The realist novel’s biggest English ancestors are Defoe (whose texts were faux-memoirs written by people who had had remarkable experiences in minutely described natural or social settings—Robinson Crusoe on his island and Moll Flanders in London and imperial environs) and Richardson (whose texts also posed as real documents—letters, this time—recording minutely the goings on in bourgeois homes). Realism’s commitment to reality, at the beginning, went all the way down; no third-person narrator obtruded on the transmission of experience. Theorists from Watt to Josipovici have convincingly linked this to the ethos of the rising middle-class, Protestantism and scientism.

However, there was another tradition co-existing with this and related to it, in which the commitment to reality gets mocked all to pieces: in this genre, whose biggest English eighteenth- century exempla are Gulliver’s Travels and Tristram Shandy, documentary records of “reality” either get put in question by the impossibility of what they describe or by the writer’s own manic linguistic proliferations which both testify to and undermine writing’s referential function. This tradition is actually the root of the novel proper, beginning as it does with Don Quixote.

(I almost made the adjective “Western” modify the noun “novel,” but it’s time to stop that: Cervantes was a prisoner in Algiers for five years, where he may or may not have read the Maqamat al-Hariri. Defoe’s inspiration for Robinson Crusoe was the Philosophus Autodidactus of Ibn Tufail, also read by Locke and Liebniz. These books, which I have not read, need to become more widely known, and Franco Moretti should put some graduate students to work seeing if their influence on western literature might not call into question some of our literary historical bromides. Generally, I’ll say this: we need to enlarge our historical.geographical parameters and stop thinking of everything in terms of “modernity”—a truly pernicious concept, I’m starting to think—and even “capitalism.” Perhaps, if we must be influenced by the Christian turn in Continental Philosophy, we might adopt something like “monotheism” as our governing abstraction, if we need one. It would at least have the effect of dissolving some of the artificial separations between national literatures, between the so-called “medieval” and the so-called “modern” and between “East” and “West.”)

Anyway, third-person narratives up until this time either had a timeless, non-omniscient, fabular register, as in epics, romances and folk-tales, or had explicitly self-aware narrators who commented on their own storytelling, as in, for instance, Tom Jones.

(Full disclosure: I have never managed to finish Tom Jones or anything by Richardson; the thought of Clarissa makes me go all clammy. I asked a professor of mine once, “Did you really read the whole thing?” “Yeah,” he said, “it was on my orals.” I asked: “How was it?” He replied, “Hard on the wrist.”)

The real nineteenth-century revolution is the invisible but omniscient third-person narrator and its attendant innovation, James Wood’s beloved free indirect discourse. This technique is already developing in Jane Austen and gets taken up and really radicalized by Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy, George Eliot, Henry James, Anton Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and on into the present.

(These writers, psychological realists, applied free-indirect technique systematically to social realism. In that sense, both groups are realist, but the word needs a modifier to remain intelligible.)

It’s essentially a modernist technique, from which stream of consciousness develops, not a Victorian one. The Victorian writers who tried it didn’t do it consistently, and most Victorian novels are actually participating in one or another eighteenth-century tradition. Dickens, for instance, who often gets referred to as a paradigmatic Victorian realist, uses the Fielding technique of the foregrounded, chatty narrator far more than he uses free indirect discourse; so does George Eliot, so does Thackeray. Charlotte Bronte gives us faux-memoirs, her sister Emily gives us a Sternean or Swiftian collection of nested texts that certainly don’t add up to unproblematic omniscience. The Victorians don’t disguise that they’re writing fiction, but constantly make us aware of the fact that they are; say what you like about them, but they are not epistemologically naive.

Narrative reflexivity is not postmodern, but rather as old as the hills, going back to when Homer invoked the muse. It’s narrative invisibility that is new, the production of text out of seemingly thin air, and not just text, but text that makes the entire world, inner and outer, legible. It’s not just new, it’s “modern”—or modernist, rather.

If our current bête noire is the psychological realism championed by James Wood, we should pay attention to his likes and dislikes: he more or less dislikes Dickens and loathes his influence, he seems to agree with Henry James that George Eliot’s narrators are not nearly invisible enough, and all of his favorite old writers are grouped around the modernist years, 1870-1930 (Chekhov, Woolf, Lawrence, etc.).

In other words, the popular account of the modernists against the Victorians is incorrect: what we’re actually seeing is a battle between two or maybe three different tendencies within modernism.

Okay, enough for tonight, but I hope to say more later, perhaps with reference to James Joyce…