Picaresque Necessity: Episodic Narrative
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PICARESQUE NECESSITY: EPISODIC NARRATIVE AND CAUSALITY IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY by NATHAN PETERSON A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School––New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in English Written under the direction of Lynn Festa And approved by ____________________ ____________________ ____________________ ____________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October 2016 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Picaresque Necessity: Episodic Narrative and Causality in the Long Eighteenth Century by NATHAN PETERSON Dissertation Director: Lynn Festa This dissertation argues that eighteenth-century picaresque narratives opposed modern notions of individual autonomy and social progress by stressing questions of necessity. The picaresque highlights the kinds of causes––such as bodily need or economic hardship––that overpower individual and collective capacities for self-determination. Whereas eighteenth-century scholarship has long emphasized the affiliation between the rise of the novel and the rise of the autonomous individual, Picaresque Necessity argues that authors such as Daniel Defoe and Tobias Smollett were preoccupied with how states of extreme need threaten an individual’s capacity for survival and social advancement. I argue that the open-ended and repetitive nature of the picaresque stems from its emphasis on the interminable demands of the body, and that its episodic narrative defies higher order modes of explanation by lingering on the irreducible power of bodily need. Necessity resists being apprehended in the objective language of social or political theory because its impetus can only be felt by the sufferer, whose testimony is thus often disregarded as irredeemably partial and subjective. By insisting that the immediate power of necessity cannot reliably be represented in language, the picaresque exposes a gap between social theory and individual need that continues to trouble socioeconomic discourse to this day. ii Acknowledgments I have been extremely fortunate in finding such a supportive and challenging committee. Thanks, first and foremost, to Lynn Festa, who pushed me toward greater rigor and clarity of thought with every draft (there were many) and who has been the source of much-needed inspiration, provocation, and support. Thanks to Michael McKeon, who has helped me to see the broader contexts and further implications of my ideas from the first day that I arrived at Rutgers. I am extremely grateful to Colin Jager, who provided incisive feedback at multiple points in this project. Thanks to Dan Carey, who helped to shape my dissertation by pointing me in the right direction at a key moment. I am grateful to the Mellon Foundation, the School of Arts and Sciences, and the English Department of Rutgers University, all of which provided financial support for research and writing. Thanks also to the members of the Long Eighteenth-Century Reading Group, who oriented my thinking at many junctures, especially Jason Gulya, Alex Solomon, Sean Barry, and Isaac Cowell. Thanks to Meredith McGill and the members of my Dissertation Writing Seminar, who provided practical feedback on my work at a moment when my spirits were low. I am indebted to many members of the Rutgers English faculty who helped in ways that they may not be aware of––especially Billy Galperin, John Kucich, Martin Gliserman, and Myra Jehlen. I want to extend my special thanks to Cheryl Robinson and Courtney Borack, who made me feel at home at Rutgers. Thanks to my former professors at Portland State, who planted the seeds––Marcia Klotz, Ann-Marie Fallon, and John Smyth. Thanks to my parents, who provided support over the course of a long and episodic educational career. I iii am overwhelmingly thankful to Galen, without whom I could not have written this dissertation, and who brought me a slice of cake while I was writing this sentence. Thanks also to Wren, who makes everything wonderful. iv Table of Contents Abstract ……………………………………………………….. ii Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………….. iii List of Tables ……………………………………………………….. vi Introduction ……………………………………………………….. 1 Chapter One The Ends of Hunger: Lazarillo de Tormes in English 16 Translation (1586-1777) Chapter Two Above the Power of Human Nature: Self-Preservation 79 in Daniel Defoe’s Narratives Chapter Three The Consequence of Compulsion: Necessity and Social 133 Order in Tobias Smollett’s Picaresque Novels Chapter Four Sex and Necessity in Mid-Century Women’s Novels of 201 Adventure Coda …………………………………………………………. 247 Bibliography …………………………………………………………. 251 v List of Tables Table 1. English-Language Editions of Lazarillo before 1700 ……………..……… 38 Table 2. Eighteenth-Century English Editions of Lazarillo………………………… 67 vi 1 Introduction A classic thought experiment describes the plight of a hungry donkey stationed between two bales of hay, equivalent in size and equidistant from one another. Early modern philosophers puzzled over and satirized variants of this scenario for centuries, with some concluding that the donkey (call it an ass) would starve to death without a strong enough reason to tip the balance between two equivalent choices.1 The paradox of Buridan’s Ass reveals how philosophical frameworks that privilege reason and choice occlude the power of bodily needs, which have the potential to exert powerful influence on the behavior of humans (as well as donkeys). Philosophers and novelists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from Baruch Spinoza to Tobias Smollett, used the paradox of Buridan’s Ass to generate questions about the relationship between freedom and necessity: What does the immanent threat of starvation do to basic beliefs about individual agency and identity, not just in philosophical speculation, but in socioeconomic and political theory? How do the innate needs and limits of the body shape (or deform) human behavior and social institutions? Literary narratives of hardship in the eighteenth century offer a unique set of insights for addressing these questions because they imagine situations of necessity from a less abstract and more immediate perspective than the one used by philosophers. This dissertation uses the picaresque, a genre traditionally associated with the episodic misfortunes of rogues and vagabonds, to 1 In the long eighteenth century, Baruch Spinoza, Ethics [orig. 1677] II, 49 schol, in Complete Works ed. Michael Morgan trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), 274; Thomas Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Mind [orig. 1788] (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969), 288-89. For a discussion of Buridan’s Ass from a philosophical perspective, see Nicholas Rescher, “Choice without Preference: A History of the Logic of the Problem of Buridan’s Ass” Kant-Studien 51 (1960): 142-175. 2 argue that representations of bodily necessity influenced the way that authors and readers understood the limits of individual autonomy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Picaresque Necessity brings together philosophical and socioeconomic accounts of necessity with literary narratives of privation and exigency to show how the picaresque contested the emergent model of individual liberty underpinning modern theories of social, economic, and political relations. Novelists and philosophers used the word necessity in markedly different ways, ranging from economic lack to biological imperative to divine providence. When Daniel Defoe claims, “Necessity makes an honest man a knave,”2 he means that poverty overcomes the scruples of otherwise ethical individuals whereas when Thomas Malthus refers to “Necessity, that imperious all pervading law of nature,”3 he points to the ubiquity of biological principles in a more abstract and systematic sense. Ideas of necessity underpin a range of deterministic frameworks, yet in the eighteenth century, as today, the term was also frequently associated with hunger and indigence. How can definitions of necessity as a pervasive and “imperious” force of nature be reconciled with the figure of a starving pauper? Social theorists and philosophers describe economics and natural law in terms of necessity, which, by tacitly putting models of causation in place, proves to be a way of begging the question. Necessity is a problematic vessel for conflicting meanings, which becomes apparent when the word is applied to a literally starving body. Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary illustrates the polyvalence of the term by identifying necessity with both “want; need; poverty” and “things necessary for 2 Daniel Defoe, Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe (London, 1720), 38. 3 Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population [orig. 1798] ed. Philip Appelman (New York: Norton & Company, 2004), 20. 3 human life.” Simultaneously an internal lack––a want that drives the impoverished from within––and an external object without which one cannot live, necessity describes both a state of being and an imperative to alter that state. Picaresque narratives point to bodily needs as particularly distressing forms of necessity that remain external to conscious desires and loftier goals.4 By using the interminable demands of the body as a way of structuring narrative, the picaresque focuses on instances in which the body rather than the mind propels action, reducing humans to animal instincts and disrupting philosophical and socioeconomic accounts of progress and development. Seventeenth-century political philosophers, such as Thomas Hobbes