The Consequence of Ian Watt: A Call for Papers on Diminished Reputations

Several years ago, a small California press published a volume of essays, The Literal Imagination, by Ian Watt. Collected posthumously (the author died in 1991), they attracted very little attention. Yet Watt had written a book, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, that from the moment of its publication (1957) had been recognized as a major contribution to the study of the novel as a literary genre. It has never been out of print, and a new edition appeared in 2001. This work was followed by the first volume of an intended two-volume opus on Joseph Conrad, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (1980), also immediately recognized as a distinguished addition to a subject already amply explored. (In addition, Watt wrote a brochure on Nostromo, published in 1988, and a collection of pieces titled Essays on Conrad, issued posthumously in 2000.) No other body of work on Conrad can compete with the illuminating richness of Watt's examination of this novelist in the context of nineteenth-century thought. Myths of Modern Individualism (1996), Watt's last volume (alas, lacking final redaction because of illness) is a pioneering attempt to account for the elevation of a quartet of modern literary characters to the status of mythical prototypes.

Despite the range of his interests and the importance of the subjects that he treated, Watt's name is hardly known outside the academy; and even there, as the years went by, he tended to be regarded with some condescension. One reason is that the study of literature during his lifetime passed from a focus on literary works themselves to a preoccupation with critical methodology. As one specialized vocabulary was followed by its competing successor, as more attention was paid to how literature was being written about and less and less to the literature itself, Watt's preoccupation with the historical, moral-social, and philosophical significance of the texts he was probing began to be seen as terribly old fashioned. Nor did he make any effort—indeed, he deliberately avoided doing so—to enter the critical fray.

He wrote one or two articles countering critics of The Rise of the Novel, the work arousing (and continuing to arouse) the most controversy; but these were invariably responses to editorial requests, and a lecture of the same kind remained unpublished in his files. Some notion of his attitude may be gleaned from his riposte when the book on Conrad was provisionally rejected by a university press. The reason given was that it lacked a "theoretical preface"; and he replied that, while such an addition might be necessary for a doctoral dissertation, a preface of this kind, with its "necessary abstractness, oversimplification and implied self-importance . . . would remove the book from the particular literary sphere where I think it belongs."¹ In response to questions about his critical principles, posed by his admirer Tzvetan Todorov, Watt responded that "this reluctance to state one's premises is partly because of my empiricism, or my skepticism about philosophical methods in general," adding, a few sentences later, that "critical reticence may just be a reflection of the English notion of polite manners in public discourse."²

If nothing else, this last remark indicates why younger generations might consider Watt, born in 1917, to have been "old-fashioned"; but he did set down some general principles, all the same. The humanities, he wrote, should uphold "a way of responding to experience which involves what I would call 'the literal imagination' entering as fully as possible in all the concrete particularities of a literary work or the lives of others or the lessons of history." And Watt insisted that, "unlike the mysteries of metaphysics, or indeed of faith or science, the literary work is really there, and needs only our own experience of life and language for us to be able to decipher its meaning." If we are to judge from the latest volume from Terry Eagleton, always a reliable bellwether, there now seems to be a general exhaustion with the convolutions of literary critical theory, against which Ian...