Blogging the Novel--Hunter, part 1

Some thoughts on J. Paul Hunter's "The novel and social/cultural history," to be revisited later

I enjoyed Hunter's piece, probably because it's the first cultural studies like item I've read in a while. His concerns are my concerns, his assumptions are my assumptions...but I, of course, have this little Burke in my head (the Parliament of Voices seems to be ruled by one short rhetorician...)

Hunter begins with the assumption that "Novels [...] explicitly render manners, habits, customs, and beliefs that differ from culture to cutlure, and they depend heavily on the particulars of time and place" (10). As I noted in my Watt entry, both time and place are essential to the argumentative force of the text. But what is it that novels argue for?

Hunter also states that the early novels are readable "even if you know nothing of the history of their time and place, but often conflicts in the plot--and subtle differences between different characters--derive from the interpretations of desires, needs, and values that are culturally based" (10). I would argue that it is not subtle at all--that those particulars of the place are essential for the defamiliarization aspect of the rhetoric of fiction. That those who read the novels without the same understandings as the audience of the original context are reading an entirely different novel, and that novel has an entirely different rhetorical effect. In fact, it may no longer be a "novel" at all, for the readers in the new context. Because the novel bases its identifications in the particular, not the universal, the consubstantiality among author/narrator and reader changes as time and place change.

In other words, 1984 may not be a dystopian novel any more. Texts within a genre can be re-ordered as their function within a culture shifts. This is one of the wonderful things about the printed text; as Derrida points out, texts now outlive their contexts--writing anticipates death. Pamela no longer incites young women to social subversion. Pamela is now so legitimated within the academy that it cannot have the same representative anecdote. I'm not even sure if there is a representative anecdote for 21st century readers, unless those readers are aware of Pamela's context.

While Hunter never uses Burkeian phrases, I find Burkeian ideas throughout (big surprise). When he states that our view of the 18th century was once "appealing for its escapism in the midst of World War I" he acknowledges the Symbolic Action of the narratives we create.