A Film Canon

A far more elegant philosophical-sentimental novel than Julie, The Sorrows Of Young Werther fuses discursion and sentiment into the voice of Nature - or, at least, its conduit, as evinced in Werther's constant regret that he stands between the reader and his own objects of perception and description. Not only does this make it one of the first novels to deal with an unreliable, or at least inadequate narrator - let alone in which the object of inadequate narration is that narrator - but it atomises the 'book' into those organic, perishable fragments so precious to the proto-romantics. Given that these correspond to the canon of natural and inanimate objects that Werther feels compelled to ceremonially remember, Sorrows ultimately confirms that the sheer act of writing, and encountering writing - especially in the confessional mode outlined here, Confessions' most immediate forerunner - is inherently melancholy, retrospective and, above all, morbid, with Werther's suicide drawing attention to a textual as much as a theological limitation. From this perspective, the genius of Goethe's authorial voice lies in its invocation of a subject that, at his most solipsistic, seems to lose the use of language altogether and, at his most eloquent, is capable of summoning up sufficient ekphrastic power to elide himself in the name of a series of extraordinary, proto-romantic tableaux, fusing his pen with the paintbrush that represents his true artistic calling. This fusion of introspection and extroversion, again, recalls Julie, and provides the most elegant instance of the pathetic fallacy in the novel to date, if only because the correlation between Werther's perpetual uncertainty and meterological flux is so inevitable as to shift that uncertainty to the meaning of the correlation itself, producing the ambiguity that is one of the novel's key registers, and the symptom of Werther's futile efforts to escape the projections of his pathological 'sensibility'.

One of the clearest bridges between 'sensibility' and romanticism, The Man Of Feeling is effectively a series of voyeuristic, sentimental tableaux; a proudly anti-intellectual appeal to the erotic frisson of tears. Not only is the first conversation about political machination disrupted by an appeal to sentiment, and Bedlaim - the quintessential eighteenth century voyeuristic space - figured as the logical conclusion of academic, scientific, economic and political discourse, but the one sustained account of government is immediately fragmented, part elided, part attributed to a subsequent redactor of the work. This makes Mackenzie's nebulous appeals to 'equality' somewhat halfhearted, but does gesture towards the novel's more enduring affective kernel; namely, its melancholy prescience of the disposability and mortality of the printed word itself. Opening with the discovery of the work proper in a romantic ruin, and marked attention to its decaying incompletion ("no more a history than it is a sermon"), Mackenzie uses what little narrative remains as the mere pretext for a series of transitory written and verbal gestures. These correspond to the unnamed protagonist's retreat to the country, culminating with the doggerel that he finds scrawled on the walls and furniture of an old inn and, finally, the pastoral poetic fragment that he finds carelessly attached to a rustic domestic implement, and which, written at nature's command, and quoted in its entirety, could be taken as a rough prototype for the whole romantic school: "As I talk I have seen her recline/With an aspect so pensively sweet/Tho' I spoke what the shepherds opine/A fop were ashamed to repeat."

If Tristram Shandy's authorial voice subordinated sympathetic to empirical immediacy - the writer, sitting alone in his room, sharing his mistakes and contingencies with the reader - A Sentimental Journey identifies travel literature as the genre in which this dissociation is best taken to its logical and comic conclusion. To this end, Sterne draws upon the travel narrative that constitutes Tristram Shandy's most contiguous, incongruous chapter, to explicate 'immediacy' as a highly associative, if not implicitly materialistic, succession of sensations, incapable of being arranged into anything more than the fragments that constitute this new narrative - or, rather, replace it, achieving the series of pure digressions that Tristram Shandy envisaged and, in the process, suggesting that travel literature is less indebted to the novel's rich genealogy of eccentric 'systems' as to the much wider, more amorphous, canon of half-baked thoughts - let alone provide any kind of sustained or insightful commentary upon people, places or customs, or the philosophical and political speculation that might be expected to result from them. By taking the sentimental traveller to this extremity, Sterne presents him as a figure whose sensations are so intense, atomised and narcissistic that he ultimately sees nothing, subsuming himself into his own armchair readership; a fusion of reader, writer and traveller that is beautifully encapsulated in the same mechanistic approach to the body that characterised Tristram Shandy, but with a heightened attention to the fingers that open the narrative with a direct message from the author, are used as synecdoches for all its major incidents, and culminate with a mistaken clasp in the dark that is sufficiently shocking for the writer to conclude mid-sentence - and, in its original incarnation, to lead the reader's own finger directly to the end-page. If Tristram Shandy was obsessed with the conventions of the page, A Sentimental Journey is obsessed with the conventions of the cover, in each case because they find themselves unable or unwilling to submit to, enjoy, or comprehend them.

The Castle Of Otranto would be underwhelming, were it not for Walpole's delightfully articulate, genuinely modest preface, in which he characterises the work as concisely as any critic; generally, as a gesture of originality, rather than genius and, specifically, as an attempt to fuse the romance tradition with the novel's greater focus on psychological realism, elaborating the reactions of ordinary people to extraordinary events in a way that effectively sets the stage for all subsequent horror literature. To this end, Walpole draws particular attention to his comic use of 'lower' characters - and his invocation of Shakespeare seems less a claim for his own canonicity than a tacit acknowledgment of the inherent theatricality of the work which, organised around five act-like chapters, largely composed of dialogue, and preoccupied with the kinds of spectacles that might render a playhouse incredulous, frequently feels like little more than a script, or transcript, in keeping with Walpole's playful speculations about its origins. For this reason, his transformation of a series of prototypical romantic spaces - the castle, convent, woods, caves - into a Gothic register is more rudimentary than their foundational status might suggest, while his intricate, incestual family drama is a little too mechanical to exploit the logical, tortuous conclusion of feminine 'sympathy' that will subsequently suffuse the genre.

Rameau's Nephew is the most novelistic of Diderot's philosophical dialogues, largely because its sceptical voice - Jean-Francois Rameau ('He'), nephew of the notorious composer, with whom Diderot ('I') enjoys an extended conversation in the Tuileries - is a character, rather than a mouthpiece; or, rather, is imbued with a multifarious, prosopopoeic intensity that transforms every utterance into a nascent narrative, anticipating the dead ends of Jacques The Fatalist. As a result, the various objects of discursion - education, epistemology, aesthetics, commerce - are ultimately subordinated to a rhythmic rehearsal, catharsis and expulsion of the philosophical stance itself, as if the most entertaining defense of Diderot's encyclopedic materialism were a taxonomic reduction of all its opponents to so many behavioural deformities. This may explain the privileged role ascribed to musicology as the culmination of all these argumentative strands - and, more specifically, Rameau's insistence on the replacement of baroque proportions and pedantries with the maxim that "it is the animal cry of passion that should dictate the melodic line...phrases must be short and the meaning self-contained, so that the musician can utilise the whole and every part...turning it all ways like a polyp, without destroying it."

Just as the novel starts to glimpse itself as a legitimate, independent subcategory of literature, Tristram Shandy removes it to the foot of an interminable genealogy of syncretic, interdisciplinary, picaresque "systems", thereby subsuming its privileged mode of individuated, sympathetic immersion into one of collaborative, pseudo-ceremonial, crypto-exposition, and focusing all its attention on those remaining hinges between authorial visibility and invisibility that, in previous and contemporary novels, tend to be relegated to the tactful distance of prefaces, opening chapters, and opening paragraphs. In fact, Sterne's masterpiece is little more than an extended preface, in which Tristram's attempt to tell his life in accordance with Locke's Essay Upon Human Understanding - the most recent and reputable of these systems, along with Don Quixote, and, to a lesser extent, the works of Burton and Rabelais - requires an ever-more expansive, incidental and, above all, retrospective collation of facts, expanding these hinges into the digressions that Sterne considered his most enduring signature, and ensuring that the narrative never progresses beyond the first day of Tristram's life, with the exception of a travel interlude that lays the foundations for A Sentimental Journey. In particular, Sterne's taste for medical speculation translates every "system" into an anatomy, producing a hyperbolic delineation of the most incidental bodily attitudes or positions, and an unprecedented dissection of the material constituents of the book itself, as the various organs that compose the page - ink, typography, formatting, the awareness of preceding and succeeding pages - are isolated and displayed. It feels as if Sterne ultimately wants to place the reader in a position where their body - and especially their eyes - cuckold their brain, just as his proportionate attention to the organic, genealogical character of words themselves perpetually cuckolds any attempt at sustained discourse, whether on his own part or that of his characters; a reduction of epistemology to fortification, and pedagogy to the tabulation of auxiliary verbs.

Rasselas, Prince Of Abissinia explicates wisdom literature as an inherently negative genre, an attempt to curb the excesses of imagination, exhortation and ratiocination, by positioning itself somewhere between poetry, theology and natural philosophy; that is, as a fundamentally unsatisfying genre and, therefore, the most appropriate to evoke - if not systematise, let alone solve - the paradoxical nature of desire, and structural impossibility of its fulfillment. Structuring his rudimentary narrative around his protagonist's escape from a sheltered, "happy valley", in search of the dissatisfaction that will sharpen satisfaction, Johnson ensures that his exquisite descriptions and elaborations of places, people and customs are always curbed or attenuated just when they seem on the verge of the exotic revelations of travel literature. In the same way, the various allegories, examples and lessons encountered on the course of this journey tend to be short, elliptical and inconclusive, while his taste for aphoristic pronouncement is both interrogated ("the emptiness of rhetorical sound and the inefficacy of polished sentences") and only indulged when it is it's own object. The resultant sense of self-referentiality, or redundancy, reflects the financial necessity under which Johnson wrote, and suggests that the final, unusually pointed argument against materialism is more about the materiality of language than of substance; or, alternatively, that the pervasive association of solitude with trauma stems from the former's ability to gradually denaturalise language, as evinced in the episode where Rasselas and his companions encounter an astronomer who has retreated into an insane conversation with the clouds. The latter also gestures towards a trauma peculiar to the individuated, sympathetic immersion of the novel reader, pathologising the entire genre as an instance of the omniscient imagination that turns desire into its own object, and suggesting that Johnson's distinctively anti-imaginative statement should ultimately be read aloud, or in some other collective or ceremonial fashion; or, alternatively, that the childish world of pure wish-fulfillment from which Rasselas flees is that of the emergent novel itself.

Amelia replaces the picaresque realism perfected by Tom Jones with a blueprint for a new, syncretic social realism; a fusion of prose fiction with liberal journalism, parliamentary discursion and legal testimony. At its strongest, this translates Fielding's preoccupation with class mobility into the limited physical mobility of the debtor, as the various constrictions placed upon protagonist Booth meld into a single, twilit antechamber, and his wife Amelia's virtue is condensed to that of an exemplary porter. Similarly, Fielding structures the narrative around a series of losses - of property, virginity, beauty - sets it in motion with a disruptive chain of class signifiers - an equipage, new horses - and, most ingeniously, deflects its central preoccupation - jealousy - from an economic to romantic register, as well as identifying that deflection as the central role of taste, decorum and judgment. Unfortunately, this is paired with a sentimental humorlessness that reduces every character to a cipher - especially Amelia, whose complete self-denial makes her an uneasy fit with a medium predicated on individual autonomy - and approaches the smug moralism and florid, verbose discursion that were so memorably satirised in Shamela, as evinced in the subsumption of 'sensibility' into the more traditionally Christian conceptions of charity, grace and forgiveness. That said, this Christian framework opens up the real possibilities of atheism and materialism, just as the figure of Dr. Murphy - a sustained embodiment of pedantic classicism, incredulity at women's education, and belief in heightened state intervention in religious matters - functions as a kind of limit to Fielding's authorial voice, and possibly motivates his increasing tendency to break off didactics just before they peak.

Peregrine Pickle plays like a far cruder response to Tom Jones' central challenge - to build audience identification with a potentially unsympathetic, or at least not wholly sympathetic, protagonist. However, whereas Fielding builds identification cumulatively, gradually integrating a series of potentially alienating traits and acts into Jones' sympathetic centrality, Smollett builds it cyclically, presenting his hero in alternating states of reprehensibility and heroism, empowerment and abjection, virility and emasulcation, all of which correspond to the various intellectual (ancients and moderns, law and justice) and geographical (England and the Continent, city and country) dichotomies around which the narrative is somewhat simplistically structured. That said, the most basic mechanism of identification - repeatedly making the reader privy to a trick, scheme or strategem which Pickle is playing upon some unsuspecting victim - is also, for the first third, the most profound, insofar as Smollett injects a surplus of cruelty into these acts that pathologises identification itself, imbuing all Pickle's subsequent 'redemptions' with a mild distaste. Unfortunately, these schemes gradually degenerate from a physical to a discursive register, eventually settling into a pale imitation of Fielding's more self-consciously moralistic exposure of affectation. Combined with two interpolated, extensive, and irrelevant 'memoirs', this repetition and attenuation precludes exactly the kind of tight narrative structure required to rein in Smollett's turgid, if delightfully misanthropic, prose style, as will occur in Humphry Clinker. In the end, it feels as if Pickle's 'narrative' is little more than a pretext for Smollett to attack and satirise every eighteenth-century institution - and personage (the proliferation of disguised names making the memoirs especially confusing) - that has offended him, with the result that Fielding's elegant compromise between panoramic and microcosmic registers is frequently subordinated to the latter, generating a tedious, indiscriminate sprawls of legal, political and autobiographical detritus.

Candide epitomises the problematic status of the French philosophical novel. Philosophically, Voltaire's only sustained target is Leibniz's doctrine of optimism - and yet, his inane repetition of the phrase 'the best of all possible worlds' would be sufficient to denaturalise, demystify and ridicule it, without the surrounding narrative apparatus. Similarly, references to other philosophers are fleeting, and tend to be more in the nature of a personal joke; or, more accurately, to present philosophical conversation as little more than a series of jokes, grudges and ambitious rivalry. At the same time, it is difficult to know exactly how the form of Candide is meant to support this systemic assault on philosophers and philosophy. Most basically, it deals with a global quest that, generally, has enlightenment as its object and, specifically, has Leibniz' doctrine to test, its mouthpiece being the eponymous hero's picaresque sidekick. Whether Voltaire means to suggest a similar relation between himself and the philosopher is uncertain, as is the exact extent of his criticisms and jibes at others. In the end, it feels as if his critique is the attempt to create a philosophical picaresque, replacing the heroes of romance with the monoliths of the Enlightenment; or, alternatively, that the supposedly middlebrow beliefs of his contemporaries and progenitors are best expressed through the emergent medium of prose fiction, as evinced in his extraordinary prose style, whose sharp, punchy syntax and punctuation manages to make the most ludicrous cliches sound like a string of propositions, and imbues every position, however unlikely or impossible, with the finality of logical proof.

If the novel emerges as an argument for the affective and physiological power of 'sensibility', then Tom Jones stands as its first fully-fledged incarnation, teasing out the disparity between compassion and identification with an unprecedented rigor and acuity (at least for the medium), and deflecting the class cusp of Joseph Andrews into the vision of a society revolutionised by sympathy, and governed by the importance of marrying for love, to the extent that - at its most radical - love comes to effectively constitute and precede marriage.  Despite Fielding's claim that "I am writing a history, not a system", his most striking aesthetic gesture is the extraordinary systematicity with which this panorama of characters and situations is elaborated, combined with the casual, conversational register within which they are couched, extending to the comically discursive openings of each book, each of which outlines some issue facing the burgeoning novelist. Whereas Joseph Andrews felt pointedly regressive, Tom Jones is self-consciously original, commencing a hypothetical literary lineage, rather than concluding an imaginary one, and presenting the emergent middle-class sensibility as a naturalistic limit ("human nature") towards which its increasingly reticulated typage aspires, rather than a culmination of mock-heroic traditions.

Fully prescient of the erotic novel’s proclivity for “uniformity of expressions and adventures”, Fanny Hill presents sexual intercourse as the logical conclusion of (female) ‘sensibility’, thereby translating the eighteenth-century preoccupation with sympathetic extension into a voyeuristic fascination with the moment at which pain is converted into pleasure, lust into love, and rape into rape-fantasy – most explicity in the fetishistic value placed upon virginity, or at least upon the spectacle of “virgin gore”; most graphically in a scene in which Fanny's buttocks – one of the novel's most exotic topographies, only provisionally charted and colonised – are lashed until they bleed; but perhaps most pervasively in a conjunction of impossibly tight orifices and impossibly large members that renders the final condemnation of sodomy on practical grounds (“it was not in nature to force such immense disproportions”) somewhat disingenuous, insofar as that act simply culinates the book’s whole economy of proto-Sadean torture-pleasure – the "second maidenhead" that Fanny associates with a particularly taxing encounter. In the process, the phallus becomes the pretext for a dizzying array of aesthetic registers – the seat of a physiological aestheticism, or a reclamation of aisthesis from aesthetics: ‘sex for sex’s sake’ – all of which are ultimately subordinated to sublimity (“I found it too true...that objects which affright us, when we cannot get from them, draw our eyes as forcibly as those that please us”), ensuring that Fanny’s most intense experiences tend to reduce her to a cowering, devouring gaze; or, alternatively, conflate oral and ocular registers, perhaps explaining the relative disinterest in the mouth, or at least its transplantation to the subsidiary spectacle of the clitoris, and its own welcoming, hyperbolic gaze, which acts as primary sensory anchor for the rest of the body. It also explains the particular attention paid to Fanny’s position as voyeur – again, culminating with the final, sodomitical spectacle – as well as the ekphrastic ingenuity with which Cleland sets up and differentiates his tableaux, artfully fusing their chivalric, "golden age" symmetries with the carnivalesque squalor with which mutual orgasm temporarily and blissfully obliterates class distinctions, "...as no condition of life is subject to revolutions more than that of a woman of pleasure." 

Roderick Random attempts to extrapolate a social realist aesthetic from the picaresque tradition, with varying degrees of success. The second half, in which Roderick searches for a wealthy wife, is quite close to traditional picaresque, throwing Smollett's primitive narrative structure and characterisation into uncomfortable relief, and forcing the reader to identity with the hyperbolic, idiotic credulity of Roderick's sidekick, Strap. However, the first half, which is more autobiographical, contains three relatively discrete sections that feel more serialistic than primitively episodic, and all capture that "sordid and vicious disposition of the world" that seems to be the cornerstone of Smollett's social realist ambitions. The first describes Roderick's early years, and represents the closest the novel has yet come to a sentimental depiction of childhood, explaining the particular place Smollett had in Dickens' library. That said, this sentimentality is offset by the designation of childhood as the genesis of the revenge ethic that forms the novel's fundamental motivating factor, frequently outpacing love in it's compulsions, and never completely distinguished from gallantry, as will occur in Peregrine Pickle. The second section describes Roderick's arrival in London, and delightfully evokes the voyeuristic fascination of the Scotch with the capital of their recently United Kingdom, as Roderick learns that bribes and favours are the only lubricant for "the snares young people are exposed to daily in this metropolis". The third section describes Roderick's early career as a naval surgeon and, combined with the second, provides an extraordinary elaboration of the diseased, disfigured eighteenth-century body, whether in the form of those panoramas of abject, visceral horror that constitute the novel's most original aesthetic gesture, Smollett's particular taste for olfactory imagery (with the result that the supposedly contemptible captain who insists upon being surrounded with perfume is perhaps not so far from the contemporary reader's requirements), or a pervasive equation of gossip with the spread of (sexually transmitted) disease. All of this is pointedly defined against the more lurid 1740s fascination with death and decay, both by an extended episode in which Roderick encounters one of its most ludicrous embodiments, and, more generally, by Smollett's comic, irreverent, bathetic tone, which is less preoccupied with affected citation (as occurs in Fielding) than abject citation, only invoking the classical corpus to curb pathetic, pedantic squabbles over credit.

Seguing Shamela into the ancillary narrative of Pamela's younger brother, Joseph Andrews attempts to formulate an alternative language from Richardson's to describe the increasingly fluid cusp between "the lower class of the gentry, and the higher of the mercantile world...the worst-bred part of mankind." To some extent, this language is pointedly regressive, fusing the picaresque tradition of the previous century, and the mock-heroic tradition of the previous literary generation, into a sustained attack on vernacular letters, replete with comic misspellings, misquotations and misunderstandings of the classical curriculum. Nevertheless, Fielding simultaneously outlines a more self-consciously original project, purporting to compensate for both Homer's missing comic epic, and the lineage it might have produced, by way of a taxonomy of polite affectations that supervenes the more general satirical imperative; or, rather, transfers it from an economic to an epistemological register. As a result, the most delightful comic sequences are those in which the conventions governing the distribution and recognition of erudition are themselves explicated and rendered idiotic, usually with the aid of the irascible Parson Adams, who accompanies the protagonist on the short country trip that effectively constitutes the narrative - a micro-topography that is thrown into proportionately violent relief, generally as the result of some small discrepancy or disagreement over money that balloons into one of Fielding's trademark plastic, complicated, Hogarthian action sequences.

This delightful parody identifies the reader with Lady Davers, Mrs Jewkes and all the other characters in Richardson's original who express scepticism or incredulity at Pamela's motives. By continuing the fiction of Pamela as a real character - and his own work as a mere collation of letters omitted from her first incarnation - Fielding satirises the credulity of her original readership, while simultaneously undermining it with his comic exaggeration - and separation - of both her and Richardson's authorial voices. On the one hand, Pamela's hyperbolic modesty is translated into a transparent modesty topos, and justified by a series of memorable misspellings and misunderstandings. On the other, Richardson's taste for hysterical moral pronouncements is raised to a hallucinatory pitch, his awkward fusion of epistolary and diarised novel satirised and, above all, his canny ability to cloak voyeurism in moralism undermined, as Fielding paints the central rape scene in a lavish, pornographic register, albeit without quite registering the eloquence with which this cloaking represents the deeper contradictions of the rape-fantasy, rather than the disingenuity of its personification. The result is a profound scepticism about the novel's syncretic tendencies, anticipating the charmingly regressive picaresque of Joseph Andrews.

One of the most original novels of the eighteenth century, Pamela ushers in a new testament of learned letters, fusing the epistolary tradition with an emergent psychological individualism and social realism. The first volume is much stronger than the second, presenting Pamela's literacy as her greatest crime, Mr. B's insistence upon periodically reading her version of events as his greatest act of violation (thereby identifying him with the voyeuristic reader), and the aristocratic institution itself as a perverse, erotic economy, culminating with the proto-Gothic overtones of the remote estate in which Pamela finds herself imprisoned. Unfortunately, the second volume - which witnesses Pamela and Mr. B's somewhat implausible reconciliation - transforms this manual for working-class virtue into a self-consciously old-fashioned aristocratic code of conduct, as Pamela finds her delightful eloquence reduced, successively, to so many idiotic, hyperbolic affirmations of her inferiority; a recurrent, abject stammer; the silence engendered by her secret wedding ceremony (in which Mr. B teaches her to speak with her heart, rather than her mind) and, finally, the nauseating affirmation of female silence upon which the novel concludes, with Mr. B imperiously - and weakly - co-opting the dual roles of poet and essayist; or, alternatively, the role of myopic, misanthropic critic, as if the awkward transition from letters to journal were a mere index of the perverse demands of that particular readership.

This extraordinary work presents a fictionalised account of the 1665 plague, in order to elucidate a series of lessons and recommendations for the resurgence that was anticipated throughout the 1720s. Like The Storm,it construes reportage as the common denominator between the pleasures of narrative and the virtues of empiricism, defending the proliferation of newspapers, magazines and periodicals that arose between the two outbreaks, and offering itself as an exemplary piece of journalism, as much as a straightforward, eyewitness account. Narratively, Defoe presents the plague as protagonist, replete with infernal agency, intentionality and intelligence, thereby supplementing the dramatic, breathless trajectory of its dissemination, and culminating with the extended discussion of its most virulent characteristic; namely, its ability to infect people, and render them contagious, before producing symptoms. Similarly, he centres the book on an extended, instructive parable, in which the various provisions made in the course of a retreat from London conjure up the same affirmation of ingenious self-determination as Robinson Crusoe. Yet these fictive trappings are contained by the constant recourse to statistics and topography, the pervasive scepticism, or at least caution, in dealing with anecdotal sources, and, above all, that descriptive sensibility that distinguishes Defoe from his picaresque successors. From this perspective, the book ultimately feels like a collation of scrupulously researched and selected observations, and its ostensible narrator ("H.W.") little more than the personification of a methodology that encourages "that everything is set down with moderation, and rather within compass, than beyond it." It also ensures that the horror and surrealism of the plague is allowed to speak for itself, instead of being deflected into melodramatic, apocalyptic or enthusiastic flourish; or, alternatively, that its inherent inexpressibility is acknowledged in the simplest - and most honest - terms conceivable: "it is quite impossible to give a true idea of it to those who did not see it, other than this; that is was indeed very, very, very dreadful, and such as no tongue can express"