I W , The R e f he N e : S d e Def e, R cha d a d

F e d g (C &W 1957; .U . C P 1957).

Note: this copy has been made from a PDF version of the 1957 California UP edition. The footnotes in
that editon have been transposed to endnotes here and the page-numbers have been omitted.

Chapter I: Realism and the Novel Form

THERE are still no wholly satisfactory answers to many of the general questions which anyone
interested in the early eighteenth-century novelists and their works is likely to ask: Is the novel a new
literary form? And if we assume, as is commonly done, that it is, and that it was begun by Defoe,
Richardson and Fielding, how does it differ from the prose fiction of the past, from that of Greece, for
example, or that of the Middle Ages, or of seventeenth-century France? And is there any reason why
these differences appeared when and where they did?
Such large questions are never easy to approach, much less to answer, and they are particularly
difficult in this case because Defoe, Richardson and Fielding do not in the usual sense constitute a
literary school. Indeed their works show so little sign of mutual influence and are so different in nature
that at first sight it appears that our curiosity about the rise of the novel is unlikely to find any satisfaction
other than the meagre one afforded b the terms genius and accident , the twin faces on the Janus of
the dead ends of literary history. We cannot, of course, do without them: on the other hand there is not
much we can do with them. The present inquiry therefore takes another direction: assuming that the
appearance of our first three novelists within a single generation was probably not sheer accident, and
that their geniuses could not have created the new form unless the conditions of the time had also been
favourable, it attempts to discover what these favourable conditions in the literary and social situation
were, and in what ways Defoe, Richardson and Fielding were its beneficiaries.
For this investigation our first need is a working definition of the characteristics of the novel - a
definition sufficiently narrow to exclude previous types of narrative and yet broad enough to apply to
whatever is usually put in the novel category. The novelists themselves do not help us very much here.
It is true that both Richardson and Fielding saw themselves as founders of a new kind of writing, and
that both viewed their work as involving a break with the old-fashioned romances; but neither they nor
their contemporaries provide us with the kind of characterisation of the new genre that we need; indeed
they did not even canonise the changed nature of their fiction by a change in nomenclature - our usage
of the term novel was not full established until the end of the eighteenth centur .
With the help of their larger perspective the historians of the novel have been able to do much more
to determine the idios ncratic features of the new form. Briefl , the have seen realism as the defining
characteristic which differentiates the work of the early eighteenth-century novelists from previous
fiction. With their picture - that of writers otherwise different but alike in this qualit of realism -
one s initial reservation must surel be that the term itself needs further e planation, if onl because to
use it without qualification as a defining characteristic of the novel might otherwise carry the invidious
suggestion that all previous writers and literary forms pursued the unreal.
The main critical associations of the term realism are with the French school of Realists. R alisme
was apparently first used as an aesthetic description in 1835 to denote the v rit humaine of
Rembrandt as opposed to the id alit po tique of neo-classical painting; it was later consecrated as a
specifically literary term by the foundation in 1856 of Réalisme, a journal edited by Duranty. [1]
Unfortunately much of the usefulness of the word was soon lost in the bitter controversies over the
low subjects and allegedl immoral tendencies of Flaubert and his successors. As a result, realism
came to be used primaril as the anton m of idealism , and this sense, which is actually a reflection of
the position taken by the enemies of the French Realists, has in fact coloured much critical and historical
writing about the novel.
The prehistory of the form has commonly been envisaged as a matter of tracing the continuity between
all earlier fiction which portra ed low life: the stor of the Ephesian matron is realistic because it
shows that sexual appetite is stronger than wifely sorrow; and the fabliau or the picaresque tale are
there was some influence is very likely, especially through Locke, whose thought everywhere pervades
the eighteenth-century climate of opinion. But if a causal relationship of any importance exists it is
probably much less direct: both the philosophical and the literary innovations must be seen as parallel
manifestations of larger change - that vast transformation of Western civilisation since the Renaissance
which has replaced the unified world picture of the Middle Ages with another very different oneone
which presents us, essentially, with a developing but unplanned aggregate of particular individuals
having particular experiences at particular times and at particular places.
Here, however, we are concerned with a much more limited conception, with the extent to which the
analogy with philosophical realism helps to isolate and define the distinctive narrative mode of the
novel. This, it has been suggested, is the sum of literar techniques whereb the novel s imitation of
human life follows the procedures adopted by philosophical realism in its attempt to ascertain and report
the truth. These procedures are by no means confined to philosophy; they tend, in fact, to be followed
whenever the relation to realit of an report of an event is being investigated. The novel s mode of
imitating reality may therefore be equally well summarised in terms of the procedures of another group
of specialists in epistemology, the jury in a court of law. Their expectations, and those of the novel
reader coincide in man wa s: both want to know all the particulars of a given case - the time and
place of the occurrence; both must be satisfied as to the identities of the parties concerned, and will
refuse to accept evidence about anyone called Sir Toby Belch or Mr. Badman - still less about a Chloe
who has no surname and is common as the air ; and the also e pect the witnesses to tell the stor in
his own words . The jur , in fact, takes the circumstantial view of life , which T. H. Green [40] found
to be the characteristic outlook of the novel.
The narrative method whereby the novel embodies this circumstantial view of life may be called its
formal realism; formal, because the term realism does not here refer to any special literary doctrine or
purpose, but only to a set of narrative procedures which are so commonly found together in the novel,
and so rarely in other literary genres, that they may be regarded as typical of the form itself. Formal
realism, in fact, is the narrative embodiment of a premise that Defoe and Richardson accepted very
literally, but which is implicit in the novel form in general: the premise, or primary convention, that the
novel is a full and authentic report of human experience, and is therefore under an obligation to satisfy
its reader with such details of the story as the individuality of the actors concerned, the particulars of
the times and places of their actions, details which are presented through a more largely referential use
of language than is common in other literary forms.
Formal realism is, of course, like the rules of evidence, only a convention; and there is no reason why
the report on human life which is presented by it should be in fact any truer than those presented through
the ver different conventions of other literar genres. The novel s air of total authenticit , indeed, does
tend to authorise confusion on this point: and the tendency of some Realists and Naturalists to forget
that the accurate transcription of actuality does not necessarily produce a work of any real truth or
enduring literary value is no doubt partly responsible for the rather widespread distaste for Realism and
all its works which is current today. This distaste, however, may also promote critical confusion by
leading us into the opposite error; we must not allow an awareness of certain shortcomings in the aims
of the Realist school to obscure the very considerable extent to which the novel in general, as much in
Joyce as in Zola, employs the literary means here called formal realism. Nor must we forget that,
although formal realism is only a convention, it has, like all literary conventions, its own peculiar
advantages. There are important differences in the degree to which different literary forms imitate
reality; and the formal realism of the novel allows a more immediate imitation of individual experience
set in its temporal and spatial environment than do other literary forms. Consequentl the novel s
conventions make much smaller demands on the audience than do most literary conventions; and this
surely explains why the majority of readers in the last two hundred years have found in the novel the
literary form which most closely satisfies their wishes for a close correspondence between life and art.
Nor are the advantages of the close and detailed correspondence to real life offered by formal realism

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limited to assisting the novel s popularit ; the are also related to its most distinctive literary qualities,
as we shall see.
In the strictest sense, of course, formal realism was not discovered by Defoe and Richardson; they
only applied it much more completely than had been done before. Homer, for example, as Carlyle
pointed out [41], shared with them that outstanding clearness of sight which is manifested in the
detailed, ample and lovingl e act descriptions that abound in their works; and there are man
passages in later fiction, from The Golden Ass to Aucassin and Nicolette, from Chaucer to Bunyan,
where the characters, their actions and their environment are presented with a particularity as authentic
as that in any eighteenth-century novel. But there is an important difference: in Homer and in earlier
prose fiction these passages are relatively rare, and tend to stand out from the surrounding narrative; the
total literary structure was not consistently oriented in the direction of formal realism, and the plot
especially, which was usually traditional and often highly improbable, was in direct conflict with its
premises. Even when previous writers had overtly professed a wholly realistic aim, as did many
seventeenth-century writers, they did not pursue it wholeheartedly. La Calprenède, Richard Head,
Grimmelshausen, Bunyan, Aphra Behn, Furetière [42], to mention only a few, had all asserted that their
fictions were literally true; but their prefatory asseverations are no more convincing than the very similar
ones to be found in most works of mediaeval hagiography. The aim of verisimilitude had not been
deeply enough assimilated in either case to bring about the full rejection of all the non-realistic
conventions that governed the genre.
For reasons to be considered in the next chapter, Defoe and Richardson were unprecedentedly
independent of the literary conventions which might have interfered with their primary intentions, and
they accepted the requirements of literal truth much more comprehensively. Of no fiction before
Defoe s could Lamb have written, in terms very similar to those which Hazlitt used of Richardson, [43]
It is like reading evidence in a court of Justice [44]. Whether that is in itself a good thing is open to
question; Defoe and Richardson would hardly deserve their reputation unless they had other and better
claims on our attention. Nevertheless there can be little doubt that the development of a narrative method
capable of creating such an impression is the most conspicuous manifestation of that mutation of prose
fiction which we call the novel; the historical importance of Defoe and Richardson therefore primarily
depends on the suddenness and completeness with which they brought into being what may be regarded
as the lowest common denominator of the novel genre as a whole, its formal realism.

Notes
1. See Bernard Weinberg, French Realism: the Critical Reaction 1830-1870 ( London, 1937), p. 114.
2. See R. I. Aaron, The Theory of Universals ( Oxford, 1952), pp.18-41.
3. See S. Z. Hasan, Realism (Cambridge, 1928), chs. 1 and 2.
4. Works (1773), V, 125; see also Max Scheler, Versuche zu einer Soziologie des Wissens (München
and Leip ig, 1924), pp. 104 ff.; Eli abeth L. Mann, The Problem of Originalit in English Literar
Criticism, 1750-1800 , PQ, XVIII (1939), 97-118.
5. Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Bk. 1, ch. 2, sect, xv.
6. See Posterior Analytics, Bk. I, ch. 24; Bk. II, ch. 19.
7. First Dialogue between Hylas and Philonous, 1713 (Berkeley, Works, ed. Luce and Jessop (London,
1949), II, 192).
8. Pt. IV, sect. 3.
9. 1763 ed., III, 198-199.
10. Idler, No. 79 (1759). See also Scott Elledge, The Background and Development in English
Criticism of the Theories of Generalit and Particularit , PMLA, LX (1945), 161-174.

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