The English novel
The initial proposition assumes that ‘the novel’ can be approached as a coherent form or genre. This is by no means certain; the Cambridge literary critic Raymond Williams has
claimed that ‘the novel is not so much a literary form as a whole literature in itself’. 45 Attempts at defining the novel have been fraught with controversy; the OED settles for ‘A long fictional prose narrative, usually filling one or more volumes and typically representing character and action with some degree of realism and complexity’. 46 Realism is a cornerstone of the novel if the novel is viewed as beginning in the early eighteenth century. The ‘origins’ of the novel are however disputed. To a great extent, it depends on the definition of the novel being used, where and when it originated. If the novel is defined simply as a prose fiction of some length then a case can be made, as Margaret Doody demonstrates, to locate the first novels in Greece47. If one defines the novel as essentially a romance, a romantic adventure which ends happily, then one can locate its origins in the ‘roman’ of France. For an English graduate of the 70s such as myself, Ian Watt had the answer and it was realism. This idea has become so controversial, the very nature of realism being now hugely suspect, that I have been warned by tutors that it is ‘dangerous’ to refer to ‘realism’. Williams comments, ‘The old naive realism is in any case dead, for it depended on a theory of natural seeing which is now impossible. When we thought we had only to open our eyes to see a common world, we could suppose that realism was a simple recording process’. 48 While accepting the complexity of the term ‘realism’ and that Watt oversimplified it, I contend that his characterization of the novel still has enormous value. In his seminal text The Rise of the Novel,49 the following aspects are established as key characteristics of this new genre, reflecting a move to ‘realism’:
i. The novel was new in that it did not rely on historical plots or characters, as Shakespeare or Milton had done, but created its own characters and plots which were then judged as ‘valid’ or ‘true’ by how realistic they were considered to be.
ii. There is detailed realistic description/accounting; people realised in their physical setting.
iii. Characters are given real names as opposed to those from legend or history. iv. Characters are placed in a specific time sequence.
v. The style of writing/language is everyday speech/language as opposed to the stylistic decorum of much past literature.
Watt presented the novel as making a distinct and radical break with the past. Michael McKeon challenged this view in The Origins of the English Novel 1600-174050and has displaced Watt. McKeon accepts key points of Watt’s argument but balances discontinuities with continuities and so undermines the triumphalism of Watt’s vision of the novel as the new genre of the modern age. McKeon’s dialectical approach politely challenges the simplicity of Watt’s stance. Genre, McKeon believes, has to be seen historically; all new genres feed off past genres and are inevitably dialectic in this respect. He takes each of Watt’s key points and shows how the shift or change described is dependent for meaning on a past form and so exists only in a dialectical relationship with that past form. The novel can be seen as a reaction to the old romance; it grew out of the traditional lives of the Saints, the accounts of Christian pilgrimage and of scientific discovery, travel writing, letter-writing etc.; all fed into the possibilities of the novel through the dynamics of dialectical reformation. It is not simply that the new genre feeds off the old, McKeon asserts, but that the old feeds off the new, replenishing itself hence the novel can be seen as a romance which has revamped its style to deal with a more empirical age.
The debate over the exact nature of the transformation of prose fiction in the early eighteenth century nevertheless confirms a general consensus that the English novel emerged at this time. There are several respected texts which having reviewed the
literature available, proceed with a concept of the novel as a genre developing in the early eighteenth century, these include Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel, Michael McKeon’s The Origins of the English Novel, E.M.Foster’s Aspects of the English Novel and John Richetti’s
The Modern English Novel. I am aware that the acceptance of this assumption carries political and ideological baggage which is summarised by Deirdre Lynch and William B. Warner:
Introducing the eighteenth century “origins” of “the novel”, we validate the assumption that what novels are now was already immanent in what they were then. We ratify geopolitical boundaries (between, for example, England and France). We legislate for a canon of exemplary, “truly” novelistic texts and legislate against popular practices of reading and writing. These are problems endemic to efforts to ascribe a distinct, essential nature to the novel.51
The idea of a genre is a limiting device which I am happy to accept while at the same time stretching and challenging the limits by using it to allow a comparison of institutions which would not normally be recognised as generically linked. Whether the English novel began in the eighteenth century can be argued but it is evident that it was a transformational moment in its development.