Simaklah essai kritikus sastra William B. Warner ini. Sungguh
kritik sastra modern yang membuka mata. Warner merujuk sekian banyak
premis yang terkait budaya cetak terhadap sastra novel secara global.
Warner juga menyitir sekelumit premis lain dari kritikus kawakan
(termasuk yang baru).
Yang menarik, dalam essainya, Warner menafsirkan beberapa lukisan dan
gambar cetak yang ditemukan dari periode awal pembaca di Inggris mulai
menyenangi membaca novel, yang berguna untuk memperluas pemahaman
tentang “abad pertama membaca novel”. Dengan mengadopsi strategi ini,
Warner melakukan kebalikan dari apa yang dibuat para pelukis modern
sejak awal. Seniman modern awal menggunakan gambar “pembaca membaca”
untuk merenungkan sifat lukisan. Dalam esai ini, Warner akan membaca
lukisan-lukisan itu untuk melihat bagaimana para pelukis menampilkan
krisis dalam tradisi awal membaca yang dipicu oleh popularitas membaca
sastra untuk tujuan hiburan.
Menurut Warner, dalam kiritknya pada bukunya Licensing Entertainment
bahwa gaya klasik Watt pada novel, dalam narasi yang progresif,
mengasumsikan bahwa era modern telah menemukan tehnik menulis yang
semakin kuat untuk mewakili realitas: disebutkan sebagai “realisme
formal” dan hubungan ke fokus lain narasi menandakan kemenangan
modernis: borjuis menemukan diri mereka secara kompleks dan mendalam.
Munculnya narasi novel, efektif disebabkan fakta pada tujuan utama;
untuk melegitimasi novel sebagai bentuk sastra. Jadi, munculnya narasi
baru menunjukkan bahwa tehnik narasi pada prosa tentang realisme cinta,
dihidupkan oleh sejumlah besar pembaca mulai menjadikan membaca sebagai
hiburan, pada paruh kedua abad ke-17. Ini membuat novel menjadi bentuk
sastra yang berharga dan penting, yang dilihat sebagai jenis sastra
mapan, sebagaimana puisi, epik dan drama.
Penggunaan definite article dalam “kebangkitan novel” sebagai frase novelness yang
berganti menjadi esensi setiap bentuk pencarian baru, yang pada sisi
tertentu, berusaha untuk disadari. Apa efek dari ini? Warner telah
meratifikasi proyek elevasi novel moral dan estetika yang dilakukan oleh
novelis Richardson, Fielding, Prevost dan Rousseau untuk Flaubert,
(Henry) James, Joyce dan Woolf.
Tetapi juga ada yang kurang dari pengertian kita tentang apa inti
novel. Bentuk ini telah mengambil kritik novel ke bentuk perdebatan
berkesudahan dan tendensius tentang apa realisme sebenarnya, dan menjadi
penjaga batas yang “benar” antara novelistik dan fiksi. Kita perlu
konsep yang lebih historis, termasuk apa dan bagaimana budaya novel itu
sendiri.
Pada bukunya, Licensing Entertainment, William B. Warner, menyatakan kontribusinya; “Di
sana, saya mendokumentasikan perkembangan munculnya narasi baru dalam
sejarah tradisi sastra yang panjang yang dimulai dari Clara Reeve (1785)
dan John Dunlop (1814), dan kemudian meluas melalui banyak sejarah
sastra sebelum Watt (termasuk Scott, Hazlitt, Taine, Saintsbury). Pada
saat yang sama, saya telah menyatakan perbedaan pendapat kritis saya
dari Watt dan banyak kritikus yang lebih baru yang telah berusaha untuk
memperbarui atau merevisi narasi itu.” (Licensing Entertainment, hal. 1-44)
++++++
Berikut essai William B. Warner yang saya tampilkan sebagaimana
aslinya. Belum saya terjemahkan. Nantilah, di lain kesempatan saja, jika
ada waktu luang. Demikian.
Staging Readers Reading
by William B. Warner
(UC/Santa Barbara)
***
The rise of the novel narrative, as perfected by Ian Watt in 1957,
and extended by many other literary histories in the years since, is not
“wrong,” but it is biased and incomplete. Why is this so? First of all,
Watt’s classic account places the novel within a progressive narrative,
which assumes that the modern era has discovered increasingly powerful
writing technologies for representing reality: he calls this “formal
realism” and links it to another focus of modernist triumphant
narratives: the bourgeois invention of a complex and deep self.
Secondly, the rise of the novel narrative is vitiated by the fact that
its essential aim is to legitimize the novel as a form of literature.
Thus the rise of the novel narrative demonstrates that the technology of
realism enabled prose narratives about love and adventure, which large
numbers of readers had begun to read for entertainment by the second
half of the 17th century, to rise into a form of literature every bit as
valuable and important as the established literary types of poetry,
epic and drama. Thirdly, and this follows from the first two, the use of
the definite article in the phrase “rise of
the novel” turns
novelness into a fugitive essence every particular novel strives to
realize. What has been the effect of this narrative? It has ratified the
project of the novel’s moral and aesthetic elevation undertaken by
novelists from Richardson, Fielding, Prevost and Rousseau to Flaubert,
(Henry) James, Joyce and Woolf. But it has also impoverished our sense
of what the novel is, first by taking novel criticism into interminable
and tendentious debates about what realism really is, and second by
making it our business to be guardians of the boundary between the
“truly” novelistic and the “merely” fictional. We need a more
historically rigorous and culturally inclusive conception of what the
novel is and has been. My recent book, Licensing Entertainment aims to
contribute to such a project. There, I document the development of the
rise of the novel narrative within a long literary historical tradition
that begins with Clara Reeve (1785) and John Dunlop (1814) and extends
through many of the literary histories before Watt (including Scott,
Hazlitt, Taine, Saintsbury, ). At the same time I have articulated my
critical differences from Watt and many more recent critics who have
sought to update or revise that narrative. (Licensing Entertainment,
1-44)
To develop a more inclusive understanding of early modern novel
reading and to grasp novels at their highest level of generality, it is
useful to compare the novel to that other successful offspring of the
cultures of print, the newspaper. A newspaper is not just an unbound
folio sheet printed with ads and news. It evolved within a social
practice of reading, drinking (usually coffee or tea) and conversation;
it required the development of the idea of “the world” as a plenum of
more or less remote, more or less strange things–events, disasters,
commodities–translated into print and worthy of our daily attention. The
idea of the modern may be the effect of this media-assisted mutation in
our way of taking in the world. This intricate marriage of print form
and social practice has survived to this day as “reading the paper.” In
an analogous fashion the institution of novel reading requires a
distinct mutation of both print forms and reading practices. While the
printing of books devoted to prestigious cultural activities (like
religion, law, natural philosophy) began in the 15th century and gained
momentum in the 16th century, it was not until the later 17th century
that short novels helped to shift the practices of reading so that
novels could become a mode of entertainment. Several factors helped
promote novel reading for entertainment: lower printing costs; an
infrastructure of booksellers, printers and means of transport; a
critical mass of readers of vernacular writing; and the opportunistic
exploitation of the new vogue for reading novels (usually in octavo or
duodecimo format) by generations of printers and booksellers. But if
there was to be a rise of novel reading, it required a complex shift in
reading practices. Historians of reading like Robert Darnton and Roger
Chartier have described these changes, changes which are never complete
or unidirectional: from intensive reading of a few books (like the
Bible) to extensive reading of a series of similar books (like novels);
from slow reading as a prod to meditation to an absorptive reading for
plot; from reading aloud in groups to reading alone and in silence; from
reading the Bible or conduct books as a way of consolidating dominant
cultural authority to reading novels as a way to link kindred spirits;
from reading what is good for you to reading what you like. Like
television watching in the mid 20th century, novel reading took France
and England by storm; like television watching, reading novels
engendered excitement and resistance in the societies where it first
flourished.
In this essay I will interpret some of the paintings and prints of
the period that stage readers reading in hopes of broadening our
understanding of the first century of novel reading. In adopting this
strategy, I will be doing the reverse of what early modern image makers
have done. As we shall see, early modern artists use images of readers
reading to reflect upon the nature of viewing painting; in this essay, I
will read these paintings to see how they reflect the crisis in early
modern reading provoked by the popularity of reading novels for
entertainment. Anyone surveying the Dutch and French genre paintings and
prints of the 17th and 18th century–a type of image making that
captures ordinary people in their everyday domestic activities–will
quickly discover the currency of images of readers reading. From old men
reading grand folios in solitude to young women absorbed in their
novels, the paintings and prints of the period stage reading as
inviting, compelling, and sometimes dangerous. They document the
period’s fascination with what was after all still a relatively new
activity, one which, with the spread of literacy, was becoming an
increasingly important part of everyday life. These images don’t merely
reflect a struggle around literacy happening elsewhere; instead, these
images are themselves part of a critical debate that developed, over the
course of the early modern period, as to how reading influences
readers. What started as a promotional campaign for the reading of moral
and didactic books ends up as a culture war about the pleasures and
dangers of novel reading. However these visual texts also meditate upon a
cultural problem closely related to book reading, the question of how a
viewer should benefit from their encounter with a painting.
"The Prophetess Anne" (figure 1; 1631) By Rembrandt’s
I begin with several images that communicate the higher purposes of
reading. Rembrandt’s “The Prophetess Anne” (figure 1: 1631) suggests the
thoughtful solitude of a reader absorbed in her book. Several features
of this painting’s composition imbue reading with hushed reverence: the
old woman bends into the grand folio volume she holds; the hand with
which she gently touches the page is painted in high focus; a swirl of
color and light–hood, shawl and page–cast her face into the shade of
meditation; there is an utter absence of distracting background. This
painting, in which Rembrandt used his mother as a model, stages reading
as an intimate and delicious encounter with the light of truth. In a
painting by Chardin from 1734 (figure 2), reading is imbued with a
similar hush and solemnity. However, the different titles given to this
celebrated painting suggest the pivotal role of reading in the
professions: “The Chemist in his laboratory”, “The Alchemist”, “A
Philosopher occupied with his Reading” (1734; the Salon of 1753), and
more recently, “Portrait of the Painter Joseph Aved.”
"Portrait of the Painter Joseph Aved" by Chardin (1734)
This painting’s communication of the cultural centrality of reading
is made explicit in the contemporary commentary upon this image by the
Abbe Laugier at the Salon of 1753: “This is a truly philosophical reader
who is not content merely to read, but who meditates and ponders, and
who appears so deeply absorbed in his meditation that is seems one would
have a hard time distracting him.”(Fried, 11) In Absorption and
Theatricality, a broad spectrum of French 18th century genre painting,
Michael Fried demonstrates what he calls “the primacy of absorption,” in
the subjects , who are represented reading, sleeping, playing games, or
caught up in a moment of high personal drama. Fried shows how
representation of figures deeply absorbed in some activity becomes a
strategy for taking painting beyond the arch theatricality and
superficial sensuality attributed to the Rococo style by mid century. At
the same time various compositional effects are used to produce
paintings that will absorb the beholder of the painting: rich painterly
surfaces (Chardin), animated brush work (Fragonard), and didactic drama
(Greuze). It is no surprise, I think, that figures of readers reading
figure so prominently in this elevation of the cultural role of genre
painting: by articulating beholding an image with reading a book, images
of reading could anchor the greater cultural significance being claimed
for painting. It is as though these images are saying, “look at this
image with the same seriousness of purpose that these readers accord to
reading.”
"The Father of the Family reads the Bible to his children" (figure 3; Salon 1755) by Greuze
In the 18th century, reading was not always silent and solitary; it
was also oral and collective. Reading could offer a means of inculcating
religious and family values. In this painting by Greuze, entitled “The
Father of the Family reads the Bible to his children”, (figure 3; Salon
1755) reading has the power to compose a magic circle in which nearly
the whole family is absorbed into the power of Scripture as it is
relayed through the father’s voice. Like the paintings of Rembrandt and
Chardin, this painting grasps a particular moment: when the smallest
child’s effort to play with a dog fails to distract a family utterly
absorbed by the reading. In this way the power of reading to move its
auditors is put on visual display. How does this painting earn its claim
to broad moral significance? Norman Bryson argues that Greuze’s
dramatic tableaus of family life arrange a variety of ages and human
types out of a single family, so that, hermetically sealed off from the
world outside the home, a general “idea of ‘humanity’ with its powerful
emotional and didactic charge, can be generated.”(Bryson, 128).
In all three of these paintings—whether reading is oral or silent,
part of solitude or social exchange—it is supposed that one reads to
improve the self. In The Practices of Everyday Life, Michel DeCerteau
suggests that a particular concept of the book lies at the heart of the
enlightenment educational project: “The ideology of the Enlightenment
claimed that the book was capable of reforming society, that educational
popularization could transform manners and customs, that an elite’s
products could, if they were sufficiently widespread, remodel a whole
nation.”(166) This enlightenment project is, according to De Certeau,
structured around a certain concept of education as mimicry, with a
“scriptural system” that assumes that “although the public is more or
less resistant, it is molded by (verbal or iconic) writing, that it
becomes similar to what it receives, and that it is imprinted by and
like the text which is imposed on it.”(167)
"Boy Reading" (figure 4; 1747) by Reynolds
The disciplinary
promise and weight of the book receives
their most explicit expression in early modern education. Here are
several images that express different aspects of that vast cultural
project. In a painting by Reynolds, entitled a “Boy Reading”(figure 4;
1747), the tension between resolute body language and an abstracted gaze
communicates the arduous demands of labor with books.
To imprint the knowledge of the book upon one’s mind requires all of
one’s energy, as expressed for example, in Greuze’s “A Student who
studies his Lesson” (figure 5; 1757), where the posture of the
student–he is poised over the book–and the high focus of the fingers
crossed over the volume–suggest the concentration required to memorize.
"A Student who studies his Lesson" (figure 5; 1757) by Greuze’s
"A Child Who Sleeps on his Book" (figure 6; 1755) by Greuze's
This student, like Rembrandt’s Prophetess, and like Chardin’s
philosopher, is touched into a state of silent thought by the book he
touches. In the companion piece of the same child, we can see the
exhaustion this sort of intensive reading may entail. ( Greuze, “A Child
Who Sleeps on his Book” (figure 6; 1755)).
Finally, in a painting by Chardin, “A young girl reciting her
Gospels,” (figure 7;1753), one grasps the expected payoff of the
enlightenment pedagogical project: a young girl stands before her
mother, who is holding a book, and recites what she has learned from her
reading. The intimacy of this domestic space does not qualify the
solemn importance of what is transpiring. Here truth is given its ideal
symbolic resonance as light: it passes from Nature (as sunlight) to the
mother (‘s dress) to the gospels she holds, to the face and bonnet of
the young girl who recites the Word she has learned. While this
metaphorical substitution of light for truth has its grounds in the
fourth Gospel (John 1:4-5,9), this trope was also of course adapted by
secular thinkers of the Eighteenth century to characterize this epoch as
an “age of Enlightenment.”(Kant) These four paintings describe,
celebrate, and promote the proper practice of reading as a way to
enlighten readers by educating them. Of course, like all representations
of reading or spectatorship, these images don’t really tell us what is
going on when one reads. But notice the implicit corollary of the
enlightenment program of reading as mimicry:
by making the reader a
passive receptacle for the book’s meaning, this theory of reading makes
the reading of the wrong kind of writing especially dangerous. By
interpreting reading as automatic and uncritical, the enlightenment
theory of reading produced as its logical correllary the anxiety
triggered by the popularity of novels among the young.
"A young girl reciting her Gospels" (figure 7;1753) by Chardin
Given the enormous cultural investment in reading for instruction,
how did reading for entertainment become an important new form of
reading? The market plays a pivotal role in advancing this new kind of
reading. In the England of the early 18th century, printed matter became
what it is today: a commodity on the market. Rather than requiring
subsidy by patrons, print received its ultimate support from that
complex collaboration between producers and consumers we call “the
market.” Eighteenth century observers of these changes were less
sanguine and less resigned about the effects of taking culture to the
market than we seem to be today. In The Fable of the Bees (1712, 1714)
Bernard Mandeville offers an ironic celebration of the surprising
effects of markets: many individual decisions produce effects in excess
of any single guiding intention. But while the market in books meant
increases in both production and wealth, it also entailed the
publication of anything that might sell, a relaxation of “standards” and
an unprecedented access to print for writers of all levels of quality,
in both 18th century senses of that word—value and class. Since the 18th
century this new cultural formation—then dubbed “Grub Street”, now
called “Hollywood”—has been celebrated and condemned for its fecundity
and filth, its compelling vulgarity. To conservative critics of the 18th
century print market, the trade in books seemed a system dangerously
out of control precisely because no one was in control.
"The Spanish Reading" (figure 8; 1754) by Carle Van Loo
Improvements in the production and distribution of printed books
allowed booksellers to expand the numbers, kinds and formats of books
printed; this allowed booksellers to promote reading for entertainment.
However, reading for entertainment set off a debate about the proper
functions of reading. Although publishers found that many species of
books (from ghost stories to travel narratives to a criminal’s Newgate
confessions) might gratify this desire for reading pleasure, no genre
was more broadly popular than novels. We can glimpse one way novels were
used in this painting by Carle Van Loo, entitled “the Spanish Reading”
(figure 8; 1754). In this idealized bucolic setting, reading aloud
harmonizes a diverse group into a tableau of “the good life.” Here a
young beau reads to two young women, who appear entirely enraptured by
what he reads. An 18th century commentator interprets the painting in
terms of the anti-novel discourse which developed to oppose novel
reading.
“A young man dressed in Spanish costume is reading
aloud from a small book which, on the evidence of his keen attention and
that of the company, can be recognized as a novel dealing with love.
Two young girls listen to him with a pleasure expressed by everything
about them. Their mother (actually their governess), who is on the other
side of the reader and behind him, suspends her needlework in order to
listen also. But her attention is altogether different from that of the
girls; one reads in it the thoughts that she is having, and the mixture
of pleasure given to her by the book and the fear she perhaps entertains
of the dangerous impression that that book might make on young girl’s
hearts.” [Quoted by Fried, 27]
Print might
impress itself upon the (page of an)
impressionable heart: this metaphor, which uses the mechanism of
printing (the press which makes identical impressions) to elucidate the
practice of reading, resonates through Eighteenth century discussions of
print media policy. Worry focuses upon a possible reversal of proper
agency, by which a weakened subject—the susceptible reader—might come
under the control of a smart object—the insinuating novel. Thus “The
Whole Duty of Woman” (of 1737) registers this warning to novel readers:
“Those amorous Passions, which it is [the novel’s] Design to paint to
the utmost Life, are apt to insinuate themselves into their unwary
Readers, and by an unhappy Inversion a Copy shall produce an Original.”
In keeping with the latent misogyny of the period’s anti-novel
discourse, it was widely thought that novel reading could induce a
restructuring of the labile emotions of the woman reader.
"The Reader" (figure 9; 1769-72) by Fragonard’s
If collective reading of a novel carried risks, what might be the
effect of novel reading upon a solitary woman reader? We can approach
this question by looking at what two major French painters of the mid
18th century do with the topic of the woman
alone with her
novel. Fragonard’s painting, “The Reader,” (figure 9; 1769-72) does not
invest the figure with a specific legible meaning. The painting is one
of fourteen paintings art historians call “Figures de Fantaisie,” all
men and women in half-length portraits of the same dimension, apparently
executed very quickly, and dressed in what were known as Spanish
costumes…with “expressions lively, their eyes turned away…as if they
have been frozen in the middle of an action.” (Jean-Pierre Cuzin, 102)
Norman Bryson has explained the effect of these paintings of Fragonard’s
in terms that are useful to understanding the absorptive power of novel
reading, especially of the vivid “hallucination” of experiencing
Richardson’s characters as though they were real persons.(104) To know a
character in a novel or the woman in this painting as an “ideal
presence, half transmitted by the artwork” requires “for its full
existence the imaginative participation of reader or viewer”(Bryson,
104). There are several ways “The Reader” teases its viewer into
interpretation: the painting is incomplete (for example in the drawing
of the left hand) but the brush-strokes are richly evocative; the
blankness of the background withholds any context for this figure; and,
and finally, the brilliant foreground lighting of the Reader’s gold and
white Spanish costume gives this pretty young woman an oddly extravagant
aura. She seems to be posed for our gaze, but she looks away. The
delicate balance of book, hand and head as seen in profile, and the ease
of her body resting against cushion and arm rail, communicates the
graceful self-completeness of the solitary reader. Some art historians
suppose that “The Reader” is the portrait of an actual young woman
(Curzin, 123-125), “The Reader” remains enveloped in mystery, as
illusive as the thoughts and feelings of another person’s reading. In
this painting, reading achieves an allegorical generality.
"Lady Reading Eloise and Abelard" (figure 10; 1758-59) by Greuze's
If Fragonard’s painting offers an implicit endorsement of the
pleasures of a young girl’s reading, Greuze’s “Lady reading Eloise and
Abelard” (figure 10; 1758-59) seeks to make visible the explicitly
erotic dangers of novel reading. In contrast with the self-possession of
Fragonard’s reader, passion sweeps through this solitary reader: there
is a strong contortion to her position, her lips are open, her hands
languorous. The title of this painting by Greuze gives the reason for
this disorder: “Lady Reading the Letters of Helouise and Abelard.” The
tokens on her table—a billet-doux, a string of black pearls, a sheet of
music, and a book entitled “The Art of Love”—are the details that allow
the viewer of the painting to surmise that this reader is involved in an
affair of her own. The lighting and contiguity of book, dress and bosom
invite the viewer to detect a causal relationship: it is precisely
this kind of reading that leads to illicit affairs, it is
this novel
that has transported this lady into a state of distracted arousal. But
the didacticism of this image is fraught with unintended consequences.
By linking the animated white leaves of the book to the white morning
dress that is slipping off the partially exposed breasts of this aroused
reader, by inviting us to survey the erotic effects of novel reading
upon the body of this woman, this painting becomes as lush and explicit
and arousing as the novel reading it intends to warn us against. The
resulting confusion of erotic means and ends is one Greuze’s painting
will share with Richardson’s novels. (Warner,
Licensing Entertainment, 212-224)
William Hogarth’s playful pair of erotic prints from 1736, entitled "Before" (figure 11; 1736)
William Hogarth embeds a warning against novel reading into a
non-seductive, broadly comic set of images. In Hogarth’s playful pair of
erotic prints from 1736, entitled “Before”(figure 11; 1736) and “After”
(figure 12; 1736), William Hogarth finds a very different way to encode
a warning against novel reading.
Hogarth’s playful pair of erotic prints from 1736, entitled "After" (figure 12; 1736)
The heroine’s succumbing to her admirer suggests that the influence
of the volume of “Novels”, as well as the poems of Rochester, have
prevailed over the other book on her night stand, “The Practice of
Piety.” In this pair of prints, the abrupt movement from the “before” to
“after” (sex), prevents precisely the sort of absorptive identification
Greuze’s painting encourages.
The reader of these two prints is positioned as a bemused observer of
a comic deflation in condition: in “Before,” the woman is a heroic
defender of her virtue, but “After” she is a pathetic petitioner for the
man’s attentions; and likewise, the man goes from being the robust
lover to a condition of confused, and slightly harassed, sexual
reticence. While Hogarth’s moral rhetoric in this pair obliquely invokes
the warning of the epoch’s anti-novel discourse—that is, ‘purify your
reading if you would guard your virtue’—, his more famous Progress
Pieces, are much closer in their narrative trajectory and entertainment
values of the novels they ostensibly spurn. For most of the 18th
century, readers accepted as a truism the proposition that novel reading
did one no real good, and that other, more serious reading, should
attract our reading energies. For an example of this by then antiquated
opinion, one can read Jane Austen’s satirical account of Mr. Collins
attempted reading of Fordyce’s sermons after supper on his first night
with the Bennet’s in
Pride and Prejudice (1812?).
One
pair of paintings, John Opie offers wry social commentary upon this
chronic schism in the order of reading. In "A Moral Homily" (figure 13;
date)
In one pair of paintings, John Opie offers wry social commentary upon
this chronic schism in the order of reading. In “A Moral Homily”
(figure 13; date), Opie represents the likely effects of improving
reading here imposed by a solemn dame upon her comely young
auditors—yawns and boredom. However, the structure the governess or
teacher has imposed—auditors gathered around one reader with the
book—can be adopted to other purposes.
One
pair of paintings, John Opie offers wry social commentary upon this
chronic schism in the order of reading. In "A Tale of Romance" (figure
14; date)
Once the austere matriarch has left, evidently taking her heavy tomes
with her, the girls can gather into a rapt circle to hear “A Tale of
Romance,”(figure 14; date) the title of this painting. Opie’s
representations of novel reading and its effects suggest a question for
those who want to exploit the improving potential of books.
The
connection between books and mediation is illustrated by the print
entitled "Meditation" (figure 15; date) from Ripa's Iconologia (1709)
How is an author to solve the problem posed by adolescent boredom
with conduct discourse and fascination with narratives of love? For a
writer like Samuel Richardson what was required was above all the
development of a hybrid form of writing, one which would use stories of
love to attract young readers to the higher purposes of reading, reading
as a spur to meditation. The connection between books and mediation is
illustrated by the print entitled “Meditation” (figure 15; date) from
Ripa’s Iconologia (1709). With a book on her lap, and her feet on
several grand folios, reading has become a prod to deep thought. In
Ripa’s gloss on this iconography, dame Meditation’s “holding up her head
with her hand, denotes the gravity of her thoughts.”(Paulowicz, 50).
In this Reynolds portrait, entitled “Theophilia Palmer Reading
Clarissa Harlow”(figure 16; date), we find the same tight compositional
circle of head, arms and book we have found in other absorbed readers.
But here Reynold’s use of the iconography of meditation–the touch of the
hand to the forehead–gives visual expression to Richardson’s program to
reconcile novel reading with the
weighty purposes of moral
reflection. With this painting, Reynolds represents the woman reader
Richardson intended Clarissa to win: one immune from erotic
appropriation. Thus, Reynolds does not imbue this woman novel reader
with any of the mystery of Fragonard’s “Reader” or the emotionally
labile susceptibility of Greuze’s reader. Instead, here we have an
ordinary girl, safely ensconced in her sturdy chair, directing her full
attentions to Clarissa Harlowe. But the actual readers of Richardson’s
novels found them rife with erotic potential. (footnote:For the
remarkably erotic imagery that develops around the Pamela vogue, see
James Turner, Representations. For accounts of the dangous effects of
reading Richarson’s novels see RC, LE.).
"Theophilia Palmer Reading Clarissa Harlow" (figure 16; date) by Reynolds
Why are so many images of readers reading so close to the plane of
the canvas that they threaten to fall right into the viewer’s own space?
Norman Bryson’s interpretation of the “transformations of rococo space”
during the first half of the 18th century offers an account that links
one of the chief traits of the rococo–the elimination of classical space
established through Renaissance perspective–and the way the subject on
the surface of the rococo makes itself available to the fascinated gaze
of the beholder.
"Mme. Pompador" the mistress to Louis the XVth (figure 17; date) by Francois Boucher
Within “rococo space” Bryson finds that “the erotic body is not a
place of meanings and the erotic gaze does not attend to signification…
[instead the painting devotes its painterly resources to] providing a
setting for the spectacle…transported to [a] space that is as close as
possible to that inhabited by the viewer..[that] of the picture plane
[itself].”(Bryson, 91-92).
One can see the erotic potential of this sort of compositional
strategy at work, in a rather sublimated form, in a glamorous portrait
by Francois Boucher, of his celebrated patron “Mme. Pompador,” the
mistress to Louis the XVth (figure 17; date). This portrait catches its
subject in a momentary pause in the elegant leisure activity of what is
most likely novel reading.
"Reclining
Nude" (figure 18; 1751; Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz Museum), Bouncher
uses another of Louis XV's mistresses, Louise O'Murphy as a model.
Several factors conspire to compose a shimmering surface that invites
the spectator’s gaze to wander: the oblique gaze of Mme. Pompador
releases our eyes from her face; instead the viewer’s eye is free to
wander over the artful arrangement of her arms and hands, over the
richly detailed silk brocade of her dress, to the animated leaves of the
book that lies at the center of this composition. Here is painting that
addresses its beholder outside of any informing moral purpose, looking
that is in danger of becoming its own pleasurable end. The anti-rococo
reaction, most evident in the morally programmatic paintings of Greuze,
resonates with the anti-novel discourse deployed by Richardson in his
morally programmatic narratives.
"Reclining Nude" (figure 18; 1751) by Bouncher. Model Louise O'Murphy, another of Louis XV's mistresses.
For critics of early modern novel reading were not just concerned
about mimicry of a novel’s action; they were also alarmed about the
perverse displacement by which the reader, through the repetitive
effects of absorptive reading for pleasure, conducted in freedom and
solitude, (in other words in the sort of autonomous erotic reverie the
rococo encourages) might become a compulsively reading body. In a
painting entitled “Reclining Nude” (figure 18; 1751; Cologne,
Wallraf-Richartz Museum), Boucher uses
another of Louis XV’s
mistresses, Louise O’Murphy as a model. Here, the open book to the left
of the nude woman reclining on the couch suggests that the equivocal
potential of reading novels for pleasure arises in part from a shift in
location: one may read these books in the intimate undress of the
boudoir.
Replica "Reclining Nude" by Bouncher.
The novel in this setting functions as a stimulant, like tea in the
samovar, which has replaced the novel in this rendering of the same
model in the same pose in a painting of the same title (figure 19; 1752;
Munich, Alte Pinokotk ).
The erotic use of novels becomes quite explicit in this Pierre Antoine Baudourin’s print of 1770, entitled "Midi" (figure 21)
With a small difference in position, and woth a dark haired model,
the painting becomes more explicitly salacious, and well on the way to
the pornographic image. (figure 20; 1745). 1748, the year of the
publication of the third and final installment of Clarissa, is the same
year as John Cleland’s anonymous publication of “The Memoirs of a Woman
of Pleasure”, better known to us by the title, “Fanny Hill.” The erotic
use of novels becomes quite explicit in this Pierre Antoine Baudourin’s
print of 1770, entitled “Midi” (figure 21). This image suggests that the
head or heart were not the only body parts that might be stimulated by
reading. In his analysis of this print, Jean Marie Goulemot notes what
invites the viewer to enjoy this spectacle of this aroused young lady:
the secure enclosure of a stage-like garden setting, the presence of a
voyeur in the form of a statue, and the young female body posed to
maximize our view of her. The print invites us to note the crucial
details: a small book has dropped from her right hand; her left hand had
disappeared into her dress. In this print the outcome dreaded within
the anti novel discourse, the reader aroused to the point of orgasm,
becomes a positive program: solitary reading for entertainment is a
preparative to masturbation. The reading body has become a pleasure
machine.
Given the range of these images of readers reading, one might well
ask “Is reading to serve education, provide entertainment, promote moral
improvement, or turn us on?” My study of British print media culture
suggests the answer should be, “All of the above.” The diverse
representation of novel reading in the painting and prints of the 18th
century, and the polymorphous uses of painting (for instruction,
pleasure, etc.) suggest the struggle going on in the culture at large.
Over the arc of the period, educational and moral projects to improve
reading collide with market driven efforts to popularize reading in such
a way as to expand and deepen the repertoire of reading practices. Thus
between 1684 and 1730, Behn, Manley and Haywood wrote short, erotic,
plot-centered novels that were accepted as the fashionable new thing in
reading. However, the avid reading of these novels, especially by youth,
drew a strong critique from those who wished to reserve reading for
valuable, elevating, educational practices. In response, novelists like
Manley and Haywood blended the anti-novel discourse into their own
novels as a way to make novel reading more deliciously transgressive, as
well as to protect their own novels from censure. Reformers of the
novel –from Defoe and Aubin to Richardson and Fielding—sought to rewrite
reading by offering their novels as substitutes and antidotes to the
novels of amorous intrigue. But while they sought to purify their
narratives of novelistic erotics, they could only guarantee the
popularity of their books by incorporating the plot formulas and
character types perfected by their antagonists. By my account, the
Pamela media event—the outpouring of criticism, sequels, and revisions
that followed the 1740 publication of Pamela—marks a turning point in
the debate about the pleasures and dangers of novel reading. By winning a
large and admiring readership, and by attracting sustained acts of
criticism, Pamela changed the terms of the anti- and pro-novel
discourse. Now it is not a question of
whether one should read novels, but of
what kind of
novels will be beneficial or dangerous to readers. Richardson’s project
finds itself overcome by this irony: while he seeks to purge print
media culture of corrupting novel reading, he can only do so by
inventing new hybrids, like Pamela. While Pamela is supposed to be a
non-novel which will end novel reading, in fact, of course, it expands
the practices of reading, and the possibilities for novel writing. In
order to enter the psychosexual life of its protagonists, the readers of
Pamela practice hyper-absorptive reading which achieves new levels of
emotional intensity and identification. This provides the pretext for
new forms of erotic writing, like John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of
Pleasure, which stars a heroine-prostitute who has an odd combination of
innocence and experience. In later decades Richardson’s Clarissa and
Rousseau’s Richardsonian novel La Nouvelle Heloise invite rewriting as
Laclos’s Les Liasions Dangereuses and Sade’s Justine. Efforts at moral
and generic purification breed new hybids and mediators.
I can summarize the literary historical implications of this
narrative, and come back to issue of the novel’s “rise,” in this way:
when the market’s modernization of reading for entertainment stimulates
an ethically motivated anti-modern critique, we get a hybrid of amorous
novels and conduct discourse, which subsequent English literary
historians dub “the first modern novels in English.” Richardson and
Fielding are usually given credit for this invention. Why? Because their
novels include something central to all subsequent novels: a reader’s
guide on how to use print media. Thus, at least since Fielding’s model
Don Quixote, the novel warns readers of the dangers of mindless
emulation; the novel teaches the reader the difference between fiction
and reality; and the novel interrupts the atavistic absorption of the
reader by promoting an ethical reflection upon the self. In this way the
early modern struggle around the proper uses of reading sediments
itself as thematic concerns and narrative processes within the elevated
novel. But such a project of purification can not prevent, it may in
fact incite, the development of new hybrids. By 1764, Horace Walpole
pronounces himself bored with the limitations of the modern novel’s
reading protocols and its version of reality. So Walpole offers his
“gothic tale,” The Castle of Ortranto, as a self-consciously concocted
blend of ancient and modern romance.
These comments suggest some of the ways I have sought, in my book
Licensing Entertainment, to challenge the distinctions, separations and
efforts at purification evident in the canonical account of the novel’s
acquisition of modern legitimacy, Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel. By
aligning the formal traits of Richardson’s writing with reality, Watt
countersigns the rough drafts for the ‘rise of the novel’ thesis
Richardson and Fielding penned during and after the Pamela media event.
By making a single novel an object and occasion for sustained critical
writing, the Pamela media event defined task of much future novel
criticism:
selected novels are declared to be more than a
vehicle of leisure entertainment. They come to be objectified as “the”
novel and valued as a new literary genre. In the process, the
promiscuous and unclassified mass of romances and novels that remain are
cast into limbo as “non-novels.” In order to secure the distinction
between “the” novel and its others, criticism acquires the gate-keeping
function evident in a range of practices developed over the 60 years
following the Pamela media event: the emergence of journals reviewing
novels (
Monthly Review, 1749-; and
Critical Review,1756-);
literary histories of the novel; the collection of novels into
anthologies and multi-volume sets; and the inclusion of novels in
pedagogical projects, from those directed at young girls to those of
Scottish university professors.(Court, 17-38) Of course, my book and
this talk don’t escape that academic discursive system for defining
novels. The institution of criticism and the pedagogical practice of
English professors are shaped to teach informed reading, that is,
reading purged of mimicry. Pedagogy becomes the cure prescribed for
market based media. Of course, in the process, we may be replacing
compulsive novel reading with our own repetitive and obsessional
practice: “close” reading. Our institutional practices of teaching
literature, and cultural narratives like “the rise of the novel,” are
deeply implicated in an ongoing effort, which began with the anti-print
media discourse of the eighteenth century, to protect readers from
market culture. In short, we are the late-modern offspring of early
modern media policy. (*)
