Watt's Rise of the Novel within the Tradition of the Rise of the Novel

Watt's Rise ofthe Novel within the Tradition of the Rise Of the NovelMichael McKeon When Ian Watt's The Rise ofthe Novel was first published in 1957, it was recognizably a distinctive contribution to an already existent tradition of scholarship. By this I mean the scholarly effort to understand the novel not simply through the lens of an empirical literary history, or through the lens of an abstract literary theory, but through a method in which history and theory join together to inform each other. For this tradition of scholarship, to understand the novel required establishing an idea of the coherence of the novel genre as an historical phenomenon. To be "coherent" in these terms requires that the novel fulfil the demands that pertain to all historical things: namely, that it display both the continuity of an integral entity and, within thatcontinuity, the discontinuity that confirms its existence over time and space, its capacity to change without changing into something else. The study of genre is both a theoretical and an historical enterprise that conceives literary categories in their contingency. Understood as integral structures, genres have a temporal and spatial existence that defines the scope of their identity; understood as parts of greater wholes, genres have a structural existence in relation to other integral formations. That is, genres are formal structures that have an historical existence in the sense that they come into being, flourish, and decay, waxing and waning in complex relationship to other historical phenomena. Genres are contingent in the sense that they are not necessary: neither their nature nor their transformation , neithertheircontinuity northeirdiscontinuity, canbe predicated in advance. This distinguishes genres from "modes" or "universals." Aristotle is the source for our division of literary discourse into the three basic EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000 254 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION categories "lyric," "drama," and "narrative."1 These three modes are basic in that they purport to cover the logical range of possibility: for the poet may either speak in a single voice, or represent two or more voices in dialogue, oralternate between these two modes. Whereas genres are contingent and conventional, modes are "necessary" or "natural," an inescapable consequence of discourse itself. For the scholarly tradition in which Watt participates, establishing the generic coherence ofthe novel in particularhas its own special interest. This is becausethe novel is, with the essay, the only genre to have emergedunder the conditions of epistemological and historiographie self-consciousness that characterize the modern period. All genres, presumably, have had their "rise." But to account for "the rise of the novel" is a peculiarly compelling project because unlike the origins of the classical genres, which are lost in the mists of time, the rise of the novel is at least putatively accessible to full scholarly view. Indeed, for this tradition of scholarship the novel is the quintessentially modern genre, deeply intertwined with the historicity of the modern period, of modernity itself. In the following pages I will provide a brief account of what I take to be common in and central to the thought of three of Watt's predecessors as they define a tradition of novel scholarship: Georg Lukács, José Ortega y Gasset, and Mikhail M. Bakhtin. I will then turn to the ways in which The Rise of the Novel does and does not participate in this tradition, and conclude with some reflections on the relevance of this account to the fortunes of novel studies since Watt's book first appeared. A halfcentury after its publication, Georg Lukács looked back on The Theory ofthe Novel (1920) as a youthful effusion whose pre-Marxist excesses were deeply coloured by the imminent outbreak of the Great War. Written in draft in 1914, it was first published in Max Dessoir's journal Zeitschrift für Aesthetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft in 1916. Its subtitle—A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature— suggests the author's theoretical and historical ambitions. Lukács understood his task to require the discrimination of the novel, as a modern form, from the founding Western narrative genre, the epic. "The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive...