Flat-Footed and Fly-Blown: The Realities of Realism

Fiat-Footed and Fly-Blown: The Realities of Realismian Watt Iam, of course, immensely flattered to be invited here, and for many reasons.1 As Horace Walpole said about the unexpected success of The Castle of Otranto, "It is charming to totter into vogue."2 It is particularly charming because it lends credibility to the hypothesis of my continuing survival, which is not universally accepted: not long ago I fell into conversation with a student at Berkeley, and when, on parting, I told him my name, he answered with genuine astonishment: "Oh, I thought you were dead." A third reason, no doubt, is that I cannot claim to be wholly a stranger to what Johnson said about Richardson: that he "could not be content to sail quietly down the stream of reputation without longing to taste the froth from every stroke of the oar."3 My original difficulty in deciding whether to come and, if so, what to talk about arose partly from a sense of decorum which told me that I should not be observed visibly to agitate the stream of reputation myself; and yet this is what Paul Hunter in effect has asked me to do. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that I don't want to repeat an earlier solicited transgression in the self1 This talk was given as the plenary address to the fourth annual meeting of the Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, 12 March 1978. It is published jointly by the Stanford Humanities Review and Eighteenth-Century Fiction, with the permission of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries. Bibliographical information supplied by the editors is signed "Ed." 2 Letter to George Augustus Selwyn, 2 December 1765, Letters ofHorace Walpole, ed. Mrs Paget Toynbee, 15 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904), 6:367. 3 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957), p. 260. References are to this edition. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000 148 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION congratulation line, an essay called "Serious Reflections on The Rise ofthe Novell Titles beginning with "towards" always make me wonder "Why doesn't he wait till he arrives? Then he'll know if there is anything there worth reporting." In any case, you will not expect any report from me on that vast abstraction, the "Poetics of Fiction." For the "flat-footed" pedestrian of my title is, of course, myself; and I continue to totter along the "flyblown " paths of "realism." I thought that one reasonably decorous way of fulfilling my assignment would be to avoid tracks I've made already, or that have been much noted by others, and give a biographical account of how some of the less obviously pedestrian elements in The Rise ofthe Novel came into being, mainly through the influence of that least earthbound ofall modes ofthought, the German intellectual tradition. I will then, still remaining abroad, look briefly at how the various foreign translations and the subsequentreceptions ofwhat I normally think ofas the R ofNdrew attention to some of its larger and less-noticed ideological implications. Finally there may be a stopover in Paris, before coming home to speak my mind about the representational status of fiction and, more emphatically, about the need for realism in literary criticism. The Three Periods of Composition: Thesis Looking back on the process of composition of the R of N, I have been delighted to discover a truly Hegelian pattern of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The registered topic of my PhD dissertation in 1 938 was "The Novel and Its Reader: 1719-1754." The title reflects something of the intellectual atmosphere of Cambridge in the late 1930s. There was logical positivism. Some ofmy friends spent a good deal oftime waiting for someone to use the word "why" so that they could jump in with "But you mustn't say that. The only real questions are how questions." My research topic wholly disregarded the "why," assumed the more or less publicly attested phenomenon of the "rise of the novel," and attempted to study merely the "how." Behind my...