Wave-Theories and Affective Physiologies: The Cognitive Strain in Victorian Novel Theories

I want to begin with a familiar, and familiarly vexing, question: what do we mean when we use the generic term "novel"? If we stand within the usual institutional and discursive parameters of what today goes under the term "novel theory," we mean either a kind of object—a loosely distinct kind of prose narration—or a compositional practice, one given over to a set of formal assumptions about ordinary experience and its narrative expression. If we mean the latter, we can possibly extend our consideration of the "novelistic" or "novelesque" to other media, such as cinema, television, or even computer gaming, but we still root ourselves within a familiar theoretical network, one which privileges either an objectivist account of the novel (this is the kind of thing a novel is) or an account oriented toward production (this is how the novelistic is written). But the tremendous success of the novel-theory tradition based on these two approaches—reaching from Henry James, through Percy Lubbock, to Ian Watt, Wayne Booth, and even versions in M. M. Bakhtin or Roland Barthes outside the Anglo-American tradition—has obscured the quite different origins of the quasi-professional, quasi-institutional study of the novel. The methodological gambit taken by an earlier, pre-Jamesian version of novel theory is fundamentally distinct from an objectivist or authorial field of study, and its invisibility has heretofore been guaranteed by the odd interdisciplinary formation it represents. A passage from late in this forgotten tradition, in Paul Valéry's 1927 talk "Propos sur la poésie," will help introduce a sense of this difference:

Consider the comparative attitudes of the novel reader and the reader of poems. They may be the same man, but he is spectacularly different as he reads one or the other work. Watch the reader of a novel plunge into the imaginary life his book shows him. His body no longer exists. He leans his forehead on his two hands. He exists, moves, acts, and suffers only in the mind. He is absorbed by what he is devouring; he cannot restrain himself, for a kind of demon drives him on. He wants the continuation and the end; he is prey to a kind of insanity; he takes sides, he is saddened, he is no longer himself, he is no more than a brain separated from its outer forces, that is, given up to its images, going through a sort of crisis of credulity.

How very different is the reader of poems....

In short, between the action of a poem and that of an ordinary narrative, the difference is psychological in nature. The poem unfolds itself in a richer sphere of our functions of movement, it exacts from us a participation that is nearer to complete action, whereas the story and the novel transform us rather into slaves of a dream and of our faculty of being hallucinated.

(1374-75)¹

What is this speculation but a theory of the novel extrapolated from the manner in which it is usually consumed? Put another way, Valéry outlines here a genre theory based on modes of consumption, one which would necessarily take the form of a psychological, or more properly physiological, investigation. No longer the study of an object ("the novel") or a compositional practice ("the novelistic"), novel theory is in Valéry's hands the study of the affective and physiological responses called forth by a given form. Remarkable as this shift of attention is— from the object, or the composer of the object, to the person holding the object—it is not unique. It is, in fact, belated: it is a last, isolated and condensed expression of the dominant mid-nineteenth-century novel theory as it was practiced in Britain and France, a theory that, in its combination of physiological investigation and literary analysis, presents us with a vanished interdisciplinary formation, as well as an...