romance; in English the longest, most detailed, and most artistic of these is Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur published 1485 by Caxton.
Fictional satire also continues, usually in shorter forms, of which the best known are the comic tales in the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio and the fabliau, which English‐speaking readers know best in the bawdy stories in rhyming couplets told by the Miller and the Reeve in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
There is a genuine flowering of Elizabethan prose fiction but it, nevertheless, does not produce anything remotely like the eighteenth‐century novel. One strand, that of the long form romance, long form, is the pastoral; these are English texts usually mixing prose and poetry, such as Sidney’s Arcadia (1580; New Arcadia 1586) and Mary Wroth’s Urania (1621). Some of the shorter and less elaborate versions of prose romance served as the sources of Shakespeare’s comedies, like Thomas Lodge’s lyrical Rosalynde (1590), which became As You Like It, and Robert Greene’s acerbic Pandosto: The Triumph of Time (1588), which became The Winter’s Tale. Behind the poetic prose of these romances stands John Lyly’s Euphues (1578), a homiletic conduct book written in a style with elaborately balanced phrases, which has given its name to the genre. This style can be seen in the following soliloquy from Pandosto, in which Franion (on whom Antigonus in The Winter’s Tale is based) meditates whether he should follow his sovereign’s orders to kill the queen:
But some of the more interesting prose fiction of the sixteenth century is explicitly antiromantic: coney‐catching pamphlets like those of Robert Greene, explaining petty criminals’ methods. The tradition goes back to the Spanish picaresque in La Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) and Guzman de Alfraches (1598), which inspired works like Deloney’s Thomas of Reading (1598?) and Thomas Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveler (1594) – possibly the most readable of the Elizabethan novellas today. Here Jack Wilton convinces a credulous innkeeper that enemies at Henry VIII’s court have plotted against him, telling the king that he sells his alcoholic cider to the enemy:
So romance and satiric anti‐romance developed in various forms for around 1500 years before a dialectical synthesis of the two genres explicitly took shape in Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1607). These episodic tales about the country gentleman Alonso Quijano, whose reading of chivalric tales have created in him the delusion that he is the noble Don Quixote, could be said to initiate the European novel. Don Quixote is translated into English by Thomas Shelton as early as 1612, but it is surprising how little Cervantes affects the course of prose fiction in English, until Henry Fielding nearly 150 years later set his quixotic Parson Adams onto the high road in Joseph Andrews (1742).
The flowering of the Elizabethan period is followed by a relative desert in the seventeenth century. There are influential works of prose fiction, such as the lengthy pastoral romances translated from the French, for example, Honoré D’Urfé’s Astrée (translated as the Romance of Astrea and Celadon, 5399 pages, published in stages from 1607 to 1627); and Madeleine de Scudéry’s Grand Cyrus and Clélie published in the 1650s). But there is no canonical English text of prose fiction until John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), which puts to use colloquial, racy language in its homiletic allegory. In a more minor vein, the line of romance is carried forward by two Restoration playwrights, Aphra Behn and William Congreve, in Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave (1688) and Incognita (1690). Oroonoko is discussed in all its complexities in Chapter 2. Incognita, unfortunately out of print, reads a bit like a “novelization” of a Restoration comedy with a marriage plot: Congreve has hit upon a way of writing fiction using comic form; what he lacks is a way of making us visualize the characters and the reality of the dramatic situation without the presence of stage actors. In other words he “tells” his story but does not know how to “show” it.
The movement of the picaresque and its combination with other nonfictional genres like the spiritual autobiography and the lives of notorious criminals can be seen in texts like Francis Kirkman’s The Counterfeit Lady Unveiled, or the History of Mary Carleton, a retelling of the nonfictional story of a notorious imposter, bigamist, and thief of that name who ended her life on the gallows in 1673. These nonfictional genres become important in the lineage of Daniel Defoe, who would use the various lives of Carleton and other criminals in his own fiction (particularly his most accomplished impersonations, Moll Flanders and Roxana). Lennard Davis suggested in Factual Fictions (1983) that it was nonfictional work of this sort – biography, spiritual confession, and crime news – that contributed most to the development of the novel in the eighteenth century. But it is interesting and true that the seventeenth century, the period when English prose is acquiring its fluidity and rapidity of effect – the sort of change you see when you move from Sidney to Dryden – is also a time when there are no canonical or even semi‐canonical fictions. Nothing we would want to call a novel really gets published until the eighteenth century in England, doubting that gets us nowhere, but accounting for why it happened then and there is the real problem.
The Rise of the Novel
Probably the most influential single book on the eighteenth century novel was Ian Watt’s: The Rise of the Novel (1957). There had been chronological studies of fiction before – including an encyclopedic ten‐volume History of the English Novel by Ernest Baker – but Watt’s was the first book to pose the question of historical causation.
It is important to understand how Ian Watt posed the question: he accepts the general assumption that the English novel starts with Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, but that there was no common influence among the three, so that understanding why the novel sprung up when it did is a matter of understanding what preparation the general culture had made for the appearance of a new genre and form of text.
Formal Realism
Watt identifies the novel proper with the literary technique he calls “formal realism,” which is defined in terms of the text’s explicit notation of the circumstantiality of the dramatic events. In terms of the history of thought, “formal realism” is the literary equivalent of what he calls the “realist” philosophy of Descartes and Locke, with their emphasis on particulars as the basis of knowledge, and the source of all abstract or general ideas, and on knowledge as growing from our individual experience of specific times and places, rather than by authorities or by abstract principles derived a priori. Watt doesn’t exactly say that Defoe couldn’t have written without Locke, but the implication of the dependence of literary on philosophical realism is that we don’t need to look earlier than the 1680s for the philosophical roots of the literary phenomenon.
Individualism
Watt saw formal realism, especially that of Defoe, as going hand in hand with a belief in individualism, in the sense that the individual is viewed as able to define and master his or her own fate, rather than having to find a role relative to a group or a hieratic system of authority. This belief Watt identifies with the social movements favoring Protestantism and capitalism.
The Reading Public
In addition to these ideological factors, Watt proposed that the rise of the novel depended on the emergence of a different and larger middle‐class reading public. The problem is that literacy beyond the ability to sign one’s name was rare at the beginning of the eighteenth century. There is no evidence for a mass reading public at the time of Defoe, or even at the end of the eighteenth century – and Watt is well aware of this. Still, he feels that the slow, continual expansion of the reading public into the middle class (and among the household servants of the urban aristocracy and middle class as well) might have “tipped the balance” so that the money to be made would be made by appealing to the middle class interests.
Watt is particularly interested in the fact that women become an important element of the reading public in the eighteenth century, and that their interests were better served by those of the novel as it developed than by the traditional genres. (Women also become important as writers, a fact Watt is less interested in.) Another key issue is that the booksellers of the time – we would call them publishers – are replacing aristocratic patrons as the chief middlemen for the production of literature, which would have favored market forces (and therefore the interests of the middle classes) at the expense of traditional values and forms.
The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740
Watt’s theory dominated the critical landscape for thirty years, until scholar Michael McKeon did an elaborate revision of Watt’s vision of history. McKeon was in essential agreement with the way Watt set up the question – that the origins of the English novel are to be explained by explaining the social and intellectual preconditions that made possible writers like Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding.
One thing that is quite obviously wrong with Watt is that, while positing that the English novel begins with Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, the model he created did not really apply particularly well to Fielding. As Watt himself noted, the elements of “formal realism” are not as important in Fielding as they are in Richardson and Defoe: Unlike Defoe and Richardson, Fielding uses type names for his characters (like Allworthy and Thwackum), doesn’t minutely describe furniture, clothing, and landscapes, frequently summarizes the content of people’s utterances instead of minutely detailing what they say, and so on. And you can’t possibly write Fielding out of the history of the novel, since he is so important for the later development of Smollett and Austen, and still later for Dickens and Thackeray.
In a more important sense, though, what is wrong with Watt, from McKeon’s point of view, is that he simply doesn’t go back far enough to find the roots of what happened to English society, and he doesn’t dig deep enough. McKeon is a Marxist, so he would find Watt’s three factors, individualism, Protestantism, and capitalism, all in the wrong order. First there must come the economic transformation of a society, then its social transformation, and finally the revolution in ideology that mediates, explains, and justifies the new relationships.
Mercantile capitalism had been displacing feudal agrarianism since the late fifteenth century as the source of English wealth, and the process is continuing throughout the period of the rise of the novel. But the catastrophe for the ideology of the feudal period is for McKeon the crucial period of the rise of the novel. McKeon sees the seventeenth century as the great watershed, the point at which the old ideologies collapse to be replaced by those of the modern world.
Like any good Marxist, McKeon sees these ideological shifts as happening in what we might call the plot form of transcendental dialectic, in which old ways of understanding the notions of truth and virtue call into being their opposites, and then the conflict between these hypostatized opposites calls into existence a third term, which partly recurs to the first, partly opposes it. These dialectics operate in what McKeon calls “Stories of Truth” and “Stories of Virtue”:
We could diagram McKeon’s dialectical oppositions thus:
McKeon’s argument is not that his oppositional elements lead to a clear resolution, but rather that the novel as it develops is shaped from within by the tensions of the struggle. His epistemological dialectic describes a shift from an opposition between: (1) idealized romance plots, and (2) literally true stories narrated by individuals giving their subjective impressions, toward (3) a new sort of “truth” – an ideal of verisimilitude, in which fictional characters behave in the way real people would in their situations – which is precisely the kind of truth today’s readers expect from the novel.
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe does not reproduce the literal experience of the title character’s real‐life counterpart, Alexander Selkirk; rather, the castaway plot, with all the minutely detailed events by which Robinson survives, is made to serve Robinson’s fictional journey from the heedless adventurer to the Christian who accepts his worldly fate as part of God’s providence. Similarly in terms of virtue, the conservative ideology critiques the excesses of both aristocratic and bourgeois values; Richardson’s Clarissa positions his Christian heroine as threatened, and ultimately destroyed, both by the aristocratic Lovelace’s pursuit of power and pleasure and by the emergent bourgeois Harlowe family’s urgent need to pursue ever‐greater wealth and status. And unlike Watt, McKeon clearly includes Fielding in his purview, although with Fielding it is primarily the authorial voice rather than the character‐narrators of Defoe and Richardson that is the repository of the clearest vision of truth and virtue.
Causality and the Rise of the Novel
McKeon’s explanation of the economic and social factors leading to the development of the English novel is so much more powerful that Watt’s that one might think that was the end of the matter. In one sense, it may be too powerful, because the general factors McKeon is interested in – his stories of truth and stories of virtue – are not peculiar to narrative literature at all: we find them behind the drama and poetry of the eighteenth century, and indeed behind a good deal of the philosophical and historical writing as well.
And here again, as with Margaret Doody’s theory, the issue is how we frame the vexed question of what we mean by “the novel.” For McKeon, the “novel” whose origin he wants to explain takes a multiplicity of forms: Cervantes’s satire on knightly romance, Bunyan’s religious allegories, Defoe’s pseudo‐autobiographies, Swift’s Menippean satire, Richardson’s serious and tragic novels in letters, Fielding’s comic and serious narratives and Sterne’s strange mixture of sentimentality and satiric wit. Some of these forms have “legs”: they continue and develop further in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while others are texts that have early modern or even medieval forebears but don’t extend their tradition into later periods. That is the basis of Ralph Rader’s strong critique of McKeon’s explanation of the rise of the novel:2 precisely what is it whose cause we want to understand?
Causality is a word that has many meanings. Generally it means agency, sometimes teleology; but we also distinguish between necessary and sufficient conditions, between predisposing and precipitating causes. We flexibly use the term “cause” or “origin” for each of these things, and in our general conversation we don’t usually get confused since we know which we really want to talk about in particular cases. In remoter matters, however, like the writing of literary history, it is possible to have a marked preference for one form of causality over another.
The controversy between Michael McKeon and Ralph Rader on the origins of the English novel is illustrative of this. It isn’t just that McKeon and Rader disagree over what caused the English novel, it’s that they don’t even agree on what should count as an explanation. For Michael McKeon the true explanation of the origin of the novel has to be found in the predisposing factors: his explanation ends when he has elucidated what made society change in such a way as to make collectively meaningful narratives in which the domestic struggles of individuals were made significant, narratives that at the same time were “realistic,” like the truth about the real world but not historically veracious. The peculiar concerns and intents of the authors of these novels are unimportant. As far as McKeon is concerned, if Richardson had not written the first English novel, someone else would have, and the course of literary history would have developed almost precisely as it did.
But for Rader, it doesn’t count as an explanation of the novel to be able to say how society got to the state where it could support realistic fictional narrative as a literary genre. For Rader the predisposing causes are less interesting, and he is willing to take McKeon’s explanations of them for granted. Instead the novel begins when a particular individual – Samuel Richardson – tells a story about a virtuous servant who marries a well‐born landowner, and tells that story in a way that was unique at the time. What was original about Pamela for Rader is the way we are made to read it. The events recounted have to be understood in two different ways at once, on a narrative plane and on an authorial plane. That is, the reader is forced to take the story as autonomously “real,” on the one hand, in the sense that we understand Pamela’s world as operating by the laws that obtain in our own world and therefore independent of our desires about her (the narrative plane). But the reader is also required to read the text as “constructed,” in the sense that we understand the novel in terms of Richardson’s creative intention, forming expectations and desires respecting the protagonist that shape our sense of the whole (the authorial plane). We could diagram this double mode of reading thus:
For Rader the crucial moment is the construction of a form that operates on both levels at once – as autonomous narrative and as authorial construct. Once that had been done, others could, and did, imitate the achievement, bringing to the form new sorts of meaning and structure.
These preferences as to what counts as an acceptable explanation of the origin of a genre have further consequences. Rader is not deeply concerned with the predecessors to Richardson’s formal achievement, because for him Bunyan, Defoe, and Swift belong to strands of literary history that did not initiate world‐historical change.3 And in a similar way in the opposite direction, Michael McKeon loses most of his interest in the history of the novel once the genre has gotten fully started, as though it were the embryology of the novel rather than its history that is of primary concern.4
Well, which of them is right? Is the origin of the English novel to be found in its predisposing or its precipitating causes? Clearly both – and neither. Surely each answer is only one element of what would be a totally satisfying solution, and rationally, we ought to reject the either/or quality of the question. But while we can reject the disjunction as undesirable, it is harder to come up with a method of historical research that does not enforce it. As Johnson’s Imlac cautioned Rasselas, one cannot simultaneously fill one’s cup from the mouth and the source of the Nile. And the systematic study that provides us with a sense of all that was crucially necessary to produce an artifact will never tell us about the moment of invention that went beyond the necessary to the sufficient. When the focus is upon the individual genius engaged in constructing something new out of materials that are available to hand, we see the foreground with clarity, but the background – including how those materials came to be available to hand – recedes into a blur. Conversely, when it is the ground that occupies our attention, we must take the figure for granted. Indeed, those who investigate the background may even assume that the foregrounded individual’s contribution is ultimately not very important.
With technological invention parallel discoveries are common. If Edison had not invented the lightbulb in October 1879, someone else would have done so a few months or years later, and we would be lighting our homes and offices in similar ways, though without paying our bills to Consolidated Edison. Those who follow in the path of artistic innovators, similarly, often pay them the homage of picking up their topics and techniques, which is why aspects of the specific architecture of Pamela run throughout the history of the novel into our own time, via Jane Eyre, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Rebecca, and on to Fifty Shades of Grey.
Historical Presentism and the History of the Rise of the Novel
At the risk of becoming hopelessly relativistic, we need to point out that the answer to the question of when the English novel starts may depends not only on who is asking the question, but on when they are asking it. John Richetti’s article on the history of the English novel in the eighteenth century, in the massive Encyclopedia of the Novel, credits the sociological origins of the novel to an “emerging and enlarging urban professional and middle class acquired more leisure and a greater appetite and disposable income for consumer goods,” resulting in the creation of a “growing audience” for entertaining and improving literature, including “prose narratives frequently called ‘novels’ but sometimes ‘histories’ or ‘true histories.’” Richetti begins his story much earlier than Ian Watt does, and covers the seventeenth‐century narratives out of which the novel grew, including French romances, chroniques scandaleuses, Newgate biographies, travel books, amatory tales, and spiritual pilgrimages. But unlike Watt, who considered Defoe one of the founders of the novel, Richetti considers even his greatest creations, Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and even Roxana, merely “proto‐novelistic” (359). For Richetti as for Ralph Rader, the truly “pathbreaking” text is Richardson’s Pamela, which conveys “an illusion of immediacy and personal authenticity.” The attempt to parody Pamela then draws Henry Fielding into the orbit of the novel, where his contribution, in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, is “an authoritative narrative voice that manipulates and arranges characters and incidents and engages in an implicit conversation with his reader about the meanings of his fiction” (360). Between them Richardson and Fielding create “the new novel of the 1740s” whose “social‐historical and moral ambitions” can be reshaped, by other hands, to the representation of subtle, sometimes aberrant, psychological states (361).
And looking into that same encyclopedia to other articles delineating the history of narrative in the various European languages – Dutch, French, German, Italian, Hungarian, Russian, Spanish – they all seem to agree in one respect: whatever individual nations were doing with narrative before the middle of the eighteenth century – and they were all doing very different things – each of them was enormously influenced either directly by Richardson or indirectly by him via Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse. Pamela was an internationally pathbreaking text that displaced proto‐novelistic genres, not only in England but everywhere Richardson was translated. A new sort of narrative, often epistolary in form, sentimental and romantic, yet vivid with psychological realism, seems to become the dominant practically everywhere.
On the other hand, many other recent studies of the origin of the English novel, the grand narratives by Nancy Armstrong, Ros Ballaster, John Bender, Homer Obed Brown, Lennard Davis, Margaret Doody, Catherine Gallagher, J. Paul Hunter, and William Beatty Warner take very different positions. Many of these histories have been pushing the historical horizon of the “novel” back from Richardson, back further than Defoe, into the romances and amatory fictions and chroniques scandaleuses of the late seventeenth century. Obviously, one motivation is the need of literary scholars for more fodder, but given how unnecessary it is these days to claim a place on Parnassus for the objects of our study, that cannot be the only answer.
Rader’s and Richetti’s notion that Pamela was uniquely important in the foundation of the novel as an institutional form really rests on a cultural horizon that views the historical sequence starting with Richardson and Fielding and continuing through Smollett, Sterne, Burney, Austen, Scott, Dickens, the Brontes, Thackeray, Trollope, Eliot, Hardy, Conrad, and James, all leading up to the high modernist works of Joyce and Woolf, as the backbone of contemporary civilization. Born like Rader and Richetti before 1950, I can still feel the attraction of this vision of a great tradition. But what if one’s notion of what a novel is was formed through contemporary texts like Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas? Then the experimentation with prose forms between 1660 and 1740 becomes much more relevant to one’s sense of what the novel is all about. In the twenty‐first century, we live under the magnetic attraction of the postmodern, and if the dry crumbs and abîmes of self‐reflexive narrative (in Barth, Nabokov, Robbe‐Grillet, and Calvino) are no longer in the height of fashion, we are nevertheless writing “novels” in scare quotes rather than Novels. And what Catherine Gallagher spoke of as the great innovation of the eighteenth century, the telling of “Nobody’s Story” – pure fiction about characters with whom we can let ourselves identify because we are sure they are unreal – is no more. It has given way to “Somebody’s Story,” a fictionalized version of reality, which may tilt more or less toward the documentary and historical. What we most want to read today are stories about Thomas Cromwell, or about Mason and Dixon, or about Margaret Garner.
The other great change, since the achievements of high modernism, one need hardly point out, is that the novel has become considerably less important than it used to be as a class of cultural objects. Competing for its place in supplying us with objects of feeling and thought are all the latest movies and reality TV shows and music videos and television serials like Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones. And the fictions that grab us are, more often than not, romances like the Harry Potter series, amatory fictions like Fifty Shades of Grey, or chroniques scandaleuses, thinly veiled romans à clef like The Ghostwriter or Primary Colors. The world of narrative in the early twenty‐first century, in other words, looks a lot more like that of the late seventeenth century, messy and turbulent, without a world‐historical art form, rather than like the second half of the eighteenth century, when all of Europe was learning to improve on Richardson’s Pamela.
A Rhetorical Theory of Narrative
Each of following ten chapters considers one, or in a couple of cases two, British narratives written between 1660 and 1830. This is a period when, at its beginning at least, the novel as we understand it today does not yet exist, while by its end the novel will have become an important institution within literature and within culture. And within this period, we will encounter conventions which today’s reader, for whom the concept of the novel is a commonplace, will find odd or naive. What follows here is a general discussion of some of the theoretical issues taken up in these chapters.
I should say at the outset that this discussion comes from one of the two major branches of narrative theory, rhetorical theory of narrative, a theory that starts with the premise that the narrative is from the outset a purposive act of communication between a teller and an audience. Rhetorical technique involves setting a point of view, a way or a set of ways in which the message is mediated or transmitted by surrogates the author creates (the “implied author” of the narrative, the narrator, the characters), to a “narratee” within the tale, and to the narrative and authorial audiences outside the tale. And such basic units of structure as plot devices and characters are viewed not as abstract possibilities but as elements constructed as part of the tenor of the message, as elements of what the author is “trying to say.” This theory originates in the work of R.S. Crane in the 1940s, and its principal architects are Wayne Booth, James Phelan, and Peter Rabinowitz.
Truth and Fiction
One of the key issues that is problematized in the early novel is the relation between truth and fiction. From the first days of literary criticism, when Plato exiled the poets from the Republic for telling attractive lies about gods and men, it has been necessary to defend the writing and reading of nonfactual narrative. One possible reply was that of Philip Sidney, whose poets in effect take the fifth amendment: they are not liars because “the poet never affirmeth”: storytellers tell stories all right, but at least they do not tell them for true.
But if they do not tell the truth, then what do they tell? Aristotle, in the generation after Plato, defended epic and tragedy not merely as refusing any claim to factual and circumstantial truth. He argued that literature was both nobler and more philosophical than factual narrative or history, because its plots were necessary and probable, representing what would happen in life purified from the dross of the accidental and the incidental. Although Aristotle’s defense is geared to the notion that fictions are more probable and thus in a sense truer than real life, he nevertheless suggests late in the Poetics that the stories of poets can follow a probability scheme different from that of ordinary contemporary reality. Poets can represent with verisimilitude not merely “the way things are” but “the way things used to be” or “the way things are thought to be” or “the way things used to be thought to be” – so that beliefs about the supernatural, or even superstitions in which people no longer believe, can work in a plot.
A more general statement of this might take the form of viewing fictions as hypotheticals, existing in a separate “possible world” where some of the facts of life or even of the laws of nature we normally recognize are suspended.5 We require such hypothetical worlds to be consistent (that is, rules like “vampires can be killed by pounding a wooden stake through their heart” should work all the time if they work at all) and coherent (a world in which people can become vampires after death must also be one in which the soul survives the mortal body). These possible worlds of fiction can resemble the world we live in or can be very different. A “conservative” bias is implicit in the reading process, though, since we readers generally try to minimize the adjustments we make, naturalizing the “possible world” in terms of the world we live in till that becomes impossible. And authors usually cooperate with this, since the less the worlds they create resemble the one we live in, the more difficult it is going to be for them to give us a lively sense of the values and the rules by which things happen. As a result, even science fiction stories set far in the future or among strange extraterrestrials seldom change more than a few of the routine scripts about the contemporary world.
The difference between hypothetical stories and narratives claiming falsely to be a factual account of something that actually occurred is a distinction that gets ingrained into us from early childhood. By the age of seven my children knew the difference, not only between truth and falsehood, but between falsehood and “once upon a time.” They were even savvy to more complicated hybrids of lies and “once upon a time,” like myths, stories – like the tooth fairy’s nocturnal substitution of money for deciduous teeth – that adults pretend to believe for ritual purposes while knowing them to be false.
If works of fiction were all pure hypotheticals like fairy tales and fantasies, truth and fiction would be mutually exclusive. There would be one large category of stories that made claims to be true about the actual world (which would include both true stories and lies) and there would be another category of stories that were hypothetically but not actually or factually true. But of course it isn’t that simple. Fiction includes allegories and fables, in which impossible events – like a goose that lays golden eggs – can be represented as a way of inculcating homely truths about the real world – like the fact that excessive greed can cause one to lose everything. It includes satires like Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Orwell’s Animal Farm, in which comic caricatures are meant to represent public figures like Sir Robert Walpole or Joseph Stalin, and historical novels like Waverley and War and Peace, in which real‐life figures like Bonnie Prince Charlie and Napoleon can influence the action and its outcome for Scott and Tolstoy’s imagined characters.
Even more confusingly, the novel includes texts such as Defoe’s Moll Flanders that are read as “false true stories,” a sort of lie, rather than a “let’s pretend.” As actual readers we know, with one part of our minds, that Moll Flanders is by Daniel Defoe, but the experience of reading the text of Moll Flanders doesn’t convey that fact, not even covertly. As we see in Chapter 3, there are occasional signs of Defoe’s authorship, but they are signs rather than signals, inadvertent traces rather than messages to the reader. The reading experience is close to that of reading a genuine autobiography by a naive and inexperienced author, partly because of the skill of Defoe’s impersonation, partly because he carefully avoids giving us any sense of a structured consequential plot.
And on the other hand, the novel also includes high modernist texts like Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse that are aesthetically designed simulations of real life, autobiographies presented in the form of fiction. In contrast to Defoe’s “false true stories” these are “true fictions” about the contingent real worlds that Joyce and Woolf grew up in and whose meaning they did not invent. But in each of these cases an autobiographical character within the novel – Stephen Dedalus and Lily Briscoe – discovers that the need to comprehend and to master that contingent world can only be fulfilled by the symbolic triumph of successful artistic representation.6
But factual narrative can also be described in such honorific terms as the “triumph of successful artistic representation.” Many critics have judged In Cold Blood, Truman Capote’s true crime narrative about Perry Smith and Steve Hickock, the two murderers of the Clutter family in Kansas, as more powerfully written than any of his novels. It can be read as a work of literature, because, like factual texts of the eighteenth century that we read as literature – such as Boswell’s Life of Johnson – it is a work of the imagination. As we know from their notes and diaries, Capote and Boswell were able to discover within themselves what it was like to be Perry Smith or Samuel Johnson, down to their physical bodily feelings, with the minuteness that we ordinarily think possible only of purely hypothetical creations.
It is true that readers today have no trouble differentiating fictions that take their shape from real life from the biographies, histories, and “factions” that make a claim to historical veracity.7 But it is important to remember that these distinctions, though theoretically always available, came into existence historically. Catherine Gallagher suggests that the reader of the eighteenth‐century novel did not necessarily understand the difference between fiction and falsehood, and one of the frequent features of early novels is the claims of truth that they make. Aphra Behn claims to have met Oroonoko in Guyana in the 1660s and heard his story from his own lips. The first‐person narrator of Moll Flanders explicitly tells us that she is suppressing her real name because of her notoriety, while the editor’s preface insists that this is a true autobiography (“a private history”) and not one of those “novels and romances” that trifle with public credulity. The bookseller Samuel Richardson, in publishing Pamela, claims that he is printing the genuine letters and journals of the principal characters of the story. Henry Fielding included in Tom Jones references to his friends, acquaintances, and even local businessmen (like “the celebrated Mrs Hussy,” the “mantua‐maker in the Strand” who gets a cameo in Book X, chapter iii). Some time around the middle of the eighteenth century, though, something like the current distinction between falsehood and fiction begins to take hold, and it may be some indication that it is then that we begin to get texts like Charlotte Lennox’s Female Quixote (1752), whose heroine doesn’t get the difference.
Story and Discourse
It’s hard to know precisely where to start discussing narrative form, but the most common distinction – and this goes back all the way to Aristotle – is to separate the what from the how, the story that is told from the way that story is told. In his notebooks, Henry James called them the “story” and the “treatment”; Russian Formalist critics of the 1920s used the terms fabula and sjuzet; the French structuralist Claude Bremond used récit and raconte; and Seymour Chatman called them story and discourse. These represent two sets of choices the author makes: what will happen in the story, and to whom, and why; and how to go about telling that.
Story: Plot Construction
Sometime people assume the story itself is given, but of course it is constructed, even when an author purloins a plot from some other text. When T.H. White adapted Malory’s Morte d’Arthur into The Once and Future King, he had to decide what to keep and what to omit, where to start and where to leave off, which of Malory’s themes to highlight and which to be silent about. Similarly, it’s easy to presume that there is a “natural” way of telling a story: “Begin at the beginning, go all the way through to the end, and then stop,” says Humpty Dumpty to Alice, as though that were easy and natural. But of course it’s not natural at all. When people tell stories to each other, only the very shortest are told in successive time‐sequence. When we tell stories of any length we usually put in analepses (flashbacks to a past situation) and prolepses (anticipations of a future situation).
And the places we start and end aren’t natural either: they too are choices dictated by any number of considerations, all of which add to or subtract from the impact the story makes. Some novels have to start considerably before the beginning of the plot – there needs to be exposition, to set a scene or set up an unusual character or situation – and some novels will make the strongest impression if we start in the middle and fill in the beginning later. We will use James Phelan’s term “launch” to denote the place within the story where the major instabilities of the plot begin, “voyage” to indicate the complication, and “arrival” to indicate the establishment of a new stable situation. Elements of story prior to the launch are in effect exposition (although exposition can be inserted at any time). In some texts like Richardson’s Pamela, the launch occurs right at the start of the novel; in others, like Fielding’s Tom Jones, the launch is long delayed, until the fifth book (out of 18).
A unified plot – as opposed to a series of unconnected episodes centering around a single character – is according to Aristotle one with a beginning, middle, and end. The plot begins when an initially stable situation becomes unstable, undergoes further complications, and is finally resolved with the introduction of a new stability. To take the familiar story of Great Expectations, it does not launch until chapter 18 (out of 59) when Pip is informed through the lawyer Jaggers, that he is to be taken away from his brother‐in‐law Joe Gargery’s forge and made into a gentleman, courtesy of an anonymous benefactor. In the “middle” the story is complicated by Pip’s shifting and equivocal relations with the eccentric heiress Miss Havisham – whom he mistakenly takes for that benefactor – and her circle, including his friend Herbert Pocket and his disdainful beloved Estella, and it includes his partial corruption by the forces of money and snobbery, until his fantasies are snapped by the knowledge that the benefactor is actually Magwitch, a transported convict grown rich in Australia. The end involves the recrudescence of Pip’s originally generous and noble character, which we see in his rejection of the money and his heroic attempt to save Magwitch from the death prescribed for returned transportees. In a new stability, Pip becomes a middle‐class merchant rather than a leisured gentleman, working for his living with his friend Pocket and married to Estella, who has also been humbled by fate.8
This story presupposes many events that precede the launch: Pip’s first encounter with Magwitch, which inspires the latter’s generosity; his early meetings with Miss Havisham and Estella, which lead him to aspire above his working‐class station in life. The economy of a Dickens novel, even a relatively short one like Great Expectations, allows for this sort of leisurely opening, with vast quantities of exposition whose relevance may not appear for hundreds of pages. Some Victorian novels (like Thackeray’s Vanity Fair) include epilogue material – episodes from the lives of the main characters after the story is over – that goes on for dozens of pages. In other eras, novels may have a very different sort of economy, and in some modern novels – such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby – we meet the narrator after the story he means to tell is over, when he is coping with its aftermath; and as Nick Carraway begins his narration of the story proper, he starts in the middle, long after the initial romance of Gatsby and Daisy has begun, presenting the beginning of that story through a series of analepses (flashbacks), explaining the origin of Gatsby’s romantic dreams and how they came to be focused on his love for Daisy.
Story: Desires, Expectations, Responsibility
In any rhetorical poetics of fiction, the end of a mimetic narrative will be its power to produce an emotional effect in its audience. The specific effect is determined by three main factors. First, the moral quality of the protagonist(s) inspires us with more or less definite desires; depending on our degree of sympathy, we will wish the protagonist good or bad fortune, with greater or less ardor. Second, the events of the plot set up lines of probability that lead us to form more or less definite expectations regarding the protagonist’s fate. We expect him or her to have either good or bad fortune, in greater or less degree, temporarily or permanently. (We may also have indeterminate expectations, either because we are placed in suspense between two or more well‐defined possible outcomes, or because the alternatives for the outcome are poorly defined.) Finally, the protagonist has a more or less definite degree of responsibility for what happens. We may be made to feel that he or she exercises definite control through conscious choice or, on the other hand, that the outcome is the result of the planned actions of other agents, or of a benevolent Providence, or malignant Destiny, or blind Chance. If the protagonist controls the outcome, though, it matters whether he or she acts in full knowledge or as the result of a mistake of some sort.
These factors can lead us to make some of the usual generic discriminations between types of plot: Tragedies differ from comedies by whether we are led to expect an unhappy or a happy ending, and comedies are unlike melodramas that end happily because in comedies we are assured of the happy ending almost from the outset, while the melodramas arouse suspense about what will happen. They can also help us make subtle discriminations. Two comedies ending in marriage, such as Fielding’s Tom Jones and Austen’s Emma, differ over the protagonist’s degree of responsibility. Austen implicitly suggests that her heroine primarily generates her own vexations through her blind egocentric choices, and finally assures her future happiness by gaining self‐knowledge and transforming herself into a suitable partner for the man she realizes she loves. Fielding on the other hand insistently reminds us that both the misfortunes and the happy ending for the hero of Tom Jones occur to a great extent because of bad and good luck, respectively. In Tom Jones, in other words, our nose is rubbed in the fact that happiness is not always in the power of the innocent, the noble, and the good.9 To take another example, Godwin’s two endings for Caleb Williams were both tragic: Caleb’s life is blighted in both; but in Godwin’s original ending, Caleb is purely a victim of the power of his antagonist Falkland, while in the published ending Caleb succeeds in vindicating his reputation – he is cleared of the charge of theft – but the vindication ends Falkland’s life, leading Caleb to condemn himself as a murderer.
Story: Unity and Pattern
We have already mentioned the unified plot. In the eighteenth‐century novel, unity of action is not something one can take for granted. Moll Flanders is an episodic form with connections to the picaresque; each episode – and a few of them can be quite lengthy – is coherent in itself, but once it is over, Moll counts up her assets and liabilities and goes on to the next episode. Tristram Shandy purports to be the narrator’s “life and opinions” but the novel is an elaborate series of digressions loosely hung onto a very few “events” in Tristram’s life, often ones (like the act of sexual intercourse that initiates the hero’s conception) that would not normally appear in an autobiography. But while the incoherence of Moll Flanders is proto‐novelistic, the apparent incoherence of Tristram Shandy is in a sense post‐novelistic: what Sterne does depends on the prior existence of already formed conventions of the novel, conventions that he flouts and parodies.
Beginning with Richardson, though, novelistic plots often develop expectations through patterns in the action that the reader can discern. The increasingly tense deadlocks between Lovelace and his prisoner in Clarissa point the way to the climactic rape. On the other side, in Fielding’s novel, the pattern of Tom Jones getting in trouble through a magnanimous but imprudent act and then getting out of trouble again signals to the reader that, since nothing terribly bad ever seems to happen as a result, nothing very bad ever will. (One of the functions of the delayed launch in Tom Jones is to establish such a pattern, which generates comic expectations.)
Pattern can perhaps be a danger to a novelist’s intent. In Pamela, Richardson escalates, throughout the first volume of the novel, the threats to Pamela’s bodily integrity, because the pattern of threatened rape followed by escape leads to the same kind of comic expectations that we find in Tom Jones. This not only explains the presence, in the Lincolnshire estate to which Pamela is kidnapped, of the masculine housekeeper Mrs. Jewkes, but also the arrival of the ferocious‐looking valet Colbrand. Pamela’s fears increase drastically as she realizes that if Mr. B. is determined to have his way with her there will be two strong servants to assist him and no one to save her. Nevertheless, the experience of many readers is that the repeated pattern of threat followed by escape overwhelms the escalating threats, leading us to expect that the threats will never ultimately be carried out. (And of course Richardson’s subtitle, “Virtue Rewarded,” reprinted on each recto page, certainly implies a happy ending.)
Discourse: Authors, Narrators, Audiences, and their Surrogates
In the narrative situation, authors (from Aphra Behn to Walter Scott) tell stories to the readers of their novels for some purpose. In the course of doing so they create narrators who may live inside the storyworld (as the narrator of Oroonoko does) or outside that storyworld (as the narrator of Waverley does). Narrators who live inside the story world may tell their own story, like Defoe’s Moll Flanders, and Richardson’s Pamela, through her letters. Or the narrator inside the storyworld may be, like Behn’s narrator, primarily the observer of another character’s story.10
Wayne Booth coined the term “unreliable narrator” to characterize narrators who are deficient in: (1) the literal reporting of events and characters, or (2) the interpretation of events that they observe, or (3) the ethical evaluation of characters and their actions, or some combination of these. For example, after Emma Woodhouse meets Harriet Smith in chapter 3 of Emma we get the following:
The passage is character narration employing free indirect discourse, expressing thoughts and judgments by Emma that Austen means for us to distrust. The logic here – the fact Harriet is deferential to Emma implies that she has good sense – is slippery and self‐serving, as is the judgment that Harriet’s friends are “unworthy of her”; the constant reference to rank (deference, superior style, inferior society, unworthy) indicates that Emma is a snob. But though Emma’s evaluations are clouded, her perceptions are not: she is quite aware that Harriet, though physically attractive, is not very bright, and later, when she reads Robert Martin’s letter of proposal to Harriet, she is impressed in spite of herself by its unaffected language and delicacy of feeling, even though she immediately afterwards bullies Harriet into refusing him. Misevaluation is not the only form of unreliability Emma displays: once she has decided to make a match between Harriet and the bachelor clergyman of the parish, Emma almost willfully misinterprets all the signals that he is romantically interested in her rather than her friend.11
If these complex judgments are communicated to the reader over Emma’s head or behind her back, who then is doing the communicating? Wayne Booth coined the term “implied author” for the authorial perspective within the text, controlling the “unreliable” third‐person character narration. Although some theorists have argued that the “implied author” is an entity without utility, within a theory of the novel as communication, it makes sense to differentiate the author we infer from our reading of the novel from the author we know from biographers.
The audience too is inscribed within the text. Each novel is written for an “implied reader” – which Peter Rabinowitz calls the “authorial audience” – which ideally responds perfectly to the signals within the constructed text. (Actual readers attempt to approximate the response of the authorial audience within the text, with greater or less success.) The narrator, similarly, evokes a “narrative audience” who will be that narrator’s receptor; one level further in, the narrative audience is inside the storyworld; for the narrative audience the characters and events are real.
In most realist novels since Pamela there will both an authorial audience, who knows that it is reading a fiction and is responding to signals from an implied author outside the storyworld, and a narrative audience who responds to the text as though it were happening in the real world. In Tom Jones, the signals that the text is generically a comedy, in which characters’ fates are commensurate with their ethical deserts, generate in the authorial audience assurances that Tom will live happily ever after, even when, in Book XVIII, Tom is in Newgate prison awaiting trial for the murder of Mr. Fitzpatrick. Nevertheless, the reader may simultaneously feel intense suspense because she has also joined a narrative audience who does not know that Mr. Fitzpatrick will recover from his wound and Tom will be released.12
A complete diagram of this usual arrangement of actual and virtual authors and readers would be as follows:
Fiction before Pamela is another story. In texts like Moll Flanders, where there are signs but no actual signals that Defoe, rather than Moll, wrote the narrative, there is in effect no authorial audience, so that we respond to the text with the ethical relativism that we would respond to a real person’s memoir. As we see in Chapter 3, Moll herself gives the narrative audience signals about how she judges herself and others, and often proleptically signals how episodes are going to turn out. But in texts of this sort there are no signposts for how to judge the narrator, and therefore no right or wrong way of ethically interpreting the characters’ behavior. Some readers are appalled by Moll when, after stealing a necklace of gold beads from a little girl, she first thinks of killing the child to assure her own safety, decides against it, and then, forgetting about these thoughts, speaks of the episode as a valuable lesson to the girl’s parents for not taking better care of her. Other readers find Moll’s responses screamingly funny. And still others may take the “valuable lesson” sentence to be Defoe briefly speaking through Moll – so that for the moment the illusion of Moll’s reality dissipates. The “usual arrangement” portrayed above is in the eighteenth century a work in progress.
One other matter is narrative levels. The “usual arrangement” discussed here presumes a single narrative voice within the text. But there are additional complexities if there are several narrators, either “side by side” or “nested” in layers. Epistolary novels like Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa – particularly the latter – can involve multiple correspondences with different narrators and narratees, and the reader is forced to evaluate the veracity, acumen, and prejudices of each correspondent. In Clarissa, for example, both Clarissa and Lovelace may produce a narrative of the same meeting between them, in letters to Anna Howe and John Belford, respectively, and the reader will often note how one or both of the characters misinterpreted the words and actions of the other. Nested narratives often are found in Gothic novels; in Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) for example, the story Alonzo de Monçada tells to John Melmoth includes a manuscript titled “Tale of the Indians,”a story in which – among many other things – Francisco de Aliaga visits an inn where a stranger tells him “The Tale of Guzman’s Family,” and where Melmoth the Wanderer tells him “The Tale of the Lovers.” At one point there are five levels of narrative nested within one another like Russian Matryoshka dolls. (Complex nested narratives occur in Alexandrian romances and are also found in the Arabian Nights.)
Finally, we should note with James Phelan that the relationship between the various authors, narrators, and audiences is recursive, rather than stable; it can change both within and between readings of a narrative text. We often misinterpret elements of the text, sometimes because those misreadings are exactly what the implied author has built into the text. Or even without authorial help we may make guesses about where the narrative is going that are not fulfilled, or ethical judgments about characters that are inconsistent with other textual elements, forcing us to revise our sense of what we are reading. And inevitably some textual elements that may seem relatively inert on a first reading can acquire great significance on a second reading.
Discourse: Point of View, Focalization and Voice, and Representations of Speech and Thought
Beginning with Henry James, theorists of fiction have concerned themselves with the other all‐important aspect of the “discourse,” the “point of view” from which the story is told. It is conventional to describe narrative technique primarily in terms of the characteristics of the narrator, and to differentiate between first‐person narrators telling their own stories, like Moll Flanders, first‐person narrators telling other people’s stories, as in Oroonoko; and third‐person narrators.13 First‐person narrators can tell us only what they know or can find out; in epistolary novels, for example, like Pamela or Evelina, the correspondents only know what they have already experienced, while in first‐person narratives structured as memoirs (like Moll Flanders), the narrators already know how things came out and can anticipate whether their actions were wise or foolish, their interpretations wise or naive. Third‐person narrators may have unlimited privilege (the so‐called “omniscient” narrator), or they may be limited to knowing a single character’s inner life (selective omniscience), or may know a number of character’s inner states, each in turn (multiple selective omniscience), or may serve as a virtual camera eye objectively regarding the scene with no privilege to recount any character’s thoughts and feelings.14 As Wayne Booth insists in his classic essay, “Distance and Point of View,” the “person” in which the story is told is far less important than the privilege the narrator is accorded to see into the characters’ hearts (or to find them opaque), to know the end of the story at the beginning (or to come to each new event as a surprise), to judge and comment on the agents and their acts.
Point of view is usually now split into the separate issues of “focalization” and “voice,” which is roughly equivalent to the question of who sees and who speaks, the perspective from which the action is viewed and the language used to convey the action. This distinction is clearly important in any third‐person narrative, where the language used may be similar to that which the center of consciousness would have used – or may be very different. Even in first‐person narratives, like James Joyce’s short story “Araby,” for example, the focalizing agent, a pre‐adolescent boy, could hardly be responsible for the gnarled syntax and difficult vocabulary in which the narrative is pitched. Readers can naturalize the difference between focalization and voice here if they think of the story as a retrospective narration by the depressed and disappointed adult into whom the boy of the story grew up – but that is not a fact directly presented in the story.15
Speech and thought can be represented directly (as direct quotations in the first person), or can be summarized (by an exterior narrator in the third person). And during our period, before 1800, a special form of free indirect discourse develops, in which a character speaks or thinks in language that conveys the voice of the character, but the words are represented as coming from the narrator, in the third person and in the past tense.
For example from the beginning of chapter 16 of Emma:
We can see here what is actually a typical blend of the various ways of presenting interiority or consciousness. At the outset there is a summary, in the narrator’s language, of what is going on in the character’s mind (“Emma sat down to think and be miserable.”). The theorist Dorrit Cohn refers to this sort of summary as psychonarration. Then we get what is usually called free indirect discourse, or FID, where the third person and the preterite are used, in the character’s language, but shifted from the first person and present tense (“Such an overthrow of every thing she had been wishing for. How could she have been so deceived!”).16 And we also get direct quotations of Emma’s interior monologue, like “If I had not persuaded Harriet into liking the man ….” The sympathy (or irony) with which characters are regarded often depends on the particular way their thoughts are framed. In chapter 11, I speculate that Austen increases our sympathy for Emma when she uses FID, and increases irony at Emma’s expense when she uses quoted interior monologue.
Discourse: Order, Pacing, Frequency
One obvious sign of authorial manipulation is telling the story out of order. Although, as I have already noted, naive nonliterary narratives frequently include proleptic statements indicating where the narrative is going, and also analeptic flashbacks, going back to fill in a previous event which is necessary to understand the speaker’s reaction to what happened, we usually assume that a story will be told in chronological order and that any deviation from that order is done for effect. What we learn first is viewed as a given, the status quo, the point from which change is registered. Scott Fitzgerald created an indelible sense of Gatsby as a man of mystery and glamour by introducing him near the end of his life’s saga, and only much later allowing us to view, in a flashback, how he had transformed himself into an icon of the jazz age from a Midwestern country boy.
Richardson starts Clarissa in the middle of things as well, with the aftermath of the duel between James Harlowe and Robert Lovelace, leaving the motives for the duel, and the underlying tensions within the Harlowe family to come out gradually. Fielding starts Tom Jones with Tom’s discovery as an infant, long before any instability arises; on the other hand, he avoids giving any hint of Bridget Allworthy’s romance with Mr. Summers in the previous year because, far from wanting to prepare the reader, he wants the mystery of Tom’s birth to continue into the denouement. Fielding also reverses time, when necessary, to give us a sense of the simultaneous but separate journeys of Tom and Sophia from Somersetshire to London. Tristram Shandy plays with every aspect of narrative including order: we usually, in fact, are told first about effects, allowing Tristram to hark back to explain causes. Tristram’s deformed nose is ascribed to Doctor Slop’s wounded thumb, which in turn harks back to the knots Obadiah has tied to secure Slop’s obstetrical instruments. And the novel as a whole, beginning with Tristram’s conception and birth, ends with a final tableau at a time years before Tristram was born.
Gérard Genette’s analysis of time in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time takes this sort of manipulation essentially for granted and concentrates more intensely on two other methods by which narrative can manipulate the sense of time. The second method, which Genette calls “duration” and which is more usually called pacing, refers to the relationship between story‐time and reader‐time and can be gauged by how many words in the narrative are used to convey how much time in the storyworld. In Proust, years can pass in the course of a few sentences, while some of the soirees that Proust describes can take longer to read than to live through. Fielding telescopes time during Tom Jones’s first eighteen years, but he slows the pace at points of crisis. Laurence Sterne self‐consciously manipulates pacing to even greater extremes: Tristram at one point takes several chapters to describe his father and uncle descending a single flight of stairs.
What Genette calls “frequency” – whether a particular action is performed once or repeatedly, over and over again, is a third way of manipulating the reader’s time sense. “In the evening … the little Englishman, Hawkins, would light the lamp and bring out the cards,” we are told at the start of Frank O’Connor’s story “Guests of the Nation,” and the use of the modal auxiliary “would” lets us know that the scene being described is a repetitive everyday occurrence. At the beginning of section II, however, we read “One evening, Hawkins lit the lamp …” and we know at once that we are now in a section of the narrative where what happens will happen only once. Frequency can also be used together with pacing for a specific effect: “Guests of the Nation,” for example, uses the repetitive mode at the beginning of the story as a way of telescoping the time sense, of conveying in a few words the habits formed over months. As the story goes on to recount the singular events leading to the execution of two British prisoners by their IRA guards, O’Connor progressively slows the pace as the moment of violence approaches in a way that intensifies the horror of the spectacle. Repetition is used primarily for comic effect in Tristram Shandy, from minor moments like Corporal Trim’s inability to tell the story of the King of Bohemia and His Seven Castles, to major movements like Uncle Toby’s all‐consuming obsession with fortifications.
I shall be using the ideas and distinctions presented here, about story and discourse, structure and texture, in the ten following chapters analyzing representative novels in its first century or so of the novel’s development.