The Boundaries of Fiction: History and the Eighteenth-Century British Novel (review)

Reviews Everett Zimmerman. The Boundaries of Fiction: History and the Eighteenth -Century British Novel. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996. vii + 250pp. US$39.95. ISBN 0-8014-3252-9. In The Boundaries of Fiction Everett Zimmerman analyses relations between fiction and history in eighteenth-century England. In extending his discussion to include not only works such as A Journal ofthe Plague Year and Tom Jones but also, and unexpectedly, Pilgrim's Progress, A Tale of a Tub, Clarissa, Tristram Shandy, and The Man of Feeling, he provides a more comprehensive account than has previously been available of the ways that many varieties of the novel participate in an extended cultural interrogation of the foundations of historical narrative in the eighteenth century: thus, although such canonical novels are "not commonly historical fiction," they are very often "historicized fiction" (p. 51). Zimmerman argues that fictions in the early part of the period mediate between competing paradigms of discourse, that those of mid-century "place themselves in a complementary as well as critical relationship with history" (p. 4), and that paradoxically the development of a firm boundary between fiction and history finally enables Scott to combine the two in the historical novel. The first chapter of this book thus explores the questioning of the evidentiary bases of history by empirical and sceptical thinking in the eighteenth century. Rather than maintaining, as some have, that the novel imitated history in order to borrow some of its cultural prestige, Zimmerman argues that the novel supplements history, working out in fiction responses to the challenges raised by empiricism and scepticism. For example, in Tom Jones, Fielding defends the historicity of his characters as based on the kinds of individuals of whom he and his readers have had experience; they thus satisfy the empirical demands being made of history. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 10, Number 2, January 1998 222 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 10:2 Much of The Boundaries ofFiction explores the movement from one form of narrative understanding to another, through analysis in each of the four central chapters of a pair of fictional narratives that speak to similar issues and to each other. The earlier paradigm based on resemblance and commentary places individual histories in relation to an overarching frame of biblical history, a relation that, following Erich Auerbach, Zimmerman terms figurai. The later paradigm depends on empirical evidence and criticism of sources, thus on the remnants of historical passing that Paul Ricoeur has discussed as traces. Thus, figurai and providential narrative understandings structure Pilgrim's Progress, although Bunyan's narrative shows the strains of its composition within the beginnings of a modern empirical discourse. By contrast, Defoe's Journal ofthe Plague Year much more clearly oscillates between providential and naturalistic understandings of the origins and progress of the plague. Traces of the passage of individuals take on great importance in Defoe, for example, in the parenthetical note that informs us of the site where the narrator is buried. A similar relation obtains between Tom Jones and Caleb Williams. Acknowledging the importance of empirical evidence, Fielding attempts to assert a figura] pattern dependent not on a providential authority but on an epistemological perspective accepted by a community of readers. Godwin shows the underside of such communally derived opinion by the ease with which Falkland's narratives defeat Caleb's throughout the novel, but Godwin's narrative itself remains committed to the possibility of arriving at full truthfulness through the spoken word. As Godwin provides retrospectively a critique of Fielding's unified narrative, Swift's Tale ofa Tub prospectively parodies the modern attitudes towards writing and texts that inform Clarissa. In the Tale, Swift satirizes the idea of writing to the moment, as well as the confidence of modern textual editors (such as Robert Bentley) that what is fragmentary might be brought to yield a full meaning when placed in context. Instead, as in the Tale, fragmentary documents multiply in Clarissa without leading to the unified total interpretation that Richardson sought to produce. The last of these four chapters continues the analysis of the fragment. Focusing on Tristram Shandy and The Man ofFeeling, this chapter shows how a concern with the empirical evidence of documentation...