24 Nov 2023

Tom Jones by Henry Fielding



Discussion

Literary context

Henry Fielding's (1707-1754) picaresque narrative Tom Jones (1749) draws on the Spanish tradition of Don Quixote (1605). Cervantes invented a manuscript to lend realism to his story and, in the second part of Book 1, he documents Quixote's adventures as a journal, a procedure followed in Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels. Both of these narratives are also travel stories, as is Tom Jones. (Jones also has a Sancho Panza sidekick in Mr. Patridge.) Cervantes structured Book 1 as a 'history' with the author following the antics of his leading characters. This is how Fielding also presents what he calls his history

Cervantes' narrative points also towards the modern novel through its subplots, low and high styles and self-commentary. However, Don Quixote went deeper than Tom Jones since the author himself became a character in Book 2. This allowed Cervantes to write a fiction about fiction, a satire on realism. Nonetheless, because of its chosen theme Cervantes' masterpiece remains unrealistic and credibility will be the mark of the new art form of the novel. Quixote's distorted perception of reality lies in his belief that romance novels are real and Cervantes is satirising these chivalric tales. The English author, on the other hand, uses the romance theme of true love to power his narrative.

Some Enlightenment French novels also adopted themes from Spanish literature which appear in Tom Jones, too: satire, a panorama of social milieux and coming-of-age stories such as Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane by Alain-René Lesage (1715).

Fielding had been a playwright and was steeped in classical literature. The characters in Tom Jones are presented in the Greco-Roman dramatic tradition, many dominated by humours, such as lechery, avarice or superstition. Fielding was famous for the formula that the novel was ‘the comic epic in prose’. However, the epic as a classical genre was oral and poetic. It dealt with historical or legendary deeds and people working as a collectivity. The novel is none of these things but deals with individuals and their personal stories. Tom Jones is epic in the sense that it presents a panorama of society, unlike Richardson his contemporary who portrayed a small social group. Nevertheless, the novel does introduce characteristics of the epic plot by using mock heroic battles in a comic context and includes many quotes from classical writers.

Fielding's deep classical background led him to maintain that the contemporary literary taste was anarchic. He affirmed that no critic should be officially recognised unless he had understood Aristotle, Horace, and Longinus, in their original. Aristotle prioriterised plot over character but Defoe and Richardson inverted this, making plot dependent on characters. Fielding reverts to an aristotelian priority of plot. He does this through theatrical portrayal in Tom Jones, treating the plot as a history and his characters as actors. Unlike Defoe, Swift and Richardson before him, who carefully constructed a credible story through a first person narrator, Fielding sets himself up as the chorus in a Greek comedy. He is an omniscient narrator who addresses readers constantly, guiding them through the interpretation of his own fiction.

In the neoclassical tradition epic action featured two elements: verisimilitude and the marvellous which are very difficult to integrate. Fielding thought that the novelist should remain within the limits of probability. He emphasised verisimilitude as a reference against the contemporary romance and epic novels, yet avoiding the commonplace as represented in the home section of newspapers, as he explains in Book VIII, chapter 1.

Among Fielding’s contemporaries were writers who contributed to the newly emerging genre of the novel, including Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson. The circumstantial manner in which Defoe’s and Richardson’s novels imitate reality was essential to the new, empirical approach to the world, invoked by scientists of the Royal Society whose approach to truth was through the amassing, weighing, and measuring of particulars. This approach is particularly apparent in Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels. However, it was Richardson's bestselling novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), narrated as a series of letters, that prompted Fielding to turn from playwright to novelist. The same novel later inspired Rousseau to write Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), also an epistolary novel depicting romantic love.

Pamela was the story of a young woman who became a great lady and found true happiness by defending her chastity. Fielding admired the novel's success but disapproved of its moralising. He wrote an anonymous parody called Shamela in 1741. The next year the author penned his first novel, Joseph Andrews, which began as another spoof of Pamela, but then found its own narrative voice. 

Fielding, while embracing the empirical approach to some extent, in other respects differed from the style of Defoe and Richardson. As a classicist Fielding remained loyal to the tradition of Plato and Aristotle who taught that reality transcends the singularities of daily life. This highest reality is found in the essential forms of things and in generalized representative types; the artist must show the general through particulars, the universal through the accidental. Thus, Fielding’s characters, though they have a life and integrity of their own, can also be read as symbols of a reality larger than themselves, and his novels can be seen as broad depictions of society and even of human nature.

Political background

Tom Jones (1749) was written following the Stuart attempt to reclaim the British throne in 1745. Mr. Patridge is a Jacobite, a supporter of the deposed Catholic king James II and his claim as the legitimate heir to the throne. There was support for the Jacobite cause of a Stuart Catholic monarchy from 1688 until 1745, when the last battle was won by Protestants. The Test Act 1673 was passed to ensure that non-Protestants could hold no State power. It stated that anyone filling any office, civil, military or religious, must take the oaths of supremacy and allegiance and subscribe to a declaration against transubstantiation. (The first Catholic Prime Minister since Thomas More (executed in 1535) was Boris Johnson.)

The Whigs were members of a political group representing some powerful aristocratic families and the financial interests of the middle classes. They monopolized parliamentary politics for most of the century. Whig policies were strongly anti-Catholic, anti-Jacobite, and anti-French.

The Tories were a political group that supporting the hereditary right of the deposed Stuart king James II, in spite of his Roman Catholic faith. They were mainly High-Church Anglicans, the aristocracy, and the squirearchy (country gentry) such as Western. Although they held little parliamentary power after the Hanoverians ascended the throne in 1714, they were dominant in local politics.


10 Oct 2023

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

 

Discussion


Literary background

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) was an Irish clergyman. He visited England briefly and joined The Scriblerus Club along with Alexander Pope. Their aim was to write satires on modern knowledge. This was the Age of the Enlightenement in Europe when reason was king and traditional knowledge through faith and revelation was considered secondary. Swift was a Anglican cleric and satirised the widespread intellectual belief in reason.

Gulliver’s Travels (1726) is a satire on the contemporary travel narratives which was a popular literary genre. Using the traditional picaresque structure they were presented as diaries and first-hand accounts of exploration, similar to Robinson Crusoe. Both novels use the technique of fictional realism where the narrator pretends to tell a true tale, although it is a fiction. Defoe had used this novel technique to tell his moral and economic tale of a self-made man in the guise of a shipwrecked sailor. Swift uses his four shipwreck tales to satirise his contemporary society. Readers were eager to learn about far-off lands, such as those explored by Cook. Swift ridicules these often exaggerated adventures by inventing the outrageous trips of Gulliver to entertain gullible readers and as a cover for his sharp social criticism. (His satire of contemporary adventure voyages is parallel to Cervantes' picaresque parody of chivalric novels in Don Quixote and the 19th. century mocking of romantic heroines by the realist novelist, Flaubert, in Madame Bovary.)

The adventures of Gulliver include political satire. In 1714 the liberal Whig party took over power from the conservative Tories. As a Tory, Swift satirised the opposition between the two parties, particularly in the Lilliput episode.

The satire also covers human nature and its pettiness. The Lilliputians are not only petty politicians, but small-minded human beings with their trivial morality. The second voyage to a land of giants includes satirical passages on English law and political system under the guise of comparison with Brobdingnag.

As a clergyman Swift is critical of the contemporary Enlightenment ideology which attempted to rationalise all aspects of life. Locke promoted theories of natural religion and Descartes based his thinking on doubt instead of on faith. A cult arose, which included Diderot and Voltaire, calling themselves Deists. They believed that people could observe the universe and understand it through reason which included religion, but excluded biblical revelation. However, Swift did not agree with the Enlightenment concept that science and reasoning could replace religion. He argued that the Age of Science needed limits, not devotion. The impractical scientists of Laputa and the reasonable, but impersonal, Houyhnhnms, were satires on scientific beliefs.

The French picaresque satire Candide (1759) is also based on travel and it parodies contemporary adventure stories. Voltaire satirises most of society in the novel, particularly Enlightenment optimism, as did Swift.

In Italy the satirical style was exemplified by Zaccaria Seriman's Viaggi di Enrico Wanton (1749–64). It tells the story of an imaginary voyage similar to those of Swift and Voltaire.

4 Aug 2023

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe


Discussion

Literary context

This short introductory background to the novel is an overview of its historical situation in European literature. The monthly sessions will focus on each novel in itself.

In the middle of the 16th. century there arose a form of fiction that appears to have led to the 18th. century novel. It is exemplified in the anonymous picaresque novella The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes and of His Fortunes and Adversities (1554). What separates the picacaresque novella from preceeding texts is its first person narrator who tells his life as it is, without embroidery. He describes sights, sounds and smells which contemporary readers could relate to. The style is confessional, satirical and realistic. A similar style is followed in Cervantes' El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha (1605). Cervantes followed the convention of travelling from adventure to adventure in chivaric romances and picaresque novellas. Each episode is set to refine Don Quixote's identity as in the famous example of the windmills showing the protagonist's false impression of reality.

The picaresque novel was also a genre used in 18th. century French literature. One of the earliest of these novellas was Lesage’s Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715–1735). Not unlike El Lazarillo it is about the education of a young valet as he changes masters.

It is generally recognised that Daniel Defoe was one of the first writers in English to reject plots based on mythology, history, legend or previous literature, such as Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton had done. That literary tradition had been based on the aristotelian premise that Nature is complete, unchanging and definitive. It was Descartes in Discourse on Method (1637) who introduced the modern assumption that the pursuit of truth is a wholly individual matter, independent of past thought and universals. The 18th. century novel reflects this individualistic outlook using the new format of formal realism, a pretence that the narrative is real. In this sense it was truly novel.

The first novel in English is considered to be Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719). The original title of the book is a succinct summary of its narrative technique of formal realism:

"The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who Lived Eight and Twenty Years, All Alone in an Un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, Near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having Been Cast on Shore by Shipwreck, Wherein All the Men Perished but Himself. With an Account how he was at last as Strangely Deliver’d by Pyrates. Written by Himself."

Defoe composed the place, time, plot and autobiographical aspects of the work to maintain an illusion of realism, understood as particularisation. To achieve this readers are presented information in the story as if they were jurors in a court.





5 Jun 2023

Memories of the Future by Siri Hustveldt

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1 May 2023