Novels and "The Novel": The Poetics of Embarrassment
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Abstract
Not everything in novels-even in good novelsgoes the way critics and critical theorists think it should, and some of the "failures" are characteristic of the species, even definitive. Novels, especially early novels, often bear features that do not "fit" conceptions of what the novel is or ought to be, and even the most sophisticated later novels embarrass readers who bring to them rigid formal expectations. Novels remain, for example, too loose and digressive in structure to seem focused and well made, and their tones are often too intense for those who want their ideologies implicit or subdued. Traditional novelistic theory, based as it is on analogies with more traditional and more conservative literary forms and the structures that support them, does not like to hear the multiple voices in novels or recognize the presence of competing modes within individual works. Recent narrative theory has been more willing to accept odd, lumpy, and unexpected features, but criticism concerned primarily with novels retains its arriviste snootiness, remaining intolerant of features that do not meet preconceived standards. Definitions remain highminded, novels recalcitrant.' Some of the difficulty stems from the novel's inferiority complex. Because of its obscure beginnings and insecure place in the hierarchy of literary forms and kinds, the novel has historically asserted itself by comparison to more established forms. Fielding set the terms for that defense early on by inventing an ancestry and claiming the legitimacy of certain features because they were to be found in literature which had passed the test and had already entered the tradition.2 As an upstart species, the novel was reluctant to appear to stray far from established aesthetic standards, and critics ever since have been loath to emphasize, or even admit to seeing, features-digressiveness, for example, or didacticism or sensationalism-that might threaten the novel's formal claims. But the difficulty also results from an opposite cause-the desire to make clear that the novel was new and different, needing to be defined carefully to show its distinctiveness from other forms of fictional narrative, especially romance. Making a clear case for the novel as a new kind with characteristic features of its own became, and has remained, a critical mandate with enormous implications for literary history. The novel has thus become subjective, individualistic, realistic-an account of contemporary life peopled with ordinary characters in everyday situations using the informal language of everyday life to describe, for ordinary readers, the directions and values that inform a series of particular, connected actions and events. Such a