Governing Consumption: Needs and Wants, Suspended Characters, and the "Origins" of Eighteenth-Century Novels (review)

Abstract

84 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:1 an explication of Murphy's joke). It is a striking remark, but it seems to leave ordinary human life and experience behind. It must either mean that, at "this historical moment," kingship is no longer of the slightest significance (which can hardly be true), or alternatively that, ethically speaking, there has been a sad fallingoff from the grand siècle—which would be a quite unjust slur on the France of Turgot, Voltaire, and Diderot. P.N. Furbank London James Cruise. Governing Consumption: Needs and Wants, Suspended Characters, and the "Origins" ofEighteenth-Century Novels. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2000. 246pp. US$42.50. ISBN 0-8387-5428-7. Ian Watt's sociological explanation of how the realistic novel rose in the course of the eighteenth century in response to the growing forces of individualism, Protestantism, and capitalism held sway for nearly thirty years. But beginning with Lennard J. Davis's Factual Fictions (1983) and Michael McKeon's The Origins ofthe English Novel 1600-1 740 ( 1987), we were persuaded that Watt had the skein of influences exactly backwards, that a materialist conception of history would show that it had been capitalism that had created both the appetite for narrative and the shifts in fundamental values—notions of truth and of virtue— that made the narratives of Defoe and Richardson possible, even inevitable, as productions of ideology. Responding to Watt and to the Marxist responses to Watt has by now become something of a cottage industry—about which more anon. James Cruise also thinks that the canonical eighteenth-century novels owe a great deal to the rise of commercial capitalism, but for Cruise capitalism is not, as it is to the Marxists, the motor of history, a hegemonic mode of production that reshapes the world in its wake. What is important to Cruise is the discourse of capitalism, or more generally of political economy, within the marketplace of ideas of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Here the economy is viewed as driven by demand, by the needs and wants held by, or stimulated within, the consumer, and the richer and more varied the goods available for purchase, the healthier the economy. But while the consumer demands immediate satisfaction, the man of business—who is also, of course, a consumer in his spare time— is induced to suspend the satisfaction of desire, induced to part with money that could give present gratification to a project or scheme that proposes to return it, after a time, with advantage. Cruise has read widely in these texts—this segment of his bibliography fills ten pages—and he sees in them a set of analogies to how canonical eighteenth-century fictions work. Desires generate narrativity, stories REVIEWS 85 contain multitudes, suspense holds offthe end. The "grand narrative" ofcapitalism thus explains the grand narratives of Defoe and Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne. Some readers may be unimpressed by the analogues Cruise collects, may see no more than what Addison termed false wit in calling Tristram Shandy an "industrial novel" because Tristram's fate is bound up with the workings of a machine (his father's clock), or because Tristram himself refers to the "machinery" of his text that has "digressive and progressive movements, one wheel within another" (p. 161). And can such analogies, however striking, ever explain literary history, allow us to understand the rise of the novel? To this last question, Cruise argues that the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century is a non-issue, requiring no explanation, because novels, meaning long prose fictions, had been around for many centuries, almost continuously since the Alexandrian romance, as has been pointed out by Arthur Heiserman (The Novel before the Novel, 1977) and more recently by Margaret Anne Doody (The True Story ofthe Novel, 1996). The scarequotes around "origins" in Cruise's title implicitly stake out this position and his first chapter argues it. But ofcourse using Cruise's own favoured method—reading the prose texts of the period—reveals that eighteenth-century English men and women themselves thought something very new was happening to prose narrative in their day, something for which Scudéry's Clelia...