Joseph Andrews and the Failure of Authority

Joseph Andrews and the Failure Of AuthorityCharles A. Knight The garrulous narrator ??Joseph Andrews and his complex novel have been interpreted in terms of implicitly conflicting analogies describable alternatively as religious and political. According to the first, the apparent authority of the narrator stands for the authority of God, especially the Christian and incarnate God who acts in history.1 The function of Fielding's fictions is thus to reinforce, by their comic conclusion, the reader's confidence in a universe controlled by a benevolent deity. The secular alternative sees narrative authority as analogous to political and legal control. The narrator's control over the actions of characters and the interpretations of readers stands for social control over personal behaviour . The narrator adopts or prefigures techniques like those of civil control. John Bender sees Fielding concerned with "the deployment of narrative as an authoritative resource." Narratives parallel the information systems that organize an urban society, "the densely stored, crossreferenced informational networks that characterize written accounting in the modern metropolis. ... I count the realist novel as one these systems."2 1 Martin Battestin, The Moral Basis of Fielding's Art (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), as well as several articles on Tom Jones reprinted in The Providence of Wit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974); see also Aubrey J. Williams, "Interpositions of Providence and the Design of Fielding's Novels," South Atlantic Quarterly 70 (1971), 265-86. 2 John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture ofMind in EighteenthCentury England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), especially pp. 139-98 (die quotations appear on pp. 139 and 140); John Richetti compares die narrative procedure of Tom Jones to "the workings of die Hanoverian-Whig oligarchy" in "The Old Order and me New EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 4, Number 2, January 1992 110 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION The epistemic shifts implied by the closely sequential developments of the novel as a canonic genre, of lawyers' roles in presenting and arguing legal cases, and of the reforming penitentiary give particular importance to narratives: "not to possess a story, to be without narrative resources, is to lack a comprehensible character within the metropolitan order and to be subject to a reformation of consciousness."3 These religious and secular versions of Fielding's narrative authority are both clearly analogies, although of different sorts. Both account for a limited range of material and shape the text to fit the terms of the analogy. My present concern is with a possible misfit between Bender's legal-political analogy and the text of Joseph Andrews. The secular analogy proposes suggestive connections (especially for Jonathan Wild and Amelia), but it represents the critic's assertion of an authority which, like the narrator's, is open to sceptical scrutiny about the limits of its utility. Authority is the assertion of a claim to power and, because it is an assertion, it is both the subject and product of interpretation: "it is an attempt to interpret the conditions of power, to give the conditions of control and influence a meaning by defining an image of strength. ... It is an interpretive process which seeks for itself the solidity of a thing."4 But the urgency that governs this interpretive assertion often derives from the threat to authority or even from its collapse. In Fielding's case the values he could use in addressing a broader audience seemed uncertain, forcing him both to pretend to authority and to mock that pretence. And the new genre of the novel either required an authoritative statement of generic ancestry or served to undermine literary authority altogether. In Joseph Andrews the significant collapse of generic clarity portends broader failure. Three elements of Joseph Andrews seem to threaten its claim to narrative authority: the instability of its genre, the unreliability of its narrator, and the ironies of its ending. Generic Instability Fielding's critical pronouncements on the genre of Joseph Andrews manifest his authority in several ways: he parodies Richardson to establish authority through contrast; he asserts the realism of his own material Novel of die Mid-Eighteenth Century: Narrative Audiority in Fielding and Smollett," EighteenthCentury Fiction 2 (1990), 190. 3 Bender, p. 160. 4 Richard Sennett, Authority (New...