Telling the Tale of the Rise of the Novel

Why is the

Reeves, Margaret, CLIO

The most influential story ever told about the origins of the novel is Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel: Studies
in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, published in 1957.(1) Indeed, for the past four decades, the debate over
the novel's origins has been framed largely by Watt's account.

While Watt's followers, to this day, still pay tribute to

In both cases, however, responses to Watt have focused on the content of the story told in Rise of the Novel.

This paper explores the possibilities that emerge when the focus of critique is shifted from the content of the
tale to its form.

Such an approach to literary history adapts

Reading Rise of the Novel through an interpretive grid of critical historiographic theory affords an
opportunity to investigate the nature of narrative form in the writing of literary history and the ideological
implications that attend the ongoing search for the novel's origins.

Critical historiography has engendered debates still current within the discipline of history proper about the
nature of historical narratives; such debates are part of larger contests in contemporary culture over the
politics of representation.

The epistemological direction of much critical theory over the last quarter century
has been to denaturalize those cultural values and practices that
, viewed through the prism of ideology, have seemed natural, normal, and worthy
 of their position of dominance.(2)

This destabilization of naturalizing ideologies is the critical principle underlying the evaluation of historical
narratives as "verbal artifacts" in Hayden White's historiographic theory.(3)

Because White's demonstration of the poetic structures of historical writing goes against the grain of
conventional assumptions about the recording of historical fact, it has enriched the level of critical self-
reflection within a discipline that remains, Dominick LaCapra boldly claims, "typically blind to its own
rhetoric" in its adherence to a "`documentary' or `objectivist' model of knowledge."(4) Not surprisingly, the
impact of critical historiographers such as White and LaCapra has been a testing of the boundaries between
history and its disciplinary sibling, literature.
Consequently, opposition to critical historiography is often expressed in terms of tensions between those
critical practices that are seen to have overstepped conventional disciplinary boundaries. For example, in a
series of recent interviews conducted with historians about the nature of the discipline, Roger Adelson finds
that some are "deeply troubled" by critical historiographic approaches that seek to erase clear distinctions
between history and fiction. Historian Walter Arnstein blames "theories imported either from literary
criticism or from the social sciences."(5) Others, however, openly embrace the use of literary strategies in
historical writing. Joan Jensen, for example, looks to classical and contemporary literature for narrative
models in her historical writing, but her qualifying comment that "[o]f course, history is not fiction,"
suggests that to walk close to the line is still not to cross it (qtd. in Adelson, 139-40). On other occasions,
these tensions between the discipline and its critics are formulated in terms of ideological divisions between
contemporary critical theory (whether postmodernist or poststructuralist) and materialist fields of analysis.
For instance, whereas Linda Hutcheon (from the vantage point of postmodern theory) assesses history as a
discipline that is still "largely empirical and practical ... with a radical distrust of the abstract and the
theoretical," a materialist historian's distrust of the pervasive focus on language in contemporary theory is
exemplified in Bryan D. Palmer's Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of
Social History.(6) Palmer characterizes the interrogation of historical language as a downward spiral into
discourse, observing with horror how theory has led literary criticism into a "hubristic wilderness of
unreason" (42). For Palmer, the final and fundamental opposition is "discourse versus materialism" (xv).
Although Palmer subsumes the debate on historical writing into the realm of contesting theoretical
approaches, what is actually at stake here is the integrity of the discipline of history itself. Because history
defines itself in opposition to literature, the usual object of literary-critical scrutiny--such encounters between
literary criticism and historical writing threaten to blur the boundary on which history stakes its claims to
truth.
Historical writing, of course, also crosses disciplinary boundaries in the more conventional sense, in that
literary scholars rely substantially on literary-historical narratives to give shape and coherence to the
discipline of English studies. Literary histories, by convention, tell stories that are shaped around particular
groups of texts, and the telling of these stories is central to the conceptualization of literary traditions and the
formation of literary canons. In this essay, I address a story central to the canon of eighteenth-century
literature, one that takes its name from the title of Watt's text: The Rise of the Novel. I compare Wart's
influential account of this rise with other literary histories of the novel written during the three decades prior
to 1957 in order to suggest reasons for the remarkable success of Watt's version of the story in comparison to
his predecessors. To this end, I read Watt's text through the lens of contemporary historiographic theory,
examining Rise of the Novel as a narrative that can be fruitfully subjected to the kind of critical analysis
normally applied to works of literature.
An application of critical historiographic theory to Watt's study might seem like a futile attempt to marry two
radically irreconcilable schools of thought, postmodern and poststructuralist theory on the one hand, and
genre history and criticism on the other. Moreover, it seems both fair and relevant to acknowledge Watt's
declared opposition to schools of theory which are aligned with and have emerged from French
structuralism, such as the work of Michel Foucault, whose critical challenges to conventional historiography
I intend to incorporate into this historiographic analysis. In a plenary address presented in 1978 (and recently
published), Watt argues an admittedly useful point in his objection to the overuse of "brilliantly idiosyncratic
verbalization" in some contemporary literary theory, especially when such language obfuscates more than `it
explicates, but his objections to the excessive verbal acrobatics performed within French structuralism
(although this criticism applies equally well to some postmodern and poststructuralist theoretical writing) are
not in any way a wholesale dismissal of critical theory per se.(7) Watt outlines the major influences on his
intellectual development as a literary critic and historian; the depth of his learning and background in theory
and philosophy is formidable, and his detailed account of the forces shaping his intellectual and critical
outlook points to his engagement with a wide range of critical schools and theorists from I. A. Richards to
Theodor Adorno. Watt's objections to schools of theory dominating literary criticism during the late twentieth
century arise from his belief in the referential adequacy of language within the novel; given that he resists
trends in literary criticism which question the truth status of literature (158), it is certain that he would abhor
a critical historiographic analysis that extends the interrogation of truth to the writing of literary historical
narratives. Tensions between these two fields of inquiry (that is, between genre criticism and contemporary
critical theory) have existed for the past forty years, according to Michael McKeon, with one site of
contestation being that of genre; literary-historical criticism theorizing the novel as a genre has been
undercut, McKeon argues, by poststructuralist demystifications of the category of genre.(8) But McKeon's
claim, that contemporary critical theory dismisses genre as a "superstitious constraint on authorial and
especially readerly innovation" (275), fails to account for the role that genre theory plays in historiographic
analysis. White, for example, shows how an understanding of generic form can be used within critical
historiography to extend rather than constrain the hermeneutic function of genre. The crucial difference in
White's work, of course, is that he uses a form of genre criticism to analyze historical rather than literary
narratives, and it is this adaptation of genre criticism to literary-historiography that I draw upon in my
analysis of narrative form in Watt's Rise of the Novel.
To propose that Rise of the Novel remains a valid subject for critical scrutiny more than forty years after its
publication is not to ignore, however, the work of subsequent literary historians of the novel. Some might
argue that Rise of the Novel has been superseded, especially during the last two decades, by a number of
histories incorporating more recent theoretical methodologies,(9) yet it remains the case that Watt's text has
functioned, as Brian Corman points out, as "the source of most critical commonplaces on the topic for the
past generation."(10) Moreover, this literary-historical narrative established Watt's status as a pioneer in
research on the origins of the novel, and for these reasons, Rise of the Novel still merits critical attention as a
ground-breaking work. Watt's central argument is that the novel's rise was made possible by five major
changes conditioning the nature of the reading public during the eighteenth-century: first, an increased
demand for realism in fiction; second, the rise of individualism; third, changes in intellectual and
psychological tempers of readers; fourth, the rise of the middle class; and fifth, an increase in the number of
female readers. Watt's thesis argues on behalf of the novelty of the novel, insisting that it began in the
eighteenth century as a new literary form that can be distinguished from previous fiction by its distinctive
literary features, the most significant of which is formal realism, and that this new form appeared within one
generation in the works of three writers--Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding--because of
this set of favorable conditions in the social, cultural, and intellectual milieu creating a reading public for the
genre.
One historiographical problem, however, emerges with respect to the phenomenal success of Rise of the
Novel and its status as a pioneering work, because these five major changes in the nature of the reading
public had already been discussed by historians of the novel prior to 1957. Not only was Watt following in
the footsteps of most early-twentieth-century literary historians by locating the emergence of the novel as a
recognizable and definable literary form in the eighteenth century, he also was writing from an established
tradition in articulating these major changes; in fact, such connections between the novel and society had
been the subject of investigation in the field for at least three decades prior to 1957. For example, the
question of realism was invoked frequently as a crucial feature in formal definitions of the novel, as in its
extensive treatment in Ernest A. Baker's ten-volume History of the English Novel.(11) In addition to Baker,
Frank Godfrey Singer (in 1933), Bruce McCullough (in 1946), Arnold Kettle (in 1951), and Diana Neill (in
1951) all dealt with the question of realism, realistic representations of life, and the connection of this formal
shift in the concerns of prose fiction to the emergence of the novel as a distinguishable form.(12) The second
and third changes in the nature of the reading public (the rise of individualism and consequent changes in the
mental and intellectual natures of individuals in the modern period) were explored extensively by Kettle, and
to some extent by Baker in several volumes, Virginia Woolf (in 1932), Neill, Walter Allen (in 1954), and
Frank O'Connor (in 1956).(13) The fourth major change (the relation of the rise of the middle class to the
rise of the novel) was addressed also by Kettle, Woolf, and O'Connor. And finally, the fifth change (the role
of female readers as a factor in the rise of the novel) was noted prior to Watt by both Kettle and Woolf.
Consequently, it is evident that the arguments upon which Watt structured his central thesis had been in
circulation in the literary-historical discourse on the novel for some time prior to 1957.
Why is it, then, that Rise of the Novel has had a much greater impact on our understanding of the conditions
enabling the novel's growth than any of these earlier literary histories? Indeed, as Laurence Veysey explains,
the discovery of new evidence is given significant weight in the discipline of history: "[I]t remains true,"
Veysey observes, "that the very highest amount of prestige is still awarded to an historian who uncovers ...
some incontestable but previously unknown fact of undeniably major importance."(14) It may be that literary
history evaluates prestige by a different measure. After all, Watt does not refer explicitly to the work of his
eight predecessors cited above in his discussion of changes in the eighteenth-century reading public. Two of
these eight, Singer and Woolf, are mentioned in Rise of the Novel, but their names are noted in relation to
other issues. Moreover, it is important to note that in this narrative, Watt never claims originality, but instead
locates his work within an existing tradition of literary-historical knowledge in pointing out that "historians
of the novel have ... seen `realism' as the defining characteristic which differentiates the work of the early
eighteenth-century novelists from previous fiction" (10). Unquestionably, Watt draws on this literary-
historical tradition not to appropriate, but to codify a body of knowledge. His approach is explained in his
retrospective account of the writing of Rise of the Novel: his chosen methodology required him to start from
a hypothesis based not on his own opinion, "but on that of the majority of qualified observers." His initial
plan was to follow a specific, well-defined theoretical approach--what he calls the "hypothetico-deductive
method" combining literary history and criticism--but his subsequent decision to abandon the introductory
chapter detailing that methodology left him open, he explains, to the charge that "its basic thesis was not
original."(15) Of course, in many respects Watt explored some of the changes in the reading public (noted
above) in more depth than his predecessors, yet it is apparent that the supporting arguments for this thesis
were deduced from the body of work already published. My point is that Watt's hypothetico-deductive
method entails an approach to literary historiography that focuses not on discovery, but on argument, on the
telling of the tale. Furthermore, it can be shown that this emphasis on story is the key to the success of Rise
of the Novel, because the form that its argument assumes has, more than any earlier literary history, given
shape to current understandings of the origins of the novel.
Shifting the focus of scrutiny from content to form allows for a critical historiographic analysis of the story
told in Rise of the Novel by examining it as a verbal artifact. The analytic framework that White first
introduced in Metahistory proposes a methodology based on distinctions between narrative categories of
literature articulated by Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism, a work published in the same year as Rise of
the Novel.(16) Historical narratives assume, according to White, one of the four mythic shapes of romance,
tragedy, comedy, and satire that in Frye's theory of archetypes are linked to the seasons of the year in a
recurring annual cycle, and that correspond most readily in historical writing, White proposes, to four main
tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, respectively.(17) Frye's theory of archetypes endorses
the notion that cultural location determines the selection and recognition of narrative form. That is to say, we
recognize the mythic shapes of literature because of our shared cultural experience; consequently, narrative
form intensifies the explanatory power of narrative because that form is culturally endowed with a
preexisting aesthetic function based on shared affinities between modes of emplotment and their respective
tropological categories.(18) As a result, meaning in historical writing obtains not only from the facts but also
from the narrative's "pregeneric plot structure"; according to White, this is the narrative process through
which cultures make sense of the past (85).
This same understanding of the process of cultural endowment underpinning narrative form can, I argue,
open up new ways of evaluating and responding to literary-historical narratives. Literary historiographers,
like other historians, can also draw on these pregeneric plot structures to give shape to literary history. For
example, in its configuration of the "events" in the history of the novel (the historical "events" in this case
being the publication of particular texts), Rise of the Novel relies on the pregeneric plot structure of romance,
a mode of emplotment deriving from the archetypal form for the "dawn, spring and birth phase" of the
seasonal cycle of the year.(19) Narratives arising from this phase include myths of the birth of the hero (with
both mother and father who are, in this phase, relegated to the status of subordinate characters), myths of
creation, and, as Frye puts it, "defeat of the powers of darkness, winter and death" (16). The hero of Watt's
"tale," however, is the novel itself. Rise of the Novel authorizes a pseudobiological myth of the birth of the
novel by locating the beginnings of the genre in historical specifics: the defining moment for the novel's
emergence in the eighteenth century occurs in the works of Defoe and Richardson through"the suddenness
and completeness with which they brought into being what may be regarded as the lowest common
denominator of the novel genre as a whole, its formal realism" (34). This originary moment is less precisely
situated than Watt's rhetorical flourish implies, however, because more than two decades separate the 1719
publication of Robinson Crusoe from that of Pamela, the first version of which was published in 1740.
Moreover, the novel does not finally come into being as a genre until, Watt explains, Fielding's "realism of
assessment" becomes available to balance the "realism of presentation" afforded by Defoe and Richardson
(288). As a result, these three novelists are given full credit for the creation of the novel as a new literary
form. By delimiting the number who qualify as authors not only of exemplary novels but also of this
originary moment to three specific writers, Watt is, in effect, assigning parentage to this triumvirate of
novelists in a manner consistent with romance narratives as Frye defines them. The "powers of darkness"
that the novel defeats (still following Frye's definition of the romance genre) are, in Watt's terms, the "body
of past assumptions and traditional beliefs" associated with medieval and Renaissance culture (12). Watt
contends that the modern period "decisively separated from its classical and mediaeval heritage by its
rejection ... of universals" in favor of an individualist orientation (12). Thus, the novel is situated as a key
player in the transition within British culture from the medieval to the modern period.
The prominence accorded to an individualist orientation in the plot structure of Rise of the Novel offers a
suggestive avenue through which to identify the ideological implications associated with the literary form
within which the history of the novel is emplotted. In charting the novel's rise from birth at the hands of
Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding to its climax in the works of Jane Austen (298) and supreme culmination in
James Joyce's Ulysses (206), Watt inscribes the novel's history within a romance narrative structure that
produces a Bildungsroman, with the crucial qualification that the narrative charts the growth not of a human
protagonist, but of a genre--the novel.(20) Usually defined as the novel of development or formation, the
generic form, Bildungsroman, stages an account of individual progress falling within the category of
romance as Frye defines it. In The Secular Scripture, Frye locates romance at "the structural core of all
fiction," the narrative vehicle for "man's vision of his own life as a quest."(21) Given that the Bildungsroman
organizes its plot around a theme of ascent realized by the movement of the protagonist from birth to
maturity through the trials and tribulations of life the organizational model for human life that is, Frye
suggests, generally inscribed in romance narratives--it is evident that this form thematically epitomizes
romance modes of emplotment (176).
Admittedly, much of Watt's text fulfills the promise of its subtitle, "Studies in Defoe, Richardson and
Fielding," especially in its extensive accounts of their respective innovations as writers of fiction. But the
story within which such discussion takes place is a narrative of evolutionary development. What interests me
here are a series of recurring instances of syntactical slippage in the narrative, where the novel itself
displaces these three writers as the grammatical subject, and an abstraction designating a generic category
becomes situated both grammatically and conceptually as the active agent of its own development. For
example, although Watt's delineation of the novel's path from birth to maturity freely credits Defoe for his
talent as a master illusionist, which "almost makes him the founder of the new form" (131), at times the
writers take second place to the novel as actors in the drama of generic development, as do Richardson and
Fielding, once "the novel had gone far beyond their solutions of its formal problems" (133). Thus
grammatically, the novel's "fathers" are relegated to the status of subordinate characters in a manner
consistent with the romance paradigm of the questing hero. This effect is intensified when the novel appears
as the grammatical subject of an active verb in the account of the genre's historical progression. Watt
explains that "[a]fter Richardson and Fielding the novel played a part of increasing importance in the literary
scene" (290). Watt reiterates this stylistic personification in his claim that, in its achievement of maturity in
the twentieth century, "the novel, and its associated way of life, individualism, seem to have come full circle"
(132). In addition, Watt claims that the novel achieves this level of maturity through "[t]he development of
the novel's concentration on private experience and personal relationships" (206).
It is, of course, common practice for historians and literary-historians to use techniques of personification in
historical narrative, but there is a qualitative difference between the occasional use of stylistic devices to
enliven narrative and the more extensive encoding of an entire argument within a specific and identifiable
narrative form. Rise of the Novel sustains the form of a Bildungsroman by emplotting the novel's rise within
specific developmental achievements. Watt charts a path for the novel from its birth--"the novel is born
because Pamela makes her epic resistance to `a fate worse than death'" (165)--to adulthood, expressed as the
"full maturity of the genre" (296). These examples indicate the consistency with which Watt draws upon the
plot structure of the Bildungsroman, creating a pattern that is reinforced by his frequent deployment of a
rhetoric of agency for the novel, the genre situated here as its own literary protagonist. Consequently, literary
innovation is represented as the work of the novel, as hero, rather than those writers who created their
respective versions of the form.
The generic term Bildungsroman refers to narratives of exemplary development. Susan Fraiman points to the
common understanding of the Bildungsroman as an apprentice novel chronicling the hero's "educative wrong
choices en route to right ones."(22) Such choices fall by convention within a particular structure of moral and
educative development. Wilhelm Dilthey explains that this narrative form
consciously and artfully represents in one life what is human in general
terms.... A certain lawful development is considered in the individual's
 life; each stage has a value of its own, while at the same time it forms
the basis for a higher stage. The dissonances and conflicts of life appear
as the necessary transitions in the individual's progression toward
maturity and harmony.(23)
Such dissonances and conflicts are incorporated into the Bildungsroman within Rise of the Novel in a
manner which places the novel's development within progressive stages. In the first stage, the novel faces
choices and conflicts at its beginnings, because "the novel could only begin its study of personal
relationships once Robinson Crusoe had revealed a solitude that cried aloud for them" [emphasis added]
(92), and, "the novel could only concentrate on personal relations once most writers and readers believed that
individual human beings ... were allotted the supreme role on the earthly stage" [emphasis added] (84). In
these passages, Watt's use of personification goes beyond historiographic convention in assigning an active
intellect to a literary genre: the novel studies and concentrates as if it is endowed with a human
consciousness. Moreover, the putative hero makes choices when confronted with situations of conflict
because the novel's formal characteristics, Watt insists, "were contrary to the dominant literary outlook" (16),
especially its formal realism, which Watt claims "involved a many-sided break with the current literary
tradition" (35). Eventually, the novel as hero completes its upward path--its rise--to mastery by resolving the
conflicts with which it is presented: "[I]f the novel was to achieve equality of status with other genres," and
"if the new genre was to challenge older literary forms," it had to rise above these challenges and resolve a
fundamental internal conflict of identity (288). In sum, Watt's narrative shows the novel reaching maturity
only after proceeding through a series of educative choices and successfully resolving conflicts which
present themselves as impediments to its progress.
Thus, the novel's quest for identity, maturity, and internal harmony is ultimately fulfilled by its active role as
an agent of its own development, a role that is inscribed within Rise of the Novel's narrative form and
reinforced within its grammatical structures. In a revealing prefatory comment, Watt gestures to the potential
for artifice inherent in this line of argument:
[A]lthough my main effort has been to elucidate ... the enduring
connections between the distinctive literary qualities of the novel and
those of the society in which it began and flourished, I have not limited
myself to such considerations ... partly because my studies had confronted
me with the monitory example of how that rigorously systematic thinker
Walter Shandy would "twist and torture everything in nature to support his
hypothesis." (7)
Watt's comment negotiates between the aesthetic demands of emplotment and the conventions associated
with a documentary approach to historical knowledge; as he observes, there are risks involved in telling a
story too well. Watt's hypothesis, that the novel rose from a historically particular, originary moment along a
more or less straightforward path to maturity, seems especially convincing because the argument formulated
in the content of the story is reiterated in its form through the figurative vehicle of an organic metaphor
underwriting the surface narrative.(24) As the hero of its own quest for identity, the novel in Watt's tale
simultaneously embodies and exemplifies the myth of the self-made bourgeois liberal individual commonly
found in early versions of Bildungsromane,(25) the novel as hero achieving its own goals through a process
of willful self-making, and the form as Bildungsroman confirming these achievements through the medium
of metaphoric representation. The remarkable success of Rise of the Novel is due in large measure to the
coherence of the narrative and its aesthetic achievement as a story of generic birth, growth, and fulfillment.
In addition, the story at the heart of Rise of the Novel may have enjoyed such success because its aesthetic
appeal is enhanced by the affinity between the dominant trope shaping the story, metaphor, and the mode of
emplotment providing its plot structure, a form of romance narrative. The easy fit between the organic
metaphor inherent in the idea of a rise and the Bildungsroman within which that rise is emplotted helps to
naturalize the version of the origins-of-the-novel debate articulated by Rise of the Novel. A further
explication of its historiographic style shows how metaphor endorses an understanding of literary history
well-suited to the individualistic ideology underwriting the story. White maintains that a historian "who
originally encodes the world in the mode of metaphor will be inclined to decode it--that is, narratively
`explicate' and discursively analyze it--as a congeries of individualities"; such narratives will more likely
follow the romance mode of emplotment and employ a mode of argument that "identifies knowledge with
the appreciation and delineation of the particularity and individuality of things."(26) White's assessment of
the affinities between corresponding narrative modalities is confirmed in this instance by Watt's use of a
romance form, given that the concept of individuality occupies a pivotal role in Rise of the Novel, both in its
content and its form.
Of the five major changes in the reading public traced in Watt's account of the contextual factors surrounding
the rise of the novel, the rise of individualism occupies the thematic center, his other thematic preoccupations
either directly or indirectly related to a concern with defining and delineating individualism in the novel's
"story." Watt insists that "the rise of individualism is of great importance. By weakening communal and
traditional relationships, it fostered not only the kind of private and egocentric mental life we find in Defoe's
heroes, but also the later stress on the importance of personal relationships which is so characteristic both of
modern society and of the novel" (177). The rise of individualism is, by Watt's account, indicative of changes
in the intellectual and psychological natures of people in the modern era. Such changes are confirmed by the
dominant trope operating at the mythical level of this literary-historical narrative, in which the rise of the
novel figures metaphorically as the achievement of full humanity in modern society. Consequently, the
ideological implications of this Bildungsroman are those conventionally associated with liberal ideologies,
given that the achievement conveyed metaphorically within Rise of the Novel affirms a model for modern
humanity that privileges autonomy, progress, and individualism.
In these respects, Rise of the Novel is a decidedly modern text, in its plot structure (a Bildungsroman of the
novel), its central argument (for the rise of the realistic novel), and its central thematic concern (the rise of
individualism). Jean-Francois Lyotard, in his assessment of the condition of knowledge in contemporary
culture, defines as modern "any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse ... making an
explicit appeal to some grand narrative."(27) This is the mode of legitimation enacted by Rise of the Novel
within the context of the debate on the novel's origins, the notion of progress commonly associated with the
metanarratives of modernity staged within the Bildungsroman form. Narrative knowledge is produced,
Lyotard proposes, through what he calls stories of "positive or negative apprenticeships (Bildungen)"; such
forms of narrative are used within modern epistemology, Lyotard explains, either to "bestow legitimacy upon
social institutions (the function of myths), or represent positive or negative models (the successful or
unsuccessful hero) of integration into established institutions (legends and tales)" (20). The institution
legitimated in Rise of the Novel is the eighteenth-century novel, normatively understood, following Watt, as
the novel of formal realism, and integrated within these terms as a recognized genre into the literary canon.
Such narratives, Lyotard contends, "allow the society in which they are told ... to define its criteria of
competence and ... to evaluate according to those criteria what is performed or can be performed within it
(20). One unfortunate consequence of this process of legitimation has been the exclusion of a considerable
body of prose fictional narratives published during the eighteenth century, the majority written by women, as
Watt acknowledges all too briefly in Rise of the Novel (298). Such fictions are excluded because of their
inability to meet the criteria of competence which Watt establishes, regretfully, without reference to these
works. As J. Paul Hunter observes, Rise of the Novel "actually shrank a canon that at the time still then
included [many more] novelists," such as Aphra Behn, Delariviere Manley, Eliza Haywood, and Fanny
Burney, amongst a number of other (male) novelists, denoted "minor" along with three of the women writers
mentioned here.(28) Wart's central argument, in which he identifies formal realism as the novel's
distinguishing feature, is formulated on the basis of works by three writers out of several hundreds of
novelists publishing during the period.
Can we assume, however, in an era (of postmodernity) that has fostered substantial challenges to liberal
humanism and to the dominant values of the modern episteme,(29) that Rise of the Novel is a tale past its
time?(30) Have the discourses of modernity, which presume the existence of a self-articulating,
individualized subject, given way within postmodernity to a radically different understanding of the self as a
subject without any predefining essence, constituted not by its own articulatory ability, but by discourse
itself? It may be that a culture that has seriously entertained the notion that the subject is dead is also a
culture in which the intellectual and psychological natures of critical readers will no longer be satisfied by a
quest for origins as a credible approach to historical knowledge. The version of the quest emplotted within
the Bildungsroman of the novel inscribes an Enlightenment narrative of uninterrupted progress which may
have been intelligible within a modern intellectual frame of reference, but which may seem less so for critics
working within a postmodern critical sensibility. Witness, for example, Stephen Greenblatt's condemnation
of such teleological narratives as "intellectually and ideologically bankrupt."(31) The acute skepticism of
late-twentieth-century critical theorists about the ability of language and linguistic forms to provide direct
access to knowledge about the "real" world of the past (or even the present) has worked to undermine, in
large measure, our confidence not only in the referential adequacy of fictional narratives, but also in the
ability of literary-historical narratives to convey a truthful or sufficiently complete version of the literary
past.
Certainly, during the past forty years, critical theory has literally transformed the way in which we look to
the past, both in the kinds of questions we ask, and in the kind of evidence we bring to bear in arriving at
historical knowledge. Nevertheless, within literary-historical discourses on the novel, Rise of the Novel
never seems to have lost its considerable purchase as an influential text. Daniel Schwarz, writing in 1982,
argues that Rise of the Novel "remains a compelling argument and a pleasure to read," while McKeon,
writing in 1987, thirty years after its publication, lauds Watt's literary history as "[t]he most successful
attempt to explain the origins of the English novel."(32) In John Richetti's view (expressed in 1992), Watt's
text retains its status as "a foundational critical work" which has produced, but has not been displaced by, "a
line of worthy successors," a position reiterated by William Warner (in 1994), who situates Watt as a
touchstone figure against which "those many critics and literary historians who have followed in his wake"
are implicitly measured.(33) But the strongest reassertion of Watt's status in literary-historical discourse on
the novel is represented by the special January-April 2000 issue of Eighteenth-Century Fiction entitled
Reconsidering the Rise of the Novel, in which the editor, David Blewett, urges a position shared by a number
of contributors: "The shadow cast by The Rise of the Novel is so long that general studies of the early novel
are still written in its shade."(34) These affirmations suggest that Rise of the Novel still retains its place as
the authoritative history of the novel among a respectable number of scholars working in literary history.
It seems, then, that the critical practices that have emerged within poststructuralist and postmodernist theory
pose little threat to the status of Watt's tale in the origins of the novel debate. My analysis of the narrative
form of Rise of the Novel is intended to show, however, that the language-centered analysis of historical
writing in critical historiography can be extended to literary-historical discourses--including the story of the
rise of the novel--in order to delineate more precisely the role played by literary history in the process of
canonical construction and the consequent (re)production of ideology. This critical approach supports other
critiques of literary-historical knowledge undertaken in the work of Foucault. For example, to assert that the
explanatory power of Rise of the Novel derives from its metaphoric rather than an evidentiary base confirms
Foucault's observation in The Archaeology of Knowledge that, until now, the history of discourses "has been
animated by the reassuring metaphors of life or the intentional continuity of the lived."(35) Foucault's
critique of history helps to explain the emotional appeal of organic metaphors and the suggestion of
inevitability encoded within such narrative forms as the Bildungsroman. Foucault's resistance to the
inscription of a modern approach to knowledge registers an objection to the forms of narrative--
developmental, teleological, and progressive--that have dominated literary-historical discourses on the novel
(203). In addition, Foucault argues more precisely against such approaches to historical knowledge in his
essay, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History."(36) Here, Foucault rejects a search for origins as a futile quest for a
nonexistent essence, proposing instead a genealogical model; such a model attempts to resist Enlightenment
narratives of progress by envisioning both an anti-foundational and antiteleological approach to historical
thought, although this model's resistance to metanarrative may be compromised by genealogy's own
metaphorical affinity with models of human ancestral relationships. In this sense, Foucault's notion of
genealogy does not refuse the possibility of historical knowledge altogether, but his skepticism of essential
identity could, if applied to the novel, help in pursuing questions that critics have raised about the validity of
Watt's selection of formal realism as the defining element of the eighteenth-century novel.(37) Foucault's
interrogation of narrative forms of knowledge in systems of historical thought exemplifies a prevailing
concern within postmodern and poststructuralist theory about the central role of language in constructing
meaning and disseminating ideology across all dimensions of culture. In this respect, Foucault's work, like
that of White, participates in one of the major political projects of postmodernism--a form of ideological
critique whose goal is to denaturalize and, as Hutcheon suggests, "to `de-doxify' our cultural representations
and their undeniable political import."(38)
This political project has, to be sure, fostered a sense of radical instability commonly associated with
postmodern theories of culture; such instability has led, Timothy Reiss insists, to a moment of "crisis in all
forms of discursive practice" that appears "precisely analogous to that occupied by Bacon and Descartes,
Galileo, Milton, and Hobbes."(39) Lyotard, too, places his own discussion of the radical shift in the
conditions of knowledge within postmodern culture "in the context of the crisis of narratives."(40) This is the
condition that causes the greatest resistance to postmodern theories--a condition of radical epistemological
uncertainty brought about by a widespread interrogation within critical theory of the role of language in the
construction of knowledge. The gloomy consequence of these interrogations places us, according to some
opponents of postmodern theory, face to face with the sheer impossibility of historical knowledge of
literature. Fredric Jameson contends that we have reached the "end of history," where historical thought is no
longer possible because of the antifoundationalist practices of postmodern and poststructural critical
theorists.(41) Similarly, David Perkins answers the title question of his book, Is Literary History Possible?,
primarily in the negative: "[H]aving tried to write literary history, I am unconvinced (or deconvinced) that it
can be done."(42) Unlike Jameson, however, Perkins does not blame the messengers for this state of affairs,
but instead repositions his historiographic approach in response to recent developments in critical theory.
Perkins concedes that while the old "faith" in an objective literary history has been lost, it is still possible to
value, in a provisional and skeptical way, what literary history can teach us, as criticism, about literary texts
and about the "otherness" of the past (185). A critical historiographic approach can further Perkins's
argument by using these literary critical techniques to show, through the lens of genre criticism, that rather
than being an enabling link between the present and the past, literary-historical narratives function as
intervening vehicles whose very textuality points to their own status as narratives, and whose coherence
testifies to the artifice underwriting their creation. Of course early modern novels did exist in a reality now
long past, but our perception of their cultural and historical significance is shaped by and filtered through the
enabling stories of literary history. The power of narrative form in literary history derives from its ability to
give shape to ideology; the methodology involved in formulating literary-historical narratives privileges a
group of texts whose selection for consideration within the history registers an aesthetic evaluation as part
and parcel of the process. This is the mechanism through which literary histories engage in the retrospective
construction of canons, and the avenue through which the ideology of the historiographic text is produced.
Narrative form functions as a conceptual screen, naturalizing the historiographic process and rendering
invisible the production of ideology inherent within the telling of the tale.
Besides, it is also important to acknowledge that conventional narrative forms continue to be used in writing
the literary histories of marginalized communities for a number of strategic, pragmatic reasons that are,
Hutcheon argues, neither politically naive nor ideologically retrograde. Although these evolutionary,
developmental, teleological narrative models are the mechanisms by which significant sectors of the culture
have been excluded from the major literary histories of the modern era, Hutcheon shows that such models
are still being used by those excluded identities to serve interventionist aims, and to provide validating
structures and ideological power.(43) Such narratives of modernity are still being employed in the debate on
the origins of the novel even though they coexist in ironic simultaneity with the critical stances of
postmodernity. Consequently, although Lyotard claims that postmodern culture is characterized by an
incredulity toward metanarratives, the persistence of the metanarrative of evolutionary development in
histories of the novel suggests that this same incredulity does not constitute absolute refusal of politically
strategic narrative forms. Instead, postmodern and poststructuralist critics have nurtured the necessary
skepticism toward totalizing discourses that makes it possible to recognize the metanarratives that are also in
play within postmodern and poststructuralist critical theories;(44) this skeptical stance prevents the critical
discourses of postmodernist and poststructuralist critics from sweeping away in too totalizing a gesture all of
the politically-strategic stories made possible by the dominant discourses of modernity. Therefore, the
condition of the field of historiography of the novel mirrors that which exists in history proper, in that we
find literary historians of the novel, like their counterparts in traditional history, still pursuing an approach to
the writing of literary history that critical historiography reads as a form of fictional narrative. It may be that
critical theory has increased the level of self-reflexivity in more recent literary historiography, but such views
have not fulfilled Perkins's gloomy prophecy that literary history is no longer possible.(45) Indeed, the vigor
that characterizes the debate on the origins of the novel suggests that literary history is alive and well (a
claim that itself threatens to embrace the kind of metaphor that is at present under investigation). In the end, I
doubt whether critical theory will ever completely undermine the pleasure of narrative for literary scholars.
After all, for now, it seems, "the story's the thing," for even this most linguistically self-conscious of cultures,
for we are still attracted by the seductive pleasures of narrative. Rather than undermining the possibility of
narrative knowledge in literary histories, critical historiographical analysis lends more depth to the pleasure
of discovery in its advocation of a double-vision afforded by reading both with and against the grain to see
the imbrications of meaning encoded within narrative form.
This conclusion, however, leaves open the question of whether new models of postmodern literary-historical
inquiry will emerge for the novel. It is now the case that we have not one literary history of the novel, but a
plurality of histories, each in their own way claiming to offer, as Margaret Anne Doody ironically signals in
her title, The True Story of the Novel.(46) Is there a form of historical knowledge that would satisfy the
demands of some critics for the qualities of self-reflexivity and an ironic awareness of its own status as
narrative that we have come to associate with postmodern narratives? And what ideological implications
would attend a fully postmodernist approach to literary history? It may never be possible to tell the whole
story within one coherent narrative, or for any one literary history of early novels to incorporate the plurality
of texts, positions, and generic definitions currently at issue in literary-historical discourses. Given the
plethora of fictional narratives that have existed throughout English literary history, and the multiple layers
of mediating literary histories that have shaped our knowledge of these cultural forms, the challenge for
literary historians will also be to impose form on what could seem like chaos without the comfort of the
frame provided by an organic narrative. Indeed, it is possible to speculate that literary historiographers may
find the insights of chaos theory--especially its search for order within disorder--productive in devising new
explanatory models through which to rethink and tell the story of early novels and other prose (fictional)
narratives.(47) But that, of course, is another story.
Reading Rise of the Novel through an interpretive grid of critical historiographic theory explains why Watt's
story has enjoyed such remarkable success, and why it has had such an impact on subsequent literary
historians engaged in the debate on the origins of the novel. Reading Watt's narrative as story, complete with
protagonist, antagonists, plot structure, and form, functions as a hermeneutic strategy, denaturalizing the
historiographic process, and thereby opening a window onto the way literary-historical narratives convey so
much more than their evidentiary content. To explore the fictional dimension of Watt's story is not to claim
that the story is false, but to see Rise of the Novel as a revealing illustration of the way literary-historical
writing operates as an ideological apparatus. To call attention to the art (and artifice) in one exemplary
literary history is not, then, to assert the end or impossibility of literary-historical knowledge, but to celebrate
additional ways of reading such narratives. Moreover, to identify form in literary-historical narrative is, at
least, a useful reminder that the emplotment of the novel's history is not inevitably that of a rise, and that the
adoption of this mode of explanation is ideologically determined. Critical historiography can be used to
explicate the ideological functions of narrative forms of literary-historical knowledge, and to remind us that
historical revision entails a reconsideration of form in addition to content in our investigations and rethinking
of the literary past(s).
(1.) Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (1957; London: Hogarth P, 1987). Subsequent references to this work
are cited parenthetically in the text. I wish to thank Brian Corman, Linda Hutcheon, and Mary Nyquist for
their advice and support, and Susan Carter, Tanya Hagen, Joanne Rochester, Joanne Saul, Lisa Wood, and
Tanya Wood for their helpful responses to earlier drafts of this paper. This work has been supported by
funding provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada in the form of a
doctoral fellowship.
(2.) Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), 2. See also Louis Althusser,
Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), 148, 161;
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Paladin-Grafton, 1973), 131, 141-42;
Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London and New York: Methuen, 1980), 1-7; Terry Eagleton, Ideology:
An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), 58-61; and Christopher Norris, Paul De Man: Deconstruction and
the Critique of Aesthetic Ideology (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), 182.
(3.) Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978),
82.
(4.) Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985), 17.
(5.) Quoted in Roger Adelson, ed., Speaking of History: Conversations with Historians (East Lansing:
Michigan State UP, 1997), 19.
(6.) Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York and London: Routledge,
1988), 96; and Bryan D. Palmer, Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of
Social History (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1990). See also Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How
Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering our Past (New York: Free P, 1997). For a sampling of the
impact on historiography of a range of theoretical approaches, see Anna Green and Kathleen Troup, eds., and
introduction to The Houses of History: A Critical Reader in Twentieth-Century History and Theory
(Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999).
(7.) See Watt, "Flat-Footed and Fly-Blown: The Realities of Realism," Reconsidering the Rise of the Novel,
special issue of Eighteenth-Century Fiction 12.2-3 (2000): 161. This essay is the published version of a
plenary Watt gave at the Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies meeting he1, ! at the
University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, March 12, 1978.
(8.) Michael McKeon, "Watt's Rise of the Novel within the Tradition of the Rise of the Novel," in
Eighteenth. Century Fiction 12.2-3 (2000): 275.
(9.) See, for example, Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New
York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987); John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture
of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987); Lennard J. Davis, Factual
Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia UP, 1983); J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels:
The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990); Michael McKeon,
The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987); and William B. Warner,
Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684-1750 (Berkeley: U of California
P, 1998).
(10.) Brian Corman, "Congreve, Fielding, and the Rise of Some Novels," British Theatre and the Other Arts,
1660-1800, ed. Shirley Strum Kenny (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1984), 257.
(11.) Ernest A. Baker, The History of the English Novel, 10 vols. (London: H.F. & G. Witherby, 1924-39). It
seems appropriate to take a review of Watt's predecessors as far back as the 1920s, given that Baker's ten-
volume study still counts as the most comprehensive history of the novel to date.
(12.) Godfrey Frank Singer, The Epistolary Novel: Its Origin, Development, Decline, and Residuary
Influence (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1933); Bruce McCullough, Representative English Novelists:
Defoe to Conrad (New York and London: Harper, 1946); Arnold Kettle, An Introduction to the English
Novel, vol. 1 (London: Hutchinson House, 1951); Diana S. Neill, A Short History of the English Novel
(London: Jarrolds, 1951).
(13.) Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader, 2d ser. (London: Hogarth P, 1932); Walter Allen, The English
Novel: A Short Critical History (New York: Dutton, 1954); Frank O'Connor [Michael O'Donovan], The
Mirror in the Roadway: A Study of the Modern Novel (New York: Knopf, 1956).
(14.) Laurence Veysey, "The United States," International Handbook of Historical Studies: Contemporary
Research and Theory, ed. Georg G. Iggers and Harold T. Parker (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood P, 1979), 168.
(15.) Ian Watt, "Serious Reflections on The Rise of the Novel," Novel: A Forum on Fiction 1.3 (1968): 206.
(16.) Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957); White,
Metahistory : The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth. Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
1973), 29.
(17.) See White, Metahistory, 29; and Frye, Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1963), 16.
(18.) White, Tropics, 85.
(19.) Frye, Fables of Identity, 16.
(20.) Warner alludes briefly to this possibility in Licensing Entertainment, 23. See also the discussion of
narrative form in literary history in David Perkins, Is Literary History Possible? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
UP, 1992), 39.
(21.) Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1976), 15.
(22.) Susan Fraiman, Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and The Novel of Development (New
York: Columbia UP, 1993), 5.
(23.) Quoted in Dorothea E. von Mucke, Virtue and the Veil of Illusion: Generic Innovation and the
Pedagogical Project in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991), 230.
(24.) On the use of organic metaphors in literary-historical writing, see Frye, Fables of Identity, 11;
Hutcheon, "Interventionist Literary Histories: Nostalgic, Pragmatic, or Utopian?" Modern Language
Quarterly 59.4 (1998): 404, 407; and Perkins, 33, 39-40.
(25.) Fraiman, ix-x, 5-6.
(26.) White, Tropics, 128.
(27.) Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington
and Brian Massumi, vol. 10, Theory and History of Literature (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984), xxiii.
(28.) Burney was, Hunter points out, deemed "major" before Watt reshaped the canon of eighteenth-century
novelists. See Hunter's "Serious Reflections on Daniel Defoe (with an Excursus on the Farther Adventures of
Ian Watt and Two Notes on the Present State of Literary Studies)," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 12.2-3 (2000):
231.
(29.) Hutcheon, Poetics of Postmodernism, 6.
(30.) Such a conclusion would, somewhat belatedly, respond to Paul Salzman's wish expressed fifteen years
ago that the "quest for the first English `novel' is, one hopes, an outdated game today," see English Prose
Fiction 1558-1700: A Critical History (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1985), 1.
(31.) Quoted in Hutcheon, "Interventionist Literary Histories": 410.
(32.) Daniel R. Schwarz, "The Importance of Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel," The Journal of Narrative
Technique 12.2 (1982): 72; Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740 (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP, 1987), 1.
(33.) John Richetti, "The Legacy of lan Watt's The Rise of the Novel," The Profession of Eighteenth-Century
Literature: Reflections on an Institution, ed. Leo Damrosch (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1992), 96; and
William Warner, "Licensing Pleasure: Literary History and the Novel in Early Modern Britain," The
Columbia History of the British Novel, ed. John Richetti (New York: Columbia UP, 1994), 21. See also
Josephine Donovan's Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405-1726 (New York: St. Martin's P, 1999), which
confirms Watt's status in its title and in its opening remarks acknowledging Watt's "still-classic study," 1.
(34.) David Blewett, "Introduction," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 12.2.3 (2000):141. See also in this issue
Robert B. Alter's claim that "The Rise of the Novel remains the most illuminating account we have of the
emergence of the new genre in eighteenth-century England ("A Question of Beginnings": 214); W. B.
Carnochan's observation that "The Rise of the Novel has remained the touchstone" whereas "other critics
who turned to the novel in the postwar years are (by and large) not much remembered, but there were a good
number of them" ("`A Matter Discutable'": 175); Michael Seidel's argument that Watt's "value as a critic
remains paramount because to this date [his] argument has not been made with more force or with more
conviction" ("The Man Who Came To Dinner": 212); and McKeon's assessment of The Rise of the Novel as
the twentieth-century's "most influential Anglo-American exercise in the theoretical-historical understanding
of the novel" ("Watt's Rise of the Novel within the Tradition of the Rise of the Novel": 276).
(35.) Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock,
1972), 210.
(36.) Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and
Interviews, ed. and intro. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977),
139-64.
(37.) See Corman 258,268; and Richetti, The English Novel in History 1700-1780
(London: Routledge, 1999), 2, 3.
(38.) Hutcheon, Politics of Postmodernism, 3.
(39.) Timothy J. Reiss, The Discourse of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982), 385.
(40.) Lyotard, xxiii.
(41.) Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia UP, 1994), xi.
(42.) Perkins, 11.
(43.) Hutcheon, "Interventionist Literary Histories": 417. In the field of feminist literary history, for example,
see Jane Spencer's The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Blackwell,
1986); and Donovan's Women and the Rise of the Novel 1405-1726, noted above.
(44.) Hutcheon, Poetics, 7, 229.
(45.) Perkins, 11, 17, 182.
(46.) Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1996).
(47.) See, for example, N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature
and Science (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990). Frye also turns to science for explanatory models for literary history
in recommending a shift from a Ptolemaic (that is, novel-centered) view to a Copernican perspective, which
would see the novel as only one of a number of forms of continuous prose [fictional] narratives, see Anatomy
of Criticism, 304.
Margaret Reeves is a doctoral candidate in English and Women's Studies at the University of Toronto. She
has published articles on Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex writing a dissertation examining the use of
political satire in women's seventeenth-century prose fictional narratives.