Content provided in partnership with

Rewriting the rise of the novel

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Summer 1999 by Thompson, James

Rewriting the Rise of the Novel

CLIFFORD SISKIN, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 2700-1830 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,1998), pp. 285, $39.95.

WILLIAM B. WARNER, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684-1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. xvi + 326, cloth, $48.00, paper, $22.50.

Most Popular Articles in Arts: Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism; Free-standing cardboard sculpture; What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...; Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...; Tino Sehgal at the ICA; More »

These two superb studies would appear to have little in common. William Warner is an eighteenth-century scholar, and Clifford Siskin is primarily a romanticist, and while Warner focuses closely on a genre, Siskin takes up the vast topic of writing as such and its cultural consequences in the division of knowledge into recognizably modern specializations. When Siskin turns to the novel, it is the romantic novel, whereas Warner's study extends only to the 1740s. Siskin is far more drawn to the disciplinary and epistemic dimensions of Foucault, while Warner is consistently suspicious of such grand master narratives. Warner proceeds with intricate psychoanalytic interpretations that attend to the thematization of the erotics of reading, while Siskin is correspondingly attentive to writing. Warner and Siskin do however share interests, the most important of which is an abiding sense of the inadequacy of the received rise of the novel narrative and its failure to demonstrate exactly how novels "rose" in terms of both production and consumption. They further share an interest in the masculinization of British literature-the ways in which Behn, Manley, Haywood, Barker, Aubin and others were written out of the history of fiction. Both of these studies also share a remarkable capacity to combine effectively vast historical knowledge with theoretical sophistication.

After a series of intriguing essays and reviews, Warner's full explanation of the development of the novel is now available in Licensing Entertainment. The most articulate and persuasive of the antifoucaultians, Warner argues that Armstrong, Davis, Bender, and McKeon remain within the problematic of Watt-presuming the uniqueness and distinction of the novel-that "heroic, progressive, teleological 'rise of the novel' narrative" (xii-- Warner shrewdly notes how commonly rise of the novel stories take on the form of bildungsroman, 23). His strategy for "breaking the spell" of this narrative is threefold-first, to return to the notion of the novelistic as but a subset of story; he rigorously refuses to theorize about "the" novel, as though it were a platonic form. Second, following Ballaster and Gallagher, through Behn, Manley, and Haywood, Warner writes the prequel to Watt, though avoiding an alternative maternity of the novel. And thirdly, Warner rejects the teleological, functionalist, dialectical, ideologically driven character of modern novel-genesis narratives. The latter is his most important component, and it involves replacing the power/knowledge matrix with pleasure-novel reading is not predicated on coercive normalization or regularization, but rather on a more immediate pursuit of pleasure. In other words, the novel is not an instrument for resolving irresolvable social contradictions. If marxist, feminist, and foucaultian models read the development of the novel as driven towards the ideological goals of docile and gendered subjectivity, Warner reads the ideological content of the early amatory fiction of Behn, Manley, and Haywood as "a licentious ethical nihilism," in which the "only consistent ideology is that of pleasure itself" (92, 93). The whole debate about the didactic burden of the novel then turns on this question: "how is culture to license-that is, sanction but also control-the powerful new reading pleasures these novels produce?" (94). Swimming against the tide of political readings of the novel, Warner's object is finally the destruction of a paradigm and in many ways he succeeds. Above all, he does a really splendid job of deconstructing realism as the commonsense foundation of the novel, and further, he succeeds in tracing a line of the fiction of amatory intrigue. Reading Pamela against Haywood's "Fantomina" is the set piece of the book, exposing the ways in which Richardson and then Fielding expunge the taint of amorous intrigue from fiction and make the novel safe for masculine didacticism. Similarly, Warner does a fine job of reading Roxana in the context of amatory fiction. At the same time, however, he has nothing to say of any other Defoe, which leads one to think that accounts of the genesis or development or rise of the novel are inevitably exercises in the mathematics of curve fitting: out of a few select examples, a narrative is extrapolated.

While Warner focuses closely on the fortunes of a single genre, in The Work of Writing, Siskin works across the genres, poetry and prose, lyric, georgic, and novel, for he has taken up the vast topic of writing as such, and its cultural consequences in the division of knowledge into recognizably modern specializations. Siskin is finally concerned with the emergence and interrelation of three central abstractions (what Marx calls simple abstractions): discipline, profession, and literature. Siskin focuses on the recognition of a peculiarly modern form of intellectual labor, one that depends on the conjunction of three late eighteenth-century developments in disciplinarity and professionalization, and the consequent emergence of the category of literature. As this array of conceptual categories might indicate, the argument is profoundly relational-literature as a professional activity is only imaginable within a certain division of knowledge that we modems conceive of as the disciplines. Despite the ferociously abstract character of these subjects, Siskin is always able to exemplify and particularize; for example, in tying together literary authority and ownership, along with intellectual labor, Siskin offers up a wonderful discussion of the Prelude as resume. The results are everywhere startling, such as his historicization of depth as specialization-one of those foundational abstractions that is invisible until someone such as Siskin points it out. Of particular interest to readers of this journal is Siskin's critique of the rise of the novel narrative, which Siskin extends in his concept of "novelism"-the ways in which the novel has come to stand in for literature and writing as such: "novelism is the discursive site in which the naturalization of writing is negotiated, in large part through the rubric of imitation" (174). The realist novel comes to stand for the way in which the material world and personal experience get translated into words, transferred onto paper-the novel writes life. Though Warner and Siskin offer quite different explanations of how this particular piece of mystification got disseminated, in the end, they both attempt to turn histories of fiction away from development and towards an exploration of how and why we have come to accept a very particular English kind of writing as the transcript of life.

Rewriting the rise of the novel

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Summer 1999 by Thompson, James

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Reference

Most Popular Articles in Arts

Most Popular Publications in Arts