Before Fiction. Nicholas D. Paige

or heard, they belong to the same “storyworld” as the characters. The third-person narrators of fiction, by contrast, are not part of the storyworld of their novels; in many cases they are invisible, and the story seems to be somehow telling itself. But even when narrators are intrusive in their use of the word “I,” the “I” is no longer that of Behn or Fielding, no more than it recalls the much older poet-bard of, say, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1383) or the romances of Chrétien de Troyes. Rather, it belongs to an author-narrator who invents the persons and actions of which he or she writes. The novel that seems to tell itself and the novel told by an author-narrator who is in no way a “witness”: obviously these techniques open up new vistas for the genre. But they are, precisely, techniques, not a timeless narrative option that Richardson or Rousseau chose not to employ. The eighteenth-century novel’s inertia was not conceptual, but formal. Appropriating real-world discursive forms was the only game in town—at least until writers started to experiment with other possibilities and slowly stretched the bounds of what the novel could do.⁸⁵

      What is a literary regime, then? A dominant practice, modifiable over time, that corresponds to what enough people want their literature to do. Such a qualified proposition may seem toothless. It would be much better for the prestige of literary historians if something more dramatic were afoot—a change in worldview, a cultural mutation, a revolution in what is thinkable by humans, all registered first by the Geiger-like sensitivity of the literary work. And being able to read in the too-well-known pages of the canon the secret correspondences between novels and other apparently separate domains—this cements the critic’s ingenuity. Fiction’s advent has been tied in this way to momentous transformations and hidden causes. For Michael McKeon, nuancing Ian Watt’s argument that novels reflected a new empirical philosophical stance, the genre has to steer a dialectical path between the rock of empiricism and the hard place of skepticism, arriving at fiction as a soft middle ground. For Foley, realist fiction is logically subtended by a new vision of history. Gallagher looks away from philosophy and toward economics, suggesting that fiction follows from developments in capitalism, notably the use of credit.⁸⁶ John Bender prefers to underline fiction’s congruence with the scientific hypothesis.⁸⁷ I am certainly not prepared to deny a certain Lockean je ne sais quoi about the pseudofactual novel, especially since it is not hard to find corroboration that in the early modern period a qualitatively new form of discursive referentiality—what Timothy Reiss dubs “analytico-referential discourse”—replaced the textual practices of humanism or scholasticism, rooted in the citation of prior authorities.⁸⁸ And discourses do interpenetrate. Fielding, trained as a lawyer, integrated legal standards of proof into Tom Jones⁸⁹; Zola’s interest in the experimental science of Claude Bernard is a still more obvious example. But this is another order of link than the one proposed by the above scholars. Rarely content with demonstrable influence or seeking to leverage it into something grander, practitioners of Cultural Studies especially posit something more like a form of “magical ‘sympathy’” between otherwise disparate cultural manifestations.⁹⁰ To be sure, if we get sufficiently abstract about what fiction “is,” then yes, we will start to notice suggestive resemblances with any number of other cultural elements. But this is not evidence of a link; it is evidence of the human propensity to see patterns—to assume the islands of data are subtended by a common conceptual or logical substrate. I am as intrigued by coincidences as anyone—by the fact, say, that Kant defines the judgment of taste as being “indifferent as regards the existence of an object” precisely in 1790, which is to say the moment properly fictional forms started to multiply.⁹¹ Nevertheless, the present study simply resists the temptation to link fiction to the domains of philosophy, science, economics, law, and so on.

      Before Fiction remains focused, rather, on the nuts and bolts of literary form. My intraliterary preoccupations do not mean that I regard literature as autonomous or absolute in the common modern sense. After all, the fact that the writers of the period I deal with attributed to literature effects both moral and emotional implies something far from aesthetic autonomy (art-for-art’s sake), disinterestedness (art is for the mind not the senses), or self-referentiality (the medium is the message). Literary form, therefore, is not an aesthetic but morphological matter. If we stop asking what the novel is a “sign of,” an array of interesting and nearly unasked questions come into view—questions that have little to do with those old studies that simply grouped novels into waxing and waning subgenres or schools. Here are a few. When do individual innovations modify communal practice and when don’t they? Do inherited forms possess a kind of inertia, or, reformulated slightly, might literature show signs of “path-dependence”? If so, what is necessary for a new formal regime to overcome an old one? Is formal evolution continuous, or marked by plateaus and breaks, or a combination of both? Which possibility fits the data better: does an earlier form “turn into” a later form, or is the later form actually a competitor, coming to dominate and displace the other because it is better at doing certain things? Does a given form imply a content, or can new forms simply serve as vehicles for the same old preoccupations? Or do we observe a lag between the new form and the subsequent exploitation of the possibilities it offers—as when Walter Benjamin describes the use of iron in the nineteenth century at first mimicking familiar materials and then, slowly, permitting heretofore impossible constructions?⁹² Are literary forms, instead of being possibilities that any writer can pull out of the air when needed, something more like technologies—devices that need to be invented and then worked on by their inventor and the inventor’s competitors? What would a history of the novel written as a history of forms, as a morphological history, look like?

      For better or worse, it wouldn’t look entirely like Before Fiction, which at its origin was conceived much along the lines of the histories I have come to critique. This book carries in its structure—chapters on individual novelists strung together like chronological pearls—the trace of a mode of inquiry that the actual works, once contextualized, invalidated. But form, no more than biology, is not destiny, and the six case studies that follow no longer point to something “happening” underneath or around them. On the contrary, they show rather clearly that apart from some local skirmishes, nothing is happening, in the sense that fiction is not coming into being. Maybe elsewhere it is—I doubt it—but not in the texts I have selected. If we want to know how fictional forms came to dominate the novel, then we need to study the spread of their devices—notably, as I’ve hinted and as I will sketch out further in the Conclusion, the use of omniscient narration. That would require, obviously, a quite different type of study, one in which unusual individual works would fade into the background.⁹³ So, because a few isolated cases, contextualized or not, can’t add up to a history of communal practices, Before Fiction is only a prolegomenon to a future history that one day may offer a more adequate understanding of the various succeeding and competing forms the novel has taken.

      Chapter 1

      The Impossible Princess (Lafayette)

      La Princesse de Clèves’ claims to the title “the first modern novel” are many. The historical romances that had been the glory of the previous French prose tradition were labyrinthine and interminable; Lafayette’s work is compact and linear. It replaces heroic actions and hyperbolic passions with stifled feelings, confused thoughts, wavering intentions; it is thus psychological. Its heroine’s inimitability, famously lauded in the text’s closing sentence, signals the triumph of originality and individuality over conformity and the authority of the past; it is therefore an allegory of modernity itself. We can add to these arguments a trait that has been more or less taken for granted: Lafayette invents her heroine. The novel’s congruence in this regard with what we expect of fiction is remarkable. If we are looking for formal ancestors of the typical nineteenth-century novel—that is, third-person narratives focalized through nonexistent characters placed in a firmly drawn and recognizable milieu—then La Princesse de Clèves is really a much better choice than, say, Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), with its mock-epic themes and a garrulous narrator who repeatedly if facetiously affirms his story as true. One can sympathize with Ian Watt’s need to dismiss this and other French novels, in an infamous