Harm's Way: Tragic Responsibility and the Novel Form (review)

We have rewritten Watt's Rise of the Novel so often in recent years that one approaches each new attempt with justified wariness; indeed, each Watt-undone tends to return us to his account—flawed though it might be—with renewed appreciation for his acute perceptiveness and clear and precise prose. Harm's Way is also flawed, perhaps, but it is the best reconsideration of the "rise of the novel" that I have read, a masterful pursuit of a single thread in the many-stranded rope that constitutes any complex literary phenomenon. To Ms. Macpherson's immense credit, the thread she selects, changes in the laws of liability during the eighteenth century, provides a dramatic new insight into the novel form and excellent readings of several works each by Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (a penultimate chapter on Sheridan's Memoirs of Miss Sidney Biddulph, 1761, is beyond the Scriblerian's scope).

Ms. Macpherson's thesis is stated in her introduction and restated, perhaps too insistently, in each subsequent chapter: "Harm's Way addresses the centrality of accident and injury to the realist novel by shifting attention away from contract . . . to liability." This shift enables her to reconsider the meaning of agency and responsibility in these fictions, with the result that individualism and consciousness, supposed mainstays of the "rise of the novel," are demoted in significance, and actions (plot) rather than intentions (character) are elevated to primary status. That she explores the work of Bernard Williams (and his popularizer, Ian McEwan) in her Introduction is telling: Ms. Macpherson seems to find her inspiration in the so-called new ethical criticism announced in a special issue of PMLA (edited by Lawrence Buell) in 1999, and slowly emerging in the decade since as a particularly interesting and innovative turn in literary studies.

Watt's notion that the novel is necessarily a comic genre is based on the liberal enlightenment idea that knowledge of ourselves, and acting on that knowledge, rescues our lives from tragic consequences. What Williams and liability law have in common is that both posit a world in which we are responsible for the harm that occurs without our having willed it: "tragedy must turn on 'innocent suffering' and on the tragic hero's recognition that he is responsible without being culpable." Ms. Macpherson argues that the eighteenth-century novels she is analyzing all defy Watt's "comedy" in that they all entail bad things happening and good people being held responsible. This is a source of difficulty for modern readers steeped, she writes, "in what Williams calls the 'bad philosophy' of the will and the corresponding assumption that it is unjust to sanction people for things they have not meant to do." Rather than seeing this strict liability as somehow immoral, Williams and Ms. Macpherson agree that "the tragic principle that persons must accept responsibility for things they could not avoid doing is at the very heart of ethics."

Insofar as Williams (and Stanley Cavell) ameliorate strict liability by positing an ethics of recognition (consciousness), they move away from what Ms. Macpherson argues is an eighteenth-century legal version in which liability is unlimited, "nondisclaimable, because there is no way to escape from obligation. . . . It conceives of the person as a material abstraction—as the bearer of a harm that is substantive" and as the "perpetrator of a harm that is causal but not agentive." In this reading, the novel develops not because of an interest in interiority and subjectivity, but just the opposite: by considering human beings as "matter in motion: and if this is quite literally dehumanizing, it is not, therefore, inhumane. The legal person on this account is a formal person—a person whose content as represented by the state of her interior (or mind) is irrelevant to the question of her responsibility and thus to the question of what or who she is."

While this argument sounds complicated and involuted in its retelling, it actually could have profited from two further...