Robert Boyle and the Epistemology of the Novel

Robert Boyle and the Epistemology of the NovelJ. Paul Hunter Somewhere in the dawning light of modern science, the consciousness that led to the novel—as plot, literary form, epistemological system, and physical book—came to be. Here almost all accounts of the beginnings and origins of the novel agree, for it is hard to imagine, in preempirical ages, a literary species with the distinctive modern features of the novel.1 But there are radical differences of opinion about sequence, influence, and cause: protestantism, empiricism, individualism, imperialism , and modernism are key terms for nearly everyone in describing the ideological and cultural contexts of the early novel, but the sequence and weight among these forces is open to doubt. The emergence of the novel is concurrent and consonant with the rise of these other values, biases, and methods, but in the sorting a new cultural and literary history may well emerge. I will not propose here a causal sequence, but I do want to indicate how one quasi-scientific goal became a feature of the culture, bridged several of the categories, and led, at least in an indirect way, to the novel. The novel's curiosity about process, its interest in how people make sense of a dense, complex, and resistant world, and its concentration on the materials and rhythms of everyday life all seem to have their roots in ways of thinking about the world that emphasize 1 It is, of course, possible to define the novel more broadly so that the fictions of virtually all ages and nations may be called novels, in which case historical considerations about cultural enablement do not apply. See, for example, Arthur Heiserman, The Novel before the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977) and David Margolies, Novel and Society in Elizabethan England (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1985). EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 2, Number 4, July 1990 276 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION immediacy, personal observation, subjectivity of response, circumstantiality , empirical modes of thinking, and the desire to systematize. One curious popular strand of science provides part of the cultural explanation of what happened. Newton was not the only scientist to demand the muse; the demands I am interested in here are Robert Boyle's. As a chemist, Boyle has always had his due, but his reputation in intellectual history is slender. Jonathan Swift helped establish opinion early with two typically Swiftian footnotes: his subtitle to "A Meditation upon a Broom-Stick" makes Boyle responsible for literary and philosophical absurdity, and a marginal scrawl in his copy of Burnet's History of his Own Time calls Boyle a "silly writer."2 Boyle largely deserves the place Swift and history have given him, the specialist who strayed too far from his expertise: he is like a good, well-meaning actor who strays into politics (as distinguished from bad actors who stray into politics ), and it is hard to feel sorry for him in spite of good intentions. But he deserves a larger niche in literary, cultural, and intellectual history , though not because he was a great or even a clear thinker. Rather, his pedestrian commitments make him important in the history of taste, desire, and ideas, for his fuzzy categories and refusals to make distinctions are in fact responsible for popularizing ways of thinking crucial to the reception of novels. To think about the historical reception of novels—what goes on with actual "common" readers who voraciously devour narrative accounts of daily life and experience in the contemporary world—at the same time that one thinks about the complex cultural history of epistemology may seem contradictory, and it is a challenge to standard ways of doing intellectual history under the auspices of traditional historicisms. Even to search for the conceptual roots of the novel in a post-Baconian epistemology may appear to be inconsistent with the novel's commitment to ordinary, everyday life and its accessibility to a wide variety of readers without deep learning or philosophical sophistication.3 Reconciling the 2 In the 1711 Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, Swift said his meditation was "According to the Style and Manner of the Honourable Robert Boyl's Meditations," p. 231. The standard account of how Swift...