This Introduction begins with some examples of how people have spoken, quite diversely, of the relation between poetry (or literature) and history (which itself is an unstable term). In these sections, Aristotle, Richardson, and a few nineteenth-century writers help flesh out some preliminary characteristics of what I will be calling the three “regimes” of poetic invention—the Aristotelian regime, the pseudofactual regime, and the fictional regime. Of special concern will be explaining what we lose if—following previous critics who have tried to replace the history of the novel with a history of fiction—we consider the pseudofactual novel to be merely an early version of the fictional novel: what came “before fiction,” as my title implies, was not fiction. (It was not inadequate, clunky, or naïve for not being fiction; it simply consisted of practices and rationales that fiction replaces or at least supplements with others.) I will finish up with some methodological remarks designed both to clarify what I mean by the term regime and to underline how the type of literary history it subtends departs from most accounts of the novel’s rise. This all amounts, I hope, to a preliminary case for the pragmatic usefulness of a historically restricted definition of fiction; given space limitations, it cannot be a full presentation and defense of modern fiction’s “legitimacy” (to borrow a term from Hans Blumenberg).13 Readers are asked to keep in mind that my analyses of the six writers treated in the chapters that follow will help fill in many of the blanks in this initial sketch; the Conclusion too chases down some problems it would be premature to tackle at this point. If, as I sometimes fear, Before Fiction opens up more questions than it answers, I can only hope that they are at least not the same questions.
Aristotle, Poetry, History
Homer, Rousseau, Balzac: one might grant differences in the way these authors invent without going so far as to deny some of them fictional credentials entirely. Why arbitrarily brand a given cultural practice as fiction proper, excommunicating writers who don’t measure up to the conventions of the nineteenth-century novel? Why not speak, rather, of different types of fictional modes? This would allow us to say that Homer operates in one mode, Rousseau in another, and Dickens in another still, while all the while not denying that their works have something in common. After all, fiction comes from fingere, as I’ve pointed out myself, and all these writers, readers know, are making or inventing to one degree or another. Surely we can agree that Homer, Rousseau, and Dickens did not write, did not want us to think that they were writing, history. Besides, Aristotle long ago carved out for poetry the domain of the possible, and opposed it to history. Why not call the underlying something that unites their texts—that is, the quality that separates them from historical assertions—“fiction”?
Let’s start with Aristotle, then, whose separation of poetry and history has indeed become proverbial, the place we go for an authoritative formulation of what we already know. The famous lines run as follows: “The difference between the historian and the poet is not merely that one writes verse and the other prose—one could turn Herodotus’ work into verse and it would be just as much history as before; the essential difference is that the one tells us what happened and the other the sort of thing that would happen.”14 The philosopher’s words jibe nicely with modern ideas about verisimilitude, realism, and probability on the one hand, and invention on the other: realistic works don’t pretend to be history, they create something of a parallel world that behaves like the world of history. Thus modern commentators often see Aristotle’s “would happen” as endorsing the idea that literature creates alternate, probable, or hypothetical worlds. “It is the artist’s task to convince us that this could have happened,” writes one critic of the modern novel: “Internal consistency and plausibility become more important than referential rectitude.”15 Little Dorrit, we might say, describes what might happen to an imagined debtor imprisoned in Marshalsea, not what the prison’s real inmates did and experienced. A reader could always judge Dickens’s novel unconvincing (too many coincidences, too much melodrama), but that would just make it unsuccessful fiction, not, obviously, history. Clearly, the “would happen” of poetry covers Dickens’s practice quite nicely; therefore the house of fiction may have many rooms, but it’s still fiction through and through.
And there are more ways still to argue that Aristotle’s theory of poetry makes way for Little Dorrit. Elaborating on the distinction between what happened and what would happen, the philosopher continues:
That is why poetry is at once more like philosophy and more worth while than history, since poetry tends to make general statements, while those of history are particular. A “general statement” means one that tells us what sort of man would, probably or necessarily, say or do what sort of thing, and this is what poetry aims at, though it attaches proper names; a particular statement on the other hand tells us what Alcibiades, for instance, did or what happened to him.
This passage too can underwrite an extension of the Poetics to the modern novel. First, the novel’s nonhistorical characters can be said to embody social types, human values and experiences, lessons about this or that; it is thus general. Stephen Halliwell has warned, I think rightly, that there is little to no evidence for this understanding of Aristotle’s generality, however, and so he proposes a second, less anachronistic resemblance between poetic generality and modern fiction.16 After all, we routinely speak of successful fiction as creating a thick, internally coherent world, and a small modification of the translation can reinforce this: replacing “would happen” with “might happen” or “could happen” aligns poetry still more closely with “hypothetical” or “imaginable realities.”17 Halliwell’s case for the relevance of ancient theories of mimesis to enduring problems of representation therefore includes the suggestion that the author of the Poetics “is feeling his way … toward a notion of the fictional or the fictive.”18 History is what happens, poetry is what might happen, what can be imagined as happening. Historians are given their material, poets invent it. And so do novelists, we now add.
For at least two reasons, however, Aristotle is less firm than we are in this happy division of labor. First, as Halliwell himself notes, generality—what “would happen”—is much more plausibly understood as a structural feature of poetry, related to plotting, causality, motives and so on. Aristotle, who disliked nothing so much as episodic plots, defines it himself as “what can happen in a strictly probable or necessary sequence.” Second, generality for Aristotle can hardly mean that the poet “imagines” or “invents” people and events that could “realistically” have existed or happened, for the simple reason that Greek poets, while inventing motives and causes, do not usually invent their heroes. Instead, they use proper names referring to the very same people historians do. Poetry is general, writes Aristotle, and he explains that this involves probability and necessity—plotting. But he cannot keep from adding, “though it attaches proper names”—the “though” registering an obstacle to a clean opposition between poetry and history. This does not destroy the criterion of poetic generality, certainly, for we can take our interpretive cue from subsequent commentators and practitioners (say, those of the French neoclassical stage) and understand the philosopher’s words like this: the historian cannot choose among things that happened to Alcibiades, whereas the poet selects certain things and invents other things said or done, in view of constructing a unified plot. But Aristotle’s “though” does complicate our assimilation of that generality to the modern idea of a fictional world: the world of poetry is causally coherent, but it is not invented in quite the same way as is a novel by Dickens, whose protagonists were not Gladstone or Disraeli.
The passage moreover does not stop here, as if Aristotle himself were not quite convinced that he had explained why poetry was “general.” That this remains a problem is made clear by Aristotle’s swerve away from tragedy to a species of poetry that is more obviously both supportive of claims to generality and distinct from history. “That poetry does aim at generality has long been obvious in the case of comedy, where the