Henry Fielding: Authorship and Authority (review)

REVIEWS 157 Ian A. Bell. Henry Fielding: Authorship and Authority. London and New York: Longman, 1994. ? + 248pp. ISBN 0-582-08163-7. Ian A. Bell describes his study as concerned with "the complex dialogues and relationships which Fielding establishes with his readers, with the existent materials of his contemporary literary culture, and with what he saw as the most pressing issues of the day, principally those involving order and disruption" (p. 238). He organizes each chapter except the first in terms of relationships between authorship and ideas, so his own book echoes the dialogic structure derived from Bakhtin and found in Fielding's novels . He seeks to replace Fielding the latitudinarian sermonizer with an uncertain inquirer who is doubtful about his authority as author and the capacities of his audience. This promising view of Fielding is, however, developed in a limited way. In his first chapter Bell queries the nature of authorship by looking briefly at theoretical positions, at Fielding biographies from Murphy to Battestin, and at critical discussions of Tom Jones by Crane, Booth, Preston, and Iser. These fail to convince him that an author is more than a construct created from the text. To postulate such an author he borrows from film criticism, with the help of Bakhtin and Foucault, the idea of the auteur. This concept allows him to argue that—just as critics identify the presence of given directors by personal clues marking their films—traces of Fielding may be discerned in his texts. This approach removes the barrier between the historical author and a critically constructed one, allowing Bell to move with ease between biographical suggestions and critical arguments. One might thus expect a study organized by aspects of the novelist's role—the establishment of narrative voices, the addressing of real and imagined audiences, the production of the book, the uses of irony, responsibility for plot and structure, textual references to the external world, and intertextuality. Bell's strategy is to consider these issues in the process of reading successive texts, leaving his study poised between the alternatives of theorizing about authorship, with Fielding as a case in point, and providing readings of Fielding's fictions. It does neither with complete success. His chapters on Shamela (chap. 2) and Amelia (chap. 6) make interesting points, if not altogether new ones. For Bell the attack on Richardson in Shamela is significant not only in itself but as pretext for an attack on broader cultural contexts, for which the limitations of parody do not allow sufficient scope, thus leading to the larger concerns of Joseph Andrews. In discussing Amelia Bell sees Fielding as trapped between unarticulated protest at social and institutional collapse and a philosophy of resignation. Fielding surveys the ills of society and tells the story of a marriage, but as he does so the confusions of social disorder overcome both narrative structure and authorial confidence. Bell in tum achieves the coherence of his own argument at the cost of neglecting a range of the novel's social and intellectual issues. More serious problems emerge in his treatment of Fielding's Miscellanies of 1743 (chap. 4). Bell emphasizes that the volumes were published by subscription, which, he claims, gave the author "the unusual advantage of knowing precisely who at least some of his readers would be before completing the text" (pp. 128-29). But subscribers are not necessarily readers, and authors of non-subscription texts must also have known likely audience members. Bell's distinction breaks down on the (unmentioned) fact that Fielding's bookseller immediately issued a "second" edition for the general public. Bell sees a closed community of perceptive subscribers interpreting A Journeyfrom This World to the Next but claims that the audience of Jonathan Wild does not share the author's assumptions and cannot read his irony, although the subscribers themselves were the same. He discusses Jonathan Wild in the context of the 1743 Miscellanies, but he uses the 1754 text, without acknowledging its substantial revisions. 158 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 8:1 The problem of readers is even more telling in Bell's discussions of Joseph Andrews (chap. 3) and Tom Jones (chap. 5). He sees an antagonistic relationship between Fielding and...