Re-Enlightening the Novel, Un-Restoring History: Numbers, Time, and Category in Fielding and Hume

…the pages of Homer and Virgil, of Swift and Cervantes have been turned over.

Many other are emoluments which arose from both of these, but they are for the most part so obvious that we shall not at the present stay to enumerate them.

--Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (740)

We Shall Not Enumerate

The “emoluments” Fielding has in mind near the close of this passage from Tom Jones comprise what’s called criticism at various points in the novel. The word critic, of course, occurs many times in the novel’s various chapter prefaces, a kind of literary antagonist against which the narrator spins the more desirable novelistic tale he wishes to offer instead. Criticism here becomes the archrival discourse, the narrator’s crutch and his rhetorical competitor, intruding time and again in the form of what the narrator doesn’t want to be doing throughout the course of the story of Tom. But in addition to serving as the novel’s example by inversion—the discourse that the novel is not—it performs a second function. Criticism plays an ambivalent, or better, a disappearing role in Tom Jones that also puts a stop to “enumeration.” Better still, the act of disappearance itself, or the parting nod Fielding gives criticism on its way out of the novel, is meant to be proof enough that writing has moved on to a new and better form. Criticism fights a losing battle for page space against that “new province of writing” (Fielding, Tom Jones 88)—the so-called comic-epic-in prose—that in 1749 hasn’t quite achieved the presumption of generic purity of simply being a novel.

Key here, and part of what I want to explore more fully below, is how criticism’s disappearing act performs a double function when it comes to the ways we might think about the eighteenth-century novel’s own proliferating numbers. If Tom Jones can be considered a case in point, at least by way of introduction, the many lesser “emoluments” must be reduced and ignored if the better writing is to grow. More than that, this growth—the surges that advanced the Enlightenment as a culture of print, and specifically one where the novel is valued as primary—needs a different mode of organization than criticism, with its own numbers problems, can reliably offer. That new mode is genre, sorting numbers not by adding to them with extraneous “emoluments” (too “obvious”) but by cordoning off a new literary object, subtracting whatever external variations might continue to run through that object, and then getting rid of its anomalous numbers. Getting rid of numbers on this order happens through a kind of stacking of oppositional pairs, which has the effect both of narrowing the amount of material that can be contained within the opposition (x is not y; so now we know what x is), and of expanding the space for more of a certain kind of material (x is good, as long as it stays unimpeachably x). So first criticism is pitted against the novel; then the novel is pitted against the countless forms of existing and competing examples of fiction that the novel must not be. Fielding, using the occasional, and if we take the epigram seriously, residual voice of the critic within the emerging form of the still composite, not-quite-yet fully formed novel, wants to distinguish “our writing” from “those idle Romances” (Tom Jones 151, 35, 37-8). As yet, the “swarm of foolish novels” (435) is insufficiently distinguishable from the better, because fewer, forms, and like criticism, as the word “swarm” suggests, the offending instance of over-abundance calls for sorting multitudes into disappearing categories of lesser value. This lesser state is determined not only by the alleged internal incoherence of mixed forms of writing but also because the potentially disruptive state of writing’s own numerousness becomes in Fielding’s time something that the best novel writers should avoid. The narrator-turned-critic, turning against criticism in order to “turn over” so much of that earlier kind of...