The Rise of the Novel, or 'Tis Sixty Years Since

The books before us give us an excellent sense of how we are writing the history of prose fiction in England, or of the English novel, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, but I was not surprised that both these 2017 books, like sprinters getting their impetus pushing off against a starting block, refer to Ian Watt's monograph The Rise of the Novel, which had been published exactly sixty years earlier. Leah Orr's last chapter in Novel Venturesasks "Did the Novel Rise?" (The answer, predictably, is "no.") And Tom Keymer's masterly introduction to the thirty-five mostly masterly chapters in what I shall be calling OHNE1begins with Watt and traces some of the most important questions and qualifications that the other revisionary post-Watt literary histories have raised, particularly those by Janet Spencer, William Beatty Warner, Michael McKeon, J. Paul Hunter, Margaret Doody—and, I would be tempted to add, Lennard Davis, Janet Todd, and John Richetti. Clearly, we can neither do with Watt nor do without him, and it may be interesting to ask why.

The Rise of the Novelwas not the only book on the early novel to come out in the 1950s. In fact, the secondary text on the early novel most commonly assigned where I was educated in the 1960s was Alan Dugald McKillop's The Early Masters of English Fiction(1956). What they had in common was filing the canon down to a handful of greats; they wrote what Viktor Shklovsky called "histories of kings," possibly under the influence of F. R. Leavis's Great Tradition(1948), which famously had no time for any novelist before Austen. McKillop's masters were all misters: Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne; for Watt the canon was exactly the same. ¹In fact, to get his book published more easily, he eliminated his planned chapters on Smollett and Sterne. ²The reason Watt's book is still read, while McKillop's has been long out of print, is that, while McKillop attempted to relate his "five great men" as essential to the later development of fiction, The Rise of the Noveladvanced a theory of historical causation, an attempt to understand why the novel appeared when it did.

It is important to understand how Ian Watt posed the issue: he accepts what he considers to be the widespread assumption that the English novel starts with Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, but since there was no common influence among the three, understanding why the novel sprung up when it did involves discovering how the general culture had prepared for the appearance of a new genre and form of text. Watt identifies the novel proper with the literary technique he calls "formal realism," which he defines in terms of the text's explicit notation of the circumstantiality of the narrative events. And he understands "formal realism" as the literary equivalent of what he calls the "realist" philosophy of Descartes and Locke, which emphasize particulars as the basis of knowledge, and the source of all abstract or general ideas, and knowledge as growing from our individual experience of specific times and places, rather than from authorities or abstract principles derived a priori. Although Watt does not explicitly claim that Defoe could not have written without Locke, by implying that literary realism and empiricism are linked, he needn't look any earlier than the 1670s to find the philosophical basis of the novel.

Watt also saw formal realism, especially that of Defoe, as going hand in hand with a belief in individualism: characters are viewed as able to define and master their own fate, rather than having to search out a role relative to a hierarchical system of authority. Watt identifies this belief with...