Ralph Rader on the Literary History of the Novel

For generations now, literary theorists have engaged the question of exactly how specific instances of the things that we call novels relate to the abstract notion of the novel as a genre. Perhaps the single most pronounced tendency in the writing on the novel as a genre is to identify its clear emergence in the 1740s in the work of Richardson and Fielding and then to offer instances of various novel-like writings that preceded the novel. The novel thus appears to have both a form and an ur-form in which it was almost or implicitly present. On the one hand, scholars such as Margaret Doody and J. Paul Hunter have suggested, respectively, that many recognizably novel-like works were read in classical antiquity and in the years leading up to those we have traditionally associated with the novel proper. On the other, the novel appears as a precipitate of a larger socio-economic transformation. The novel, having developed in the form of a rejection or negation, is explicable less in formal terms than as the negation of certain elements available to an earlier literature. Ian Watt and Michael McKeon, despite their differences from one another, share the view that the novel is a genre partially because it tries to write fictions with little appeal to the superhuman elements of romance. For each of them the novel is directly continuous with developments in the socioeconomic worlds of the novelists: for Watt, the drive towards attitudes that combined both this-worldly practicality and intense introspection (for which he draws on Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism); for McKeon, an alertness to social and economic tensions that made the novel a staging ground for a contest between questions of truth and questions of virtue that ultimately found some resolution in claims on behalf of pleasure or aesthetic knowledge.

Ralph Rader’s work stands as a crucial exception to the positions I have baldly outlined above. In order to understand his position on how we might think of the novel as a genre and how we might understand its history, I would like to examine an exchange between him and McKeon that, even while it is well known, deserves to be better known than it is. My primary aim is less, however, to address the debate fully than to explicate Rader’s views. (Thus, I shall not develop the logic of McKeon’s views, which seem to me much more substantial than Rader suggests.) Rader was interested to a remarkable degree in seeing himself as engaged in a systematic project; both the brevity of his engagement with McKeon’s work and the interconnections between his views of the history of the novel and his views of literature generally are encouragements to address writing that preceded and followed his discussion with McKeon. Hence, I shall draw on a series of Rader’s essays from the 1970s and 1980s.

Because Rader was committed to the view that genres are conspicuous only as actively singled out from literature in general, he saw himself as trying to capture the kinds of discriminations we make without necessarily having terms for them. Indeed, he took the most valuable distinctions to be ones that largely fell outside the list of forms that are operative in literary history. He was not himself interested in writing the history of the ode or the sonnet, nor did he recommend such a project to others, because he treated any account of genres in which one could simply take up a stable list of instances of the genre as likely to bypass elements of our literary experience. He wrote in “Literary Constructs” that “local interpretation needs to take into view the work in its comparative generic relation to other works” (338). The project of literary interpretation could not, he thought, proceed unless one were attending to the relationships that we continually build up as we compare one work with another. He took the job of criticism to involve mapping the field of literature so as to identify differences among works thought to be similar and the...