Table Of ContentFICTIONAL DISCOURSE AND HISTORICAL SPACE
Also by Andrew Wright
JANE AUSTEN'S NOVELS: A STUDY IN S1RUCTURE
JOYCE CARY: A PREFACE TO HIS NOVELS
HENRY FIELDING: MASK AND FEAST
BLAKE'S 'JOB': A COMMENTARY
ANTHONY 1ROLLOPE: DREAM AND ART
FICTIONAL DISCOURSE
AND HISTORICAL SPACE
Andrew Wright
Professor of English
University of California
San Diego
M
MACMILLAN
PRESS
© Andrew Wright 1987
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1987
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First published 1987
Published by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG212XS
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Companies and representatives
throughout the world
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Wright, Andrew, 1923-
Fictional discourse and historical space.
1. English fiction-History and
criticism
I. Title
823' .009 PR821
ISBN 978-1-349-18566-5 ISBN 978-1-349-18564-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-18564-1
For
Daphne, Peter, Evangeline, and Tenniel
Contents
1. Introduction 1
2. Crusoe Then and Now: Robinson Crusoe (1719) and The 13
Mosquito Coast (1981)
I Robinson Crusoe: or, Do It Yourself 13
II The Mosquito Coast: Isolation as Madness 27
3. The Emergent Woman: Emma (1816) and Howards End (1910) 44
I Emma: Perfection under Threat 44
II Howards End and the Denial of Doom 58
4. Anarchy and Apocalypse: The Secret Agent (1907) and The 74
Human Factor (1978)
I The Secret Agent: The Beginning of the End 74
II The Human Factor and Hope without Hope 88
References 105
Index 111
Note
Several sentences of the introduction have been borrowed from a
lecture, 'The Novel as a Conspiracy', published in Essays by Divers
Hands: Being the Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, n.s. 37
(1972), 122-33.
1 Introduction
While reading The Mosquito Coast, that frightening but ultimately
hopeful Crusoe novel of the 1980s, I thought back to Defoe's great
original of 1719; and, when I re-read that novel, I learned from the
juxtaposition something more about the work of both Defoe and
Theroux. From that point other contiguities suggested themselves.
The outcome is the present study: there are three pairs of novels,
each pair treating a similar subject, and each member of the pair
being removed in time from the other-263 years divide Defoe's
novel from that of Theroux; nearly a century Emma from Howards
End, and three quarters of a century The Secret Agent from The
Human Factor.
Common sense raises a preliminary objection to this way of
proceeding, and common sense also meets the objection, which is
that there are hazards in making such comparisons: each of the six
writers under scrutiny is unique. Granted; but each work in
speaking for itself speaks also for its age in that each embodies more
fully its age's possibilities, and each sketches the lineaments of that
age, the more so in that each is generally representative and on the
highest level. To choose six other great writers and six other novels
would be to make necessary a different series of findings, a dif
ferent picture from what appears in these pages. Yes, a somewhat
different picture, but not one altogether different, unless one were
to select works of the second rank. For I do claim importance for my
writers and their texts - by which I mean that they are of such
stature as to embody claims to comprehensiveness, though not of
course exhaustiveness. Obviously, there is more than one way to
write a history, and there are other important novelists than the six I
have chosen; if instead of Defoe and Theroux, Jane Austen and
Forster, Conrad and Graham Greene, I had selected Richardson and
Virginia Woolf, Walter Scott and Hardy, Dickens and Naipaul, this
would have been a different book, but it would bear recognizable
resemblances to what the reader has before him. Nor do I think
exhaustive treatment is either desirable or necessary; the aim here
is exemplary and explanatory rather than encompassing.
Mainly, the aim here is practical, to elucidate the novels under
consideration. My highest hope is that the readers of this book will
1
2 Fictional Discourse and Historical Space
regard the interpretations offered in the following pages as helpful.
If they are so, part at least of the cause will be because of a sense of
new discovery that stems from a reading of a number of literary and
historical critics of the present day, especially Michel Foucault,
Fredric Jameson, and Hayden White, all of whom have taught me
much about history, about narrative, and about the place of
literature in thought. Others too have taken me back to school:
Robert Alter, Robert Caserio, Jacques Derrida, Suzanne Gearhart,
Gerard Genette, Frank Kermode, Murray Krieger, Frank
Lentricchia, David Lodge, Walter J. Ong, Roy Pascal, Shlomith
Rimmon-Kenan, Walter Slatoff, Tzvetan Todorov, Harold Toliver,
and Marianna Torgovnick. If I have failed to include on this list the
names of Wayne C. Booth and Ian Watt, the reason is that they are
so much a part of the critical air we breathe, so indispensable to all
readers at every point, that they belong in a separate category. And
Watt's work on Conrad will find special application here. My
indebtedness to the others will emerge in the following pages. But I
want to begin by sketching my way of proceeding.
The writing of history is a literary enterprise, as Gibbon himself
indicated; by the same token, all literature belongs to history - a
claim, or truism even, that would not need to be repeated except for
the fact that it has been intermittently contested or ignored in
literary criticism for the last forty years, to the considerable
detriment of our understanding. The divorce between the writing
of history and the writing that is avowedly fictional cannot take
place because the two are not separate imaginative endeavours but
a single entity, despite the efforts of the New Criticism of the 1940s
and 1950s, which I was brought up on. Such confusion as exists
stems from another, and actual, difference, that between events
that have indisputably or supposedly happened and the accounts of
those events that constitute what is called history, the former being
the materials out of which the historian makes his constructions,
which are the literary product of the historian's practice of his art.
As historical writing is a rationalization after the event, historians
make plots out of what they think has really happened, imposing a
pattern on what they have discerned by selecting certain events out
of the undifferentiated mass of facts and suppositions, and
arranging them in a certain order. Those who compose avowedly
fictional narratives are -deceptively- somewhat more free, but
they too take the materials that observation furnishes, and try to
make sense of them by arranging them into discourses. All men of
