The Man Who Came to Dinner: Ian Watt and the Theory of Formal Realism

The Man Who Came to Dinner: Ian Watt and the Theory of Formal Realism Michael Seidel Those of a certain age recall Monty Woolley's Broadway and film performances in the Hart-Kaufman play, The Man Who Came to Dinner. A nationally renowned critic, while on a lecture tour, injures his hip on an icy staircase ofa home where he had been invited for an evening's meal. For various reasons, he ends up staying far beyond the time allotted for his recovery. The critic has opinions, and, despite his curmudgeonly nature, completely rearranges the affairs of the household he occupies, at the same time keeping in constanttelephone and telegraph contact with the world's artistic and intellectual luminaries. Curiously, one of those with whom he keeps in touch is a man named Dafoe. At the end of the play, the critic finally readies to leave when we hear him tumbling down the stairs on the way out, presumably to repeat his convalescence and, for better or worse, his influence on the affairs of the household. If analogies are proffered as too exact, they become allegories. Before thathappens I am almost done with this one. But my point is obvious. In the house of early eighteenth-century fiction, Ian Watt is the man who came to dinner. He has taken up a kind of semi-permanent residence. For some, his stay for the last half century has turned out to be amenable; for others, less so. Revisionist theorists of the novel, especially in the last decade, adduce a thousand and one reasons why Watt and his theories should depart posthaste , ranging from his failure to understand the inherent generic instability EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000 194 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION of the novel form, his misapprehension of the reading audience for fiction, his reluctance to acknowledge the existence of realist fiction much earlier and in other places than England, and his blindness to the insight that realism itself is little but another fiction, to his hesitancy to condemn realism as part of the corrupt Western bourgeois ethos. But no one, to my knowledge, has ever convincingly displaced Watt's notion of formal realism as a dominant characteristic ofnarrative during the early eighteenth century, particularly in England. To gauge the sustained place of formal realism in most commentaries on the development of fiction in England, I reread several of the essays in The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, edited by John Richetti. The volume has an introductory essay by Richetti and some generally theoretical speculations on the early novel by J. Paul Hunter, Maximillian Novak, Claude Rawson, and others. For whatever reason and in whatever contexts, these commentators agree that no matter what else one says about narrative in the early part ofthe century, the works produced are marked by features identified with formal realism: a concentration on daily life in particularized settings; a sense of information and immediacy; conventions of behaviour that would appear, at least to a reading audience , as part of its recognizable world. In Novak's fine essay, "Defoe as an Innovator of Fictional Form," he suggests that, despite arguments put forward about the novel by Michael McKeon and (in extreme form) Margaret Anne Doody that there is less new under the novel's sun than Watt imagined, the pressure to represent the circumstances of life in every detailed way imaginable, to experience narrative, as Defoe puts it, "with a new Feather in its Cap,"1 encouraged widespread experiments in realism. Of course, the reaction to realist narrative material in the eighteenth century was not categorically positive. Pope and Swift were appalled by the pressures of realism in modern narrative. For the former, realism was little more than gossip; for the latter, little less than onanism. Rawson points out that Fielding saw the tendencies of realistic narration (at least in Richardson's fiction) as the "hothouse immediacies" of a kind of debased writing. In an even better phrase for the realist trompe l'œil of fiction, Rawson calls the work of Defoe and Richardson "hoax without irony."2 He has in mind the illusionism of realist narrative, what James Joyce...