BOO KS
147
the novel from earlier prose fiction. He skillfully relates the early Eng–
lish novel to the growth of philosophical realism, which provided not
doctrine but "a critical, anti-traditional and innovating temper," thereby
encouraging "the study of the particulars of experience." In Defoe, for
example, the "total subordination of the plot to the pattern of the
autobiographical memoir is as defiant an assertion of the primacy of
individual experience in the novel as Descartes's
cogito ergo sum
in
philosophy." Mr. Watt then examines the novel's unprecedented con–
centration upon the texture of daily experience through "its employ–
ment of a much more minutely discriminated time-scale than had previ–
ously been employed in narrative"; its dependence on the idea of
causality as a means of ordering large quantities of behavior; its com–
mitment to the assumptions of historicity; its concern with establishing
a background of spatial familiarity and density ; and above all, its em–
ployment of language in a manner far more "referential ... than in
other literary forms, [so that] the genre itself works by exhaustive pre–
sentation rather than by elegant concentration." This last insight is es–
pecially valuable, since it undercuts a great deal of fruitless debate as
ON LOVE: ASPECTS OF A SINGLE THEME
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Translated by Toby Talbot
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LI'l'ERATURE IN AMERICA
edited and introduced by
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Critical writings on American literature, chosen
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NElV POETS OF ENGLAND AND AMERICA
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