the minnesota review n.s. 55-57 (2002)Eric LeuschnerAnthologizing the Novel(on Michael McKeon, ed., Theory of the Novel: An Historical Approach [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000])The first course on the contemporary novel at Yale was offered in 1895, sparking newspaper headlines such as "They Study Novels" across the country; the story was even picked up by the London Daily Telegraph and parodied in Punch. Although a success with students, the course was cancelled after the administration threatened to fire the instructor, William Lyon Phelps. By 1995, courses in all aspects of the novel were commonplace in the university. As W. B. Carnochan relates the novel's place in the history of the English curriculum: A hundred years ago, English departments might list perhaps one course in the novel, but poetry and drama [. . .] counted most. At mid-century, under the influence of New Criticism, poetry kept its preeminence. But after World War II, as literary criticism took a sociological turn, the novel gathered strength at the expense of poetry and drama. In the 1980s, Stanford introduced as a requirement for its English major an introduction to poetry and poetics for the reason that students, fearing the unknown, might otherwise graduate with little or no exposure to poetry at all. (1960) Likewise, Michael Hoffman and Patrick Murphy, editors of Essentials of the Theory of Fiction, describe "the great proliferation of courses in prose fiction at colleges and universities across the United States and [that] the theory of fiction is one of the burgeoning subdivisions of the thriving study of literary theory" (xi). In short, although there are such instances as "introduction to literature" textbooks that lay out the study of fiction in terms of the short story, only occasionally appending a brief note on the novel or including a novella like Heart of Darkness or Daisy Miller to cover longer prose fiction, the novel has in many ways become the dominant form, curricularly as well as commercially. When we speak of fiction, prose, or narrative in general, we often think of the novel, or as Clifford Siskin has described it, "novelism," which has conflated the entire concept of a work of writing as book with the term "novel." Testifying to the novel's dominance, there has never been a lack of critical anthologies devoted to the novel in the past fifty years. Monographic studies of the novel, of course, represent the leading edge of critical work, the history of which has been related elsewhere by such scholars as Michael Levenson and Dorothy Hale, but the critical anthology, capitalizing on institutional and instructional needs, functions inherently to concretize and canonize a field of study in ways the monograph cannot. Anthologies act in various degrees to survey fields, establish canons, act as grave markers, provide comprehensive representation, or capture moments in time in a field's development. There are four types, or categories, that anthologies of novel criticism fall into which illustrate the emplacement of novel theory and criticism since the 1950s. Initially, the debate in novel criticism centered on the question of authority, whether authors or critics were the valid voices of novel criticism. The "novelist on the novel" anthology includes Miriam Allott's Novelists on the Novel (1959), William Buckler's Novels in the Making (1961), Louis Rubin, Jr. and John Rees Moore's The Idea of an American Novel (1961), George Barnett's Eighteenth-Century British Novelists on the Novel (1968) and Nineteenth-Century Novelists on the Novel (1971), Walter Greiner's English Theories of the Novel (1970), and Ioan Williams's Novel and Romance 1700-1800: A Documentary Record (1970). The recent Women Critics 1660-1820: An Anthology (1995) expands to recover women but essentially follows this model. This first type of anthology takes as its guiding premise that, as Allott states, "only the practitioner can speak with final authority about the problems of his art" (xi). Commonly included in these anthologies are prefaces by early novelists such as Fielding, Defoe, Walpole, and Richardson as well as prefaces and essays by later writers, including James, Conrad, Lawrence, and Proust. Eighteenth-century novelists generally apologized, defended, and legitimated the newly defined (and untrustworthy) genre of the novel, and their statements on readerly expectations and authorial decisions and questions of verisimilitude, probability, and ethics lay the groundwork for later critical discussions. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors such as James and Lawrence less defend the novel than make statements on novelistic craft, initiating discussions on technical issues like point of view as well as the political, moral, and ethical efficacy of the novel. Allott ascribes a certain naïve authority to the author, claiming that he or she is "the most likely to clear up the confusion of novel criticism" (xv), while Barnett claims that "novelists themselves are valid critics" (vii), reasserting the author-critic's authority in the growing presence of scholar-critics following World War II. In contrast, the second type of anthology, "critics on the novel," turns from impressionistic statements on practical questions of craft to more abstract, systematic accounts. Although older anthologies such as William Van O'Connor's Forms of Modern Fiction (1948) and John Aldridge's Critiques and Essays on Modern Fiction, 1920-1951 (1952) also belong in this category, the large number of anthologies in the 60s reflects the institution of the field in that time—as Jonathan Culler describes, "the displacement of public criticism by academic literary criticism" (3). Examples of this type of anthology include Robert Scholes's Approaches to the Novel: Material for a Poetics (1st ed, 1961; 2nd ed, 1966), Robert Specter's Essays on the Eighteenth-Century Novel (1965), Robert Murray Davis's The Novel: Modern Essays in Criticism (1969), and John Halperin's The Theory of the Novel: New Essays (1974). Many of these anthologies reflect the pedagogical institution of formalist schools, especially the New Criticism and to a lesser extent the Chicago School. As Levenson points out, "the Jamesian current had met the new Criticism, and this convergence helped to consolidate a strong formalist tendency in American approaches to the novel" (485). What could be considered a hybrid category of anthology combines these first two approaches and collects both critics and novelists. Roger Sale's Discussions of the Novel (1960) and Philip Stevick's Theory of the Novel (1967), for example, reprints prefaces by Fielding, Hawthorne, James, and Conrad alongside essays by Frye, Booth, Trilling, Crane, and Schorer. If not granting equal weight to both novelists and critics, these anthologies suggest at best a mutual informing of one another; at worst, they ascribe the novelists to an historical, museum-like section whereas the critics are in the current, "modern" section. As theory, especially narrative theory and narratology, became prominent in the university in the 70s and 80s, the substance of the anthologies shifted to fundamental questions of structure and origins, suggesting a split between synchronic and diachronic approaches. Disturbed by the move to view all narrative prose as the novel, literary critics such as Northrop Frye and Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, as early as the 50s, attempted to replace the term "novel" with "narrative," considering the novel as just one of several narrative possibilities. Later developments in structuralism and poststructuralism also leveled the generic playing field by challenging the ubiquity of the novel. Narratology as a pseudo/proto-scientific field of inquiry at its extreme reduces narrative to formulaic equations meant to represent narrative agents and functions, and narrative theory now encompasses everything from hypertext and paratext to metahistory, history as narrative, narratives of domestic abuse, and film narrative. Semiotics and cultural studies, too, expand the subjects of study to a wider array of possibilities. Not only is the novel one type of narrative, but everything is now considered a narrative. Thus, the third category of anthologies, focusing on the structure of the genre, reflects an interest in the intrinsic nature of fiction. Because of the structuralist emphasis in theory in the 70s and 80s, the "novel" in a sense almost disappears, supplanted by the conceptual/theoretical category "narrative" rather than the empirical title "novel." Mark Spilka's two collections, Towards a Poetics of the Novel and Why the Novel Matters, emphasize the nature of the novel in narrative terms. Towards a Poetics of Fiction opens with essays delineating narrative-oriented approaches to the study of the novel: structure, language, history, narrative, genre, and time. Similarly, Why the Novel Matters breaks down the operations of the novel into six functional categories indicating an interest in how the novel operates; these categories include "novel as ethical paradigm," "novel as cultural discourse," "novel as therapeutic discourse," and "novel as psychosocial discourse." The first edition of Hoffman and Murphy's Essentials of the Theory of Fiction begins with James and Woolf, covers the formalist period, and then includes selections steeped in classic and then-current narrative theory. As the title suggests, it expands to consider the short story and novella. During the 80s narratology established itself enough to warrant anthologies based on that specific approach. Peter Messent's New Readings of the American Novel: Narrative Theory and its Application (1990), for example, applies narratological concepts to the American novel, including a Bakhtinian reading of Huckleberry Finn and a study of focalization in The Great Gatsby. Richter's more general anthology Narrative/Theory (1996) includes essays considered primary in narrative theory, including Bakhtin's "Heteroglossia in the Novel," Booth's "Distance and Point of View," Crane's "The Concept of Plot and the Plot in Tom Jones," and Prince's "Introduction to the Study of the Narratee." The 80s and 90s also witnessed a plethora of primers such as Shlomith Rimmon-Keenan's Narrative Fiction, Contemporary Poetics, Seymour Chatman's Story and Discourse, and Wallace Martin's Recent Theories of Narrative, which summarized and contextualized the growing work in narratology. These synthetic accounts function in a way like the anthology, which looks backward to consolidate a particular field. More recently, there has been a resurgence of collections such as Willie van Peer and Chatman's New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective, David Herman's Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, and Brian Richardson's Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames that, while often focusing on the novel, favor framing their work within the field of narrative theory. The fourth category, prevalent in the 1990s, includes anthologies dealing with the genealogy and historical development of the novel to locate both where the novel comes from and what cultural, sociological, and historical factors influenced its development, which reflect a resurgence in historical scholarship framed in New Historicist or cultural studies terms. For the most part, these anthologies deal with the eighteenth-century British novel, although studies of non-British novels have and continue to appear. These studies are, however, rarely anthologized. Part of this results from a certain disciplinary provincialism, despite the clear influence of other traditions, especially the French and Russian novel. It also comes from the overwhelming presence of the "rise of the novel" paradigm, or as William Warner argues, "the 'rise of the novel' has come to prestructure our approach to the 'novel'" and has established the "cultural centrality" of the eighteenth-century British novel (2). Anthologies such as the Cambridge and Columbia Histories and Companions published in the 90s and in the present decade, which are more anthologies than encyclopedic reference works, emphasize historical and social factors over narratological concerns. The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel includes essays on religion, science, and professions in the novel, as well as essays on gender, sexuality, and race. Much of the resurgence of interest in the genealogy of the novel integrates the historical with the theoretical. Deidre Lynch and Warner's Cultural Institutions of the Novel argues that it is more significant to analyze what novels do in a cultural sense, fostering, for example, a nationalistic identity for a country. One of this collection's major contributions is its attempt to wrest the novel away from its western proclivities to open up a "global horizon for novel studies" (5). A recent special issue of Eighteenth-Century Fiction, "Reconsidering the Rise of the Novel," in a sense offers a retrospective inventory of this approach, offering a wide variety of responses to Watt's Rise of the Novel by leading scholars of the eighteenth-century novel, including J. Paul Hunter, Maximillian Novak, John Richetti, Lynch, Warner, Janet Todd, Margaret Doody, Lennard Davis, and McKeon. With the distinctive trappings of an anthology—size; heft; dull, green cover—Michael McKeon's Theory of the Novel can best be described as "McKeonesque," reminiscent of McKeon's now-standard study The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740. His imprimatur certainly adds a strong note to the text. As such, it might be taken to be the definitive statement on the "theory of the novel," as its title implies, recalling the titles of Halperin's and Stevick's, and even Hoffman and Murphy's anthologies. Indeed, McKeon tends to cover aspects of each of the four categories described above. After sections explaining and defending genre theory, the subsequent sections are an example of the fourth category, its selections eliciting more of a literary history of the novel. McKeon begins with the "grand theories" of Lukács, Ortega y Gassett, and Bakhtin, which focus on how the novel differs from the epic, and trace its origins back to ancient sources. These are then juxtaposed with "revisionist" theories of Watt, McKeon, Fredric Jameson, and Benedict Anderson. The texts of Watt and McKeon, for instance, are avowedly concerned with the formation of the English novel out of social and cultural influences. McKeon then follows with specific issues particular to the novel genre, including domesticity, subjectivity, and realism, as well as a section on the confluence of photography, film, and the novel, that could be taken as a nod to narrative theory; he emphasizes, for example, free indirect discourse in the selection from the only narratologist, Dorrit Cohn. The anthology concludes by bringing the novel into the twentieth century with sections on modernism, the nouveau roman, the postmodern novel, and the colonial and postcolonial novel. Although the majority of the selections are from critics, primarily from the last twenty years, McKeon does include statements from James, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Virginia Woolf. While the selections are wide-ranging and extensive (40+ pages of the original from Bakhtin, and Marthe Robert; 50+ pages from Watt and Ortega; 100+ pages from Lukács), what and who are left out say something about the conception of novel theory McKeon presents. Where, for example, are essential theorists like Barthes, Booth, Chatman, Genette, Prince, Propp, and Todorov? From Theory of the Novel, one could assume narrative theory is inconsequential. McKeon defends this exclusion as an "exercise in rebalancing" (xv), stating that the aim of the anthology is to present the "idea of the coherence of the novel as a historical phenomenon" (xiv). If this is the case, where are critic-historians of the British novel such as John Bender, Lennard Davis, Margaret Doody, Catherine Gallagher, J. Paul Hunter, William Warner, and of the American novel like Richard Chase, Cathy Davidson, or Jane Tompkins? McKeon's inclusion of Nancy Armstrong and the section on privacy, domesticity, and women, while certainly a key issue in novel theory, repeats the genesis of the novel in such forms as conduct manuals, but ignores the novel's ties to journalism, historiography, media culture, sermons, and economic theory or cultural institutions like the penitentiary or the public sphere—issues taken up variously by the missing critics noted above. Likewise, debates between, for example, James and H. G. Wells on the nature of realism, or more recently between McKeon and Warner in Diacritics, which highlights McKeon's dialectical method would foreground distinctly different understandings of literary history. Also absent are examples of those statements on the novel that grapple with its political significance, an aspect that is actually lacking in most of the latter two categories. Although possibly considered untheoretical or anachronistic, essays by Irving Howe, George Orwell, D. H. Lawrence, and Lionel Trilling deserve a place in the theory of the novel, as statements like these determine or construct the novel's social relevance. The historical development of these views in particular shed distinct light on the development of the novel as well as novel criticism. The question of inclusion and exclusion will always be subject to debate, but the issue is that an anthology titled "Theory of the Novel" enjoins the expectation that it be more complete. Revealingly, McKeon's headnotes which thread the selections together create a master narrative based on McKeon's dialectical approach and his impetus to reentrench genre criticism over narrative theory. McKeon is upfront about this, noting that all anthologies at least implicitly support the editor's views. Focusing on the genre of "novel" as opposed to "narrative" or "narrative theory," McKeon contrasts his anthology to older ones by Stevick, Halperin, and Hoffman and Murphy, who, he charges, "indiscriminately" include essays on both. He rehearses the theoretical debate over the definition of the novel, beginning with Frye and Scholes and Kellogg and continuing to structuralist and poststructuralists critics. But by separating the history of the novel from the theory of narrative, McKeon imposes a critical divide that is an accident of history. One of the difficulties these many anthologies repeatedly raise is the impossibility of defining the nature of the novel. Sale notes that "neither James nor anyone after him formulated a poetics of the novel and some of the great attractiveness of the genre is that we shall not and cannot" (viii). Questioning the possibility of a theory of the novel, Ralph Freedman claimed in a 1968 article, "The Possibility of a Theory of the Novel," "the phrase les problèmes du roman signifies the attempt of at least two centuries to come to terms with an intransient genre" (57). Since that time, we have yet to come to terms with it. Given the difficulty in defining the novel, is it impossible to construct a workable anthology that provides a balanced picture of the differing perspectives on it? Perhaps an anthology organized around the history of novel theory as opposed to the history of the novel would be appropriate. McKeon's anthology becomes a very partial—in both senses of the word—theory of the novel. Even the idea of "grand theory" seems to have run its ground, but that very idea would become part of the history, as well as the struggle between literary theory and literary history. Instead of selecting, as McKeon does, those essays that "take as their focus how the genre develops over time," placing the essays themselves in a historical sense would open up more possibilities. Rather than McKeon's historical approach, I would propose a metacritical anthology. Instead of heeding McKeon's Chicago-style insistence on genre, I would call for another aspect emphasized by the Chicago critics, that is, an interest in the history of criticism. This type of anthology would consolidate each of the categories described above and employ a more dialogical structure, perhaps a version of Gerald Graff's "teach the conflicts" model, to highlight the formation of the field. Such an anthology would place the history of novel theory amid the history of criticism. Relevant Works
Eric Leuschner, a doctoral candidate at the University of Missouri-Columbia, has published several essays in the Henry James Review and the Wallace Stevens Journal. |