From Digressions to Intrusions: Authorial Commentary in the Novel

Abstract

Be it known, then, that human species are divided into two sorts of people, to wit, high people and low people. (146) --Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews (1742) so we need not trouble ourselves any more either about insertions or about exordiums. They both please me; second class has pleased persons much better worth pleasing than I can pretend to be. (xx) --George Saintsbury, introduction to Joseph Andrews (1910) I would like to preface this article by asserting that there are two types of people in world; those who like authorial intrusions, and those who don't. And just as these preferences tell us much about people who hold them, critical reception of authorial intrusions reveals much about our theories of novel. Authorial intrusions are typically characterized, and criticized, as interruptions to a that disrupt illusion of fictional truth to varying degrees. In this way, intrusions highlight by contrast our sense of two formative elements of genre: its structure and its referential status. Gerard Genette (1997) tells us that authorial preface is a paratextual frame in service of ensuring that text is read properly: explaining to readers why and how they should read it. I think we can profitably approach authorial commentary as intratextual continuation of this rhetorical enterprise, and this is one reason why intrusions have been condemned. As a result we can also approach them as barometers for historical shifts in concepts of novel because of various ways they both evoke and respond to critical reception. My aim is to investigate reasons why authorial commentary is considered intrusive, and whether these reasons have been constant throughout history of novel. Central to this investigation will be tracing significance of a broad terminological shift, from eighteenth to twentieth century, in which common rhetorical practice of digression, or turning away from a narrative, came to be characterized as intrusion into a narrative. Answering these questions will help address what Mary Jane Chilton Curry has called the much disputed question of relation between authorial intrusion and realism (31), and I hope to demonstrate, in particular, paradoxical role authorial commentary has played in both establishing and challenging conventions of realist fiction in relation to eighteenth-century theories of probability, nineteenth-century theories of sympathy, and twentieth-century theories of impersonality. Authorial Intrusions and Realist Novel When formalist theories of novel took shape in twentieth century, they enshrined all forms of intrusion, self-reflexive or otherwise, as interference to aesthetic ideal of genre itself: verisimilar effacement of medium of narration, described by Percy Lubbock, in The Craft of Fiction (1921), as practice of showing rather than telling. (1) This was also central tenet of modernist novelists themselves, best expressed by Ford Madox Ford's assertion that it is an obvious and unchanging fact that if author intrudes his comments into middle of his he will endanger illusion conveyed by that story (148). The influence of this belief on historical scholarship can be found in Ian Watt's seminal work, The Rise of Novel (1957), which defines formal realism as methods for providing authentic report of individual experience that were developed in eighteenth-century English novel. The prototype for authorial intrusions in this tradition is provided by Henry Fielding's essayistic musings in Tom Jones (1749), and according to Watt's theory of realism, such authorial intrusions, of course, tend to diminish authenticity of his narrative and break spell of imaginary world represented in novel, preventing readers from being fully immersed in lives of characters (285). …