Regimes and the History of Forms
Davis, Foley, and Gallagher’s efforts to give fiction a history have a conceptual focus. That is, the way people write novels follows from the way they think; it is because the way they think changes that the novel changes. The schema can be made bi-directional—the novel reflects a change in thought while then furthering and deepening the change—without altering the basic method. Either way, the history of fiction is to be read in a select group of works that document the progress of an underlying conceptual evolution. And this is the way much literary history is done. Individual works are important insofar as they are signs of something else that is otherwise out of sight but nonetheless on the rise—fiction and realism; “the novel,” which is often more of an idea than a thing; a culture of this or that; but really just plain modernity.
A drawing of such an approach to fiction’s history might look like this. A, B, and C are the great authors who over time were coming to see that their works could be fictional; to perceive fiction as legitimate, freed from the alibi of history; to realize at long last that reading and writing involved the coveted “willing suspension of disbelief.” They sighted the conceptual territory of fiction (D) that would soon emerge for all to colonize. D had always been there, pushing up, but aside from these islands, it remained under water. There is, however, a problem. What if nothing below the waterline links these islands to each other or to the mainland in the distance? Sicily lies smack up against the boot of Italy. But despite appearances, it was never part of the boot; geologically speaking, it’s part of North Africa. We see our canonical novels of the past as an archipelago connected to the mainland of now, whereas they may be only a series of data points acting as hosts for our perception of patterns—patterns we perceive based on our knowledge of what is to come.
Do things rise? Of course. Oil painting, or the landscape, or abstract art. In literature, the sonnet and the murder mystery and the naturalist novel. But such things are practices, and tracing the rise of identifiable practices makes a kind of sense that the divination of rising ways of thinking does not. If we redefine fiction as a practice, not as a mode of cognition or an underlying concept detectible beneath the surface of individual works, it too becomes traceable, and its difference with respect to earlier practices—Aristotelian invention and the pseudofactual mode—remains clear. Above, I’ve tried to bring those different practices into focus using a few examples that I believe are representative of the dominant practices of their time. They add up, I believe, to the following narrative.
As is clear from Aristotle and the classical corpus, for a very long time poets—but of course not all poets—took their characters and their main actions from history and wove their plots around what was commonly said to be true. They went about their work this way not because their thinking was hard-wired, but because they and their audience shared a set of assumptions about what literature was good for and how it worked upon us. And so during the first big European heyday of the novel—from the beginning of the seventeenth century until around 1660—writers of French romances who wanted to dignify the genre inspired by the Renaissance rediscovery of Heliodorus’s fourth-century Aethiopica generally hewed close to this sanctioned practice.69 Then, in the latter decades of the seventeenth century, a new formal possibility was devised that ended up mostly displacing the older method of composition. This innovation is the pseudofactual posture: novels were no longer spun around legendary heroes, they took the form of memoirs, letters, or occasionally eyewitness histories by or about contemporaries of whom no one had heard. No conceptual mutation was necessary for this new phase or regime—just a set of forms offering, as we’ll see, concrete advantages over previous forms. Then, around the turn of the nineteenth century, there was a last change—last in the sense that I think we are still in it, not last in the sense of perfect or final. This change is what I’m calling fiction—works that make no bones about their invention despite being set within contemporary reality. (This last trait clearly separates fiction from the “fanciful” genres of the fairy tale or the oriental tale, as well as from allegory.) And as with the pseudofactual novel, represented chiefly by first-person forms, a specific form characterizes the fictional novel—a type of third-person narration that was more or less unexploited before this period. (As my Conclusion will suggest, the fictional novel also makes new use of the first-person forms associated with the pseudofactual regime.)
I call each of these periods regimes. The term must not be confused with Kuhnian “paradigms” or Foucault’s “epistemes”—ways of thinking or modes of knowledge production that shift. In fact, even the common vocabulary of “shifting” is out of place, for it yokes us to modeling cultural change along the lines of sudden and unpredictable tectonic movement. Regimes do change, and the change may possibly (but not necessarily) be abrupt. This is not to say, however, that human cognition makes a leap, only that people’s literary behavior changes—generally speaking. “Generally” is a loose word, purposely on the opposite end of the spectrum from “shift.” Its looseness is not designed to protect my theory from the vagaries of history, which is to say, from troublesome counterexamples. In fact, it is inseparable from what I mean by a regime. Let’s take a closer look at the Aristotelian one.
Aristotle mentions Agathon’s tragedy Antheus as proof that the genre did not need to concern itself with real people; the Greek novels of Xenophon, Heliodorus, and others set invented characters loose in a recognizable Mediterranean landscape. Greeks and Romans, just like early modern readers, were hardly conceptually short-changed or congenitally literal-minded. They could well imagine invented characters. But, they reasoned, why bother with them? Like many other ancient works, Antheus is lost, yet this particular loss is emblematic of a persistent disinterest in characters with no historical sanction. Most commentators were much less forgiving than Aristotle on this point, even when they were Aristotelians: when examples of made-up narratives were there to be denigrated, they were. Macrobius treated Petronius’s and Apuleius’s works as childish fables; the emperor Julian in the fourth century firmly rejected the Greek romances that were nothing but spurious history.70 (Comedy always constituted an exception: it was the one place where pure invention did not bring down upon the poet charges of irrelevance, though it did of course make the genre an also-ran to epic and tragedy in terms of prestige. I will postpone consideration of comic types until Chapter 3.) Of course, some people must have enjoyed these writings, but given the widespread opprobrium—which meant that cultural prestige did not accrue to works not dealing with real heroes—it is no wonder more writers did not push further in this direction.
If the Aristotelian critical tradition did not sanction the use of invented heroes, this was not because they didn’t have the right “mental equipment,”71 but—much less dramatically—because they reasoned that heroes should be taken from history. As we’ve seen, Aristotle’s treatise did not set history and literature as two opposite poles—what moderns might want to call the poles of fact and fiction. On the contrary, literature was what poets made of the gaps in history, and conversely, as Lionel Gossman has emphatically put