EPISTEMOLOGICAL PROVISIONALITY AS A GENERIC FEATURE OF THE BRITISH NOVEL MARCUS CONLEY Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy SEPTEMBER 2010 i Abstract This thesis attempts to identify a particular epistemological stance as a trans-historical generic feature of the British novel, seeking theoretical commonalities across readings of four novelistic texts. Drawing upon conventional critical reliance on realism as a definitive feature of the novel, chapter one examines the dialectical interplay of empiricism and scepticism in the intellectual climate and public discourse of eighteenth- century Britain as an influence on realistic literary modes and proposes that the novel as a genre is preoccupied with problems of epistemology. Chapter two considers Jane Barker’s Galesia trilogy as an example of novelistic engagement with a common theme in the empiricism/scepticism dialectic: the epistemological complications entailed by individual subjectivity. Barker’s thematic emphases on uncertainty, multiplicity, and fallenness coincide with a generically entrenched, and thus novelistic, orientation toward open-endedness and unfinalizability, as articulated in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. Chapter three associates realism with mimesis, a figure whose tendency toward duplicity and reversibility align it with Jacques Derrida’s concept of pharmakon. Mimesis-as-pharmakon is considered in the context of Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Roderick Random. Chapter four shifts critical focus to contemporary fiction -- Martin Amis’s Money: A Suicide Note -- and examines how postmodernist literary techniques, particularly the metafictional inclusion of an author figure, reiterate the novelistic portrayal and exemplification of epistemological provisionality that underlies eighteenth-century texts. Chapter five, with analysis of Ian McEwan’s Saturday and reference to the philosophy of Iris Murdoch, suggests that the problems of knowledge entailed by situated individual subjectivity, as represented by the novel, ii privilege a corresponding ethical posture of deference and openness to the other. In an afterword, these ethical implications are extended to suggest a possible political significance to the genre. iii Acknowledgements Whatever merit I might claim for this thesis I owe in part to the kind assistance of my supervisor, Dr Mark Robson, who, in addition to patiently executing the usual duties of such a position, was unrivalled in his ability to decipher what I meant when I could articulate nascent ideas with little more than mixed metaphors and wild gesticulations. I would also like to express my gratitude to my friends and colleagues at the University of Nottingham, in particular the academic and support staff and the postgraduate students of the Department of English Studies, whose generosity and scholarship have been reliable sources of encouragement and inspiration throughout my postgraduate studies. Further, I would like to recognize the contributions of the Conley and Anderson-McBride families, whose material, emotional, and intellectual support have been indispensable to this project. Above all I thank my wife, Elyse, for more than can be put into words. v Contents Abstract p. i Acknowledgements p. iii Preface p. vii 1. A real genre: Identifying the novel p. 1 2. ‘Discoveries of our own Ignorance’: p. 47 Jane Barker’s Galesia fictions 3. Mimetic duplicity and ‘the Devil’s tennis ball’ p. 117 4. Amis’s Money: ‘A realism problem’ p. 175 5. Helplessly culpable: Ian McEwan’s Saturday p. 229 Afterword p. 285 References p. 291 vii Preface The substance of this thesis is wide-ranging and somewhat eclectic, and so a remark on methodology is due. My aim is not to provide a complete image of the novel, a task better suited to a character from Borges, but rather to assemble a diverse collection of propositions about the novel in Britain and its contexts and to seek out connections, influences, and resemblances within that collection.1 The underlying assumption of such a project is that the various historians, theoreticians, and philosophers whose work contributes to the study are all considering more or less the same thing. In other words, this thesis begins with a double leap of faith, presupposing that ‘the novel’ exists, and that when people talk about the novel, they are discussing either a coherent entity or at least complementary, overlapping concepts. These propositions are by no means certain, and to interrogate them is a worthy goal. Here, however, the existence and potential self-identity of the novel will be axiomatic. This presumption of the novel’s self-identity has also guided the selection of the fictional texts that come under analysis here as examples of novels. If these fictions are novels, they should be amenable to the application of the theoretical and descriptive frameworks that have been created with novels in mind. There is consequently a degree of arbitrariness in the selection of novels to be analyzed -- any novel, to the extent that it is a novel, should do. Nevertheless, the limited length of the thesis, not to mention the limited research capacity of a lone postgraduate, requires a small sample of texts, and so the diversity of 1 It is beyond the remit of this study to take into account the traditions of Continental novels, which involve distinct but not altogether independent interactions with their respective social, intellectual, and historical contexts. viii such a sample is its principal strength. As such, the four novels considered here are distinct from each other both in technique and historical context. All of them resist, to some extent, definitions of the novel drawn from a nineteenth-century Realist template. A hostile critic could excommunicate them all: the first is strictly not a single text at all; the second could be considered a European-style picaresque; the third is an unrealistic assemblage of postmodernist wordplay; and the fourth, with its spare characterization and genre-fiction plot, is an overgrown short story. However, precisely because of the pressures they exert on prescriptive definitions, these texts provide useful instantiations of the novel, or -- as I will resort to writing many times in the coming pages in order to dissociate genre from form -- the ‘novelistic’ mode.2 This is why I have made the decision to overlook the nineteenth- century novel. The fictions I have selected function as outliers, helping to establish the perimeter of the novelistic field, as it were, in a way that an indisputably prototypical novel might not. This is not to claim that nineteenth-century fiction is irrelevant to the theorization of the novel, quite the contrary. The majority of the critical and theoretical materials on the novel that support this thesis rely, whether explicitly or implicitly, on nineteenth-century models. In this thesis, therefore, I am interested in how well those conceptions of the novel might be applied beyond their prototypical foundations. Again, to the extent that the fictions under consideration are novels, such theorizations should apply. The emphases and continuities that arise in the course of this application are the focus of the thesis. The secondary sources are themselves a diverse collection, but their diversity is not intended to suggest seamless integration. No single 2 Further comment on the instrumentality of these fictions to the overall aims of the thesis can be found in the opening paragraphs of the respective chapters. ix field of academic endeavour is host to tranquil unanimity, and to make leaps between them as I do -- sampling, for example, literary historicism, post-structuralism, and ethical philosophy -- is undeniably to take liberties. However, the aim of my eclecticism is not to reconstruct these approaches, to contest them, to pit one against another, or even to claim to reconcile them. Instead I attempt to sketch a sort of cross-section of statements that can be made about the novel, constrained by a concern with generic identity and its epistemological consequences, and to extrapolate from this disparate composite a flexible generalization. As in the selection of literary sources, this method explores connections within variety rather than attempting comprehensiveness, with the objective of plausibility rather than certainty. In sum, the method of this thesis is to seek out the entailments of a proposition: if we assume that the novel as it has been theorized is ‘real’, what might its presence reveal about the way humans understand experience (or perhaps experience understanding)? I hope, therefore, to make some small contribution to the ongoing dialogue about what the novel is, and in doing so perhaps also to make a gesture toward the importance of literary generic concerns in cultural currents that extend beyond literature. 1 Chapter 1 A real genre: Identifying the novel As syntheses of prescription and description, definitions tend toward circularity. Such certainly is the case with definitions of the novel, which arise from the characteristics of the very texts they classify. To posit generic traits requires tracing the commonalities between particular novels, and so defining the novel begins only after some provisional drawing of boundaries is already in effect. (Indeed, using the definite article -- ‘the novel’ -- already betrays such presumption.) The result is a pervasive sense that novels are always slightly beyond the scope of full delineation. The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, for