Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic by Marina MacKay (review)

THEORIZING THE NOVEL ON THE RIVER KWAI

As the late Robert Folkenflik wrote in a notable review essay in these pages, Ian Watt’s 1957 The Rise of the Novel “has exerted a remarkable hold on the imagination of those writing about the eighteenth-century novel.” Watt is “the man who came to dinner”—and stayed, as Michael Seidel quipped. ¹Despite The Rise of the Novel’s now recognized shortcomings, scholars of the eighteenth century continue to feel the truth of Marina MacKay’s claim that Watt’s book is “unusual among literary-critical classics because it continues after almost sixty years to elicit serious engagement rather than the conscientious citation . . . appropriate to the period piece” (17). Watt may have misidentified the spatial and temporal beginnings of the novel, eighteenth-century critics now agree, but his book itself has become a point of beginning in English studies, an origin not only of eighteenth-century literary criticism, but also of what scholars of other periods and languages know of the eighteenth-century novel. Valuable as an intellectual biography of an influential critic, Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic additionally demonstrates the importance of eighteenth-century studies to other literary periods, even as it highlights the merit of cross-period scholarship. MacKay’s book is remarkable both for the depth of its learning in eighteenth-century criticism and for its assembly of a broad range of interwar primary and secondary sources that resonate with Watt’s seminal, but flawed, masterpiece. Its excellence is further bolstered by discussions of great value to eighteenth-century critics, which include McKay’s reflections on Watt as the “administrator” of “the prison-camp English Department,” on Watt’s and Paul Fussell’s readings of Augustan literature, and on Watt’s views of Joseph Conrad. This review essay, it is worth emphasizing, however, focuses not on Watt and MacKay in relation to eighteenth-century studies but instead on the intersections of assumptions about “wartime” that undergird both The Rise of the Novel and MacKay’s account of it.

Watt fashioned in The Rise of the Novel, its blemishes notwithstanding, an original poetics of the novel, one that helped establish the English eighteenth-century novel as more than an imperfect precursor of a more achieved artistic form yet to come. Against the negative appraisals of F.R. Leavis, Watt’s own teacher, who had excluded the eighteenth-century novel almost entirely from his “Great Tradition,” Watt reclaimed the eighteenth-century novel for literary history, anchoring his appraisal of its structural features in “the habits of mind and culture that began in seventeenth-century Europe,” as Seidel has remarked (190). Influentially, and controversially, Watt defined “novels” as fictional eighteenth-century narratives characterized by “formal realism,” that is “the premise, or primary convention, that the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience.” For Watt, the rise of the novel and the rise of the individual were intertwined: “Philosophically,” he argued, “the particularizing approach to character resolves itself into the problem of defining the individual person.” ² Many literary historians have detailed the implications of Watt’s predication of his formal realism on the philosophy of Descartes and Locke; these implications are largely overlooked in Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic. For even as Watt explicitly emphasizes fiction’s difference from philosophy, the centrality in The Rise of the Novel of a specific kind of individualism and its valorization of private subjectivity ends up conflating modes that Watt understood as both separable and distinct. The Rise of the Novel, that is, ultimately duplicates the enabling abstractions of “early modern philosophy,” within which “the individual subject of experience had been substituted for the total drama of all reality,” to adapt Alfred North Whitehead’s pithy phrase.³ Still, in arguing for a connection between the eighteenth-century novel and its social settings, Watt grounded his formalist method in a historical context, an approach that helps explain...