Richardson's "Clarissa" and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (review)

192 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 5:2 Tom Keymer. Richardson's "Clarissa" and the Eighteenth-Century Reader. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. xxiii + 270pp. US$59.95. ISBN 0-521-39023-0. On the cover of Tom Keymer's book a worried, fresh-faced girl peers into the pages of a book, careless that its spine, like hers, has slumped. She is Joshua Reynolds's niece Theophila Palmer, and the work that holds her enthralled is Clarissa. This engaging image encapsulates the argument of Keymer's rich book, tiiat Richardson, in the full knowledge of what he did, designed his novel to be exactly the mock encounter with experience that Johnson recommends in Rambler no. 4. Readers would thus become, said Richardson, "if not Authors, Carvers"; they would learn to distinguish among a range of competing voices in the way that Stanley Fish has shown happens when one reads Paradise Lost. Appalled by contemporary threats of tyranny, Jacobitism, and libertinism, especially as it appeared on stage, Richardson prepared his readers for a dangerous world by involving them in the intellectually strenuous act of reading Clarissa. For long enough Richardson has been regarded as an idiot savant, who wrote better than he knew. Keymer, however, respects his aim of training readers to assess evidence and thereby life, and in a bold act of heresy portrays a fully intentional Richardson. By examining three vexed issues, Clarissa's relationship with her father, Lovelace's depiction in terms of criminality and disruption, and the protection of Clarissa's memory, Keymer shows that, just as in Westminster trials, the protagonists act as their own lawyers and speak on their own behalf. He recalls, for instance, Belford, taking minutes like a Middlesex justice, recording all the particulars but missing the main points (a sly glance perhaps at Richardson's rival, the Middlesex justice Henry Fielding). With similar relativism, Lovelace's gaze, when he describes Clarissa's hair as wantoning like Eve's before the Fall, defines her. In such ways, says Keymer, Richardson constructs a carnivalesque conflict of partisan voices. He further complicates the forensic task when characters prove inadequate readers or wilful reinterpreters, imposing their own narratives on events and mirroring what will happen in the real world. Clarissa's readers must leam the sophisticated truth that no account is transparent or free from taint. The book thus "allows its suspected or accused persons to tell their own stories , and in so doing confronts the reader with a welter of charges, counter-charges, and pleas," says Keymer: "Clarissa's story is vexed, complex and irreducible; and by giving voice to such contradictory versions of it Richardson only redoubles its remoteness. In this respect, the multiple epistolary form of his novel problematises the very notion of a definable form of meaning, of a coherent 'whole truth' at its centre, and focuses attention instead on the only events to which our access is reliable or direct—the epistolary acts in which the novel's most interested parties create and communicate their various conflicting tales. It is only by the closest attention to these primary events, to Clarissa's story of story-telling, that the novel's reader will understand anything at all" (p. 56). Keymer argues that Richardson's "elaborate and perplexing interplay of confession, casuistry , apology and dissembling" is the essential, the intended experience of reading Clarissa (p. 45). The ascendancy of different voices over each of the three sections compounds the effect, while the letter form itself raises troubling doubts about sincerity and transparency. Richardson's novels, says Keymer, are not simply dramatic; they are "preoccupied by the inevitability of slippage between world and word, and in particular by the deformations that arise from the rhetorical or performative tendencies of first-person discourse " (p. ?vi). In sheer self-defence Richardson's characters must learn to read against the grain, as he himself characteristically did, as his readers must also do. The significance of Clarissa lies in the process of reading it, in textual indeterminacy and readerly REVIEWS 193 creativity. By responding to the challenge of the work, the reader "will develop capacities of understanding by which, thereafter, to light his way through the...