Reconsidering Origins: How Novel Are Theories of the Novel?

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 ofthe English Novel (1943) At 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 literary 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 ofthe 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...

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