Dorothee Birke Writing the Reader Linguae & Litterae
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Dorothee Birke Writing the Reader linguae & litterae Publications of the School of Language & Literature Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies Edited by Peter Auer, Gesa von Essen, Werner Frick Editorial Board Michel Espagne (Paris), Marino Freschi (Rom), Ekkehard König (Berlin), Michael Lackner (Erlangen-Nürnberg), Per Linell (Linköping), Angelika Linke (Zürich), Christine Maillard (Strasbourg), Lorenza Mondada (Basel), Pieter Muysken (Nijmegen), Wolfgang Raible (Freiburg), Monika Schmitz-Emans (Bochum) Volume 59 Dorothee Birke Writing the Reader Configurations of a Cultural Practice in the English Novel An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libra- ries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access. More information about the initiative can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License, as of February 23, 2017. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. ISBN 978-3-11-030763-4 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-039984-4 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-040006-9 ISSN 1869-7054 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at: http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: jürgen ullrich typosatz, Nördlingen Printing and binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Contents Acknowledgements IX Abbreviations of Titles XI Part I Chapter 1 Writing the Reader 3 Four Approaches to Reading 8 The Significance of the Quixotic Reader’s Gender 15 The Quixotic Plot 18 Self-Reflexivity Revisited 25 Chapter 2 The Reader in the Text: Dramatizing Literary Communication 30 The Projection of Reading Stances 33 Narratorial Commentary and the Performance of Authorship 41 Part II Chapter 3 The Ambivalent Rise of the Novel Reader: Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote 55 Novel, Romance, and Reading around 1750 57 Sex, Violence, and Arabella: Debating the Physical Impact of Reading 62 Models of Virtue? Lennox and Johnson 68 Great Expectations? Reading as a Socially Embedded Practice 78 Probing Problems of Authority and Instruction 83 Chapter 4 The Institutionalization of Novel Reading: Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey 91 The Uses of Parody: Restructuring the Quixotic Plot 94 Catherine Morland and the Politics of the Didactic 101 Reading and the Channelling of Emotions 109 VI Contents Consumerism and Communities of Taste 113 Reconsidering the Defense of the Novel 118 Chapter 5 Psychologizing Reading as Social Behaviour: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife 126 Reading as a Bad Habit: Idleness and Licentiousness 130 Isabel Sleaford and Emma Bovary 135 Young Isabel and Reading as Compensation 142 Isabel and Roland: The Temptations of Companionship 149 Intertextuality Reloaded 155 Sigismund Smith: Sensation Fiction and the Pleasures of Reading 159 Part III Chapter 6 Looking Forward, Looking Back: Novel Reading in the Twenty-First Century 169 Chapter 7 Taking Stock of the Novel Reader’s History: Ian McEwan’s Atonement 175 Briony as a Quixotic Reader/Writer and the Problem of Cognition 176 Achieving Atonement? Briony’s Ethics of Storytelling 181 Narrative Situation(s) and the Ethics of Form 187 Atonement as Homage and Challenge to the History of the Novel 191 Cecilia and Robbie: The Sacralization of Reading 195 Chapter 8 The Nostalgic Future of Novel Reading: Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader 201 The Quixote in Reverse 202 Common and Uncommon Readers 208 From the London Review of Books to the Internet: Medial Environments and Reading as Cultural Affiliation 213 Emphasizing Medial Difference: The Uncommon Reader and Stephen Frears’s The Queen 220 Contents VII Concluding Remarks 225 Works Cited 234 Index of Names 254 Acknowledgements This book is based on my Habilitationsschrift with the title “Writing the Reader: The Quixotic Novel in England, 1752–2007”, which was accepted by the University of Freiburg in summer 2014 and awarded the Helene-Richter-Preis by the “Deutscher Anglistenverband” in 2015. A part of chapter 2 first appeared as a contribution to the collection Author and Narrator (eds. Birke/Köppe, de Gruyter, 2015), and an early draft of a section of chapter 3 was the basis of the article “Direction and Diversion”, published in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (2012). I am very grateful for the support I received from many sides when writing the book. In particular I would like to thank Monika Fludernik, who acted as a knowledgeable advisor and mentor; the two reviewers, Paul Goetsch and Matías Martínez, whose expertise was invaluable; the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS), which offered the best “window for research” I could have hoped for. Special thanks go to the FRIAS director, Werner Frick, and the research coordinator, Gesa von Essen – also in their capacity as editors of the “linguae & litterae” book series; my colleagues at FRIAS, in particular my office mates Michael Butter, Til- mann Köppe, and Henning Hufnagel, as well as Katharina Böhm, Eva von Contzen, Peter Itzen, and Albert Joosse, who were always willing to discuss ideas, whether in the colloquium or over a drink in the evening; my colleagues at the English department, especially Laura Bieger, Nicole Falkenhayner, Johannes Fehrle, Kerstin Fest, Benjamin Kohlmann, Stefanie Leth- bridge, Miriam Nandi, Ulrike Pirker, Anna Rosen, Wibke Schniedermann, Kai Woodfin, and Ulrike Zimmermann, for a stimulating working environment and great company at lunch; the discerning readers who have commented on various versions of this text: Stella Butter, Birte Christ, Sabine Volk-Birke, and Robyn Warhol; Heike Meier, Simone Zipser, Luise Lohmann, and Nicole Bancher for first- class administrative support; Annika Brunck, Heidi Liedke, Carolin Peschel, and Charlotte Wolff, who competently helped with formatting, proof-reading, and obtaining relevant mate- rial; the Aarhus Institute for Advanced Studies, where I had the opportunity to work on corrections of the manuscript during the first months of my fellowship; the team at de Gruyter, in particular Anja-Simone Michalski and Lena Ebert, for the excellent cooperation in the publication process; and my family for being there. Abbreviations of Titles AT Ian McEwan, Atonement DQ Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote (translated by Burton Raffel) DS Sarah Fielding, David Simple FQ Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote MB Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (translated by Eleanor Marx Aveling/Paul de Man) NA Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey UC Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader TDW Mary Elizabeth Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife The abbreviations refer to the editions listed in the bibliography. Part I Chapter 1 Writing the Reader “All writers overrate the impact of writing, or else they would choose another line of work.” (Adam Mars Jones) “When you read a book, you’re totally lost in your own private world, and society says that’s a good and wonderful thing. But if you play a [computer] game by yourself, it’s this weird, fucked-up socially damaging activity.” (Douglas Coupland) Reading is dangerous. That, at least, could be the conclusion drawn from looking at some of the classics of European literature: think of Don Quijote, intemperate consumer of medieval romances and charger of windmills. Think of Emma Bovary, wanton lover of romance novels, later on adulterer and suicide. The preoccupation with fictional reading as a problem that is prevalent in so many novels has led Patrick Brantlinger (1998: 3) to charge the genre as a whole with an “inferiority complex”: [T]he condemnation of novels by novelists characterizes the genre throughout its history. The inscription of anti-novel attitudes within novels is so common that it can be understood as a defining feature of the genre; accordingly, any fictional narrative which does not somehow criticize, parody, belittle, or otherwise deconstruct itself is probably not a novel. (Ibid.: 2) In this study, I will argue that far from indicating an inferiority complex, the focus on cases of obsessive reading in novels is a central instrument of novelistic reflection and self-promotion. What the representation of fiction’s life-changing impact suggests is, first and foremost, the central cultural importance of reading. Through figures of obsessive readers, the novel started to represent itself as a considerable influence on European cultural life.1 At the beginning of the twenty- first century, the same motif is used to reassess the contemporary status of novel reading. Overall, at crucial points in the development of the genre, texts with reading characters have engaged with and in turn contributed to shaping con- 1 Michail Bakhtin and George Lukács, to name two of the most prominent voices in novel theory, have both regarded Don Quijote as an influential model for the novel as a genre (see Finch/Allen 1999: 771). See also e.g. Lionel Trilling’s proclamation that “all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quijote”, quoted in Armas Wilson (1999: ix), or Daniel Burt’s characterization of Cervantes’s novel as “the originator of the novel’s hybrid form” (2004: 10). 4 Chapter 1: Writing the Reader temporary debates about the impact fictional writing might have on its audience and about desirable purposes of such writing. This is an examination of how the novel itself participates in defining the cultural value of reading. More specifically, I am concerned with the complex ways in which writers in one particular strand of the novel’s history – the novel in England – utilized the figure of the obsessive or ‘quixotic’ reader in order to explore and configurate the historical, sociological, ethical, psychological, and aesthetic aspects of literary reading as a cultural practice.