Staging Readers Reading

Staging Readers Reading William Beatty Warner The rise-of-the-novel narrative, as perfected by Ian Watt in 1957, and extended by many other literary histories in the years since, is not "wrong," but it is biased and incomplete. Why is this so? First of all, Watt's classic account places the novel within a progressive narrative, which assumes that the modem era has discovered increasingly powerful writing technologies for representing reality: he calls this "formal realism" and links it to another focus of modemist triumphant narratives, the bourgeois invention of a complex and deep self. Second, the rise-of-the-novel narrative is vitiated by the fact that its essential aim is to legitimize the novel as a form of literature. Thus the rise-of-the-novel narrative demonstrates that the technology of realism enabled prose narratives about love and adventure , which, by the second half of the seventeenth century, large numbers of readers had begun to read for entertainment, to rise into a form of literature every bit as valuable and important as the established literary types of poetry, epic, and drama. Third, and this point follows from the first two, the use of the definite article in the phrase "rise of the novel" turns novelness into a fugitive essence every particular novel strives to realize . What has been the effect of this narrative? It has ratified the project of the novel's moral and aesthetic elevation undertaken by novelists from Richardson, Fielding, Prévost, and Rousseau to Flaubert, Henry James, Joyce, and Woolf. But it has also impoverished our sense of what the novel is, first by taking novel criticism into interminable and tendentious debates about what realism really is, and second by making it our business to be guardians of the boundary between the "tmly" novelistic and the "merely" fictional. We need a more historically rigorous and culturally EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000 392 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION inclusive conception ofwhat the novel is and has been. My recent book, Licensing Entertainment (1998), aims to contribute to such a project. There, I document the development of the rise-of-the-novel narrative within a long literary-historical tradition that begins with Clara Reeve (1785) and John Dunlop (1814) and extends through many of the literary histories before Watt (including Walter Scott, William Hazlitt, Hippolyte A. Taine, and George Saintsbury). At the same time I have articulated my critical differences from Watt and many more recent critics who have sought to update or revise that narrative.1 To develop a more inclusive understanding of early modem novel reading and to grasp novels at their highest level of generality, it is useful to compare the novel to that other successful offspring ofthe cultures ofprint, the newspaper. A newspaper is notjust an unbound folio sheet printed with advertisements and news. It evolved within a social practice of reading, drinking (usually coffee or tea), and conversation; it required the development ofthe idea of "the world" as a plenum of more or less remote, more or less strange phenomena—events, disasters, commodities—translated into print and worthy of our daily attention. The idea of the modern may be the effect of this media-assisted mutation in our way of taking in the world. This intricate marriage ofprint form and social practice has survived to this day as "reading the paper." In an analogous fashion the institution of novel reading requires a distinct mutation of both print forms and reading practices . While the printing of books devoted to prestigious cultural activities (such as religion, law, natural philosophy) began in the fifteenth century and gained momentum in the sixteenth century, it was not until the later seventeenth century that short novels helped to shift the practices of reading so that novels could become a mode of entertainment. Several factors helped promote novel reading for entertainment: lower printing costs; an infrastructure of booksellers, printers, and means of transport; a critical mass of readers of vernacular writing; and the opportunistic exploitation of the new vogue for reading novels (usually in octavo or duodecimo format) by generations of printers and booksellers. But if there was to be a rise of novel...