Blogging the novel--Watt, part 1

Note that this is not "Blogging a Novel"

I made the mistake of twitching at the name of Jane Austen in my very first "Rise of the Novel" class. It has become so second nature that I don't even notice that I do it anymore. At Bluffton, this would have awarded me the same sort of chidding, yet light hearted look Mrs. Cleaver gave the Beav when he got into trouble. "Oh, you silly boy," or something, followed by a knowing shake of the head.
Instead, Emily Allen jumped on me and claimed she would reform me.
Oops.

For the record, I will state that I do not hate the 18th Century (whatever that may mean) as much as I hate William Wordsworth. In fact, all the revolutions make it loads of fun for a rhetorician of subversive moments like me. And while I would not read Jane Austen's work in a bubble bath, I would read various cultural criticism of it while in downward dog position (an excellent reading position, as the blood flows to your head).

In the Summer of Insanity (2004) I ran across several references to Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel. I checked it out and read, I think, the first chapter before returning to Murakami's Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World. It did, however, raise several dystopian questions in my mind, and some problems with genre studies in general. Emily has given us a precis of the first two chapters of Watt's book, and I found myself writing very similar notes to what can be found in the tiny black notebook from the SOI2004.

Particularly, I was working through the problem of "topia" in general. What does it mean to have a genre (here I am thinking of a multifaceted "u/dystopian" genre that combines both versions) defined by its attention to place? Watt says that the novel, in general is special because it pays particular attention to time and space. But the "topian" fictions take this aspect of the novel and make it a main component of the plot.

Watt also says that the novel is concerned with linking "past and current events through temporality and causality" (Allen paraphrasing Watt). Causality is an important word here, as I have mentioned in my "Star Wars" blog. The idea that actions X and Y lead to consequence Z are essential to the topian rhetorics; without a notion of an individual's ability to effect change, the topian novel has no argument.

And "individual" is important, as Watt notes, to novels in general as well. Instead of some universal human, novels tend to particularize their characters. But here we have a problem of causality when thinking about dystopian fictions, which are almost exclusively concerned with the individual's ability to remain a unique person in the face of a totalitarian regime. Did this concern with originality come from the novel as a genre itself, or the cause a more complex mixture of changes in beliefs about humanity in general? That is, are the fear of the unindividuated masses depicted by dystopian fiction and the novel's concern with the individual both "symptoms of" (as Burke would say) some larger movement? How do they feed into one another so that by the late 1930s Huxley can write about the Alphas and the Betas (etc) and their monotonous routines with such fear?

What is important from this (yeah, like I was going to answer those questions above) is that with the novel's "rise," characters in fiction were given added Agency (whee Burke). But Watt is not a cultural-rhetorical theorist. He only begins to think about the possible effects not only on individual readers, but on the fabric of their society. When he states that the "pirated" versions of the novel had little to do with the rise of the novel as a genre, he is missing a very big point. Just as pirated and fan-subbed versions of anime have driven that genre as well as shaped it, I would imagine that the pirated versions of novels eventually shaped the novels being written.

And what of the serialized nature of the novel? That the so-called middle class readers of the novel could only read in increments is especially important to the fanfiction movement. (Amy's question of the decade: Were novels the new epic? And if so, have we supplanted it again with another genre?)

And for the love of the now demonized Johnny Damon, "Britain" was not so isolated, Watt! Moll Flanders proves that! You can't talk about the origins and sources of the novel without considering FRANCE. Il faut qu'on le souvienne!

Il faut que je continue ce blog apres ma classe du roman.