Rethinking Reading: The Novel and Cultural Stratification

Abstract

Rethinking Reading: The Novel and Cultural StratificationWilliam Ray In the course of the last decade or so we have come to think of the novel no longer just as a reflection or product of social and cultural reality, but as an active instrument in the construction of that reality. Critics as different as Michael McKeon and Nancy Armstrong have accustomed us to take for granted that early fiction played a central role in the articulation and management of subjectivity through the formations of selfhood, ethical régimes, and models of sociality it disseminated.1 Yet within this general rethinking of fiction as an agent of historical change, far less attention has been devoted to the ways in which it might have altered the practices of reading through which novels operate. A shift from "intensive" devotional reading to "extensive" literary reading has been proposed to account for the way in which reading evolved more generally; but few have questioned how the protocols and assumptions of fiction reading in particular might have changed in concert with the novel's circulation of new models of the self.2 By and large we assume that eighteenth and nineteenth-century novels operate primarily 1 Michael McKeon, Origins ofthe English Novel 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). This article was completed during a Fellowship at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina which was funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities, both of which organizations I would like to thank for their generous support. 2 Exceptions to this tendency include John Bender's study of the narrativization of authority in Imagining the Penitentiary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Claude Labrosse's analysis of reading in Rousseau, Lire au xvme siècle: La Nouvelle Héloïse et ses lecteurs (Paris: Editions du CNRS and Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1985); and Dorothea von Miicke's study of literary pedagogy, Virtue and the Veil of Illusion: Generic Innovation and the PedaEIGHTEENTH -CENTURY FICTION, Volume 10, Number 2, January 1998 152 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION by depicting behaviour with which readers identify. Fictional narratives amend and reconfigure subjectivity by providing characters the reader can imitate or sympathize with—or be repelled by. There is of course historical justification for this assumption, since that is precisely the mechanism which most eighteenth-century authors advance in defence of their works. Yet it seems inconsistent to assume that the genre of the novel could reconfigure subjectivity in any substantial way without simultaneously changing the way people related to cultural artifacts such as novels. Moreover, given the vigour with which the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras deployed culture as a political instrument , we might assume a significant evolution in the way people related to cultural institutions in general, including the novel.3 Quite independently of such arguments, the substantial formal differences that, in the French tradition especially, separate the eighteenth-century novel from its nineteenth-century counterpart would seem to entail a wholesale revision of reading protocols. Anonymous third-person narration, free indirect discourse, a preponderance of material description, forms of irony that render the author's attitude towards the protagonists undecidable— all of these clearly require different assumptions and operations on the part of the reader than do first-person or epistolary accounts claiming to represent a real person's exemplary experience.4 I will argue here that new paradigms of reading did indeed develop in conjunction with the reconfiguration of subjectivity, and I will outline the emergence of one such paradigm in the works of an author who gogical Project in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1991). Robert Darnton, "Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity," in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984), pp. 215-56, challenges the shift to extensive reading and suggests some general ways in which the novel changes the way people respond to texts. For the difference between intensive and extensive reading see Rolf Engelsing, Der Bürgerals Leser: Lesergeschichte in Deutschland 1500-1800 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1974). For other approaches to this...