Novel Empiricisms

It is easy to forget that Bacon, Boyle, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume did not call themselves empiricists. Like "the novel," "British empiricism" as a stable denomination largely developed in the nineteenth century. And while there are clear similarities of method and spirit linking these thinkers—namely, a commitment to the primacy of sense experience—the larger philosophical and ontological stakes of their various projects differed widely. Scholars of eighteenth-century literature have in this century begun to appreciate these divergences. When Jonathan Kramnick noted in 2007 that "the connection between empiricism and the rise of the novel is a touchstone of literary studies," it was not in an effort to affirm or rebut Ian Watt's influential argument, but to show how Locke and Hume's empiricism anticipates aspects of the "mental architecture" elaborated by contemporary cognitive science and by the computational model of Theory of Mind.¹ In the introduction to the special issue of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation that contains Kramnick's article, Helen Thompson and Natania Meeker begin with a series of questions like this one: "How has empiricism functioned as a structuring principle within narratives of the emergence of eighteenth-century literary modernity?"² They go on to challenge histories of empiricism that reify matter as "reliably static, or even reliably visible," and champion an approach that affirms the power of corpuscular substance as that which demands to be figured (184). More recently, Roger Maioli asserted that "a common concern for studies of eighteenth-century narrative has been to define the relationship between prose fiction's turn to realism and the simultaneous emergence of British empiricism."³ From this basis, he argues that realist novels, insofar as they deal with the problem of how to tell the truth in fiction, lay the groundwork for today's literary cognitivism. As Stephen Priest has observed, "Empiricism is prima facie consistent with idealism, materialism, dualism, neutral monism, theism, atheism, conservatism, and liberalism"—and we might add computationalism, corpuscular chemistry, and propositionalism.⁴

Both Thompson's and Maioli's new books have "empiricism" and "the novel" in their titles, and both books claim to provide a revisionist literary history of their respective topics. But, clearly, the ontological and critical claims outlined in those earlier publications should make us wary of too swiftly uniting their projects. Helen Thompson's Fictional Matter: Empiricism, Corpuscles, and the Novel is a stunningly original attempt to rethink the connection between Enlightenment science and the eighteenth-century novel. Like many scholars before her, Thompson posits a fundamental link between John Locke and the new species of narrative developing in the period, but in her view, Locke's understanding of empirical knowledge is importantly influenced by the corpuscular chemistry of Robert Boyle. This is no mere historical corrective, however, as Thompson asks us to abandon a theory of novelistic realism based on an empiricism inherently tied to mimetic representation and to reconsider the fundamental mechanics of plot, character, and description from the perspective of a productive and dynamic jostling of material relations and qualities. Roger Maioli's Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel does not claim to advance quite so ambitious a program, but it executes its argument methodically and lucidly. Maioli follows the theses of Ian Watt and Michael McKeon (and others) concerning the powerful influence of the empirical observation on the novel, but argues, crucially, that when novels finally gave up their claim to authenticity—a claim made in order to borrow empiricist credentials—they nevertheless continued to wrangle with the "theoretical challenge . . . to prove fiction's empirical standing or exit the philosophical arena" (xi).

The nuanced points of contact and contrast between these texts will emerge over the course of this review, but, some preliminary observations: Thompson is interested in how, for Boyle and Locke, sense experience is inextricably linked to matter, while Maioli goes on to claim that early theorists [End Page...