A Question of Beginnings

Abstract

A Question of Beginnings Robert B. Alter The durability of The Rise ofthe Novel among works of literary scholarship is altogether remarkable. Before long, half a century will have elapsed since its initial publication and more time than that has already passed since Ian Watt completed his first draft in 1947. Disagreements with the perspective of the book on the novel began as early as its first reviews , the central one being that Watt's concentration on what he called "the realism of presentation" gave short shrift to other kinds of realism, or to trends in the novel not easily identifiable with realism. Nobody has summarized these objections more succinctly and more wittily than Watt himself. In an essay wryly entitled "Serious Reflections on The Rise of the Novel," published a decade after the appearance of the book, Watt explains that by cutting three concluding chapters on Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, he ended up tipping the balance in his account of the genre more than he would have liked: "As a result I have had to grow accustomed to figuring in some minds as a permanent picketerfor the Union Novel (International President H. James), carrying a sign which reads 'Cervantes Go Home' on one side and 'Fielding is a Fink' on the other."1 Watt of course cannot avoid taking responsibility for the final form of his own book, in which the reader's "belief in the reality of report" is seen as the novelistic trait par excellence, and any "patent selectiveness of vision" by 1 Ian Watt, "Serious Reflections on The Rise of the Novel," Towards a Poetics of Fiction: Essays from "Novel," a Forum on Fiction 1967-1976, ed. Mark Spilka (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1977), p. 92. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000 214 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION undermining that belief or deflecting "attention from the content of the report to the skill of the reporter,"2 ultimately goes against the grain of the genre. The issues involved in this judgment are still worth debating, but it should be said that Watt is so finely intelligent, such a shrewdly informed reader of novels in their dense contexts of social and intellectual history, that his somewhat tilted perspective proves to be far less a detriment than one would have imagined. Despite its one-sidedness, The Rise ofthe Novel remains the most illuminating account we have of the emergence of the new genre in eighteenth-century England. After all these years, it still conveys a sense of the excitement of intellectual discovery. It is scarcely necessary to say that a whole series of new waves have swept through literary studies since the publication of The Rise of the Novel. In their wake, many would be inclined to conclude that Watt's study is now superannuated, hopelessly parochial in its exclusive focus on eighteenth-century England and on three canonical white male writers. Watt tried to defend himself in "Serious Reflections" against the early harbingers of such objections by pointing out that his book was, after all, subtitled "Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding." Nevertheless, the use of the definite article before "Novel" in the title proper was a little misleading: although Watt was undertaking an ostensibly delimited investigation of a new trend in English prose narrative between 1719 and 1749, both his title and many ofthe terms ofhis analysis made larger claims about the nature of the novel. Critics who saw the novel rising elsewhere and earlier were also likely to have somewhat different views about the defining characteristics of the genre. If, for example, Cervantes, instead of being invited to go home, was assumed to be the central innovator of the new genre, as Harry Levin, Marthe Robert, and a host of other critics have plausibly argued, then the confrontation between reading and living, the problematic of fiction-making, would be the pre-eminent novelistic concern, and not the realism of presentation. If La Princesse de Clèves was taken as the point of departure for the genre, then the minute analysis of feeling, the nuanced narrative embodiment of moral dilemma, would be the distinctive novelistic concerns, necessitating certain characteristic narrative procedures...