El Arte (Dramático) de la Vida

 

 Henry Fielding, Amelia, I.1

Capítulo Primero: Que sirve de Introducción:

Veránse en esta Historia los diversos accidentes que sucedieron a dos dignos esposos después de su unión con los estrechos lazos del matrimonio. La mayor parte de las desgracias que tuvieron que sufrir fueron tan grandes, y los incidentes que las causaron tan extraordinarios, que parecen haber apurado toda la malicia y las invenciones más exquisitas que la superstición atribuye a la Fortuna. Que la Fortuna pueda tener parte en nuestras cosas, ni aun que exista semejante ente en el Universo, es lo qeu yo me guardaré muy bien de decir. En todos tiempos ha sido injusta con la Fortuna la voz pública, atribuyéndole gran número de sucesos, en los cuales no tiene ella parte alguna. Muy duro se me hace que no sea posible explicar por medios naturales la ventura de los malvados, las desgracias de los necios y todas las miserias que las personas sensatas se acarrean ellas mismas muchas veces por abandonar las sendas de la prudencia, y seguir ciegamente los movimientos de su pasión dominante; en una palabra, todos aquellos acontecimientos de que se acusa por lo ordinario a la Fortuna, aunque no se tenga más fundamento para ello ,que el que uno que juega mal tiene para quejarse de su desgracia en el ajedrez.

Si los hombres maldicen las más veces sin motivo a este ente imaginario, también se hallarán precisados a recompensarle de este agravio, dándole en otras ocasiones el honor que no merece tampoco. Salir de las tristes consecuencias de una imprudente conducta, vencer a la desgracia luchando valerosamente contra ella, es uno de los más nobles esfuerzos de la prudencia y de la virtud. Y así el que llamase a semejante hombre afortunado, se explicaría tan impropiamente como el que diese el mismo nombre a un Escultor o a un Poeta por haber hecho una Venus o una Ilíada.

La vida, así como cualquier otra cosa  puede ser mirada como un arte, y no deben tenerse los grandes incidentes de ella por casualidad, como no se tienen por tales los diferentes miembros de una Estatua, o de un excelente Poema. Los Críticos no se contentan con ver en todo esto que una cosa es grande; quieren saber cómo y por qué lo es. Examinando con cuidado los diferentes grados, por los cuales todo modelo llega a la perfección, aprendemos a conocer verdaderamente la ciencia que con este modelo se ha formado. Ahora, pues, las historias del género de ésta pueden, con razón, pasar por modelos de la Vida Humana, y así el reflexionar sobre las particularidades de los diversos incidentes que se enderezan a la catástrofe o al complemento del todo, y sobre las más pequeñas causas que han atraído estos incidentes, es el medio más propio para instruirnos en la más útil de todas las artes, que yo llamo El Arte de la Vida.

 

Henry Fielding: Tom Jones

The Eighteenth-century Novel (Saintsbury)

From George Saintsbury's A History of English Literature.
Book IX: Middle and Later Eighteenth-century Literature.  

 Ch. II, "The Eighteenth-century Novel"

Richardson - Fielding - Smollett - Sterne - Minor novelists - Walpole - Beckford - Mrs. Radcliffe - Lewis


Some reference has been made earlier to the differences, or rather the hesitations, of opinion in reference to the exact history of the English novel (1). But for general purposes these may be neglected. The early prose romance, the Euphuist innovation, major and minor, the philosophical or Utopian fantasy, the brief Elizabethan tale, the long-winded translations or imitations of the Scudéry Heroic story, the picaresque miscellany, and the like, are stages obvious as the general history unfolds itself. As to the exact position which the great names of Bunyan and of Defoe hold, difference may be agreed to with resignation. What is certain is that about the beginning of the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the period immediately succeeding the appearance of Defoe's work, there began a development of the prose novel, and that this, partly though by no means wholly owing to one group of great writers in the style, had made very great progress by the beginning of the third, about which time we find lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Italy receiving boxes full of new novels from her daughter in England.

(1) This history has been put briefly, but with much knowledge and grace, in Mr. W. A. Raleigh's The English Novel (London, 1894).

It is so difficult to mark out the precise stages by which the modern novel came into being, that the wisest critics have abstained from attempting it. We can only say that, for the nearly three generations which passed between the Restoration and the publication of Richardson's Pamela, there was an ever greater determination and concentration towards completed prose fiction; and that the use of the general form in two such different ways by two such different men as Swift and Defoe is sufficient proof how near, by the end of the second decade or so, that completed form was. But there was not much general practice of it (1). Mrs. Manley and Mrs. Haywood, women of no very good reputation, followed in the footsteps of Afra Behn, and achieved a certain popularity, but the novels of the former are thinly-veiled political libels. The earlier books of Mrs. Haywood are in seventeenth-century styles, and though she lived to do better in Betsy Thoughtless (1751) and Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (1753), these were not published till long after the three great re-creators of the novel had shown the way. To them, therefore, we may as well turn at once. 

(1) The minor novels of the eighteenth century are not generally accessible save in the original editions. There is, indeed, one useful and rather full collection, Harrison's Novelists, but, as a whole, it is very bulky, and duplicates much that every one has on his shelves in other forms. Richardson has been sometimes, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Miss Burney have been often, reprinted.

Richardson

Samuel Richardson, by a great deal the oldest, by a little the precursor in actual publication, and indirectly the inspirer of his greatest and nearest successor, was born in 1689 in Derbyshire, his father being a joiner, his mother of rather higher rank. He went to Charterhouse, and was apprenticed in 1706 to a printer, whose daugher he afterwards married. After setting up for himself he became very prosperous, had a house in Salisbury Court, Fleet Street, and another, first at North End, then at Parson's Green, was Master of the Stationers' Company in 1754, and King's Printer in 1761. A year later he died of apoplexy. He was contented for many years to print books without writing them, and he was past fifty when a commission or suggestion from two well-known London publishers, Rivington and Osborne, for a sort of Model Letter-writer (he had in his youth practised as an amateur in this art) led to the composition of Pamela, which (at least the first part of it) was published in 1740, and became very popular. Richardson had already made some acquaintance with persons of a station superior to his own, and the fame of his book enlarged this, while it also tempted him to fly higher. In 1748 he produced Clarissa, which is usually considered his masterpiece, and in 1753 Sir Charles Grandison. Except one paper in The Adventurer, he published nothing else, but left an enormous mass of correspondence. Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, gives the story of a girl of low degree who, resisting temptation, marries her master, and in the second and less good part reclaims him from irregular courses; Clarissa, that of a young lady of family and fortune, who, partly by imprudence, partly by misfortune, falls a prey to the arts of the libertine Lovelace and, resisting his offers of marriage, dies of a broken heart, to be revenged in a duel by her cousin; Sir Charles Grandison, that of a young man of still higher family and larger fortune, who is almost faultless, and constantly successful in all his endeavours, and who, after being the object of the adoration of two beautiful girls, the Italian Clementina della Porretta and the English Harriet Byron, condescends to make the latter happy. Richardson's expressed, and beyond the slightest doubt his sincere, purpose in all was, not to produce works of art, but to enforce lessons of morality. Yet posterity, while pronouncing his morals somewhat musty and even at times a little rancid, has recognised him as a great, though by no means an impeccable, artist. It is noteworthy that his popularity was as great abroad as at home—indeed, it far exceeded that which any English writer, except Scott and Byron, has obtained on the Continent during his lifetime. His adoption of the letter-form influenced novelists very powerfully, and though his style and spirit were less imitable, there is no doubt that they practically founded the novel of analysis and feeling, as distinguished from the romance of adventure.

His fault is an excessive long-windedness (Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison are by far the longest novels of great merit in English, if not in any language), an inability, which grew upon him, to construct a stroy with any diversified and constantly lively interest, an almost total lack of humour, and a teasing and meticulous  minuteness of sentimental analysis, and history of motive and mood. To those Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, a formidable critic, added, justly enough, though not so importantly from our point of view as from hers, an ignorance of the society which, in his two later novels, he endeavours to depict. His merits, on the other hand, are a faculty of vivid, though too elaborate, presentation of the outward accessories of his scenes; a real, though somewhat limp, grasp of conversation; an intense, though not very varied or extensive, mastery of pathos; and, above all, a one-sided, partial, but intimate and true, knowledge of human motive, sentiment, and even conduct, his time being considered. The proviso is necessary; and the overlooking of it (with perhaps some personal reasons) was at the bottom of Johnson's now almost incomprehensible preference of Richardson over Fielding. Richardson knew the feminine character of his time with a quite extraordinary thoroughness and accuracy, though his men are much less good; whereas Fielding knew both men and women first, eighteenth-century men and women only afterwards, and however well, in a minor degree. Nor, though Johnson had plenty of humour himself, was he likely to resent the absence of it in Richardson, as he resented the presence of a kind different from his own in Fielding.

Great, however, as are Richardson's qualities, and immense as was the impetus which his popularity and his merits combined gave to the English novel, he cannot be said to have given that novel anything like a final or universal form. The scheme of letters, though presenting to the novelist some obvious advantages and conveniences, which have secured it not merely immediate imitation but continuance even to the present day, has disadvantages as obvious, and can never rise to the merits of prose narrative from the outside (1). But it is one of not the least curiosities of literature that the attainment of the true and highest form actually resulted from an exercise in parody, which certainly, cannot be regarded as in itself a very high, and has sometimes been regarded as almost the lowest, form of literature. It is less curious, and much less unexampled, that the author of this parody was a man who had already tried, with no very distinguished success, quite different kinds of writing.

(1) In combination it can do wondrously, as in Redgauntlet.

Fielding

Henry Fielding was born at Sharpham Park, in the south of Somerset, on 22nd April 1707. His birth was higher than that of any mano of letters of all work who had preceded him. The house of Fielding claimed kindred with that of Hapsburh; it had ranked among English gentry since the twelfth century; and in the century before the novelist's birth it had been ennobled by two peerages, the earldom of Denbigh in England and that of Desmond in Ireland. Herny Fielding himself was great-grandson of the first Earl of Desmond of this creation, but was, of course, unconnected with the great Geraldines who came to an end when they rebelled against Elizabeth. His grandfather was a canon of Salisbury, his father a general in the army who had seen service under Marlborough; his mother's father was a Justice of the King's Bench, and it was at his house that the novelist was born. Nor is it to be omitted that he was a near cousin of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose mother was a Fielding.

But though his pedigree was thus undeniable, his immediate forebears had for two generations been younger sons, and his own patrimony was little or nothing. He was, indeed, well educated at Eton and at Leyden, but he seems to have found himself at twenty-one in London with a nominal allowance and no particular interest for any profession, though, like other young gentlemen, he was of the Inns of Court. He turned to the stage, and for not quite ten years produced a large number of plays, neither very bad nor very good, of which Tom Thumb, a burlesque "tragedy of tragedies," is perhaps the best, and certainly the only one which has kept any reputation. About 1735 he seems to have married a Miss Charlotte Craddock, who was very beautiful, very amiable, and an heiress in a small way; but whether, as legend asserts, Fielding really set up for a country gentleman on the strength of her fortune, and spent it on hounds and showy liveries, is quite uncertain. His theatrical enterprises being interfered with by some new legislation in 1737, he turned seriously to the law, was called to the Bar, and practised or at least went on circuit, while in 1739 he contributed largely to the Champion, a paper on the Spectator pattern (1). His first published, though probably not his first written novel, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, appeared in February 1742, when its author was almost exactly thirty-five. It was successful, and next year Fielding published three volumes of Miscellanies, the important parts of which are A Journey from this World to the Next, in the Lucianic manner which Tom Brown had made popular, and the mighty ironic story of Jonathan Wild. His wife died soon after this publication, and he married again but not for some years afterwards. He returned to periodical essay-writing (the True Patriot and the Jacobite's Journal) in '45 on the Whig side, and in 1759 he produced his third and greatest novel, Tom Jones. Meanwhile, Lyttelton had obtained for him the position of Bow Street Magistrate, as it was called, or Justice of the Peace for Westminster, an office which, though poorly paid, was of enormous importance, for its holder practically had the police of London, outside the City, in his hands. He dischrged its duties to admiration, and found time not merely to publish his last novel, Amelia, in 1751, but to conduct the Covent Garden Journal for the greater part of 1752. His health, however, was ruined, and, trying to restore it by travel, he undertook in June 1754 the voyage to Lisbon which forms the subject of his last book, issued after his death. He reached the Portuguese capital in August, but died on the 8th of October.

(1). Fielding's dramatic, periodical, and miscellanous works must be sought in their original editions, the best of which is in 4 vols. 4to (London, 1762), or in the great édition de luxe of Mr. Leslie Stephen. The present writer attempted a selection from them in the last volume of an issue of the novels, the Journey, and the Voyage, which he superintended (12 vols. London, 1893).

Fielding's first novel started as a deliberate burlesque of Pamela. Its hero is the brother of Richardson's heroine, and her trials are transferred to this Joseph. Nor did Fielding ostensibly give up his scheme throughout the book; but his genius was altogether too great to allow him to remain in the narrow and beggarly elements of parody, and after the first few Chapters, we forget all about Richardson's ideas and morals. The great character of Mr. Abraham Adams—a poor curate, extremely unworldly, but no fool, a scholar, a tall an of his hands, and a very Good Samaritan of ordinary life—is only the centre and chief of a crowd of wonderfully lifelike characters, all of whom perform their parts with a verisimilitude which had never been seen before off the stage, and very seldom there; while the new scheme of narrative gave an infinitely wider and more varied scope than the stage ever could give. Moreover, one of the instruments of this vivid presentation—an instrument the play of which not seldom sufficed in itself to make the literary result—was a very peculiar irony, almost as intense as Swift's, though less bitter, indeed hardly bitter at all, and dealing with life in a fashion which, but for being much more personal and much less poetic, is very nearly of the same kind as Shakespeare's.

In his next published book, Jonathan Wild, this irony predominates, and is more severe. The hero was a historical personage, an audacious and ingenious blend of thief and thief-taker, who had been hanged ten years earlier. Fielding's ostensible object in composing an imaginary party-history of him was to satirise the ideas of "greatness" entertained by the ordinary historian—a design showing not imitation of, but sympathy with, certain ways of thought diversely illustrated by Swift and Voltaire. But his genius, intensely creative, once more broke away from this ideal—though the ironic side of Jonathan Wild is stronger than anything else in English or any literature outside the Tale of a Tub, and so strong that the book has probably on the whole shocked, pained, or simply puzzled more readers than it has pleased. But it is really as full of live personages as Joseph Andrews itself; and if these, being drawn almost entirely from the basest originals, cannot be so agreeable as the not more true but far more sympathetic characters of the earlier-published novel, they are, as literature, equally great, and perhaps more astonishing.

It was, however, in his third and longest novel, Tom Jones, that Fielding attained a position unquestionable by anything save mere prejudice or mere crotchet. Joseph Andrews had been, at least in inception, only a parody, and Jonathan Wild mainly a satire; the former, though not destitute of plot, had had but an ordinary and sketchy one, and the latter chiefly adapted actual facts to a series of lifelike but not necessarily connected episodes. Tom Jones, on the contrary, is as artfully constructed as the most nicely proportioned drama, and, long as it is, there is hardly a character or an incident (with the exception of some avowed episodic passages, made tolerable and almost imperative by the taste of the day and the supposed example of the classical epic) which is not strictly adjusted to the attainment of the story's end. To us, perhaps, this is a less attraction than the vividness of the story itself, the extraordinarily lifelike presentation of character, and (though this is a charm less universally admitted) the piquancy of the introductory passages. In these (after a manner no doubt copied from the parabases or addresses to the audience in the chorus of the older Attic comedy, and itself serving, beyond all doubt likewise, as a model to the later asides of Thackeray — Fielding takes occasion sometimes to discuss his own characters, sometimes to deal with more general points. But the characters themselves, and the vivacity with which they are set to work, are the thing. The singular humanity of Tom Jones himself, a scapegrace even according to the ideas of his time, but a good fellow; the benevolence, not mawkish or silly, of Allworthy; the charms and generosity of Sophia; the harmless foibles of Miss Western, the aunt, and the coarse but not offensive clownishness of her brother, the Squire, with the humours of Partridge the schoolmaster, and others, have always satisfied good judges. Even among the black sheep, Lady Bellaston, shameless as she is, is a lady; and at the other end of the scale, Black George, rascal as he is, is a man. Only perhaps the villain Blifil is not exactly human, not so much by reason of his villainy, as because Fielding, for some reason, has chosen to leave him so.

There is somewhat less power and life in Amelia, though its sketches of London society in the lower and middle classes are singularly vivid, and though the character of the heroine as an amiable wife, not so much forgiving injuries as signoring their commission, has been almost idolised by some. But no other novelist of the time — and by this the novelists were numerous — could have written it.

On the whole, if we are to pronounce the novel as such present for the first time in the pages of any writer, it must be in those of Fielding rather than in those of Richardson. Johnson, in his prejudice, endeavored to set the latter above the former by comparing Fielding to a man who can only tell the time, and Richardson to one who can put together the watch. The point may be very stoutly argued; but if it be admitted, it can be turned against Johnson. For Fielding does tell the clock of nature with absolute and universal correctness, while Richardson's ingenious machinery sometimes strikes twenty-five o'clock, and constantly gives us seconds, thirds, and other troublesome details instead of putting us in possession of the useful time of day. And in fact the comparison itself will not really hold water. Fielding does not parade his mechanism as Richardson does, but his command of it is every whit as true, and in reality as delicated. He first in English (1), he thoroughly, and he in a manner unsurpassable, put humanity into fictitious working after such a fashion that the effect hitherto produced only by the dramatist and poet, the practical re-creation and presentation of life, was achieved in the larger and fuller manner possible only to the prose novelist.

(1) "In English," for, as he himself was eager to confess, Cervantes in Spanish had not merely preceded him, but had served as his model.

Smollett

The novels of Tobias George Smollett relapse in appearance and general plan upon a form — that of the "picaresque" or adventure-novel — older than that of Fielding or even of Richardson; but in reality they contributed largely to the development of the new fiction. Their author was born in 1721 at Dalquhurn, in the West of Scotland, and was a member of a good family, of which, had he lived a little longer, he would have become the head. He was born, however, the younger son of a younger son, and the harsh treatment of Roderick Random by his relations has been thought to reflect upon his own grandfather, Sir James Smollett of Bonhill, Judge of the Commissary Court of Scotland, M.P., and Commissioner for the Union. However this may be, Smollett, though well educated, had to make his own way in the world, and was apprenticed to a Glasgow surgeon. He practised at different times during his life, but his real profession was literature, by which he set out to make his fortune in London at the age of eighteen. He did not make it with a bad and boyish tragedy, The Regicide (1), but took the place of surgeon's mate on board a man-of-war in the Carthagena expedition of 1640. He does not seem to have served long, but remained for some years in the West Indies, and probably they married his wife, Anne Lascelles, a small heiress. Returning to England he tried poems and plays with no success, and then in 1748 turned to novel-writing with a great deal, as the deserved reward of Roderick Random. 

From this time onward, Smollett was a novelist by taste and genius, and a man of letters of all work by necessity. In the former capacity he wrote and published Peregrine Pickle (1751), Ferdinand, Count Fathom (1753), Sir Lancelot Greaves in 1760, and in 1771 Humprey Clinker. In the latter he edited the Critical Review, wrote a very popular and profitable History of England, gave an account, in an ill-tempered but not uninteresting book, of his Travels in France and Italy, and did a great deal of miscellaneous work, including a fierce and foul, but rather dull, political lampoon, The Adventures of an Atom. His health, between hard work and the hard living then usual, brok down early, and making a second visit to italy, he died at Leghorn in October 1771.

(1) Smollett's plays and poems are seldom reprinted with the numerous editions of his novels, but may be found in Chalmers; his History is on all the stalls; his criticism and miscellaneous works have never been, and are never likely to be collected in full. The Travels, which are worth reading, have been more than once reprinted.

Smollett's miscellaneous work, though almost always competent, and sometimes much more, need not detain us; his novels, excellent in themselves, are of the highest historical importance. It has been said that he fell back on the adventure-scheme. Plot he hardly attempted; and even, as regards incident, he probably, as Thackeray says, "did not invent much," his own varied experiences and his sharp eye for humorous character giving him abundant material. In Roderick Random he uses his naval experiences, and perhaps others, to furnish forth the picture of a young Scotchman, arrogant, unscrupulous, and not too amiable, but bold and ready enough; in Peregrine Pickle he gives that of a spendthrift scapegrace, heir to wealth; in Fathom he draws a professional chevalier d'industrie. The strange fancy which made him attempt a sort of "New Quixote" in Sir Launcelot Greaves has seldom been regarded as happy, either in inception or inresult; but in Humphrey Clinker we have the very best of all his works. It is written in the letter form, the scenes and humours of many places in England and Scotland are rendered with admirable picturesqueness, while the book has seldom been excelled for humorous character of the broad and farcical kind. Matthew Bramble, the testy hypochondriac squire who is at heart one of the best of men, and in head not one of the foolishes; his sour-visaged and greedy sister Tabitha; her maid Winifred Jenkins, who has learnt the art of grotesque misspelling from Swift's Mrs. Harris, and has improved upon the teaching; the Scotch soldier of fortune, Lismahago, — these are among the capital figures of English fiction, and in the earlier books are the Welsh surgeon's mate Morgan, Commodore Trunnion, and others.

Besides this conception of humorous if somewhat rough character, and a remarkable faculty of drawing interiors which acompanies it, and in which he perhaps even excels Fielding, Smollett made two very important contributions too the English novel. The first was the delineation of national types in which he, almost for the first time, reduced and improved the stock exaggerations of the stage to a human and artistic temper. The second, not less important, was the introduction, under proper limitations, of the professional interest. He had, though less of universality than Fielding, yet enough of it to be successful with types in which he had only observation, not experiment, to guide him, but he was naturally most fortunate with what he knew from experience, sailors and "medical gentlemen." Until his time the sailor had been drawn almost entirely from the outside in English literature. Smollett first gives him to us in his habit as he lived, and long continued to live. To these great merits must be added one or two drawbacks — a hardness and roughness of tone approaching ferocity, and not more distinguished from the somewhat epicene temper of Richardson than from the manly but kindly spirit of Fielding, and an exreme coarseness of imagery and language — a coarseness which can hardly be called immoral, but which is sometimes positively revolting.


Sterne 


One element, however, or one special conmixture of elements, remained to be added in fiction, and then (if we except such minor varieties as the terror-novel to be handled shortly) it remained with no important addition or progress until the day of Scott and Miss Austen within the present [19th] century. This was supplied, that the three kingdoms might be separately and proportionately represented, by Laurence Sterne (1), an Irishman by birth at least, and something of an Irishman in temperament.

(1) The standard edition of Sterne — novels, sermons and not quite complete letters — is in 10 vols. The work other than the novels has been often omitted in reprints; but, as in the case of Fielding, the present writer has arranged a selection from it in 2 vols (London, 1894).

 The Sternes were an East-Anglian family which, after a member became Archbishop of York in the seventeenth century, was chiefly connected with Yorkshire. Laurence was the son of Roger Sterne, a captain in the army, who was the younger son of Simons Sterne of Erlington, third son of the Archbishop, and he was born at Clonmell, where his father was quartered, in 1713, was educated at Halifax, and went thence to Jesus College, Cambridge, of which, many years before, the Archbishop had been Master. He took his degree in 1736, and orders soon afterwards, receiving the livings of Sutton and Stillington as well as minor preferment in York chapter. He married Elizabeth Lumley in 1741, and for some twenty years seems to have felt, or at any rate indulged, no literary ambition. But on New Year's Day 1760 there appeared in York and London the first volume of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. It was immediately popular, it made its author a lion in the capital and it turned his attention definitely to literary work, society, and foreign travel. During the remaning nine years of his life he continued Tristram Shandy at intervals, issued some volumes of Sermons, travelled and resided abroad, and embodied some of the results of this travel in A Sentimental Journey. This last appeared only just before his death, after some previous escapes from long disease, on 18th March 1768.

Sterne's work — his Sermons  even to some degree, his two novels to a much greater — is the most deliberately and ostentatiously eccentric in the higher ranges of English literature; and being so, contains an element of mere trick, which inevitably impairs its value. If a man will not, and does not, produce his effects withouth such mechanical devices as continual dashes, stars, points, and stopped sentences, even blank pages, blackened pages, marbled pages, and the like, he must lay his account with the charge that he cannot produce them without such apparatus. The charge, however, is in Sterne's case unjust; for though the "clothes-philosophy" of his style is fantastically adjusted, there is a real body both of style and of matter beneath.

Tristram Shandy, the pretended history of a personage who rarely appears, is, in fact, a "rigmarole" of partly original, partly borrowed, humour, arranged in the syle which the French call fatrasie, and of which Rabelais' great books are the most familiar, though not quite the normal, type. Although Tristram himself is the shadow of a shade, Sterne manages to present the most vivid character-pictures of his father, Walter Shandy, and his Uncle Toby (the latter the author's most famous, if not his greatest, creation), together with others, not much less achieved, of Corporal Trim, Uncle Toby's servant and comrade in the Marlborough wars, Mrs. Shandy, Widow Wadman, Dr. Slop, and others. And he thus gives a real novel-substance to a book which coould otherwise hardly pretend to the title of a novel at all. The Sentimental Journey, a pretended (and no doubt partly real) autobiographic account of a journey through France to the Italian frontier, is planned on no very different general principles, and has its own medallions of character, though they are less elaborately worked and less closely grouped.

Both books depend for their literay effect on a large number of means — out-of-the-way reading, of which Sterne availed himself with a freedom which has brought upon him the charge of plagiarism; very real though occasionally exaggerated pathos; a curiosly fertile though not extremely varied fancy; and a considerable indulgence, not in coarseness of the Smollettian kind, but in indecent hint and innuendo.  But their main appeal lies in two things — a kind of humour which, though sometimes artificial and seldom reaching the massive and yet mobile humanity of Fielding, has a singular trick of grace, and a really intimate knowledge of human nature, combined and contrasted with a less natural quality, to which Frnace at the time gave the name of "Sensibility" and England that of "Sentiment." It was this last which gave Sterne his immediate popularity, though perhaps for a generation or two past that popularity has been rather endangered by it; and it is still this which gives him his most distinct place, though not his greatest value, in literary history. For it, like the prominence of a less definite kind of the same quality in Richardson, shows the reaction from the rather excessive hardness and prosaic character of the earlier decades. This reaction was not yet directed in the right way. It was still powdered and patched, deliberate, artificial, fashionable. It bore to true passion very much the same relation which the mannerism of Ossian bore to true romance, and Strawberry Hill Gothic to real Pointed architecture. It was theatrical and mawkish; it sometimes toppled over into the ludicrous, or the disgusting, or both. But it shows at worst a blind groping after something that could touch the heart as well as amuse the head. 

Minor novelists

Perhaps it was the popularity of Richardson and Fielding, as early as the first years of the fifth decade of the century, but more probably the aura or prevalent tendency of general thought, which brought about a great expansion and multiplication of the novel about 1750 (1).

(1) Most of the books mentioned from this point to the end of the chapter will be found in the above-noted collection of Harrison, or in Scott's Ballantyne novels, sometimes in both. The latter, in ten capacious but unwieldy volumes, contains all the four great novelists (including Smollett's translations), the Adventures of a Guinea, Johnson's, Walpole's, and Goldsmith's novels, Mackenzie, Bage, Mrs. Radcliffe, Gulliver's Travels, Cumberland's Henry, and Clara Reeve's Old English Baron. 

Few of the minor results of this retain much reputation even with students of the subject, and most are not over-accessible.Some of them have obtained an additional prop from the mention and criticism of Lady Mary (vide supra et infra). We have mentioned Mrs. Haywood's books. Francis Coventry's Pompey the Little (1751) was the most amusing, as Charles Johnstone's Chrysal, or The Adventures of a Guinea (1760) was the most powerful, of a kind of personal fiction whereof a memorable example survives in the Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, inserted (one regrets to say for money) by Smollett in Peregrine Pickle, and doubtless rewritten by him from the materials of the beautiful and liberal Viscountess Vane. The too notorious Dr. Dodd attempted to combine Sterne and Smollett, and succeeded in combining the most objectionable parts of each without any of their genius, in The Sisters; Dr. Hawkesworth followed Dr. Johnson with steps of his usual inequality in Almoran and Hamet (1761). But the most interesting work in fiction of the middle of the century is to be found in two books, eccentric in more senses than one. John Buncle (1750-66) and The Fool of Quality (1766-70). The first was the work, though by no means the only work, of a curious Irishman named Thomas Amory, who was born in 1691 and died in 1788, who assures us that he was intimate with Swift, and on whom it would be extremely interesting to have Swift's opinion. Amory began in 1755, with a book, not improbably composed on French models and called Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain. But this, though interesting, pales before the Life of John Buncle, Esq. The hero is an enthusiastic Unitarian, the husband of seven wives of surpassing beauty, a man of letters in a way, a man of science and distinctly marked with the madness which no doubt existed in a temperate and intangible form in his creator. The book, which is entirely sui generis, fascinated Hazlitt, and has been reprinted, but never widely read.

A much more respectable and an almost equally interesting book, though a worse novel, seeing that it attempts innumerable things which the novel cannot manage, is The Fool of Quality. The author of this, Henry Brooke, was like Amory and Irishman, was born in County Cavan in 1703, and died at Dublin in 1783. He was, also like Amory, mad, and died so. He had money, education, and abundant ability, while in his earlier manhood he was familiar with the best literary society of London. In 1735 he published a poem called Universal Bounty, which is worth notice, though it has been too highly praised; four years later a play, Gustavus Vasa. The Fool of Quality, or The Adventures of Henry, Earl of Morland, is a wholly unpractical book and a chaotic history, but admirably written full of shrewdness and wit, and of a singularly chivalrous tone. Nor must we leave out the really exquisite Peter Wilkins, of an almost unknown author, Robert Paltock, which appeared in 1751. In conception it was a sort of following of Gulliver, but Paltock has little satire and no misanthropy, and the charm of his book, which once was a boys' book, and now delights some men, depends on his ingenious wonders, and on the character of the flying girl Youwarkee, the only heroine (except Fielding's) of the eighteenth-century novel who has very distinct charm.

Walpole 

The contributions of Johnson and Goldsmith to the novel will be best mentioned with their other work. But the history, as we can give it here, of eighteenth-century fiction proper is incomplete without a notice of the curious terror-novel which, anticipated by Horace Walpole, had its special time in the last decade of the century, the work of Fanny Burney, that of Mackenzie, and some others. Walpole himself will occupy us later. The incongruity of most of his work and character with the Castle of Otranto has always attracted and puzzled critics; nor is there perhaps any better explanation than that the Castle, momentous as its example proved, was mainly an accident of that half-understood devotion to "the Gothick" which was common at the time (1764) and of which Walpole as a dilettante, if not as a sincere disciple, was one of the chief English exponents. The story is a clumsy one, and its wonders are perpetually hovering on the verge of the burlesque. But its influence, though not immediate, was exceedingly great.

Its nearest successor, the Old English Baron of Clara Reeve in 1777, imitated rather Walpole's Gothicism than its ghostliness. Nor can the extremely remarkable and almost isolated novelette of Vathek (1783) be set down to Walpolian influence thoguh it undoubtedly did exemplify certain general tendencies of the day. Its author, William Beckford, was the son of a rather prominent politician in the city of London, and inherited very great wealth. He travelled a good deal, leaving much later literary memorials of his travels; he collected books; he built two gorgeous palaces, one in England, at Fonthill in Wiltshire, and another in Portugal, at Cintra; and he in many respects was, and perhaps deliberately aimed at being, the ideal English "milord" of continental fancy—rich, eccentric, morose, generous at times, and devoted to his own whimsical will. Such a character is generally contemptible in reality, but Beckford possessed very great intellectual ability, and Vathek stands alone. Its debts to the old Oriental tale are more apparent than real, those to the fantastic satirical romance of Voltaire, though larger, do not impair its main originaly; and a singular gust is imparted to its picture of unbridled power and unlimited desire by the remembrance that the author himself was, in not such a very small way, the insatiable voluptuary he draws. The picture of the Hall of Eblis at the end has no superior in a certain slightly theatrical, but still real, kind of sombre magnificence, and the heroine Nouronihar is great.

Mrs. Radcliffe

Mrs. Radcliffe (Anne Ward)—who was born in 1764, and did not die until 1822, but who published nothing after the beginning of the nineteenth century, though some work of hers appeared posthumously—produced in the course of a few years a series of elaborate and extremely popular work, which has not retained its vitality so well as has Vathek—The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), the celebrated Mysteries of Udolpho (1795), and The Italian (1797). Mrs. Radcliffe is prodigal of the mysteries which figure in the title of her most famous work, of castles and forests, of secret passages and black veils; but her great peculiarity is the constant suggestion of supernatural interferences, which conscientious scruple, or eighteenth-century rationalism, or a mere sense of art, as constantly leads her to explain by natural causes.

Lewis

Matthew Lewis, her successor, and (though he denied it) pretty certainly her imitator, had no such scruples, and in his notorious Monk and other stories and dramas simply lavished ghosts and demons. This department of the novel, unless Vathek be ranked in it, nothing of very high literary value, but its popularity was immense, and it probably did some real good by enlarging the sphere and quickening the fancy of the novelist. 

There are more than a few names of note who might be criticized if space permitted, and who must at any rate be mentioned. Henry Mackenzie (1745-1831), who followed Sterne in sentiment, though not in other ways, drew floods of tears with The Man of Feeling (1771), The Man of the World, and Julia de Roubigné; the political philosopher Godein, who will reappear, produced, besides his still famous Caleb Williams (1794), other novels, St. Leon (1799), Fleetwood, Mandeville, etc.; Holcroft the dramatist (1745-1809) gave Alwyn, Hugh Trevor,  and especially Anna St. Ives (1792); Robert Bage, a freethinking Quaker and a man of business, wrote no less than six fictions, some of them of great lenght; Mrs. Inchbald (1753-1821), a beauty, an actress, a dramatist, and a novelist, gave to her Simple Story a certain charm; Hannah More (1745-1833), who was petted by Johnson in her youth, and petted the child Macaulay in her age, wrote Cœlebs in Search of a Wife, a moral novel not untinged with social satire. The Zeluco of Dr. John Moore (1719-1802) is not insignificant. But the most important, though far from the most gifted, novelist of the latter years of the century was Frances Burney (1752-1840), the daughter of a historian of music, who was the intimate friend of Johnson and most of the men of letters of his time, a pet of the great lexicographer and of the society of the Thrales, for some time a member of the household of Queen Charlotte, and then the wife of a French refugee. From him she took the name Madame D'Arblay, by which she is more commonly known as a diarist, though almost the whole of that delightful part of her work deals with her maiden years. Miss Burney wrote in Evelina (1778) a not very well-arranged but extremely lively picture of the entrance of a young girl into society; in Cecilia (1781) a much more ambitious and regular but less fresh story of love and family pride. Her later novels, Camilla (1796) and The Wanderer (1814) were, the former, a partial, the latter a complete, failure. Her importance, however, consists in the fact  that, at any rate in youth, she had a singular knack of catching the tone and manners of ordinary and usual society, and that by transferring these to her two first books she showed a way which all novelists have followed since. Her great predecessors of the middle of the century had not quite done this. Some of the stock ingredients of the older novel are indeed thrown in for Evelina's benefit—the discovery of parentage, the bold attempts of unscrupulous lovers, etc. — but they are of no real importance in the story, which draws its entire actual interest from the faithful presentation of the most possible, probable, and ordinary events and characters.

Daiches on Sterne

—oOo—

Fielding - The history of Tom Jones, a foundling (parts 3-4-5)

TOM JONES (from a TV series on Fielding's novel)

Notes from Robert Alter's 'Partial Magic'

Notes from Robert Alter's book Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley: U of California P, 1975).  Notes taken c. 1990.


Levin: All novels are self-conscious.

Preface:

ix. There is an expectation that fiction be serious and realistic, dealing with "moral situations in their social contexts"; "and, with few exceptions, there has been a lamentable lack of critical appreciation for the kind of novel that expresses its seriousness through playfulness, that is acutely aware of itself as a mere structure of words even as it tries to discover ways of going beyond words to the experiences words seek to indicate." Leavis dismisses Fielding, Sterne and Joyce.

x. In the Marxist view, the novel is an epic of bourgeois life. Realism is considered as the dominant aesthetic. Realism is OK, but "in many important novelists from Renaissance Spain to contemporary France and America the realistic enterprise has been enormously complicated and qualified by the writer's awareness that fictions are never real things, that literary realism is a tantalizing contradiction in terms." Ontological exploration in fiction takes place through the manipulation of form, not through exposition—though the novel drawing attention to its construction, vs. transparency. "A self-conscious novel, briefly, is a novel that systematically flaunts its own condition of artifice and by so doing probes into the problematic relationship between real-seeming artifice and reality."

xi. Fits of self-consciousness vs. fully self-conscious novels, informed by a consistent effort. Many cases of self-consciousness in literature. Cf. the mirroring in the Odyssey, and in Euripides' parody of tragic conventions. In Renaissance drama: the introduction to the Taming of the Shrew and Bartholomew Fair. Diderot's drama. Reflexive poetry: Mallarmé, Valérty, Wallace Stevens, Mandelstam.  But the novel is uniquely congenial to self-consciousness.

xii. Peculiar forms are determined by genre, a distinctive trend. In the novel, the main concern with consecutive individual character and particular experience.

xiii. The self-conscious novel is no the teame as the elaborately artful novel (conrad, ford). Their elaboration is a technique of verisimilitude. Self-consciousness may be a mannerism or "be integrated into a large critical vision of the dialectic interplay between fiction and reality"—then it becomes illuminating.

xiv. "The four major self-conscious novelists of the first great age of the novel . . . are Cervantes, Fielding, Sterne and Diderot.

xv. "novels have been doing rather more than prevalent critical assumptions would allow for."



1. The Mirror of Knighthood and the World of Mirrors

1- Vs. massively produced trash in modern culture. The novel model is caught in this story.

2- It is tied up with printing. Social and economic upheavals have determined its nature.

3-  "The novel begins out of our erosion of belief in the authority of the written word and it begins with Cervantes"—seeing in the fictionality of fictions the key to a culture and using this awareness centrally in creating new fictions. This is a lesser but brilliant tradition (the realist tradition dominates). Cervantes initiates both traditions:

3-4- "his juxtaposition of high-flown literary fantasies with grubby actuality pointing the way to the realists, his zestfully ostentatious manipulation of the artifice he constructs setting a precedent for all the self-conscious novelists to come."

5- The hero of a library shows a fictional language, vs. the oral culture of Sancho, "a world of role-playing, where the dividing lines between role and identity are often blurred". Literature gives roles to that chaos in Don Quixote— the printing press is a precondition.

6-7- Self-conscious scenes in Cervantes, etc.

8- E.g. the scene of the found manuscript with illustrations, a mirror. Don Quixote equates being real and being recorded in literature and wants to become a book,

9- but when he attains his ambition he mistrusts the author; he only attains a fabric of contradictions; his raises doubts on the status of his story, and reveals the work as a trompe-l'œil. It is a real-seeming but avowedly arbitrary novelistic reality; this double nature is communicated (e.g. through names).

10- An ontological doubleness of language. "For Cervantes, the word simultaneously resonates with its old magical quality, and turns back on itself, exposing its own emptiness as an arbitrary or conventional construct."

11- A new narrative structure: "the fictional world is repeatedly conveyed into multiple regress of imitations that call attention in various ways to their own status as imitations."

12- Literary criticism keeps on calling attention to fictions: "literary criticism . . . is intrinsic to the fictional world of the Quixote and of all the self-conscious novels that follow it".

13- Literary criticism as an essential moment in the self-conscious novel.

14- Don Quixote shows extremely opposed attitudes to fiction in the Maeste Pedro episode. Don Quixote can be seen an acting out of this tension of attitudes.

15- A new sense of the autonomy of the artist is affirmed:

16- Cervantes enters his own story in the Captive's tale. Alter vs. Ortega's hermetical reading of the world of the novel—although Ortega himself elsewhere recognizes the duality of the genre.

17- The author confirms his absolute proprietorship over the fictional world: there is no compulsion to be true (or fictional): a teasing relationship of the writer to the reader.

18- "The intuition of life that, beginning with Cervantes, crystallized in the novel is profoundly paradoxical: the novelist lucidly recognizes the ways man may be painfully frustrated and victimized in a world with no fixed values or ideals, without even a secure sense of what is real and what is not, yet through the exercise of an autonomous art the writer boldly asserts the freedom of consciousness itself. The imagination, then, is alternately, or even simultaneously, the supreme insturment of human realization and the eternal source of delusion of a creature doomed to futility."

19- Games with the truthfulness or not of Cide Hamete: he 'makes believe' swearing as a Christian. Confusion fiction/fact at macroscopic and microscopic (metaphorical) levels. ¿An unreliable narrator, or is unreliability inevitable in language? we are made to wonder.

20- Transition between planes of reality [what Genette calls 'metalepsis']: Cide Hamete as a way of establishing distance between the author and the work, and also as a parody of the author's relationship to the work.

21- Attention is drawn away from the characters into the writing. Don Quixote is another surrogate for the author. Doubles are frequent in self-conscious novels: cf. the deceptiveness of similitudes.

22- The novel as a set of unstable dialectic oppositions: no sythesis is possible and each antithesis produces further antiheroes. In the Nouveau Roman, all is unstable, all is a hypothesis.

23- Pairings of characters as antitheses: the double is also a parody, a parody of reality , a critique of fiction, an experiment in imitation. Don Quixote's parodic descent to the underworld is in turn parodied by Sancho's 'flight'—

24- and by his fall; Altisidora episode is also parodic,

25- Parody as a literary mode which fuses creation and critique.

26- Dulcinea as an explicit fiction made of literary clichés.

28- Cf. Milton's use of tradition, which indicates faith in language and revelation. Cervantes in contrast is a fundamentally secular skeptic, and Don Quixote a profoundly modern novel.


2. Sterne and the Nostalgia for Reality

30- "One of the characteristic reflexes of the self-conscious novel is to flaunt 'naive' narrative devices, rescuing their usability by exploring their contrivance, working them into a highly patterned narration which reminds us that all representations of reality are, necessarily, stylizations" –e.g., the "ostentatious narrator."

31- Sterne is a great explorer of telling stories within stories, the most extreme of all; the very notion  of interpolation breaks down. Zigzag narrative as the rendering of the mind's resistence to pattern.

33- Reductionist parodies: Sterne as literary critic— "a central insight of his novel is that any literary convention means a schematization—and thus a misrepresentation—of reality."

34- Toying with conventions is not new: cf. the manuscripts in medieval romances, the plays within plays... al literature in the West, according to Barthes, gives the sign an ambiguous relationship with the real.

36- Tristram Shandy seen as most typical in this sense. A constant tension between the mental and the material spheres.

37- Cf. Descartes, etc.: Locke is treated by Sterne as a teacher to be taunted because of his undervaluing of the imagination.  He draws an opposition between the external man of mechanical causation and the internal man of feeling (Martin Price). Tristram Shandy is the first novel about the crisis of the novel,

40- TS discusses the innovativeness of his work even as he uses it. All times dissolve into the present of writing: the capture of experience becomes the plot. The fusion with critique makes Tristram poignantly alive as well. A slippery play with wit—sex appears as the Sancho Panza inside each character.

41 - A radical transformation of the self-conscious narrator he picked from Fielding. An original use of death, usually a narrative convenience: in Sterne it is associated to the opaqueness of language:

42-  (the black page is at once a joke and a way of taking us beyond language); mortality drives Tristram/Sterne in his wild scramble to write more.

43- Picaresque characters are seen in Smollett from the point of view of a normal observer; in Sterne there is no 'normality', all are eccentrics.

44- Does Sterne's sentimentality come from Richardson? OK, but "what arrested his imagination more in Richardson was the attempt at an exhaustive presentation of reality with the concomitant slowing down of narrative tempo." The blowing-up of scenes into a fantastic expansion results in an "alienating realism";

45- —these distortions produce a fantastic realism of the everyday. E.g. Trim's tale, showing the problem of narrative communication: the audience interpose their preconceptions.

46- Treatment of sex: bringing back etherealizing fancy and abstractracting reason down to their origin in the physical realm.

47- There is in Sterne a conscious awareness of repression and of its implications; double entendre involves both characters and readers.

48- An eloquent use of typographical silences in this respect.  Sterne approaches subtle moments of consciousness in the characters.

49- A paradoxical self-making realism: in parodying representation, Sterne's parodies become representative of new areas.

50- All are signs in Sterne: a nostalgia for reality (Mayoux); following intuition is best for that.

51- Intuition is proposed as an approach to reality, but we also find in Sterne an awareness of the dynamic of the mind with itself, crippling itself with stereotypes. Fantasy is coaxed into consciousness in Tristram Shandy; an invitation to unexpected moves of the mind.

52- Sterne vs. the Fieldingesque 'rational' disquisitions—disquisitions in Sterne are driven by desire and imagination.

54- "One of the general aims of Sterne's method, I would suggest, is to make us repeatedly aware of the infinite horizon of the imagination"; infinity needs the disruption and the interruption of narrative form.

55- "this elaborately rendered world of trivialities and frustrations nevertheless imparts to the reader a sense of comic liberation". Sterne takes us far from novelistic narration without ever really abandoning the enterprise of the novelist. Mimesis appears as a Sysiphean task. Sterne plays games, but he makes us aware of some of the vital processes by which we must live in reality;

56- "literary self-consciousness paradoxically proves to be a technique of realism as well."


3. Diderot's Jacques: This Is and Is Not a Story

57- Diderot: telling stories as a way of seeing life; "the story of life comes to an end unnoticed". Play with plagiarism: turning Sternee's materials to other ends.

63- Sterne mimicks the flow of consciousness, but Diderot concentrates on narration as something objective—always a lucid orderer of the materials.  

64- The acceleration of narrative (from Candide) as an emphatic structuration of evens through viewpoint.  "The informing insight of Jacques the Fatalist, I would contend, is that language can never give us experience itself but must always transmute experience into récit, that is, narration, or, if you will, fiction."

65- Narrative as the main way of making experience, or of making nonverbal experiences, distinctly human. Diderot followed Richardson early, but he came out of him on the other side of Sterne; he abandoned detailed realism,

66- and draws attention to symmetries and conventions. The time of the story fades before the time of narration in his novels. Diderot is mimetic in his aesthetic writings, traditional;

67- but he is much more skeptical in Jacques, emphasizing the relativity of truth and reacting against novel-writing and its contrivances.

68- Jacques appears as the narrator's surrogate and his master as the reader (similar to Sancho); "the journey is only an occasion for telling stories along the way." The novel is for Diderot a quest for understanding, not for authenticity like Cervantes. The adventures are adventures in storytelling, conventions to eschew, which is the end to reach.

69- Diderot lays bare the devices at the beginning (like Beckett). The flaunting of the author's power

70- does not detract from fidelity to reality in the protagonists. Against teleological narrative: reality is random. There is a randomness of reality;

71- the multiple outcomes of the plot are called attention to. Also the unpredictable nature of communication—all this results in digression and in multiple tales.

72- 'Spoken' tales in Jacques, vs. written Tristram Shandy; no typographical games... Sterne's narrative of isolation and memory is more modern than Diderot's 'oral' communication, where community is affirmed. In Sterne, eroticism is used to explore the gap imagination / reality;

73- in Diderot it is a way to allure the reader to read on and a way of analysing behavior (not experiential reality). Tristram Shandy leads to Ulysses, and Jacques le Fataliste to Proust; experiments in moral behavior.

74- The theme of appearance and deception, etc.

76- The paradox that art is a mode of deception which helps us reach the truth behind appearances.

77- Reality as flux for Diderot (versus fatalism); it is an artful decision to impose order.

78- The novel as an experiment in provisional freedom;

79- "his novel is formally an interplay between randomness and controlled pattern."

80- A control of human foibles and limitation by choosing what to tell, etc.;

81- "in the self-conscious novel, the act of fiction always implies an act of literary criticism, but, broadly speaking, it may move [outwards or inwards]." Jacques le Fataliste moves outwards, Tristram Shandy inwards. Cf. the greater isolationism and provincialism of English literature.

82- Paradoxically, Jacques le Fataliste was left posthumous, while Tristram Shandy was acclaimed and its author was lionized. Apart from some scattered romantics, Jacques le Fataliste was only appreciated in the 20th century. The 19th century was out of phase with Diderot.



4. The Self-Conscious Novel in Eclipse

85- 1. Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century.

Political materials must be accomodated to the structure of a self-conscious novel, become aesthetically relevant.

86- The novel of the nineteenth century is rooted in social and historical reality; it has a will to depict society. Realism?

87- "What changed, I would suggest, was not the degree of realism but its characteristic objects", now overriding the novelistic plot; "the disparity between the structures of the imagination and things as they are , novelistic plot plot consisting in the multifarious effects of that disparity on the protagonist and the personages involved with him or (often) her." In the 19th c., the center shifted from imagination on literary materials, to social reality.

88- History is missing as a dynamic determinant in the 18th c., even in works of detail. A desire to register social change driveves novelists away from the exploration of fiction as artifice.

89- "The imaginative involvement with history, in any case, is the main cause for an almost complete eclipse of the self-conscious novel during the nineteenth century." The novel vanguard shifts to France after 1830. (Alter vs. a strict connection between the novel and a "bourgeois era").

90- Radical social change as a motor for the novel.

91- Paris as the center of social theory and of revolution.

92- The novelists' concerns are similar to those of Michelet: organic pattern and vivid detail.

93- The novel as a vigorous competitor to reality, and a way of containing chaos. It is thus driven away from self-questioning and from its own problematics.

95- The urban hell as a central theme, beyond "documentary" description, beyond mimesis:

96- it is an occasion for the writer's virtuosity and his manipulative power; a celebration of imagination.

97- 19th-c. novelists are disinclined to explore fictiveness, "not only because they are realists but equally because they are such intent imaginists." A love of artifice, yes, but not questioning its premises as it is employed. We find no continuous ontological scrutiny of fiction.

98- "The self-conscious novelists are always simultaneously aware of the supreme power of the literary imagination within its own sphere of creation and its painful or tragicomic powerlessness ouside that sphere. The great nineteenth-century imaginists, on the other hand, are impelled by a deeper inner need to explore the two realms." Novelists begin to talk about a hallucinated sense of the reality of characters.

99- Balzac's use of returning characters not so much as a formal need of the novel, but as a psychological need of the novelist. Domination through imagination: then novelistic figure of Napoleon haunts the 19th-c. novel.

101- This suggests that hstorical change can come about though will. The novelist of the 19th century confuses mimesis and poiesis, imagination and making.

102- "For the nineteenth-century novelists, fictional invention often seems actually a mode of action and as such cannot afford the luxury of self-criticism."

103- Fielding discovers convention and artifice in the urban scene, with no spatial expansion of the plot.

104- Only vestiges of self-consciousness remain the the nineteenth-century passion for mimesis. Let's see 3 of these 'vestiges'.

2. LOST ILLUSIONS and the Assumption of Realism. 

105- Balzac's novel Lost Illusions is concerned with writers and discussions of literature, but it is not self-conscious.

106- The narrative is only "information": the medium is supposed to be transparent. The solidity of the realistic world is not questioned. Therefore he can aspire to a comprehensive portrayal of society.

110- No dialectical tension is felt by Balzac between himself and his creation. There are author-surrogates in the characters, but they are not set in couples, not a dialectical relationship. They are only herarchized.

111- At the top we find Vautrin, approaching authorial omniscience.

112- He is a Napoleonic man, instrumentalizing people and economizing them; a manipulatory character, like the author, who uses them as surrogates.

113- Tristram Shandy works with impotence, Balzac with omnipotence [Cf. Beckett vs. Joyce—JAGL]. In the Balzacian novel, surrogates are indulged or punished, instead of entering into a dialectical self-confrontation. Balzac "reconstitutes society in his fiction in order to act out his real hostility towards it, his fantasies of dominating it."

114- —Balzac is animated by ressentiment and self-gratification. The loss of illusions in Illusions perdues is a continuation of Don Quixote, but here the fiction becomes real, as against Don Quixote.

115-
3. Wavering perspectives in Vanity Fair:

Thackeray writes in the Fielding tradition of displaying his manipulation, with commentary on the characters, the reader, and the plot construction.

116- But no impression of self-conscious novel is produced; the effects are intermittent and taken in by a very different conception of fictional events and of the narrator's relation to them.

117- E.g. the double perspective on Amelia: is she a cliché, an insipid woman, or is she tender and desirable?

117-18- "The inconsistencies in this Victorian adaptation of self-conscious devices are clearest in Thackeray's treatment of his narrating persona." The metaphor of the puppet-show is not sustained; he becomes a chronicler, a "true historian" without ironic duplicity. That side of him does not interact with the puppet-master.

119- In the last analysis, the puppet-show is a moral metaphor suggested by Thackeray's sense of life unmediated in his book. —an excessive insistence on "the truth".

120-  The narrator crosses th border between fiction and reality inadvertently; there is a much greater ironic distance in Fielding, through his construction of a coherent persona and his use of the literary tradition for parodic purposes. Thackeray is more hemmed in by his moral assumptions, and by his purposes in novel-writing. Cf. his persecution of Becky, which reveals a secret identification with her;

123- "what is especially curious about the handling of Becky is that she is not just a fantasy projection of some secret self in the author but his unrecognized surrogate in regard to her mode of operation in the novel." Becky as a puppeteer! Manipulating people; she writes satire too, and impersonates others. It is remarkable that nothing is made of this: Beecky is too real for Thackeray exploring the artifice.

124- "Thackeray's self-consciousness is finally not as a novelist but as a moralist"—he gestures towards allegory. Thackeray and Balzac nevertheless share "the delusion of grandeur characteristic of the nineteeenth-century novelist: to ignore wilfully the limits of fiction, to play the role of omniscient knower, absolute judge, omnipotent arbiter of taste and morality, for a world supposedly shared by the novelist and his readers."

126- The irony is always aimed at the character, not at the fictional process.

127- The showman metaphor reveals some diffidence on the part of the writer towards his role as entertainer, but the title from Bunyan ("Vanity Fair") shows self-confidence: he tries to write a summa of his age.

4. Fictional Confidence and 'The Confidence Man'

Melville anticipates the écriture blanche, or literature of silence, in the age of realism. He moves towards the abandoning of fiction.

128- The Confidence Man as a relative failure: realism + Fieldinguesque digressions on fiction. "Melville does not have an adequate fictional technique for continuously integrating the imaginary personages and actions with the reflections on the nature of fiction." He is closest to the self-conscious novel, more than any other works of its age.

129- A mobile world of false appearances and pretense is elevated here into the essence of the human condition: there is a deep sense of the paradoxical relationship between fiction and reality; the confidence man creates fictions on himslef.

130- A paradox tha the reader should escape from reality in order to be presented a sharper reality (Melville says).

131- The novelist as confidence man: he leaves us with airy spectres.

132- Bizarre similes are the way to flaunt artifice and convey the object at once.

133- Images of fleeting images are used to describe his fiction—but this is not sustained throughout the novel, which is more conventionally realistic elsewhere:

134- "It would seem that Melville was too involved in the characteristic practices of the novel in his won age to break with them as decisively as his theoretical chapters implicitly require." He is too generalizing: Society, Mankind, etc.—there is no concern for individual psychology, no sustained plot, and character is too distant for the reader. The novel as a New Scripture.

137- We discern a sense of the possibilities of the novel in dealing with vexations of the spirit: Kafka, Conrad, and Beckett will follow. The crisis of confidence in fiction we see in Melville will become more general in the 20th century.


5. The Modernist Revival of Self-Conscious Fiction

Gide conceives of the novel as a work of art, not a mirror. Mann, pro parody and intellectual distance.

1. New Novels for New Men and Women. 

Woolf's change of nature:

139- "One of several underlying patterns in this new constellation of creative forces is an artistically manifested self-consciousness about the processes of fiction-making the like of which had not been seen in the novel since the end of the eighteenth century."

140- Though not due to a repression, fiction was often deeply concerned with a historical moment or with the future of Western civilization.

141- In modernist fiction space is represented otherwise. Instead of filling in a spatial mold, it breaks, and the consciousness of the protagonist jumps to other times and places. Now in Joyce et al. it is different from Sterne: an "ultimate sense of being as a precarious structure erected on a ground of nothingness"—reality threatens to crumble, and "the play of consciousness becomes a sustained act of desperate courage—a 'violin in the void', in Nabokov's memorable phrase—creating form and substance where perhaps there would be nothing."

143- Entropy and decay as a central concept. Broch: the unity of events and the integrity of the world is sustained by symbols. [Cf. Shelley's notions in "The Defence of Poetry"—JAGL]. Artifice has a central role.

144- There is a paradoxical tension between mimeticism and artifice in Joyce: stream of consciousness, plus parody and formalization: "he has a modern recognition not only that reality is always mediated by consciousness but that consciousness itself is an artificer in constantly making something of the formless flux of experience, inventing images and chains of connection to give it shape and substance." There is an excessive elaboration of artifice in Joyce, which is significant: it is the only reality.

145- A tension between ordered structures and the flow of experience. [Cf. the situation in games, in law...] 

147- The threat of the void in Joyce and in Biely. The relationship to history changes:

148-  the self-conscious novel is related to a feeling of apocalypse. The imagination of history, progressively unfolding in society can no longer hold. Writers of Revelation: although it is not a general equation, but only a tendency.

149- Self-consciousness as a way of affirming the integrity of the work, against a background of chaos. A sense of mortality and fading permeates scenic description in Virginia Woolf, through her protagonists' consciousness.

151- But consciousness is artifice for Joyce, and art for Woolf: there is no attempt to render its texture more poetic; it is formalized, and calls attention to its states as poetry.

153- Virginia Woolf as a transitional figure, balancing the claims of history and self-consciousness, drawing attention to her own art as self-justified, and to reality.

154- Cervantes, Sterne or Diderot are more aware that fictions are the only reality. Unamuno's Niebla is less impressive as fiction, but the ontological paradox (a character facing his author) is interesting. It is strictly self-conscious, not a mixed mode like Joyce's or Woolf's works. A paradoxical ambivalence between the reality / fictionality / autonomy of the character.

155- Life appears here as a dream: the author is also under the illusion of autonomous existence.

156- The world as chaos or order: only man puts logic in it. "Unamuno suggests here that what art must do is embody randomness as an essential principle in its own operations."

157- A relation in the 20th c. novel (Ford, Durrell) to alternative endings. Naboko, Fowler: randomness is introduced into the plot, which was the traditional area of necessity.

158- In Mist, again,  reflections on fiction are an essential moment, and the creation of paradoxes is pushed to the limit. All verbalization is (for Unamuno) falsification: parody is the only solution.


2. Gide and the Confidence Game of Fiction.

160- Gide's The Caves of the Vatican is more original than The Counterfeiters, which is "a not altogether happy mingling of narrative modes or aesthetic premises. It is self-defeating: Édouard's Journal is conventional [¿¿¿¿!!! —but its placing in the novel is not—JAGL.]. There is no split of self into the dialectic of literary creation; there is "too much direct playing out of fantasy versions of the self." Self-gratifying homosexual fantasies are not subjected to the rigours of artistic criticism.

161- the problem of the autonomy of the character is not solved. The Counterfeiters is interesting but flawwed; character's don't go anywhere. Caves of the Vatican includes successful composite parodies; a genine doubling of characters, with antithetical pairs acting dialectically.

162- The subject is the difference between the real world and our representations (a subject announced but not realized in The Counterfeiters). Julien vs. Lafcadio, a conventional novelist vs. quirky anti-literature. But Lafcadio finds himself trapped in conventional novelistic behaviour, in a crime novel.

163- Cervantesque doublings, change of roles, etc.

165- An inversion of the Quixotic model: Lafcadio tries to impose a self-validating code above models and conventions—but conforms unwittingly to them.

166- Game is a key concept here. Lafcadio is a gamer, but is caught in the novelist's game of coincidences in the plot. The playful attitude of Gide's sotie favours aesthetic success.

168- Characters are made come to life through distance and ironic obliquity. Distance is taken from confessional literature.

169- Games with characters' names evince them as verbal constructs.

170- A vertigo of masks; reality appears as dubious. There is in Les Caves du Vatican a modern sense of the instability of character and reality. Fictional conventional devices are tried on, adopted at last, as no less true than Lafcadio's dream of absolute freedom.

175- A problematic relationship between cliché and reality.

177- Iconoclasm of Modernism: e.g. the use of parody not only as reaction but also as a form of enlivening high art with the emotional power of popular fiction. The novel is a continuous tradition of parody. A daring probing of the resources of imagination is also necessary in the self-conscious novel. Gide is too parodic, does not show enough commitment. Nabokov offers a more coherent program for the self-consciousn novel, and shows the way for the novel the second half of the 20th century.




6. Nabokov's Game of Worlds

180- "Nabokov is the preeminent practitioner of partial magic in the novel, from Cervantes' days down to our own"—though not the greatest, he is the most self-conscious about self-consciousness.

181- He shows a whole spectrum of self-consciousness and also some inherent limitations of this mode of fiction.

182- Characters in Nabokov are often flattened by the design. Best works: The Gift, Invitation to a Beheading, Lolita and Pale Fire. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, like Unamuno's Mist, is more intersting for its theory than for its realized fiction.

"If the self-conscious novel tends on one side to excessive cerebrality, to an ascetic avoidance of the pungent juices of ordinary fictional life, it tends on the other side to an unchecked playfulness that may become self-indulgent". There is a tendency in Nabokov to play games with himself.

184- Where best, his self-consciousness and games collaborate with the living personality of characters.

186- The sin of Nabokov criticism: to assume that intricacy of pattern is enough of a sign of a masterful imaginative achievement. Pale Fire is an experiment into magical and probing functions of language.

187- Due to their awareness of themselves, self-conscious novels tend to reproduce themselves en abyme, "illuminating their devious narrative ways with small replicas of the innovative structure of the whole." There are ubiquitous reflections in Nabokov's novels (emblems, infinite regressions, etc. referring to the novel) —all tightly tied up with the inner life of the protagonists.

192- "The pale fire of art, in the usual view, reflects the sum of reality, but we also see it here become its own sun."

194- Ambiguous status of the difference between truth and fiction; we do not know what is supposed to be true within the framework of the novel—Alter warns that we should be careful when doing such divisions; vs. simplistic conclusions.

195- Alphabetically determined patterns—which here make thematic sense.

202- An antithesis between the two kinds of poets  in Pale Fire (Popean / Shakespearean); references, etc.

209 - The authorial consciousness never falters (unlike Durrell's Alexandria Quartet) , etc.;

214- it is used to show "how a fiction based on the dynamic of fiction-making can address itself not merely to the paradoxes of the writer's craft but to the ambiguities of the human condition."

215- Kimbote's and his own creation became real, more than puppets: the fictional world of Pale Fire is not discarded the way it was in Invitation.

217- "We do not surrender the imagination, but on our way to this ultimate point [the end of Pale Fire] we have come to see the drastic costs and limits of living by it alone."




7. The Inexhaustible Genre

218- The baring of the artifice has become more common over the past two decades [1955-75] —it is not a school, however. (Alter gives some authors' names).

219- There is self-conscious cinema, too: Fellini, Antonioni, Resnais, Godard.

220- Our culture is turned upon itself, examining its own roots and patterns, "a kind of Faust at the mirror of Narcissus". Self-awareness, which is growing, is both a paralyzing and a liberating force. It lends itself to analytical criticism;

221- and it has a deceptive appearance in making novels sound more profound and significant.

222- Some of them lack in sense of human experience (e.g. Queneau's Exercises de Style) —criticism need not make excessive claims for playful writing. It is a temptation for the self-conscious novelist to content himself with textual experiment (Robbe-Grillet, Coover...)—virtuous and arid. A complementary fault: "to give free rein to every impulse of invention or fictional contrivance without distinguishing what may serve some artistic function in the novel and what is merely silly or self-indulgent" (e.g. in Flann O'Brien).

223- According to O'Brien's the self-conscious novel is, according to himself, "a self-evident sham to wheich the reader can regulate at will the degree of his credulity"—too simple a theory.

224- The self-conscious novel is not a sham, but an artifice which is not self-evident, but cunningly and ambiguously revealed.The reader does not regulate it, the writer tries to regulate the reader's credulity, challenging him to participation, forcing re-examination.  O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds is tedious, there is no tension in the fiction. 

225- Alter defends attention to reality, vs. voguish self-consciousness, vs. arid exercises and indiscriminate invention. But the flaunting of the artifice is a valued and powerful device in many novels: Alter values Nabokov and Beckett, Barth and Coover.  

226- This helps focus the issue of the 'death of the novel'. Alter rejects Barth's  notion of a  'literature of exhaustion'  extracting new energy from its own exhaustion; this is an elitist and minimalist conception.

227- Borges is not a novelist, but a fabulist. The novel requires lived experience.

228-  But Alter favours his theory of meaning and reading: books are a mode of interaction and relationship; books grow in meaning with tradition. (See e.g. in Borges "Kafka y sus precursores").

229- Artistic possibilities are inexhaustible; each work grows up more. 

230- Vs. Coover on the contemporary exhaustion of reality, and on novelists turning into fabulists; on the the end of the humanistic world view, etc...  No, Alter says. Beckett and Nabokov are comic rather than cosmic writers; both are novelists rather than fabulists.

231- There is no move away from history now, as claimed by Coover, "unless the novel is really dead, the one thing it ultimately cannot dispense with is history".

232- "Perhpas the most reliable index to whether a piece of self-conscious fiction is closed off from life is whether it tends to diminish the actuality of personal and historical time" (as happens with Robbe-Grillet, Queneau...)

233-  Although Jealousy  is OK because it is psychologically motivated.

[!!!! —Alter's theory of self-conscious writing is far behind that of his French contemporaries, e.g. Ricardou.]

234- Queneau's Le Chiendent is also OK—a  [self-begetting fiction is the term Alter needs], a meditation on the paradoxes of being and nonbeing in life and in fiction.  Language is the art medium most steeped in memory, both public and private.

235- "Language through its layeer upon layer of associations opens up complex vistas of time, and these tend to reveal—ultimately for cultures, imminently for individuals—loss, decline, and extinction. The continuous acrobatic display of artifice in a self-conscious novel is an enlivening demonstration of human order against a background of chaos and darkness, and it is the tension between artifice and that which annihilates artifice that gives the finest self-conscious novels their urgency in the midst of play." Death impelling writers into the supreme affirmation of art. 

236- Art vs. the void: Sartre's Nausea is programmatic, but even works free from existentialism use this tension (e.g. Fielding); or the desire for the suppression of war: wishful thinking of imagination into history?

237- "The age-old impulse of the storyteller bespeaks a basic human need to imagine out of history a fictional order of fulfillment, but when the narrative is a novel and not a fairy tale, one is also made aware of the terrible persistence of history as a murderous realm of chaos constantly challenging or violating the wholeness that art can imagine." Vs. the notion of "exhaustion"; there is often a continuity with the past masters of self-conscious fiction; it is not more difficult now to write a great novel than at other moments.

238- The self-consciousness of our culture is more pronounced—self-consciousness of craft and of the relationship fiction/life.

239- Mauriac's La Marquise: a "sense of the writer's predicament as a perennial, not peculiarly modern, difficulty"—facing fiction, always an invented world; "alittérature" as an intrinsic problematic for Mauriac (the coiner of the term).

240- Literature as a constant drive to escape being "just" literature. Good self-conscious fiction does not merely shrug away its fiction, but affirms artifice too as a means, perhaps the only way to get at a whole range of real human experience. 

241- The baring of the artifice in La Marquise: a play with artifice but with a consciousness "two concentric abysses beneath the artifice of the novel"; 

242- —a consciousness of language as soaked with time, and and of the brevity of human life, etc.

243- Words as the only permanence, a dubious one; the self-conscious novel is paradoxically concerned with a long meditation on death, a subject sidestepped by myth, folk tale, fable and romance. The realist novel also sidesteps death insofar as it is a dream of omnipotence. The novel is born when literature begins to mediate on death. [??]

244-  "I suspect death in the novel might be a more serious focus for serious discussion of the genre than the death of the novel." 

245- The self-conscious novel as a "mirror held to the mirror of art held to nature"; a necessary operation for a skeptical culture nevertheless addicted to fabulation. The novel is not exhausted as novelistic self-consciosness develops: "On the contrary, in the hands of gifted writers it comes to seem precisely our most precisely fashioned instrument for joining imagined acts and figures with real things."

Notes on Metafiction