Paranoia and Fiction

Readers who can accept Jesse Molesworth's premises will find this book a major contribution to our understanding not just of the eighteenth-century novel, but of modernity and narrative more generally. Question those premises, and the book remains very interesting, if not quite so revelatory.

Molesworth begins by recalling the standard story of the "rise of the novel" as a rejection of romance, with its ghosts, goblins, and gods from machines, in favor of more "realistic" accounts of the world: stories inflected by new notions of empiricism and probability. But, he asks, is it really likely that a shipwrecked man could survive for decades on a remote, uninhabited island, that a young orphan should turn out to be the child of wealthy parents, or that a poor servant girl could resist the persistent sexual advances of her master, and indeed, finally find herself married to him and raised to the gentry? Molesworth calls such events "statistical miracles," arguing that histories based on the rise of realism in fiction focus too much on character and setting, and not enough on plot, where such miracles abound. Robinson Crusoe, Tom Jones, and Pamela are not isolated instances: plot itself, he argues—narrative—is by its nature hostile to realism. Since the Enlightenment, narrative, especially, but not only, in the new form of the novel, has offered readers not rational probability, but a way to escape modernity and return, if only imaginatively, to a premodern, magico-animistic understanding of the world. "Stronger magics lurk within verisimilitude that within fantasticality" (39): fiction, to Molesworth, is the modern substitute for religion.

Narrative seduces in this way first of all because it has an urge to shape, to create beginnings, middles, and ends, to make plots in which events form a pattern, an intelligible design (if only retrospectively). Such plots conclude, as Molesworth neatly puts in, not simply with an "end" but with a satisfying "ending." But since Enlightenment reason disenchanted the world, we can no longer rationally believe in such teleology. Thus, it is a "false presumption that narrative is capable of, or even interested in rendering, 'life in its true state'" (37). Real life, modernity has taught us, is the product of deterministic causes, which are so often beyond our ken, as to appear blind chance, or at best, statistical probabilities. Real life is messy, unpredictable, unshapely, "a disorganized jumble of accidents, haphazardly thrown together and fundamentally unintelligible" (51). Even the "single-character plotline" is mere "fantasy" (128).

Molesworth's argument recalls Northrop Frye's famous distinction, made half a century ago, between the messiness of reality and the shapeliness of fiction:

Real life does not start or stop, it never ties up loose ends; it never manifests meaning or purpose except by blind accident; it is never comic or tragic, ironic or romantic, or anything else that has a shape. Whatever gives form or pattern to fiction . . . is absurd, and contradicts our sense of reality.¹

"Narrative," meanwhile, "ultimately has two tasks: to describe events interestingly and to describe events coherently or teleologically, neither of which are [sic] especially useful to a rational understanding of causation. . . . Teleological thinking is not so much a facet of superstition but, rather, its definition" (6-7). Molesworth cannot make his point strongly enough: "Any traditional plot, no matter how complex or sophisticated, is little more than an alibi concealing a more strongly developed allegiance to the magic of teleology"; "Narrative thinking is little more than a code word for superstition" (7); "Magic, within the culture of secular modernity, operates through the principle of fictionality" (52). No one has ever really attempted to create a truly realistic narrative, and if one were to do so, it would be "nonsensical and tedious" (6). As G. K. Chesterton said, for not entirely unrelated reasons, "Realism is dull"; rejecting realism, narrative provides a way to re-enchant the world.²

How to respond to such a wholesale attack on the nature of narrative? Theists, of course, have a ready answer. What you think...