Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (review)

Abstract

Reviews Michael McKeon, ed. Theory ofthe Novel: A Historical Approach. Baltimore :Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. xviii + 947pp. US$29.95 (paper); US$65 (cloth). ISBN 0-8018-6397-X. Atjust under three and one-half pounds, Michael McKeon's anthology is not to be taken lightly. Fifty reading selections, quite properly including two pieces of his own work, are distributed in fourteen sections. The general and sectional introductions by themselves constitute virtually a new book approaching fifty thousand words. They are formidably intelligent confrontations with the reading selections and hence with the meaning of the novel in history. Dialectic is the order of the day, as McKeon debates and wrestles with his authors. He is willing to charge an author with "confusion " (Nancy Armstrong, in this case, in a footnote on p. 436), and is so serious in his purpose that he can do so without disrespect. All students, indeed all critics, can learn from his tone. Despite its subtitle, the book makes no pretence to being an historical approach to the theory ofthe novel. Its briefis neither history ofcriticism nor the historicist reckoning with literature in its social contexts featured in McKeon's earlier Politics and Poetry in Restoration England: The Case ofDryden 's "Annus MirabilL·" (1975) and, some might say, his Origins oftheEnglish Novel (1987). In fact, novels to him are less representations than exempla, "Stories of Virtue" (the title of chapter 6 of Origins and also the focus of McKeon's chapter on the eighteenth-century novel from The Cambridge Hutory ofLiterary Criticism, reprinted in part here). Consequently, instead of either history of ideas or historicism, the anthology's subject is theories "of the novel as a historical phenomenon" (p. xiv), that is, of the novel as it has changed. The antithesis is Margaret Anne Doody, whose True Story ofthe Novelis acidly dismissed as "incoherent" for refusing "a basic diachronic difEIGHTEENTH -CENTURY FICTION, Volume 15, Number 1, October 2002 132EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION15:1 ferential" (p. 807). The first three sections concern archetypal and structuralist criticism and psychoanalysis (Freud and Marthe Robert, a fine choice); they are followed by three varieties of"grand theory" (Lukács early and late, Ortega y Gasset, and Bakhtin), then come to a point in"Revisionist Grand Theory," embracing Watt, McKeon's Origins,Jameson, and Benedict Anderson . This is part 7, the end of the book's first half and the turn from genre definition towards history of the genre. To be sure, formalist elements are still acknowledged in the second half, but only as they lead to developmental ones. Thus, part 9, "Subjectivity, Character, Development," opens with Dorrit Cohn and Ann Banfield writing about free indirect discourse but ends, some selections later, with Clifford Siskin's Hhtoricity ofRomantic Discourse. And part 10, "Realism," which uses an excerpt from Rosalind Coward andJohn Ellis as an uncharacteristically bad—awful, actually—stand-in for Barthes, ends with George Levine and Michael Davitt Bell on developments in nineteenth-century England and America, respectively. The last three parts are avowedly historical: "Modernism," "The New Novel, the Postmodern Novel," and "The Colonial and Postcolonial Novel." The anthology moves from asking what the novel is to asking how it changed. Indeed, the anthology inclines towards diachrony right from the start. Already in part 2 McKeon proffers an illuminating slant on structuralism. The section title is "The Novel as Displacement I: Structuralism." Here Benjamin 's "The Storyteller" prefaces Lévi-Strauss and Northrop Frye. The collocation is surprising, even after allowance is made for a rare error that leads McKeon to call Benjamin's subject, Leskov, "a nineteenth-century novelist " (p. 72) when he actually wrote folk tales. Even more surprising than thinking of Benjamin as a structuralist is treating any of these readings as "historical" in their interest. I do not know what to make of the entailment in the following sentence: "Benjamin's interest is therefore historical: concerned both with the temporal persistence and with the structural relationality of discursive form" (p. 71, my emphasis). Yet McKeon's misapprehension of an essay concerned with ancient wisdom provides the occasion for a wonderfully usable partition of theories of the novel into the devolutionary and the evolutionary. Even structuralistsjudge...