Eighteenth-century English novels

 

Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (I719) introduces us to some central features of novels in general. Crusoe is shipwrecked on a desert island: by presenting him in isolation Defoe can convey a full impression of how man structures his world, then, when other people appear, he can examine man in a social context. From its start, then, the English novel looks at a person coming to terms with the world in which he finds himself. The manner is realistic, with a detailed account of Crusoe's feelings and the ordinary business of life. Robinson Crusoe, however, is not just a realistic novel. There is another narrative pattern in the text. There are certain archetypal stories that predate the novel, but which some novelists continue to employ. The most basic is a story of an individual on a quest. Such stories recur because they provide an effective focus for considering man's journey through life: their presence in novels is always interesting because they hint at something grander than the novel's tendency to become absorbed in the complications of ordinary life. In Crusoe we can trace a religious story of a man sent into isolation who has to rediscover his faith. The novel holds this religious search for an ideal in tension with the distractions of daily experience. In Defoe's second novel, Moll Flanders (1722), there is a similar gap between the ideal- the heroine should be devout- and how things are in a fallen world, where people are preoccupied with the daily business of life. 

 

After Defoe the next significant novelist is a more straightforward realist. This is Samuel Richardson, author of Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748). Both novels present women whose virtue is at risk in a socially corrupt world. In Richardson's treatment of this individual and society conflict we see a characteristic strength of novels, for the details accumulate to present a very disturbing impression of the lives of these women trapped in difficult dilemmas. The stress is on the complications of real life rather than on an ideal notion of how life might be. Richardson's novels are epistolary: written in letters from the main characters. It is a method that offers us a very direct insight into the characters' minds, and Richardson can be regarded as the first psychological novelist. Curiously, Richardson's Pamela was almost immediately parodied by Henry Fielding in Joseph Andrews (1742). Fielding, who also wrote Tom Jones (1749), is the first great comic novelist in England. He reacted against how seriously Richardson took his characters and their dilemmas, preferring, like all comic novelists, a stress on human folly. The realistic novelist offers a subtle analysis of his characters, but the comic novelist takes a simpler view that man's lusts and desires disrupt life: it might be a less subtle view, but it is a disturbing one, as it emphasizes the irrational impulses that motivate people. Another important aspect of Fielding's novels is his intrusive presence as narrator, where he makes it quite clear that he is making up the story. The direction in which this leads is towards mocking the whole activity of novel-writing, for, if human nature is irrational, who is the novelist to presume to order and explain life in something as contrived as a story? Such skepticism is characteristic of the eighteenth century when writers were questioning the ability of this new form to present a convincing picture of life. 

 

The realistic novel only becomes dominant in the nineteenth century. Fielding's stress on the gap between fiction and life is carried much further by Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy (1760-7), where the hero tries to tell the story of his life but in his desperation to include everything can hardly make any progress at all. This is widely recognized as the greatest reflexive novel- that is a novel which constantly draws attention to its own existence as a novel. Although a realistic novel and a novel such as Tristram Shandy are very different there is some connection, for what all novels do is disrupt a neat ordered story. In the background of a novel there is always an idea of order, indeed a story is an ordering of the events in life. The realistic novelist disrupts this neat fictional pattern by the introduction of complicating detail in the narrative. The non-realistic novelist relies more on the narrator to disrupt the neat fiction as he points out that people are, in his view, too foolish ever to settle their differences, or as he points out that life is a lot more complicated than a story. This disruption of a story is evident in the other main strand in eighteenth-century fiction, the picaresque novel. Fielding's novels are picaresque tales, as are Smollett's, for example Roderick Random (1748). But the forerunner of all novels, Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605-15), provides the model of such picaresque works . It describes the events on a long journey: Don Quixote believes he is on some glorious mission, but he is repeatedly caught up in farcical situations. Picaresque takes the quest story from romance, in which somebody is in search of an ideal, and deflates it, emphasizing that there is no goal to be reached and that one is simply entangled in the complications of life.