The Empirical Ambitions of the Eighteenth-Century Novel
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2019-12-01
Date
2015-08-13
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
My purpose in the following pages is to provide a revisionist account of empiricism’s influence on the rise of the British novel. For the most part, scholarship on eighteenth-century fiction has suggested that empiricism and the novel were collaborators in a common mission. According to this tradition, the novel’s realism owed much to themes and reportorial procedures that were typical of empiricism, while the empiricists found in the novel a powerful pedagogic ally, capable of bringing socio-ethical knowledge to readers uninterested in philosophical writing. While much can be said for this account, its picture of a collaboration between empiricism and the novel is hard to reconcile with the deep distrust of fictions that characterized the empiricist outlook. Classical empiricists from Francis Bacon to David Hume saw imaginative literature not as a vehicle for knowledge, but as a source of delusion; and they made no exception of the novel, for all its empirical ambitions.
While little is made of the empiricist distrust in extant studies of the rise of the novel, it influenced the theory and practice of prose fiction for many decades after the mid-eighteenth century. In the chapters that follow I trace and examine that influence, by first reconstituting David Hume’s case against the novel and then showing that his challenge did not go unheeded. A number of British novelists — including Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Laurence Sterne, William Godwin, and Jane Austen — recognized the issues that worried Hume and addressed them in their theory and practice as novelists.
The central issue faced by Fielding, Lennox and their successors was to explain how it is that events that never took place can qualify as sources of empirical knowledge. They approached the issue earnestly but unsystematically, and my central task has been to reconstitute the broader perspective suggested by their fragmentary reflections. Some novelists, like Fielding, argued that literary characters are empirical generalizations that synthesize, through a process of induction, the regularities observable in human nature; others, like Sterne, proposed that the reader’s emotional investment in the fate of fictional characters constitutes a form of virtual experience, with the same epistemic value of actual encounters with others. In each case, they asserted the novel’s ability to convey knowledge by arguing that fictions can be valid surrogates for direct experience.
In tracing their efforts to affirm the empirical status of prose fiction, I hope to demonstrate two things: first, that empiricism influenced the development of the novel not only by providing novelists with formal and thematic opportunities, but also by pressing them to justify their pedagogic ambitions; and second, that in seeking to align literature with an epistemology suspicious of fiction, such novelists helped inaugurate a mode of argumentation that has retained its urgency ever since. As I argue in my conclusion, the debate surrounding the empirical ambitions of the novel prefigured similar debates in modern aesthetics — particularly among philosophers and literary critics who defend the value of literary studies in the face of scientistic scepticism.
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Keywords
English literature, eighteenth-century, empiricism, rise of the novel, literary cognitivism