YOON SUN LEE Austen’s Scale-Making T WO INCHES OF IVORY MAY BE THE BEST-KNOWN METAPHOR FOR Austen’s novel-writing.1 Compare to that modest figure “the totality of national life in its complex interaction between ‘above’ and ‘below.’” This is what Georg Lukacs sees in Scott’s Waverley Novels. Lukacs’s favor ite adjective for Scott’s novels is “broad.” Scott offers “the broad delinea tion of manners and circumstances attendant upon events . . . broad, objec tive, epic form.”2 Not only broad but deep, able to reveal the full vertical sweep from base to superstructure. In comparison, two inches of ivory might seem to possess only surface and smallness. Novels are inseparable from questions of scale, as Austen and Scott knew. In his review ofEmma for the October 1815 Quarterly, Scott suggests that the modern novel shows the reader nothing “more interesting and ex traordinary than those [incidents] which occur in his own life, or that ofhis next-door neighbours,” offering “a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him.”3 Daily frequency and spatial circumscription are the measures that he uses to characterize the represen tational domain of the Austen-type novel. Positing “concentric circles of probability and possibility,” Scott explains that, while earlier novels had hovered between the outer and inner circles, Austen chooses to remain within the inner ring of probability, which is only as wide as your own neighborhood, or what you can see from your own window.4 In his first novel, published the year before, Scott sizes up his own project differently. Scotland’s dramatic alteration provides the occasion for Waverley’s writing, as well as its subject. “There is no European nation which, within the course of half a century . . . has undergone so complete a change as this 1. The quotation from one of Austen’s letters is given in a “Postscript” to Henry Austen’s biographical notice to Persuasion and Nortlianger Abbey—a postscript to a notice to a posthu mous publication. Austen refers to her work as “a little bit of ivory, two inches wide, on which 1 work with a brush so fine as to produce little effect after much labour.” Austen, “Biographical Notice of the Author,” in Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. James Kinsley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 7. 2. Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: Uni versity' of Nebraska Press, 1983), 49, 31-32. 3. Sir Walter Scott, “Emma: A Novel,” Quarterly Review 14 (October 1813): 189, 193. 4. Scott, “Emma: A Novel,” 190. SiR, 52 (Summer 2013) 171 172 YOON SUN LEE kingdom of Scotland.” Waverley, like all of Scott’s novels, takes on nations, centuries, and large-scale transformations. But it, too, is concerned with imposing measures on lived experience to enable its abstraction. In a wellknown passage, Scott likens his novel’s function to that of an artificial marker for measuring distance: “like those who drift down the stream of a deep and smooth river, we are not aware ofthe progress we have made un til we fix our eye on the now-distant point from which we set out.”5 Rather than assuming that novels are themselves large-scale, small-scale, or somewhere in between, this article will consider them as “scale-making projects.” I borrow this phrase from anthropologist Anna Tsing, who shows how projects “that [make] us imagine globality . . . locality, or the space of regions or nations” have become essential to steering the flows of global finance capital.6 Tsing defines scale as “the spatial dimensionality necessary for a particular kind of view”; as she points out, “scale must be brought into being: proposed, practiced, and evaded.”7 8 Scale-making in the novel, I will argue, involves more than the representation of geograph ical space, cultural location, or even historical specificity. We can think of it as the act of representing the conditions of referentiality. The modern novel does of course refer to actual locations, subtly connecting them to a more primordial way of thinking about the space-story relationship, as Franco Moretti has shown. In this way, Austen and Scott bring into being an intimate...