Dissenters, naturally, dissented. Sidney, with his oft-cited separation of poetry from history (in The Apologie for Poetry, c. 1583), was one. Rabelais, Ariosto, and Spenser are hardly orthodox Aristotelians (even if, as I’ve briefly suggested, they do not give history as short a shrift as might be supposed). Yet the Aristotelian line only hardened in the seventeenth century, as is evidenced by an evolution I’ve alluded to: imitating the Greek novel, which did not use characters of renown, French romance writers gave it a historical inflection.78 Upon its appearance in Amyot’s French translation of 1547, Heliodorus’s Aethiopica was praised by humanists for reasons we will see in Chapter 2. While its nonhistorical subject matter was not an insurmountable barrier to appreciation, it did restrict the work’s claim to our attention by eliminating, Amyot reasoned in his preface, any possible utility: the Aethiopica was nothing more than good leisure reading for the fatigued humanist scholar.79 Unsurprisingly, then, imparting prestige to romance in the Heliodorian model required beefing up its historical credentials. “[When] lies are made openly, such crude falsity makes no impression on the soul, and gives no pleasure,” wrote Georges and Madeleine de Scudéry in the preface to their romance Ibrahim (1641–44); “how can I be touched by the misfortunes of the Queen of Guindaye, or of the King of Astrobatia, since I know that their kingdoms are nowhere on the universal map, or more precisely, in the realm of things?”80 Romance was thus made to conform to general neoclassical arguments about verisimilitude, summed up in the formulation of Boileau, “The spirit is not moved by what it does not believe.”81 And early aesthetic speculation—in contradistinction to Kantian or Hegelian thought—built on the primacy of history by conceiving of art as an ersatz experience of reality, as a simulation or illusion. The theories of Burke, which I’ve mentioned in the context of Richardson’s editorial posture, are merely one late variant on this line of thought, in which illusion, necessarily imperfect, grounds the efficacy of the spectacle.82 The Marquis d’Argens, in his 1739 “Discours sur les nouvelles,” protested that he didn’t see why readerly involvement was discouraged by openly invented characters: “The author of a romance or a novel (un roman ou une nouvelle) has had enough genius to imagine a plot (un sujet), to decorate it with the circumstances that captivate and move the soul of the reader. So why can’t he invent names? What prevents him?”83 Nothing except tradition.
And in a sense, even tradition doesn’t prevent authors of any period from inventing their protagonists. Tradition, after all, is merely a mass of practices and beliefs that individuals may reject or modify as they see fit. The question is whether such inevitable variation, which may remain strictly individual or possibly resolve into subpractices (like the Greek novel itself), causes a change in dominant practices. In some cases the answer must be yes, in others no. It probably depends on being in the right place at the right time with the right invention.
Here the example of the pseudofactual’s leading edge is relevant. The pretense of truth was not new to the years around 1670: Cervantes claimed to discover and translate a chronicle relating the life of Don Quixote, and any number of writers had offered “true stories”—of capital crimes, say, or of fantastic voyages—for the edification or amazement of their readers. But around 1670 in France the traditional contents of the novel—quite simply, love and adventure—are poured into a number of new forms. The first epistolary novels, for instance: Lettres portugaises (1669), commonly attributed to Guilleragues; or Le Portefeuille (1674), by Villedieu. Early memoir novels: Villedieu’s La Vie de Henriette-Sylvie de Molière, which I’ve mentioned; Bremond’s Mémoires galants (1680); Courtilz de Sandras’s Mémoires de Mr L.C.D.R. (1687). Novels, often cast as long letters to a friend, purporting to recount various adventures recently befallen the writer or people in the writer’s circle: Préchac’s Voyage de Fontainebleau (1678); Murat’s Voyage de campagne (1699). And finally the aforementioned historical novella: Saint-Réal’s Dom Carlos (1672), Boursault’s Le Prince de Condé (1675). As I will show in Chapter 1, this last form, though often taken for a key step toward novelistic modernity, was in fact composed along well-trodden Aristotelian lines (it focused on attested heroes from the European past), and at any rate had no posterity (by 1700 the subgenre is exhausted). But the other forms offered something Aristotelian invention did not. They made a place for writers, from bourgeois hacks to aristocratic women, who were not poets in the old, classically trained sense; and readers who read for leisure and not for learning could read about themselves rather than figures of the remote past.
The pseudofactual posture, then, had advantages. By allowing writers to set their stories in the present, it permitted a much more direct commentary on contemporary life.84 Novelists were endlessly concerned with how they could use their works to make not only general ethical claims (which of course continued to be explored), but also to raise problems foreign to the figures bequeathed by history. If you wanted to address issues such as the institutions of marriage and slavery, the mores of Paris or London, social prejudice, political chicanery, and the abuses of the Church, then the benefits of the pseudofactual novel were clear. Another advantage to the mode was that at bottom it provided new forms without breaking with the long-established historical bent of Aristotelian poetics. Some violence was done to the common idea that the more illustrious the protagonist, the more forceful and prestigious the artwork: Defoe’s Roxana, certainly, is no Orestes. But what was lost in pedigree was gained in illusory immediacy, since readers were given to read not a poet’s invention, written in the blanks of history, but the hero’s own writing. Total belief was not required: Richardson’s letter to Warburton demonstrates that illusion was not held to be an all-or-nothing proposition. Nonetheless, whatever belief there was (and the more, the better) was envisioned as a species of the belief we have in historical discourse—literal belief with something subtracted, as it were, rather than a special type of belief reserved for literature. Granted, the epistolary novel marks quite a change from the epic; but at the same time, Richardson’s pseudofactual stance toward the reality of Clarissa’s letters does not bring us very far from Aristotle, for whom what has actually happened guarantees conviction.
The pseudofactual form, once invented, prospered because it offered something to writers and readers. But invention is necessary, and this was the case with fictional forms as well. The pseudofactual novel features either a real person narrating his or her own deeds, or a real person narrating the deeds of real people. No one believes in all these “real people,” of course, but everyone agrees to pretend. Why can’t the pretense be dropped, given that no one believes it? Partially because of the rationales I’ve outlined, but also, no doubt, because the pretense derives from the forms themselves—from the letters, the memoirs, the biographies, the true histories. The fictional novel requires a new form of third-person narration.