Reconsidering Origins: How Novel Are Theories of the Novel?

Lennard J. Davis

Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000,

pp. 479-499 (Article)

Published by University of Toronto Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/ecf.2000.0051

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/412310/summary

Access provided by Latin American Studies Association (4 Jul 2018 04:37 GMT)
Reconsidering Origins: How Novel
Are Theories of the Novel?
Lennard J. Davis

Origins ... are, when great work is concerned, questions for the study and
the lecture-room, for the literary historian and the professional critic,
rather than for the reader, however intelligent and alert, who wishes to
enjoy a masterpiece, and is content simply to enjoy it.
George Saintsbury, Introduction to Joseph Andrews (1910)
Nobody knows just what a novel is, and nobody knows just where the
novel begins.
Edward Wagenknecht, Cavalcade of the English Novel (1943)

A t a recent conference on the future of the novel, Terry Castle hurled

a Jovian lightning bolt at theories of the early novel:
I feel we have reached a saturation-point currently in academic studies of
eighteenth-century fiction—at least in those studies that bear on the history of
the genre qua genre. While vast gains have been made—and I truly think the
genealogical, historical and bibliographic work done on the early English novel
over the past twenty years is one of the great triumphs of twentieth-century lit-
erary criticism—we also have reached a kind of intellectual dead end, and like
exhausted little Lovelaces with word processors can go no further.
Castle's point was that all the really essential work on the genre of the
eighteenth-century novel had been done, and she went on to specify what
she saw as:
the soaring critical trajectory extending from Watt (the great First Cause) through
Richetti, McKeon, Davis, Armstrong, Bender, Hunter, Spacks, Doody, Gallagher
and numerous others. I don't think we need further exposition of such matters as

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000

480 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

the relationship between the novel and the romance, or the novel and the criminal
biography, or the novel and spiritual autobiography, or indeed the novel and any
other form of early popular literature. I don't think we need further exploration
of the economics of novel production, of the early eighteenth-century literary
marketplace, of the role of women in the popularization of prose fiction. I don't
think we need a further rehashing of the synergy between the early novel and
capitalism, the novel and empire, the novel and domesticity and sexual politics.
Nor indeed do we really need more disquisition on the novel and its relation to the
larger English literary canon. My sense is that we have gained all the yardage we
have needed on these points at least for a while—indeed I happen to think that with
Cathy Gallagher's brilliantly multifaceted Nobody 's Story—the true successor and
necessary supplement to Watt—I think that the ball of eighteenth-century novel
studies has been definitively kicked through the goal posts.1
As the final declamation whizzed by, one could feel a pain that spread
through the audience, mainly the pain of graduate students, in the room.
Their feeling, expressed later ex camera, was that such a pronouncement
was premature, as each of them imagined contributing more to an analysis
of the rise of the novel rather than attending its wake. Castle's assessment
may or may not be tme, but, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, all
of us are calendrically obliged to take stock of the work done on the novel
and in novel theory, and to decide, in Lenin's favourite phrase, "what is to
be done?" if there is anything more to be done.
Before we can grapple with the "to be done," we have to account for
the "done." Novel theory itself has a history. Too often when we read
eighteenth-century novels, we read them with the welter of questions of
our own epoch. To focus on what novels meant to the eighteenth century
we have to pay attention to novel theory and the way it changed over the
past three hundred years. Just as when we listen to Mozart or Beethoven on
original instruments rather than modem ones, things sound rather different,
so too when we try to imagine what novels were in the past, without the
palimpsests of each generation's subsequent views, we may get a clearer
picture of fiction's own progress. Such theory can be found, initially, in
the introductions and prefaces to longish prose narratives of the eighteenth
century. Here, writers such as Behn, Manley, the Fieldings, Haywood,
Bumey, Richardson, Smollett, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft wrestle with
the nature of their productions. That "theory" for the most part is essentially
grounded in praxis, and inaugurates "practical theory," that is, theory driven
by the craft of writing. The legacy of that kind of theory can now be found
in the myriad books of advice to young writers, in writing classes at
1 Unpublished paper presented at the "Symposium on the Novel, Early and Late" at the University
of Virginia, 13 February 1999.
 HOW NOVEL ARE THEORIES OF THE NOVEL? 481

universities, and in book reviews. This concern is for the craft of writing,
the well-wrought um, the flow of dialogue, the believability of character,
the logic of plot, the seamlessness of transitions, and so on.
The preponderance of attention to matters of craft in these early intro-
ductions serves to justify the activity of writing longish fictional narratives.
In so doing, inevitably, the authors must in some sense justify the mor-
ality and rationality of such a project. Intimately linked with this is the
attempt to explain the nature of the protagonist's character and the choices
that character makes. By and large, discussions of the early novel are really
discussions about the virtue of the central, often eponymous, character and
the probability of the events of the works. For example, a well-known early
definition of the novel by Clara Reeve in 1785 states "the novel is a pic-
ture of real life and manners, and of the times in which it is written. ... The
novel gives a familiar relation of such things, as pass every day before our
eyes, such as may happen to our friend, or to ourselves; and the perfec-
tion of it, is to represent every scene, in so easy and natural a manner, and
to make them appear so probable, as to deceive us into a persuasion (at
least while we reading) that all is real."2 Some forty years later, John Dun-
lop defined novels as "agreeable and fictitious productions, whose province
it is to bring about natural events by natural means, and which preserve
curiosity alive without the help of wonder—in which human life is exhib-
ited in its tme state, diversified only by accidents that daily happen in the
world."3
According to these relatively contemporary accounts, a palpably new
literary form with links to previous fictional types such as the romance,
tales, the epic, and so on had appeared on the scene in England and France.
And what characterizes this form is some notion that it treats "real" life
in a "familiar" way that appears to be "tme" without the intmsion of the
elements that do not appear "natural." Characters had to be "exemplary."4
Novels are judged mainly on two criteria—their realism or probability and
their attitude towards virtue, which "should always be represented in the
most beautiful and amiable light." If readers disagreed about the worth
of a novel during this period, the argument revolved around whether an
author depicted "human nature as it is, rather than as it ought to be,"5 and
it rotated on the axis of whether the events in the story were "probable" or
2 Clara Reeve, The Progress ofRomance (New York: Facsimile Text Society, 1930), 1:111.
3 John Dunlop, History of Prose Fiction (New York: AMS Press, 1969), p. 362.
4 Reeve, 1:139.
5 Reeve, 1:141.
482 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

"improbable." Virtue and verisimilitude are of interest to early novelists for

at least two reasons. First, discussions about virtue help define the process
of creating character, in effect are primers in a way for others who wish
to become novelists. And discussions about probability help define the
limits of plot so that writers can come to a consensus about what "works"
to hold the attention of readers. Both virtue and verisimilitude are, in this
sense, the same thing—devices to pull a reader hypnotically into the lifeless
collections of mnes on a page and make the reader create, in effect, the life
of characters.
Of course, there is more to this. We might well ask ourselves why
certain modes of behaviour, certain types of character, certain varieties of
virtue are deemed probable and others not. But if we do begin to ask such
questions, we begin to engage in a kind of cultural history of the novel
that would have been alien to our early novelists. We begin, in effect, to
play that music on later instmments. Early novelists, in their turn, would
have been completely mystified by the kinds of questions we have asked
about narrative and novels over the past thirty years. And, in our tum,
we are mildly interested, but essentially not compelled, by questions about
virtue and probability. Indeed, from the point of view of eighteenth-century
novelists, virtue and probability are virtually similar although not the same.
Virtue is the normative setting for moral definitions of character, while
probability is the normative setting for action. Both converge, in effect,
in some grand cultural attempt to create normative or average patterns of
behaviour.6
Works such as those of Reeve and Dunlop along with Walter Scott's
speculations about the novel inaugurated what we might call a history-
of-the-novel theory. This theory of the novel was more than simply a
praxis-oriented guide for writers and readers, more than cautions about
character, virtue, probability, and verisimilitude. Now an element of the
diachronic emerges with authors tracing a continuous progress, to use
Reeve's term, from the ancient Greeks to the present. Yet, what will strike
us is that these histories are strangely ahistorical. That is, they give us a
history of narrative that is more or less unbroken from antiquity without
seeing the novel as a radically different form. In this sense, they regard
all narrative as novels and all history as equal. So, although they have
a diachronic sense of differing epochs and kinds of narrative, including
epic and romance, they do not see these as substantially different from

6 I discuss this issue at greater length in "Who Put the THE in The Novell: Identity Politics and
Disability in Novel Studies," Novel 31:3 (1998), 317-34.
 HOW NOVEL ARE THEORIES OF THE NOVEL? 483

the novel. In fact, these authors generally call various works of fiction—
both in prose and poetry—novels. Thus, the novel, in effect, is seen as
universal, transcending any historical period.
One could claim, as some have done,7 that in fact the invention of the
novel as a form is a kind of wilful imposition of later scholars onto this
unbroken great narrative tradition. But, it will probably strike most histor-
ians of narrative that the kind of writing called "the novel," while certainly
sharing traits with other longer narratives, is a definitive type of writ-
ing with a definite type of production that begins on a large scale in the
eighteenth century. Indeed, the premise of this special issue of Eighteenth-
Century Fiction is that there is a thing called the novel, that it had a rise, and
that this rise can be considered and even reconsidered. So, one might want
to ask about the strange continuity ascribed to narrative at the end of the
eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries.8 Several explan-
ations are possible. First, during this period, although there were certainly
revolutionary activities in the area of politics, there was a general lack of in-
terest in describing art and culture in a discontinuous, raptured way. The
arts, with their emphasis on wholeness, unity, balance, and repetition, were
unlikely to be seen as radically new, amazingly different, uniquely autoch-
thonous. Even the "battle of the ancients and the modems" is based on
the premise that "modem" works are as good as the works of Greece and
Rome because they conform to the aesthetic and formal qualities of those
earlier works. There is little attempt to claim radical difference. Second,
and linked to this point, novelists and those who wrote about and read them
may have needed the legitimating history of classical antiquity and histor-
ical forms to limit the potentially criminal, transgressive, and controversial
elements in this new genre. Finally, since the novel was part of a pro-
ject to create and shore up national identity, it would make sense to place
that identity in a great tradition.

7 Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature ofNarrative (New York: Oxford University Press,
1967); Arthur Heiserman, The Novel before the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1977); J.J. Jusserand, The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare, trans. Elizabeth Lee (New
York: AMS Press, 1965); and Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story ofthe Novel (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996).
8 We should note here the obvious point that representative early novelists did think that what they
were doing was new. It was not uncommon for writers and readers to see the novel as "as new
species of writing," as Samuel Richardson put it, "a new province of writing" and "a species of
writing ... hitherto unattempted in our language," as Henry Fielding characterized it; and "a rather
new species of novel," according to at least one contemporary reader of Clarissa.
484 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

A consideration of the development of theories to account for the rise of

the novel and its deployment would be incomplete without an extensive
consideration of nineteenth-century writers. However, given the scope of
this particular issue of Eighteenth-Century Fiction, it might make more
sense to present some general comments about the criticism of this period.
First, the essential consideration of novel criticism remains focused on
the issue of verisimilitude. Novelists were judged as succeeding to the
extent that they realistically portrayed or painted various characters and
actions, and rendered them believable. The novelist was like a painter,
whose picture should resemble life closely. As Stendhal wrote in 1830, "A
novel is a mirror carried down a highway."9 George Eliot seconded this
viewpoint, saying that she, as a novelist, should "give a faithful account
of man and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind."10 Even
at the beginning of the twentieth century, George Saintsbury could write,
praising Fielding's pre-eminence among the early novelists, "No one that
I can think of ... has the same unfailing gift of breathing life into every
character he creates or borrows. ... They are there—alive, full of blood, full
of breath as we are."" Second, the rise of the novel was, by the nineteenth
century, undisputedly determined as having begun with the work of Defoe,
Fielding, Richardson, and Smollet. The complexities of the novel's origin,
and the justificatory continuous history sought for by early novelists and
theorists were largely settled in favour of a distinctly British origin to the
novel. Obviously here the consolidation of national identity contributed
to this fixing of the rise of the novel to a germinal period in eighteenth-
century England. Third, and linked to the previous point, the novel was
seen as embodying national history and issues, so that Scott, for example,
could align fictional narrative with the historical past, Dickens could write
his works as critiques of national problems, and Balzac could in effect
recreate Parisian society within the multi-novel emporium of his fiction.
Finally, the novel was also seen as a kind of quasi-scientific laboratory
or cloud chamber in which humans and society could be observed and
experimented with. Writers such as Emile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, and
even George Eliot were quite explicit about this project of including the
novel in the emerging human sciences. Here the notion of the novelist as
portrait painter takes a subtle but important turn to the inclusion of the
scientific method in the painting process.
9 Stendhal, The Red and the Black, trans. Lloyd C. Parks (New York: New American Library, 1970),
p. 359.
10 George Eliot, Adam Bede (New York: Signet, 1961), p. 174.
I I Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews (London: J. M. Dent, 1919; rpt. 1948), pp. xxii-xxiii.
 HOW NOVEL ARE THEORIES OF THE NOVEL? 485

By the twentieth century, novel criticism had been taken within the
protective embrace of the university. This process, detailed by Raymond
Williams, Terry Eagleton, Edward Said, Gauri Viswanathan, and others,
served double duty. Modem language departments were created and needed
to create a rationale for their existence. There were several. The novel
came to be seen as the form that would acculturate the working classes,
immigrants, and those outside the métropole into English and American
society. At the same time, and equally important, it provided a literary
form that could bear the weight of complex analysis from several new
scientific and quasi-scientific disciplines. While poetry remained a subject
of largely formal interest, the novel provided a terrain for study that in effect
legitimated the inclusion of modem, as opposed to classical, literature
into academia. The novel was no longer Fielding's jolly romp through
England or Defoe's seamy dip into criminal low-life, but became a serious,
historical, and philosophical study of the human mind, society, mores, and
manners worthy of study and career. Henry James, writing in 1884 from
outside the academy, yoked two seemingly contradictory words—"art" and
"fiction"—in his well-known essay:
Only a short time ago it might have been supposed that the English novel was not
what the French call discutable. It had no air of having a theory, a conviction, a
consciousness of itself behind it—of being the expression of an artistic faith, the
result of choice and comparison. ... During the period I have alluded to there was
a comfortable, good-humoured feeling abroad that a novel is a novel, as a pudding
is a pudding, and that our only business with it could be to swallow it.12
But James senses a change, an increasing gravity of purpose. The novel
"must take itself seriously for the public to take it so." So James ventures
to add that "fiction is one of the fine arts, deserving in its tum of all the
honours and emoluments that have hitherto been reserved for the successful
profession of music, poetry, painting, architecture."13 As painting becomes
a romantic profession, the novel becomes a high form of art. Joseph Conrad
echoes James in the "Preface to the Nigger ofthe Narcissus" by claiming the
highest status for fiction, akin to life, tmth, and justice. As D.H. Lawrence
wrote, "the novel is the one bright book of life."14 This luminous aesthetic
status becomes linked somewhat paradoxically to the emerging human
12Henry James, "The Art of Fiction," Partial Portraits (London: Macmillan, 1888), in Criticism:
Major Statements, ed. Charles Kaplan and William Anderson (New York: St Martin's Press, 1991),
pp. 387-88; 390.
13James, p. 388.
14D.H. Lawrence, Selected Literary Criticism, cited in The Theory of the Novel, ed. Philip Stevick
(New York: Free Press, 1967), p. 406.
486 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

sciences—psychology, sociology, anthropology—and the novel becomes

the pre-eminent theoretical occasion for the elucidation of those discursive
modalities. Because the novel is high art, it requires the most sophisticated
elucidation.
Academic novel theory in the first half of the twentieth century tended
to fall into two categories: literary history and formalist study. The former
reached a kind of height with Ernest Baker's hefty History of the Novel
(1924). In this work, literary history, with its sense of the continuity of
literary forms, teamed up with the evolutionary scheme put forth by Darwin
half a century earlier to produce the sense of the origin of the novel as
an inevitable mutation in the history of narrative.15 In another direction,
between 1910 and 1930, Russian formalists such as Vladimir Propp and
Victor Shklovsky analysed folk tales and simple stories to produce a kind
of proto-structuralist account of narratives, including novels. A decade or
two later, American and British formalists, whom we know as New Critics,
preferred to concentrate on poetry rather than fiction, presumably not
accepting James's assertions that novels were high art. It was mid-century
before that kind of formalism began to address the novel.
For the purposes of this brief foray, the cmcial time for novel theory was
the 1950s. It was during this period that many foundational works were
conceived and written. In 1954, FR. Leavis's The Great Tradition was
published in the United States. In the same year Walter Allen's The English
Novel and Dorothy Van Ghent's The English Novel: Form and Function
also appeared. Ian Watt published The Rise ofthe Novel in 1 957. As Homer
Brown points out, in the same year Richard Chase's The American Novel
and Its Tradition, Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, Erich Auerbach's
Mimesis, and the English translation of José Ortega y Gasset's "The Nature
of the Novel" appeared.16 These were followed by Raymond Williams's
Culture and Society (1958), Ernst Fischer's The Necessity of Art (1959),
and Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961).
What one can say is that the novel, as a form, became legitimized in a
new way. It was propelled ahead of poetry, or at least side-by-side with it, so
that the novel was no longer seen as a kind of inferior production. Leavis's
book is a crucial one, not because of his decisions about which novelist
is "great" and therefore part of "the line of great novelists" and which is
15See Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1983), pp. 2-5, for more on the evolutionary model in novel theory.
16See Homer Brown, "Why the Story of the Origin of the (English) Novel Is an American Romance
(If Not the Great American Novel)," Cultural institutions of the Novel, ed. Deidrc Lynch and
William Beatty Warner (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 21.
 HOW NOVEL ARE THEORIES OF THE NOVEL? 487

not, but rather because the project of selection is not seen as arbitrary or
risible but rather as cmcial not only to national but to human existence.
The novelist is no longer a hack, a garrulous busybody, or a pseudo-
journalist; rather, "the major novelists ... count in the same way as the
major poets, in the sense that they not only change the possibilities of the
art for practitioners and readers, but that they are significant in terms of the
human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life."17
Clearly, the novel is no longer valued for its verisimilitude or probability—
since much of twentieth-century fiction eschewed those hallmarks. Rather,
the novel is thought important for its insights into the human condition,
philosophy, language and symbolic activity, desire, psychology, and so on.
It becomes a Baedeker to human life and social culture.
One could speculate on many reasons for this upgrading of the novel's
status as cultural paragon. A postwar period might have sought some sense
of order in culture that history might not have yielded. The novel, even
though it had mutated into various forms including stream of conscious-
ness, absurdist, existentialist, and so on, at least had the general quality of
being seen as a prescient and subtle reading of society, history, life, and
desire. Novelists were cast in the role of being the new philosophical, polit-
ical, cultural wonks of their age. Linked to this was the sense that history
and political science had disappointed us, betrayed us, and that historians
had reached the end of their abilities. Daniel Bell announced this gloomy
view in 1960, lamenting the ineffectiveness of political analysis in his in-
fluential, if ultimately wrong, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of
Political Ideas in the Fifties. With Stalinism on the one end of the spec-
trum and McCarthyism on the other, the novel offered a middle ground for
a liberal-to-leftist understanding of society, humanity, and morality.
I have not talked about one powerful strain in this period, and that is
Marxism. The novel played a key role in much Marxist discussion of cul-
ture. From Engels and Bloch through Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin there was
debate about the nature of narrative and an interest in explaining the con-
struction of novelistic as well as other works of art in the context of social
and political history. Linked to these discussions were the influential de-
bates in the 1930s between Georg Lukács and Berthold Brecht over the
nature of realism.18 Similarly, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adomo, M.M.
Bakhtin, and others either connected with the Frankfurt School or associ-
ated with the international Communist party developed a highly elaborated
17FR. Leavis, The Great Tradition (New York: New York University Press, 1967), p. 2.
18See Ernst Bloch et al, Aesthetics and Politics, trans, and ed. Ronald Taylor; afterword, Fredric
Jameson (1977; London: Verso, 1986).
488 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

theory for discussing the novel as the prime cultural artifact that enclosed,
contained, or elaborated the entire social fabric and the economic relations
between people. These discussions provided the foundation on which the
novel, as the pre-eminent social and cultural form, could rest its weighty
and deserved status.
So by the 1960s, the novel had been conceptualized in such a way that
it was the central object to be studied. It represented the great mystery
of society and life, a kind of inscmtable and endlessly fmitful text of
quasi-biblical stature. This was a period of what I would call the "over-
valuation" of the novel. Whereas in the eighteenth century and part of the
nineteenth the novel was considered "pudding," as James had put it, by
now it was considered "caviar." It is at this historical juncture that we see
entire university courses devoted to magisterial works (works that could
at last be considered magisterial)—Tristram Shandy, Moby-Dick, Ulysses,
The Sound and the Fury, Bleak House, and Middlemarch. Courses on
individual or multiple authors also sprang up—on Fielding or Dickens or
Faulkner—on Richardson and Austen—on Joyce, Lawrence, and Woolf.
The key word in novel theory books during this period is "greatness."
Leavis had started the trend, and now it became the job of academics
to show that each author had to be considered "great." Maurice Nadeau
unproblematically called his book The Greatness ofFlaubert (1969). Ray-
mond Giraud, in 1964, begins his introduction to the Twentieth-Century
Interpretations volume on Flaubert by saying that "the greatness in a work
of art is in its inexhaustibility" and then saying that Madame Bovary is such
a work.19 The greatness of novels and novelists re-established a faith in the
word and the text. Where few would pore over the Old Testament to un-
cover the hidden secrets of revelation, scholars in droves plumbed the
depths and crevices of fiction to come up with a key to all fiction, the ul-
timate reading of Ulysses, the solution to the architectonics of Tom Jones.
Perhaps Stuart Gilbert's James Joyce's Ulysses: A Study (1930), signalled
the beginning of a trend that would regard novels as incredibly complex
texts equal to sacred works which required page-by-page analyses and in-
terpretations. When Albert J. Guerard wrote in 1958 that Joseph Conrad
"was an important spiritual historian, exceptionally aware of the destruct-
ive violence of the modem age,"20 he was able to attribute to the novelist
a quasi-religious, prophetic, superhuman ability—and to do so without
19Raymond Giraud, ed., Flaubert (Englewood, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964), p. 1.
20Albert J. Guerard, Conrad: The Novelist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958; reprinted
New York: Atheneum, 1967), pp. x-xi.
 HOW NOVEL ARE THEORIES OF THE NOVEL? 489

irony. It would seem no exaggeration that the editors of the Norton Crit-
ical Edition of Moby-Dick could, in 1967, claim that the work was "one of
the world's great books,"21 or that the author of a reader's guide to Faulkner
could write that his goal was to "provide a guideline through the complex-
ities of technique and style to reveal the greatness of Faulkner's art and the
scope and profundity of his personal vision of life."22 By the 1960s, this
over-valuation was in full swing when series such as Twentieth-Century In-
terpretations, edited by Maynard Mack, collected close readings of single
novels, and reader's guides to various novelists abounded. Scholarly series
on the work of Fielding, Defoe, and Richardson made high-profile ca-
reers for the editors of those works, who tended to be at distinguished
universities.
To see how strange this all was, think of attributing qualities like those
in the previous paragraph to any eighteenth-century novelist, or even to
any novelist of the past twenty years. One could reply that there are simply
no great novelists any more. Rather, I would argue that the over-valuation
of novelists brought into being the greatness of those authors. I am not
saying that these were not very good novelists, but the status of Tolstoy,
Dostoevsky, Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce, or Woolf is part of a long,
historically explicable process that constructs its own being in the process
of explaining it.
It is paradoxical and telling that at the moment when novels themselves
were becoming increasingly ambiguous, forsaking realism and continuity
for discontinuity, fragmentation, absurdism, unreliability, and so on, cri-
ticism reached a point of exhaustive elucidation, scientistic analysis, and
possessed a general will to attribute ultimate knowledge and tmth to nov-
elists. There is a kind of discontinuous sine wave in which, when the novel
aims at portraying the "real," critics and scholars take the position of being
humanists relying, like the critics of the nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies, on their personal subjectivities and moralistic judgments, but when
the novel assumes the role of the fallible, erring, human constmct, then
critics become scientists stressing their objective and knowledge-based
discourses.
So it is no wonder that the rise of the novel should have become a major
focus for scholars in the 1960s interested in attacking the major text of
society with the armaments of the human sciences. One could say that
the novel obsessed academia. The novel became the undecoded Rosetta

21Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (New York: Norton, 1967), p. ix.

22Edmond L. Volpe, A Reader's Guide to William Faulkner (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux,
1964), p. ix.
490 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

Stone, a kind of indecipherable Linear B, a resistant double-helix which

might tell us all about ourselves and our culture if only we might figure
out how to unlock its mysteries. Along with Northrop Frye, who named
one of his books The Stubborn Structure, we, as a culture, aimed to make
the stubbornly resistant complexity of the novel reveal its beneficial tmths
and dizzying insights.

Ian Watt and Raymond Williams both published influential works within
a year of each other that began the first of what I will call "applied know-
ledges" to the novel. Watt's contribution was the application of not one but
several branches of knowledges in a grand synergistic attempt to under-
stand the inscmtability of the novel. What Watt did was attempt to scale
the Everest of the novel by using philosophy, sociology, and formalism in
a triple assault. We tend to forget that Watt was a leftist, in the sense that
most sociologists of the time were. We also tend to forget that Watt thanks
Theodor Adomo and Talcott Parsons among others for reading and com-
menting on the manuscript. Since there had been no full-length study of the
early English novel in a considerable while (as the Manchester Guardian
pointed out in its review of the book quoted on the jacket of the paper-
back reprint), Watt had the playing field to himself. He acknowledges that
his work grew out of a primary interest in the growth of the reading pub-
lic and the emergence of the novel, an essentially sociological interest that
matched those of his Cambridge mentors. The opening chapter on philo-
sophy was, perhaps, inspired by Adomo or one of his other readers. Watt
carefully hedged the connection between philosophy and the novel, but
he nevertheless saw this interdisciplinarity as appropriate for early novel
studies. Watt, however, states carefully that the similarities between philo-
sophical and novelistic works "are not proposed as exact," acknowledging
that "some influence is likely" but a causal one is "probably much less
direct."23
Interestingly, the other area of applied knowledges imported by Watt into
a world of literary history was an emphasis on "form." In thanking I.A.
Richards for reading drafts of The Rise of the Novel, Watt signals a gen-
erational interest in formalism. Yoking together Richards's New Critical
approach to close reading with his own interest in sociology and Marx-
ism, Watt ends up creating a contemporary synergy between the dominant
23 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe. Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1957; reprinted, 1967), p. 31.
 HOW NOVEL ARE THEORIES OF THE NOVEL? 491

theoretical approaches of his time. Watt's coinage of the term "formal real-
ism" combines these two discourses. Watt's main point holds that the novel
is not realistic because of its subject matter but rather because of the way
in which it presents that subject matter.24 The formal aspects of the nar-
rative are where the novel breaks ground from previous narrative modes.
Strangely, though, one may search throughout The Rise of the Novel and
not find a careful, working definition of formal realism. In fact, his defini-
tion of formal realism is actually a kind of tautology—the novel is different
from other narrative forms because it uses a different way of writing about
things, and we can call that way of writing "novelistic." Although Watt
takes us through issues around individualism, time, space, readership, and
so on, he really never describes what is the form of formal realism. This
strange absence is actually the result of logical problems provoked by try-
ing to combine Richards's literary analysis with those of the sociologists.
While Richards may have been a progressive, his co-invention of "practical
criticism" or New Criticism was a profoundly anti- materialist, ahistorical
move in intellectual history. While Richards wanted to take literary criti-
cism away from the snobby experts, he did so by taking it away from the
historical and social context as well. So Watt finds himself frequently strad-
dling his Cambridge mentors, hovering between their historical materialist
explanations on the one side and ahistorical, individual-based aesthetics
on the other. How could he, in fact, arrive at the criteria for a formal real-
ism when the term is almost an oxymoron if you consider realism to be
something described by an economic/social diachronic explanation and
form, in the sense used by Richards and others, a synchronic universal
explanation?25
Watt's work was hailed for its managing to apply knowledges without
appearing to reduce works to a scientific precipitate. And that work set the
stage for the rise-of-the-novel phenomenon. However, it was not the only
influence. One should also mention the importance of stmcturalist thought
to the development of the applied knowledges and literature during this
period. Lucien Goldmann's Towards a Sociology ofthe Novel (1964) was a
French version, in a way, of Watt's attempt to link sociology and the novel.
However, Goldmann is more openly indebted to the Frankfurt School,
particularly in its valuation of artistic forms and its downplaying of the
24Watt, p. 11.
25Barbara Nathan Hardy, publishing a few years after Watt, also shows a parallel contemporary
interest in applying form to the novel. Her book The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form
(London: University of London, 1963) has none of Watt's problems, however, since she never tries
to combine a social sense of the novel with a formal sense.
492 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

role of the proletariat. Further, he sees his work as linked to an ongoing

project of stmcturalism, of what he calls "the immanent stmctures" in
the novel. These seem to coincide on some level with the more general
notion floated by Raymond Williams that "structures of feeling" permeate
novels and therefore render the novel part of ideology. Most influentially,
Roland Barthes's work from the 1 950s through the 1 970s sought to codify
and identify the stmctures of signification in narrative, linking a concern
to locate ideology in texts and a concern for form. Although Barthes
never actually analysed novels, his SfL (1970), providing a multi-layered
analysis, virtually word by word, of semantic and structural units in a
short story by Balzac, established a template for later works that wished
to perform stmcturalist analyses on novels. Barthes continued the applied-
knowledges approach by bringing in the work of linguist Fernand Saussure
and his explicator in culture and anthropology Claude Lévi-Strauss to
elucidate the deep stmcture of narrative.
Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg's The Nature of Narrative (1966)
stands at an important crossroads of novelistic theory. The work is clearly
also an example of applied knowledges, drawing its inspiration from an-
thropology, particularly as it applies to the oral tradition, and myth criticism
including the work of Franz Boas, Joseph Campbell, and Bronislaw Ma-
linowski, among others. There is something structural and formal in its
interests, characterized by chapters not on literary works but on concepts
such as "meaning," "character," "plot," or "point of view." Yet, it is also a be-
ginning of another mid-century trend—a reversal of reverential attitudes
towards the novel. The authors write that although "for the past two cen-
turies the dominant form of narrative literature in the West has been the
novel ... we hope to put the novel in its place ... seeing the novel as only
one of a number of narrative possibilities."26 The tendency to downgrade
the novel—or to see it as part of a larger category of narrative, storytelling,
or fiction—is the beginning of a trend that would end up in the decon-
stmctive mode that characterized the last twenty years of the century. Such
a move signals a decline in the novel's "greatness."
During the 1960s, work on the early novel still tended to be concerned
with placing it in a stronger degree of relation to the highly serious role en-
visioned for the later novel. Three works appeared in roughly the same
period and attempted to make clear that Daniel Defoe, previously regarded
as the most plodding and literal of the founding fathers of fiction, was

26 Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature ofNarrative (New York: Oxford University Press,
1966), p. 3.
 HOW NOVEL ARE THEORIES OF THE NOVEL? 493

actually worthy of serious reflection. These works, focusing on the his-

torical and formal delineations of the novel, were Maximillian Novak's
Defoe and the Nature of Man (1963), G.A. Starr's Defoe and Spiritual
Autobiography (1965), and J. Paul Hunter's The Reluctant Pilgrim: De-
foe 's Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in "Robinson Crusoe "
(1968). Clearly writing in refutation of Leavis's damning statement con-
cerning Defoe, paraphrasing Leslie Stephen, that "all that needs to be said
about him as a novelist ... [was] he made no pretension to practicing the
novelist's art, and matters little as an influence,"27 these writers want to el-
evate Defoe to the level of the philosophically and even spiritually worthy
category of the novel developed between the 1930s and the 1950s. So De-
foe is seen as a moral teacher, even casuist, on the par with Pufendorf and
other moral philosophers. In Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe's Fic-
tion (1983), Novak begins by talking about the "greatness" ofthat author,
who is now unproblematically seen as "great."
Picking up on the early pre-Frankfurt School emphasis on the importance
of proletarian literature and combining it with a 1960s interest in popular
culture, an interest most clearly articulated by Richard Poirier in an essay
in Partisan Review which saw the Beatles as contemporary troubadours,
John Richetti's Popular Fiction before Richardson appeared in 1975.28
Richetti helped to place the origin of the novel outside the expected corral
of the by now endlessly invoked triad of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding.
While Richetti's work had mixed feelings about linking the works of
"hacks" with that of the great writers, and never made claims for the
greatness of this popular lean streak in the substantial meat of the novel, it
broke new ground in reminding readers of the proletarian element in the
history of the novel. Likewise, it opened up the canon to include female
writers, whose appearances in the encomia for the novel were strictly
limited to Jane Austen, George Eliot, and sometimes Virginia Woolf. In
this sense, Richetti's work accomplished a paradoxical goal: it claimed
the novel was great because it was not great. As with critiques during
this period that would be identified with identity politics, Richetti's work
sought the inclusion of the working class, the populace, into any definition
of literature.
The influence of Michel Foucault on all branches of knowledge after the
1960s but particularly on the history of the novel is immeasurable. What
27Leavis, p. 2.
28J.M.S. Tompkins's The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800 (1932) enacted a socialist interest in
working-class literature and was republished in 1967; William McBurney's collection, Four Before
Richardson: Selected English Novels, 1720-1727, was published in 1963.
494 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

Foucault contributed, somewhat indirectly, was the idea that one could
study a variety of seemingly unrelated branches of knowledge or texts,
and link them through the idea of discourse. For Foucault, knowledge was
power, and therefore discourse was not an escape from power, as Adorno
and Horkheimer might have thought, but was an effect of power. Linked
to Foucault's project was a continuing Marxist project that culminated
in an examination of ideology. The work of Louis Althusser and Anto-
nio Gramsci was reinvigorated by a New Left investigation led by Terry
Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Stuart Hall, Edward Said, and others. Combin-
ing with Foucault's interest in the way that power is disbursed throughout
society by discursive practices, ideology studies looked at the particu-
lar forms power took when it intersected with semiological systems, and
particularly the novel. Three works on the early novel appeared heav-
ily influenced by the double barrel of Foucault and ideology: my Factual
Fictions: The Origins ofthe English Novel (1983), Nancy Armstrong's De-
sire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History ofthe Novel (1 987), and John
Bender's Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture ofMind
in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (1987).
All of these works fit into the applied-knowledges model, seeking to use
recent political understandings of generic change, feminism, and surveil-
lance to place the early novel in a new light. Whereas previously the novel
had been seen as a kind of summation of the human urge towards art, cul-
ture, morality, and so on, these works fit into a notion of the novel as
a regulatory political discourse that served to constmct the modem sub-
ject. Further, we begin to see here a deconstmction of the novel as a
discrete form of literature and its placement with genres such as conduct-
books, ballads, or disquisitions on penal reform. The relationship between
ideology and narrative was attached to the ever-in-need-of-renovation De-
foe, who seems to be the perennial favourite in the applied-knowledges
field, in two books published in 1 983, Michael Boardman's Defoe and the
Uses ofNarrative and Geoffrey Sill's Defoe and the Idea of Fiction.
Published in 1987, the same year as Bender's book, Michael McKeon's
The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 approaches the origin of the
novel from a more traditional Marxist perspective. Eschewing Foucault and
post-Marxism in general, the study returns to a more conservative, paradox-
ically, sense of the novel's greatness, of its puzzling progress and inherent
rationality. While interested in applied knowledges, McKeon bases his
knowledge on the philosophical tradition of Marxist dialectics. As such,
he sees the novel as emerging from a gigantic concatenation of intellectual,
cultural, and economic forces. The movement is essentially Hegelian, with
a notion of literary history that parallels Hegel's idea of national history,
 HOW NOVEL ARE THEORIES OF THE NOVEL? 495

only, like Marx's thought, it is Hegelian with an economic rationality. McK-

eon's work has a strangely retrospective air about it, appearing as it does
towards the last decade of the twentieth century. It is really anomalous—
more of a nineteenth or early twentieth-century project that sees large forces
of history at work in narrative forms, and sees the novel as a kind of suc-
cessful evolutionary upstart bom out of the clash between idealism and
empiricism, between romance and novel, between virtue and tmth. Ulti-
mately, it serves to insert "the dialectical process of historical experience"29
into narrative modalities, and as such is part of a metanarrativity that itself
is bom of nineteenth-century fiction.
Feminism had an incomparable effect on the way one wrote about the
early novel and set the stage for other identity-political analyses. Although
class and race had been part of larger political straggles in the first sev-
enty years of the century, feminism managed to have an effect in the
academy that these earlier categories could not achieve. Feminist works
came in at least two waves. The first feminist scholars of the early novel—
Ruth Perry, Susan Staves, Janet Todd, Patricia Craddock, Patricia Meyer
Spacks, and Margaret Anne Doody, among others—sought to rediscover
lost works, recuperate female authors, and explicate the role of female
heroines within a patriarchal stmcture. Their work was parallel, in effect,
to the work that sought to recuperate eighteenth-century novelists in gen-
eral. Before their work, authors such as Mary Astell, Maria Edgeworth,
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Frances Bumey, and others were virtu-
ally unknown and their works largely unavailable. The face of eighteenth-
century fiction and the rise-of-the-novel story had to be completely re-
vised, and the exclusive men's club of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding
disbanded. A second wave of feminists began to explore issues more re-
lated to gender and to include French feminism, deconstmction, Marxism,
cultural studies, queer studies, and disability studies into their work. Such
writers included Nancy Armstrong, Terry Castle, Felicity Nussbaum, Laura
Brown, Julia Epstein, Ellen Pollak, Kristina Straub, Catherine Gallagher,
and many others. Their work, like the other critiques we have seen, in-
volved very intricately applied knowledges. Bringing new justifications
from the human sciences, particularly psychology, sociology, anthropo-
logy, and the newly created interdisciplinary field of gender studies, these
works continued the project of elucidating the formal object of the novel
with allied fields of study.

29 Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1987), p. 42Of.
496 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

Probably most influential in this latter group has been the work of Terry
Castle, whose Clarissa's Ciphers: Meaning and Disruption in Richard-
son 's "Clarissa " (1982), along with Terry Eagleton's The Rape ofClarissa
(1 979) and William Beatty Warner's Reading "Clarissa ": The Struggles of
Interpretation (1979), signalled the beginning of a deconstmctive approach
to feminism and the early novel. And Castle's later works, Masquerade
and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Cul-
ture and Fiction (1 986) and The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century
Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (1995), aided in the introduc-
tion of cultural and queer studies into the discussion of the early novel.
Each of her books participates in applied knowledges—focusing on the
work of Jacques Derrida, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Sigmund Freud, respect-
ively. Unlike earlier feminist projects, however, which sought to reaffirm
the greatness of the novel by the inclusion of excluded "others," Castle's use
of deconstmction, at least in her first book, is indicative of the move to de-
absolutize the novel as a dominant form of narrative. Her current call for
the end of early novel studies is perhaps a legacy of this inaugurating
moment.

Indeed, with the publication of Jean-François Lyotard's The Postmod-

ern Condition (1979; English translation, 1984) and with the work of the
Yale School, notably J. Hillis Miller, faith in the novel as worldly text
and explanatory document began to decline. Lyotard's work declared that
to live at the end of the twentieth century meant that there was in effect
no longer the possibility of narration: "I define postmodern as incredu-
lity toward metanarratives."30 Here we see a crucial turning point in novel
theory. While Conrad may have written about the impossibility of descrip-
tion, he nevertheless described and his critics nevertheless elucidated. But
for Lyotard the project of explaining in narrative is over. Not only is the
issue that postmodernism requires a tearing apart of the textual object of
study, but also it requires a location of the disorder—not the wisdom, philo-
sophy, morality—in the text. Likewise, it questions the applied knowledges
and any notion of a scientific analysis. Narratives, especially coherent, cul-
turally determined narratives like novels, are no longer relevant. Whereas
before we had an over-valuation of novels, now we clearly are involved
in a devaluation. We have also gone from a faith in the possibilities in-
herent in novels, which require a metanarrativity, to a world of plural
narrations, none of which gains a hegemonic enough position to determine
the form or content of novels.

30 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Benning-
ton and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. xxiv.
 HOW NOVEL ARE THEORIES OF THE NOVEL? 497

Feminism gave contemporary identity politics its academic form and

structure. I do not have time to elaborate on this state of affairs
here,31 but suffice it to say that people with various identities—including
non-metropolitan, postcolonial, African-American, Latino/Latina, Asian-
American, non-European, transgendered, gay and lesbian, disabled, and
so on—essentially bring variations of the same applied-knowledges base
to the novel. In doing so, they are part of the larger process of devaluing
the greatness of the novel, and the early novel, by showing how these nar-
ratives participate in dominant culture and political repression. Where this
is not the case, the novel is seen as providing locations and opportunit-
ies of resistance and transgression. So from being the undecoded Rosetta
Stone of mid-century, the novel becomes the rolling stone, the location for
many voices, a Bakhtinian efflorescence of dialogicity which ends up be-
ing not many voices in a socialist community but the uncoordinated voices
of the myriad culturalities of the world. At best, the novel has become a
theatre for the dispossessed and oppressed of the world. The best-known
and most successful works tend to be those by writers whose groups tra-
ditionally have been seen as less or "other." Novel theory, rather than
bringing applied knowledges to these texts, is at present outdistanced by
them. Novel theory now pants to keep up with its object, always in a sec-
ondary elaboration of the characters and plots. The possibilities for applied
knowledges are diminished with a postmodem perspective, and the era of
applying knowledge to fiction seems at an end.
Catherine Gallagher's Nobody 's Story: Vanishing Acts ofWomen Writers
in the Marketplace, 1670-1820 (1994) is the capstone work at the end of
this process. It is the most interdisciplinary of all the books I have men-
tioned. Its strength is that it manages to combine all the applied knowledges
that one must now need in this multicultural, postcolonial, postmodem en-
terprise. Gallagher's book is at once concerned with multiple identity
positions, conscious of race, class, gender, economics, philosophy, narrat-
ive theory, language, and so on. It aims to be both reductive of the novel's
greatness and contributive to an expansion of the novel's role. Gallagher is
conscious of the novel as a discursive practice and a transgressive space.
Yet, her book comes at the end of the applied-knowledges paradigm, and
in a sense makes another work of this encyclopaedic set of interests un-
necessary, not because she covers the ground completely but because she
makes it impossible to revisit it without seeming to imitate.
Two recent books are worth mentioning as signs of the times. One is
Jeffrey Williams's Theory and the Novel: Narrative Reflexivity in the Brit-
ish Tradition (1998). Williams is no longer interested in using applied
31 See my "Who Put the THE in The Novell"
498 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION

knowledges to elucidate the novel. Rather, he sees narrative as a topos of

narrative. His mise en abyme of narrative theory envisions the telling aspect
of narrative as that moment when it digresses, creates frames or intmsions,
embeds stories to create a narrative. Citing Stanley Fish, Williams reiterates
the notion that "literature is always located in the network of the institu-
tion of literature, an institution that usually goes without saying but in a very
real sense prescribes and produces the thing called literature."32 Thus, fol-
lowing a cyborg model, the purpose of Williams's study is "to see narrative
as a technology, as a technical operation inscribing its replication. Very lit-
erally, a primary 'action' that narrative performs is the circulation (telling,
receiving, desiring) of narrative."33 So, novels become those things that
produce novelistic narratives. Likewise, Dorrit Cohn's The Distinction of
Fiction (1999) claims that fiction is fiction because it signals its fiction-
ality. Cohn notes that a novel, for example, is based on the idea that it is
non-referential; that is, it does not refer to a real world. She says of the ad-
jective "non-referential": "first and foremost it signifies that a work of
fiction itself creates the world to which it refers by referring to it."34 The
self-referential, reflexive nature of both of these texts, taken emblemat-
ically, shows us how profound is the comer into which novel theory has
painted itself. Here we have come full circle: from the initial moment of
novel theory, which essentially told writers how to write novels, we now
have a theory that identifies novels as self-producing, self-consuming stmc-
tures. The elusive rationale for the novel's existence, painfully simple in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a will to reproduce reality, has be-
come the very complex inscrutability of a form that reproduces itself like
dna, and probably for the same purpose.
At the end of the twentieth century, the novel has been demoted to a
decentred, non-hegemonic practice trailing a coruscated and excoriated
history. Once a form of criticism endowed with an anaclitic hegemonic
centrality in the embrace of applied knowledges, now novel theory can
only iterate itself by reiterating tautologies about fictionality and narrative.
And the most it can now do is chide novelists for their willed amnesia about
various multiplying identities whose histories have been simultaneously
forgotten and oppressed by regnant power hierarchies. This scenario is
dour, and perhaps even more perplexing than Castle's opening salvo, which
32Jeffrey J. Williams, Theory and the Novel: Narrative Reflexivity in the British Tradition (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. xii.
33Williams, p. 8.
34Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 13.
 HOW NOVEL ARE THEORIES OF THE NOVEL? 499

increasingly looks Pollyannaish by comparison to this jeremiad. Castle saw

the arc of a movement that began in the 1950s, while I am describing a
trajectory with considerably greater antecedents.
It would be easy to say, as Castle does, that we have reached a dead end
and can go no further. But, my point in this scenario, itself a metanarrative,
is that because novel theory has a history it has a future. If metanarratives
are dead, then mine, constmcted in this essay, surely is. But, since I hope
I have actually brought a through-line into a murky and confused set of
actions, I can also hope that there is a resolution, which all good narratives
need.
What we now need is a conceptual leap that might allow another narrative
(I will not say "new," since that word has been deployed too many times
to mean anything resembling new ways of thinking through the novel).
Obviously, we may say that narrative is linked to politics in an intimate
way, since one needs to be able to explain in a longish story, over time, the
way in which power operates. We have come to feel, at the beginning of
the twenty-first century, and Lyotard has said as much, that there can be no
long story. Therefore, we have seen apathy, passivity, lack of attention to
history (which cannot exist under Lyotard's definition of the postmodem),
the fragmentation of data banks and the Internet, and so on, as explanations
and justifications for the end of the narrativity. But this isolate hopelessness
seems only an illusion, if the events taking place in Seattle and elsewhere
as I write are any indication. For fifty thousand people to come from all
over the northern hemisphere to protest the existence of the World Trade
Organization, a shadowy formation whose aim is to erase any narrative of
its being, is surely a sign that narrations are at work. Who told this story,
and how did they tell it? That is the beginning of novel theory as it is of
political theory. So, like Walter Benjamin, we have to think in a somewhat
Messianic way of the present as many beginnings. As Benjamin put it,
a historical materialist sees "a revolutionary chance in the fight for the
oppressed past ... [and] takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific
era out of the homogenous course of history—blasting a specific life out
of the era or a specific work out of a lifework."35 For the novel, its end is
in its beginning, and the seeming end of novel theory may only be this
beginning.
Binghamton University (State University of New York)

35 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken,
1969), p. 263.