Before Fiction. Nicholas D. Paige

by distinct “conceptions of history.”⁵⁶ Yet despite this explicit opposition, Foley too lapses into slow-march-of-realism language that echoes Cohn’s paraphrase. She writes: “as the eighteenth century progressed, readers increasingly tired of tongue-in-cheek authorial disavowals of mimetic [i.e., fictional or novelistic] intent”; “The rise of the mode that we term ‘realism’ clearly involved an initial dependence upon, but an ultimate replacement of, the ‘sense of the real’ [i.e., the claim to literal truth].”⁵⁷ And Foley situates the process where Davis does: “Hesitatingly in the works of Defoe, then more boldly in subsequent novels of the eighteenth century, the pseudofactual imposture signaled the invocation of a mimetic contract.”⁵⁸ The result is that neither Foley nor Davis has much shifted our understanding of literary history. Before, pseudofactual insistence on the novel’s literal reality was the origin of realism; now, pseudofactual irony is seen as the first sign of a concept of the fictional. Defoe, no longer an incipient realist, has been repurposed as an early theorist of fictionality. We are left with a familiar arc, plotted using the same old coordinates; all that has been done has been to rename the endpoint.

      The most noted scholar to take up the problem of fiction’s history, Catherine Gallagher, has successfully avoided such gradualism. Unlike Davis or Foley, who both postulate a slow change—“readers increasing tired” and so on—Gallagher works from an implicitly Foucauldian model of rupture: in the middle decades of the eighteenth century there occurred a “massive reorientation of textual referentiality” that replaced the early novel’s direct reference to real people with fiction.⁵⁹ Gallagher develops this idea in two separate accounts. The first, found in Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (1994), is particularly noteworthy because it uses coordinates that previous scholars hadn’t: the rupture of modern fictionality is readable not in the usual English suspects—Defoe, Richardson, Fielding—but in texts by women authors. Unlike Manley’s “transparently slanderous” New Atalantis (1709), a paradigm for the keyed narratives of the early eighteenth century that refer to real people under the cover of historical or fanciful masks, Lennox’s Life of Harriot Stuart, Written by Herself (1750) was not read as keyed and “made few serious demands on the public’s credit.”⁶⁰ The invention of fiction, Gallagher suggests, must lie somewhere between the two. Her second account, “The Rise of Fictionality” (2003; English trans. 2006), is chronologically compatible with the narrative of Nobody’s Story, though it reverts to the figures prominent in familiar histories of the English novel. Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742), Gallagher observes, contains a famous passage that explicitly denies that the novel portrays real people; Fielding claims instead to describe types drawn from life. The change from the pseudofactual posture of Robinson Crusoe is obvious, and therefore sometime between 1720 and 1742 “new modes of non-reference arose” and the novel became properly fictional.⁶¹ For Gallagher, fiction does rise, but not quite in the manner of Davis and Foley. Instead, the pretense of truth is simply swept off the stage by fictionality.⁶²

      A worry, however, is that in all three accounts the line between fiction and a type of novel that purportedly preceded it grows so maddeningly fuzzy that any real distinction is blotted out. For Foley, not only are the variously ironic pseudofactual stances of the eighteenth-century novel cast as the early stage of fictional realism; in addition, the ironic stance is already detectible in Behn’s novels of the 1680s.⁶³ Mightn’t the pseudofactual always be, from the very beginning, just an early fictionality? Meanwhile, Davis’s wording makes it impossible to determine when the modern opposition between fact and fiction was in place. The culture “began” to make demands of a clear separation, Davis says in the passage I quoted above. Yet how can a culture desire a separation of two things between which it cannot distinguish? How can people want what they can’t yet conceive? And when exactly did they begin to make their demands for something new? At what point did the old truth claims “bec[o]me harder to substantiate”? Does this mean that people once took the claims seriously and then wised up? What exactly is this “possibility … that a work could be purely fictional” that “arose”? Did it arise collectively? In the mind of one author, or a group of vanguard readers? In Nobody’s Story, Gallagher achieves a sharper separation, but mostly because by using the keyed scandalous narratives of the early eighteenth century as a foil for the obviously bogus truth pretense of Lennox’s Life of Harriot Stuart, she avoids confronting the saturating presence of the pseudofactual mode. Certainly, Lennox’s truth-posture makes few serious demands on the public’s credit—but how exactly do her demands differ from the demands of Richardson, Defoe, or even Montesquieu, who prefaces Les Lettres persanes (1721) by saying “The Persians of the following letters stayed with me in my home”?⁶⁴ Moreover, if the pseudofactual form of The Life of Harriot Stuart was just a shell, not to be taken seriously, why wouldn’t any number of earlier faux memoirs—say, Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne (1731–1742), or even Villedieu’s pioneering Mémoires de la vie de Henriette-Sylvie de Molière (1672–1674)—be equally plausible signs that the modern concept of fiction was in the works?⁶⁵ In Gallagher’s view, the referential “somebodies” of the early novel are replaced by fictional “nobodies”; the worry, however, is that it is difficult to tell a nobody from a somebody as long as the pseudofactual form is present. For Davis and Foley, the pseudofactual prepares the way for the fictional; but since on inspection consciousness of the fictional is already incubating within the pseudofactual, the whole distinction falls apart.

      Furthermore, the longevity of the pseudofactual posture is odd. As Foley and Davis remark with some surprise, the mock affirmation of truth, which is supposed to be “reced[ing] to subordinate status” in Defoe, is still alive and well much later—later even than Richardson, whom Tieje chose as his terminus.⁶⁶ Foley mentions as late pseudofactual residue titles like Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker (1771) and Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses (1782). As belated as the latter is, it still allows us to preserve at least the idea that the nineteenth century will mark a clean start. But of course it doesn’t: pseudofactual assertions soldier on long into the nineteenth century. Chateaubriand’s Atala (1801) is a true tale, oral at the outset, then relayed back to the author; Constant’s Adolphe (1816) is a memoir replete with bogus provenance; Sand’s Indiana (1832) is a historical anecdote; Hugo, in Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné (1829), makes effective use of a heretofore largely unexploited pseudofactual form, the journal, prefacing it with the familiar editorial equivocations. Meanwhile, Shelley presents her Frankenstein (1818) as fact; in America, Poe does the same with The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). And still in mid-century England, heedless of dominant third-person omniscience, the Brontë sisters press all manner of pseudofactual frames into service. If in Richardson the truth pretense is, by the reckoning of another critic, “vestigial,” what are we to make of these much later examples?⁶⁷ What permits us to say that readers of certain works read them as fictional, whereas the readers of earlier ones were unequipped with that conceptual category? Villedieu, Lennox, Constant, Poe—to which one did readers cease, for the first time, according serious credit? It’s convenient to think of fiction rising, but a slope that goes on for so long may be closer to a stretch of even ground. Or, for that matter, uneven: in the course of this book we will see that writers such as Rousseau and Diderot take the truth of their novels much more seriously than Crébillon, who writes several decades before them, and that well before them all, Lafayette centers a historical novel around a heroine who never existed: “as the [eighteenth] century advanced and readers learned to accept the norms of literary realism, novelists tended to drop claims to reality or factuality”: does the record really confirm the reassuringly steady advance of the fictional that Cohn takes, no doubt accurately, from the scholarship?⁶⁸

      Such difficulties are enough to cast doubt on the effort to isolate fiction historically. The mock-factual statements issued by pseudofactual novels are after all difficult to distinguish from fictional statements, since no one is intended to believe either. Perhaps novels that make ambivalent assertions of literal truth are really not so different from novels that make no literal claims whatsoever. Maybe they’re just a little more primitive, or maybe, as so many have said for so long, literature by definition has always been self-consciously duplicitous