Enlightenment Fiction in England, France, and America (review)

Reviews/Comptes rendus William Donoghue. Enlightenment Fiction in England, France, and America. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. xi+l78pp. US$55. ISBN 0-8130-2481-1. William Donoghue's thesis is that the eighteenth-century novel in England, France, and America works to counter the scepticism that dominates, in his view, the intellectual and moral life of the period. Realistic or mimetic fiction, he argues persuasively and cogently, is cognitively meaningful because it offers readers "a second order reality that is by definition immune to real-world doubt" (140). Moreover, citing Georg Lukács, he asserts vigorously that in the novel's "appeal to order, to a set of shared rules" there is always an ethical intention and effect (141). Forme at least, this is a wholly admirable and productive approach to what novels aspire to do for their readers, although whether they actually or always achieve this is another matter. But I applaud Donoghue's insistence that there is much more to eighteenth-century fiction than an attempt at naive mimesis or (its opposite) self-reflexive play or ideological enforcement or cultural regimentation. "Realist forms," he says, in what should be a truism but lately has not been, "are a highly wrought product of the mind that help us know ourselves and our world. And this is the source of the pleasure we get from believing in them" (18). Donoghue finds that novels, like the logical fictions of Hume and Adam Smith, possess a "positive epistemological valence" and as such are "a highlywrought product ofdie mind" (18-19). I especially like his reminding us that sensibility is the soft side of scepticism. Cartesian dualism, he explains, "left behind a materialist universe" (95) for Enlightenment thinkers such as Spinoza, Diderot, and Shaftesbury, and, in the case of the latter, this led to an ethical theory based on taste and sensation. Donoghue's best moments come in his introductory chapter when he lays out his assumptions, which constitute an interesting challenge to recent criticism of the eighteenth-century novel. He admits, as Bakhtin says, that novels offer a diverse collection of voices and ideas, "a kind of host blackboard to EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 17, Number 1, October 2004 128 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION17:1 the discourse of skepticism itself, to sentimentalism, and even to attacks directed against its own practice" (3). His key point, however, is that fiction possesses its own "discourse on the novel" that opposes scepticism and sentimentalism , that negates what sometimes looks like mere relativism and subjectivism, and that makes a real contribution to "the discourse on knowledge in the century" (14). And displaying his own lucid and precise grasp of philosophical distinctions, Donoghue distinguishes between die kind ofeveryday doubt until empirical evidence arrives that critics of the novel such as McKeon and Damrosch are in fact exploring when they speak of a sense of epistemological crisis in the century and the much more serious second-order scepticism dating back to Epicurus and Protagoras and invoked byphilosophers such as Montaigne, Locke, Hume, and Shaftesbury whereby the only certain knowledge available comes from the senses. Stricüy speaking, says Donoghue, realistic fiction is necessarily hostile to scepticism, and his refreshing argument is that "verisimilitude in fiction entails a correspondence theory oftruth that presupposes the possibility of knowledge in the world" (15). However, the various chapters that follow this stirring introduction do not live up very well or fully to the opportunities Donoghue has created for himself. Certainly, one has to admire his range and linguistic abilities in these chapters that take the reader from Pope and Richardson through Sterne and Laclos; thence to Diderot and on to Radcliffe, Godwin, and Goethe, finishing with a chapter on Charles Brockden Brown and the Marquis de Sade, widi all the French and German quoted and translated. The occasional polemic against Bakhtinian polyphony is strong and convincing , as Donoghue asserts that, in fact, multiple points of view are "always structured, prioritized, and valued in novels" (39). A good deal of the time, an agile critical intelligence that offers surprising and memorable twists on familiar fictional features is on display. For example, in his discussion of Radcliffe he remarks that "the gothic takes...