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Masks of Reality the Rhetoric of Narration in The MASKS OF REALITY THE RHETORIC OF NARRATION IN THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL By SYDNEY JAMES BUTLER B.Ed., University of Alberta, 1963 M.A., University of Alberta, 1968 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in the Department of ENGLISH We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA June, 1974 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. 1 further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the Head of my Department or by his representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of The University of British Columbia Vancouver 8, Canada Date ii ABSTRACT The development of the English novel during the eighteenth century is illustrated in this thesis by the concept of the author's "mask of reality," or the rhetorical stance adopted by the novelist for the telling of his story. The novelist creates and populates a fictional world, or Kosmos, and the success of his work depends on his power to invest this illusory world with an air of reality. Through the medium of the printed word, he convinces the reader of the truth of his vision. My examination of the modes of narration in the major novels of the period clarifies their authors' use of the mask of reality. Defoe's novels seem to exclude the author from the life of the novel, allowing him to appear only on the title-page and in the editor's prefaces. Defoe uses his heroes and heroines as narrators to conceal his own presence as the creator of their world of perceptual experience. Nevertheless, the themes, images, syntactic patterns, and diction, which recur throughout the Defoe canon, enable the reader to discern, behind the mask, the existence of the author who controls and evaluates the fictional Kosmos. In Richardson's novels this authorial presence becomes more explicit in the critical prefaces and postscripts surrounding the fictional letters. Moreover, Richardson's correspondents themselves exemplify the process of fiction as they record and evaluate their fictional experiences through the medium of writing, while their letters, becoming a part of the action of the novel, bridge the gap between the fictional world of the Kosmos and the actuality of the printed text - the two realities of life and art. In Fielding's and Sterne's novels the role of the narrator becomes still more explicit with the result that the reader's attention is diverted from the contemplation of the imaginary life of the Kosmcis to the • » • Ml consideration of the work as a piece of fiction. The novelist's rhetoric involves the reader in the process of fiction by making him conscious of the novel as a created artifice rather than as the simple verbal representation of the world of imaginary or real experience. This pattern of development which shows the eighteenth-century English novel becoming increasingly self-conscious is examined in this thesis in relation to Cervantes' Don Quixote, which achieved renown during this period. Cervantes' influence is shown both in the minor and major works of English fiction. Charlotte Lennox, Smollett, and Richard Graves use the quixotic theme mainly to pit the presumed reality of their contemporary world against the literary fantasies of their protagonists. Fielding, however, emulates the perspectivism of his Spanish predecessor in the creation of his narrator-historian as his mask of reality, achieving a more complex, ironic view of the fictional Kosmos. Sterne, too, borrows many elements from Cervantes. His narrative mask of Tristram demonstrates the interaction between language and experience, as the novel displays its form in the dialogue between novelist and reader. The self-consciousness of Tristram Shandy as a work of narrative art results in a relativistic, ambiguous attitude to remembered experience, and shows many of the qualities that make Don Quixote an example of the art of mannerism. In Tristram Shandy Sterne emphasizes the narrative techniques by which Tristram re-creates the world of the Shandy family. Sterne's Shandean mask of reality fuses the self- conscious display of the art of the novelist with the fictional life of Shandy Hall. iv CONTENTS Chapter I The Significant Form of the Novel 1 Chapter II Romance and Reality - The Eighteenth-Century View 34 Chapter III The Novel as Chronicle 72 Chapter IV The Novel as Document 123 Chapter V Perspectivism in the Novel 157 Chapter VI The Self-Conscious Novel 198 Chapter VII The Reality of the Novel 246 Bibliography List of Works Cited 269 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS CRITQ Critical Quarterly DA Dissertation Abstracts ELH Journal of English Literary History JEGP Journal of English and German Philology JGE Journal of General Education MLN Modern Language Notes MLQ Modem Language Quarterly MP Modern Philology N&Q Notes and Queries PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association of America PQ Philological Quarterly SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 SP Studies in Philology WHR Western Humanities Review The air of reality seems to me to be the supreme virtue of the novel—the merit on which its other merits . helplessly and submissively depend. Henry James CHAPTER I THE SIGNIFICANT FORM OF THE NOVEL The critical problem peculiar to any form of narrative art—whether it be ballet, theatre, opera, film, television, ballad, epic poetry, or prose fiction—is that the story may seem to take on an existence independent of the artistic medium by which it is created. The story, however it is made manifest, is essentially a series of actions, implying that there are characters who participate in these actions, and that the actions occur within some sort of time-dimension. Whether the characters are portrayed as people living in the contemporary world, or in historical times, or as animals on a farm or in a jungle, or as imaginary creatures called hobbits or Houyhnhnms, their actions inevitably raise questions of human values. Although the story itself may be no more than an idea abstracted from the work of art, its appeal to the audience's natural interest in humanity may make the story seem to encompass the whole of the work. "No, but I saw the film" is thus the cliche' of literary conversation which expresses the view that the speaker has shared the experience of the person who has read the book, because both film and book share the same story. Few people would regard the reading of the story of Swan Lake as an adequate substitute for attendance at a performance of the ballet, where the combination of sound, movement, light, and colour not only creates-the story, but also conditions the audience's response to it. The novel, however, tells its story in a language that may be indistinguishable from the language of everyday human discourse, as if the writer had merely chosen the most convenient and unobtrusive medium for recording the events of a story which he had structured in the theatre of his imagination. Story, according to E.M. Forster, is the "simple and fundamental aspect of the novel"; but the story appeals only at the level 2. of primitive curiosity of wanting to know what happens next, so there is a tone of sad deprecation in Forster's grudging admittance: "Yes—oh, dear, yes—the novel tells a story."1 The novel is essentially a story told in the language of printed or manuscript prose. While there is no disputing the fact that the novel exists as a structure of words, it is also true that the reader usually remembers his experience of the novel in terms of its characters, the world they inhabit, and what happens to them—that is, the story. Only rarely, as for example, with the opening paragraphs of A Christmas Carol or Ulysses, does the familiarity or distinctiveness of the prose enable the reader to remember the actual words of the narrative, as one remembers the words of a poem, rather than the events of its story. Consequently a novel is often described according to the type of life it depicts in its fictional world, and the reader makes judgments about the credibility of the characters, the probability of their actions, and of the moral values they display, perhaps discriminating the novels of "the great tradition," as F.R. Leavis does, by their significance "in terms of 2 human awareness," and insisting that the great classic novels be on the side of life. By dealing directly with the fictional world, this approach to the criticism of the novel seems to deny the primacy of its language by implying that the real materials of the novelist's craft consist, not of words, but of the characters and objects with which he populates and furnishes his imaginary universe. By this view the language of the novel has simply a referential function as the medium through which the novelist translates the story prefigured in his imagination. To separate the story from the language which gives it concrete expression seems dangerously like reviving the "form-and-content" controversy in the criticism of art. Yet the novel, because of its inevitable concern with human experience, will always refute 3 Pater's aphorism that "all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. "w Music, of course, can only be representative of its own form of created patterns of sound.
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