DAVID THORBURN
been widely accepted. As he writes in
The Rise 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 literary doctrine or purpose, but only to
a set of narrative ptocedures 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 itse lf. Formal realism , in fact , is the narrative em–
bodiment of a premise that Defoe and Richardson accepted very literally,
but which is implicit in the novel form in general : the premise, or pri–
mary 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 .
. 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.
435
What is new,
novel,
about the novel, then, as both Watt's definition and
Cervantes's book make clear, is its special fidelity to the discrete particular–
ness, the circumstantiality, of the world . Cervantes's ambiguous contempt for
the romances of chivalry is grounded in part in his powerful sense that they
leave our too much, are, in a sense, unreal. Like the priest in the
Quixote,
Cervantes is,
partly,
a literalist, and he shares the priest's distaste for fictions
which ignore or cannot acknowledge the press and smell and pain of quo–
tidian experience.
Bur to speak solely in these terms, to locate (as Watt and Carrasco do)
what is essential to the novel exclusively in this commitment to a "circum–
stantial view of life ," is to ignore a paradox that exposes the limitations of the
idea that the novel is more' 'realistic, " closer to life , and thus less' 'artificial"
than other literary genres. I think something of this simplified understanding
is implicit in Watt's remark about the novel's reliance on a more largely refer–
ential language than is common to other genres, and in his notion that
Fielding, so much more directly the heir of Cervantes, is less a novelist than
Richardson or Defoe because the circumstantiality of his books is qualified by
a self-aware authorial voice and by an abstract, generalizing style. That we are
in thrall to some such view of the novel is clear from the attitude of a great
many scholars and readers toward books like
Tnstram Shandy
or Gide's
The
Counterfeiters
or (even)
Ulysses.
These works , and others like them, seem to
be regarded as remarkable aberrations or at least departures, richly interesting
to be sure, but still deviant books, whose powerful, explicit self-consciousness
