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Fielding: the Novelist As Philosopher of History

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Fielding: the Novelist As Philosopher of History This dissertation has been 64—1305 microfilmed exactly as received STEVICK, Philip Thayer, 1930- FIELDING: THE NOVELIST AS PHILOSOPHER OF HISTORY. The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1963 Language and Literature, modern University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan Copyright by Philip Thayer Stevick 1964 FIELDING: THE NOVELIST./ AS PHILOSOPHER OF HISTORY DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Philip Thayer Stevick, B. A., M. A. v v v u u t/ w The Ohio State University 1963 Approved by AviA/reuJ Adviser Department of English "The Mahometans think a picture an unholy thing, hut it is a long time since any Christian did, and it is therefore the more odd that in the Christian mind the traces (dissimulated though they may be) of a suspicion of the sister art should linger to this day. The only effectual way to lay it to rest is to emphasize the analogy to which I just alluded---to insist on the fact that as the picture is reality, so the novel is history. That is the only general description (which does it justice) that we may give of the novel." .{? --Henry James, "The Art of Fiction" ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION 1 Chapter I. LIES IMMORTALIZED: FIELDING AND HISTORICAL TRUTH ................................ 15 II. OUR BROTHER HISTORIANS: FIELDING'S ANALOGY . 66 III. BY NATURAL MEANS: FIELDING AND CAUSATION 114 HISTORY.............................. 118 IV. HOW THINGS ARE AND HOW THINGS WERE: HISTORI­ CAL CHANGE AND THE MEANING OF HISTORY ... 173 BIBLIOGRAPHY........ 238 AUTOBIOGRAPHY .................. 2^9 iii Textual Note References to Joseph Andrews are to the Riverside Edition, edited hy Martin C. Battestin, Boston, 1961. For the main body of Fielding’s works, I have used The Complete Works of Henry Fielding, Esq., edited by W. E. Henley and others, 16 volumes, New York, 1902. There is some ambiguity in the volume numbering in the Henley Edition, Tom Jones, for example, being in three numbered volumes which are volumes III, IV, and V of the consecutive numbering. In all refer­ ences to the Henley Edition, I have used the consecutive volume numbers. Thus a reference to Volume I of Tom Jones appears as Henley, III. I have used G. E. Jensen's edition of the Covent- Garden Journal, 2 volumes, New Haven,*-1915, and Battestin’s edition of Shamela, which appears as an appendix to the Riverside Joseph Andrews mentioned above. For other works of Fielding not contained in these modern editions, I have used eighteenth-century editions for which I have given full citations. ■ *L These abbreviations I have used in my documentation: Joseph Andrews: JA; Tom Jones: TJ; Amelia: A;-Covent-Garden Journal: CGJ. The Henley Edition I refer to as "Henley." I have, whenever pos­ sible, incorporated references to Fielding's novels into my text. INTRODUCTION In the eighteenth century, a writer who used the word history to describe an obviously fictional narrative must have used the word with a sense of its connotative weight, a connotative weight that the word could not have carried in a previous age. History was an account of what had happened, or, as Samuel Johnson defined O it, "a narration of events and facts delivered with dignity." Most eighteenth-century histories begin with a scrupulous statement of respect for fact; probably most eighteenth-century historians, whatever their philosophical premises, felt themselves in some way participators in the tradition of Bayle, felt it, that is, the The word history was used to designate\narratives of all kinds, whether or not they purported to be true,"'at least since the fourteenth century. (OED) . And indeed the Greek phrase which is customarily rendered in English "true history" (TAA.7t0#s i 6 T o f >) is as old as Lucian. By the eighteenth century, however, such substantial achieve­ ments as those of Clarendon and Burnet had established the dignity and stature of English historiography; the civil war and the Common­ wealth had received a fuller and more diverse treatment than had any previous period of English history; and England was entering the period of intense historical consciousness that was to produce the works of Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon, not to mention the antiquarian research of men like Hearne and Bishop Percy. 2A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols. (London, 1755), s. v * history. 1 2 mission of their enlightened century to separate truth from false­ hood. A title, then, like The History and Remarkable Life of the Truly honorable Colonel Jaeque borrows something of the raison d ’etre of history, something of its dignity and seriousness of pur­ pose, something of its respectability and authority.3 3as I use the word fiction, it means works of the kind treated in Ernest Baker's History of the English Novel; history means works of the kind treated in J. W. Thompson’s History of Historical Writing. I use this rough classification simply because I know of none better. Northrop Frye has made some stimulating attempts at a re­ definition of prose fiction /Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957)> p. 303 ttj, However, he has argued against a distinction that seems to me both obvious and sanctioned by long usage. His argu­ ment runs thus: "In assigning the term fiction to the genre of the written word, in which prose tends to become the predominating . rhythm, we collide with the view that the real meaning of fiction is falsehood or unreality. Thus an autobiography coming into a library would be classified as non-fiction if the librarian believed the author, and as fiction if she thought he was lying. It is difficult to see what use such a distinction can be to a -literary critic. Surely the word fiction, which, like poetry, means etymologically something made for its own sake, could be applied in criticism to any work of literary art in a radically continuous form, which almost always means a work of art in prose." (p. 303) Frye goes on to argue - that Sartor Resartus and Anatomy of Melancholy are prose fictions. If one must be unremittingly taxonomic, it is, I concede, as useful to call these prose fictions, specifically anatomies, as anything else. The trouble is that Frye does not pursue his classification into those areas which he has left most confused. If one were to be entirely strict in the application of the passage I have quoted, Cibber’s Apology is a prose fiction. So is Walton’s Donne. And so is The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The librarian's instinct, which seems ingenuous befuddlement to Frye, seems to me wholly justi­ fied, resting as it does on the perception that the mimetic premises of "the novel and the autobiography differ. Authors of history and biography and autobiography presume to imitate "what it was that actually happened"; they do this of course in various ways and with varying degrees of success. But writers of novels invent and imagin­ atively, construct, not with reference to what has actually happened in time and space but with reference to the general conditions that 3 and sociological background of what Ian watt has called "formal realism.— Novels were histories for much the same reasons that they contained non-traditional plots, precisely rendered physical settings, finely divided time schemes, and character names taken from ordinary life. That is, for the eighteenth-century novelist the use of the word history for his fiction was not only an honorific convention but a useful device of formal realism, useful when a large part of the novelist's effort was directed toward inducing his readers to believe in the literal truth of his narrative. Still, of all the devices of formal realism, the device of calling a work' of the imagination a history must, by itself, have deceived nobody. If the reading public wept for Clarissa, they did so because of the imaginative power of Richardson, not because affect man, with reference to the thematic unity which such writers wish to develop, and so on. Indeed this "is a distinction which Frye elsewhere recognizes by finding that "history" is a category which is "outside literature." (p.2^8) Obviously the two mimetic premises tend to merge in works like The Way of All Flesh or Look Homeward, Angel. But the fact that fictions may be more or less historic, histories more or less fictional, is hardly reason for throwing up one's hands. Thus, as I use the words, Robinson Crusoe is a fiction because it is an imaginary construction, what did not happen. If it could be shown that Alexander Selkirk had done what Robinson Cursoe did and that it was Defoe's intention to recount these events in the real Alexander Selkirk's life, the book would cease to be a fiction and would become broadly a history, specifi­ cally a biography. ^The Rise of the Novel (London, 1957)* Formal realism is defined on page 3 2 . k of the wording of his title page. The word history was, after all, only ^a small device in the formal realist's large bag of tricks. Fielding, of course, follows the convention. His novels are, he claims, histories. < But for Fielding this device is more than a convention. It is a peculiarly specific indication of his intention. To begin with, Fielding is not a formal realist! Ian Watt's category, so brilliantly illuminating of Defoe and Richardson, leads him to conclude that Fielding's stylistic virtues tend to interfere with his technique as a novelist, because a patent selec­ tiveness of vision destroys our belief in the reality of the report, or at least diverts our attention from the content of the report to the skill of the reporter.5 Elsewhere he finds that "Fielding does not make an attempt to indi­ vidualise his characters."® And, "Fielding's interventions obviously interfere with any sense of narrative illusion, and break with almost every narrative precedent."7 Watt's irritation at Fielding's failure to fit his categories suggests that he was doing something quite different from Richardson; he was making fiction which the category of formal realism distorts.
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