The Rise of I

Abstract

The Rise Of/ Philip Stewart That the novel was invented in England sometime around 1720 is one of the sturdiest facts in Anglo-American literary history, and no one did more to propagate it than Ian Watt in The Rise ofthe Novel (1957).1 Although this proposition nevermade much sense to anyone working in any of Europe's other literatures, there could hardly be a better example ofa reigning paradigm, or a better proof that a "fact" is less a natural phenomenon bound to come to light than a human construct. Although Watt's version of the "rise" has been complemented and qualified by several other histories of the early English novel which variously modify his fundamental premise, few English scholars seem to have noticed that it can be seriously questioned. Basically, Watt helped reinforce a wall around an aspect ofEnglish literary history so resistant that, while its novel can be contextualized , either within its confines or diachronically, it still does not dialogue much with anything beyond the Channel; theEnglish novel can more plausibly be linked to ancient Greek and Roman "novels" than to anything going on in Europe in 1700. This was no accident. Had Watt called his book "The Rise of the English Novel"—which is what it really is about—it might have done less damage. But of course the singular article "the Novel" was quite deliberate , the stronger claim being that the novel was exclusively English; this claim in turn required some contortions, the most notable ofwhich was his extraordinary exclusionary clause according to which, owing to its "classical critical outlook," "French fiction from La Princesse de Clèves to Les 1 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957). References are to this edition. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, volume 13, numéros 2-3, janvier-avril 2001 164 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Liaisons dangereuses stands outside the main tradition of the novel" (p. 30). Such an arbitrary and outlandish pronouncement can only mean that it stands outside the main tradition of the English novel, or that it was just too embarrassing to deal with; better to wish it out of existence. The French novel is, he says, "too stylish to be authentic"—the weakest (and most subjective) pretext imaginable for disqualifying it. Indeed, there has rarely been a more insular discussion than that concerning the putative "rise" of the novel. Watt's book almost totally ignores Continental literature, defining "novel" so as to exclude everything he did not want at the centre of his argument. It is not just a matter of being "too Anglocentric," as J. Paul Hunter says,2 but of totally neglecting, or rather, wilfully excluding all outside context. John Richetti and J.A. Downie, who, like Hunter, have criticized Watt's "drastically selective" focus,3 are, like him, far more concerned with English antecedents than with any that might be found abroad. Yet had Watt consulted the work of, say, Daniel Mornet, orEC. Green, oreven George Saintsbury's A History of the French Novel*—which contains two long chapters on the seventeenthcentury novel, however dated they already were in 1957—he could not have written the same book. It is essentially the first and last few pages of his book that we are concerned with here. "If we assume, as is commonly done, that [the novel is a new form], and that it was begun by Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, how does it differ from the prose fictions of the past?" (p. 9). Now it is true that ten years later, in his "second thoughts" article,s Watt disavowed all responsibility for this "if clause, which he said was just a way of condensing an elaborate operating hypothesis; there would be little point in returning to it now were it not for the fact that he at the same time took the opportunity to reaffirm his beliefthatthe assumption was, after all, true. What he thus heuristically assumed he too frequently passed offthereafter as recognized fact, even "significant" fact, as in this statement that comes a few pages later: "It is significant that the trend in favour oforiginality found its...