Two or Three Things I Know about Setting

Two or Three Things I Know about Setting Max Byrd Aword of confession at first. Several years ago I strayed from the strict world of eighteenth-century scholarship and began to write fiction of my own. I started with "hard-boiled" crime novels about a predictably oversexed and wisecracking private detective in San Francisco. Then I moved on to more expansive and complicated thrillers with international themes and sinister, exotic locales such as Harvard Yard and Paris. And most recently, I have been writing historical novels about the American past, the first of which treated a few years in the life of the philosophe Thomas Jefferson. (I resist the temptation to describe this as progress from hard-boiled to egghead.) Not completely to my surprise, writing fiction has dramatically changed the way I teach the eighteenth-century novel, and also changed the kind of scholarly criticism that I assign to students or read myself. (I am in entire agreement with Johnson's observation that "theory" is "speculation by those unversed in practice.") But one thing that has not changed is my admiration for Ian Watt's The Rise ofthe Novel, which seems to me still the definitive account of its subject. I like especially the fact that, for all its impressive historical and sociological learning, The Rise of the Novel is a highly literary book, by which I mean that it is chiefly concerned with matters such as plot and character, the topics in my experience that EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000 186 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION working novelists and editors are chiefly concerned with, not to mention readers. And I find absolutely true and right Watt's central argument that the "defining characteristic" of the novel is "the individual apprehension of reality."1 Or to put it another way, the novelist is in love with concrete nouns. Defoe is a novelist not so much because of his myth-making powers or his ability to project himself psychologically into his narrator, but largely because his mind turns constantly and automatically, as he writes, to the names ofphysical objects (open any page ofRobinson Crusoe). Carol Houlihan Flynn sees the great white feather bed that Moll Flanders tosses from a burning house as a complicated symbol of death, "physical and spiritual loneliness," and "the weight of sexuality"; but really Defoe is not much given to symbols like that—the white feather bed is simply there, like Jay Gatsby's cascade of beautiful silk shirts, because a novelist's imagination fastens with greatest delight onto things, not concepts.2 A careful reader can see the exact moment when Tristram Shandy changes from being a rather vague and undefined ecclesiastical burlesque into a novel—it is the moment in chapter 21, volume 1, when Walter Shandy's wandering attention pauses to focus on "my uncle Toby's" "new pair of black-plushbreeches ," and the real, literal, authentic world of what historians call "material history" suddenly falls like a rock into the story. This sense of material history is nowhere stronger than in the presentation of "setting" in a novel. Watt uses the term "space" (as "the necessary correlative" of "time") and remarks on the indifference to realistic time and space in earlier writers such as Sidney and Shakespeare. The picaresque novel of the late seventeenth century, he concedes, has incidental descriptions of realistic settings. But "Defoe would seem to be the first of our writers who visualized the whole of his narrative as though it occurred in an actual physical environment." (Which is exactly how a novelist works, with the scene unrolling like a strip of film in his head; alternatively , Ford Madox Ford advises the beginner to "write as if the action of your novel were taking place before your eyes on a brightly lit stage.")3 This discovery of setting as an element of craft is for me one of the most interesting events in the rise of the novel. From Defoe's tenacious 1 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964), pp. 10, 15. 2 Carol Houlihan Flynn, The Body in...