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Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels by Patricia Meyer Spacks
sherwoodreads's review against another edition
Reread--still holds up.
Original review: What a fun book!
Right at the top of the foreword.
”Desire” has become an indispensable term for late-twentieth-century critics investigating psychological intricacies of narrative. The word suggests the emotional force implicit in the acts of reading and writing fiction; it provides a means of linking the energies of characters within a text to those involved in creating and in responding to that text; it calls attention to latent as well as overt erotic elements in fiction.
I see about four really good panel discussion topics right there.
A bit later:
Samuel Johnson, for instance, appears to consider desire and fiction inextricably linked; he constructs a fable to illustrate the point. Rambler 96 [16 Feb 1751] opens with a discussion of truth: “ Truth is . . . not often welcome for its own sake; it is generally unpleasing because contrary to our wishes and opposite to our practice . . .”
Truth, dressed—like Falsehood—by Desire, becomes Fiction.
She goes on to say that Johnson was ambivalent about fiction, but even so he calls attention to the importance of truth, not realism: truth as an issue in fiction.
Johnson scorns realism—said fiction by its nature made realism impossible. He perceived a strong distinction between truth and verisimilitude.
Spacks then shifts out of idle and hits the freeway: I begin with a working hypothesis: fiction creates and conveys its truth through plot. The dynamic narrative organization of events we call plot engages our desire . . . and controls our comprehension. Modern theorists have explained in various ways the nature of plot. They have paid less attention to its functions—not only its meanings as a component of “art,” but its ways of reflecting “life.”
Desire—male and female versions and values—plot as a reflection of experience—how sub-categories of 18th C fiction are self-defeating, all of these subjects get a thorough tour in this book.
Spacks does give a drive-by to the notion that one of the reasons one cannot really sub-categorize those early novels (saying so-and-so belongs to the epistolary school, and this author belongs to the incoherent plot category, etc) is that so many of them are dialogues, in effect, with one another. Engagement with previous novels has concerned scholars and readers ever since Spenser lobbed the fictional ball back at Ariosto. I first began thinking about this when I encountered Harold Bloom’s odd, almost Chicken Littleish The Anxiety of Influence.
But Spacks is focusing . . . “specifically to indicate ways of reading 18th century works with the perspective of twentieth-century assumptions, in search of the truth they tell us.”
Along the way we get delights like the quote from Godwin that makes it clear he was the first “deconstructionist” (It seems that the impression we derive from a book depends much less upon its real contents than upon the temper of mind and preparation with which we read it), we see how important Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (certainly influenced Jane Austen)--we see that, particularly at the far end of the century, women novelists especially may seem to be paying lip-service to bourgeois values but are actually engaging in some fairly subversive thought experiments on relations between men and women, between family members, and between those making up the social fabric.
Spacks includes female as well as the usual male suspects (Fielding, Richardson, Scott) in examining how plot is used for cultural criticism and to experiment with notions of cultural change.
Original review: What a fun book!
Right at the top of the foreword.
”Desire” has become an indispensable term for late-twentieth-century critics investigating psychological intricacies of narrative. The word suggests the emotional force implicit in the acts of reading and writing fiction; it provides a means of linking the energies of characters within a text to those involved in creating and in responding to that text; it calls attention to latent as well as overt erotic elements in fiction.
I see about four really good panel discussion topics right there.
A bit later:
Samuel Johnson, for instance, appears to consider desire and fiction inextricably linked; he constructs a fable to illustrate the point. Rambler 96 [16 Feb 1751] opens with a discussion of truth: “ Truth is . . . not often welcome for its own sake; it is generally unpleasing because contrary to our wishes and opposite to our practice . . .”
Truth, dressed—like Falsehood—by Desire, becomes Fiction.
She goes on to say that Johnson was ambivalent about fiction, but even so he calls attention to the importance of truth, not realism: truth as an issue in fiction.
Johnson scorns realism—said fiction by its nature made realism impossible. He perceived a strong distinction between truth and verisimilitude.
Spacks then shifts out of idle and hits the freeway: I begin with a working hypothesis: fiction creates and conveys its truth through plot. The dynamic narrative organization of events we call plot engages our desire . . . and controls our comprehension. Modern theorists have explained in various ways the nature of plot. They have paid less attention to its functions—not only its meanings as a component of “art,” but its ways of reflecting “life.”
Desire—male and female versions and values—plot as a reflection of experience—how sub-categories of 18th C fiction are self-defeating, all of these subjects get a thorough tour in this book.
Spacks does give a drive-by to the notion that one of the reasons one cannot really sub-categorize those early novels (saying so-and-so belongs to the epistolary school, and this author belongs to the incoherent plot category, etc) is that so many of them are dialogues, in effect, with one another. Engagement with previous novels has concerned scholars and readers ever since Spenser lobbed the fictional ball back at Ariosto. I first began thinking about this when I encountered Harold Bloom’s odd, almost Chicken Littleish The Anxiety of Influence.
But Spacks is focusing . . . “specifically to indicate ways of reading 18th century works with the perspective of twentieth-century assumptions, in search of the truth they tell us.”
Along the way we get delights like the quote from Godwin that makes it clear he was the first “deconstructionist” (It seems that the impression we derive from a book depends much less upon its real contents than upon the temper of mind and preparation with which we read it), we see how important Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (certainly influenced Jane Austen)--we see that, particularly at the far end of the century, women novelists especially may seem to be paying lip-service to bourgeois values but are actually engaging in some fairly subversive thought experiments on relations between men and women, between family members, and between those making up the social fabric.
Spacks includes female as well as the usual male suspects (Fielding, Richardson, Scott) in examining how plot is used for cultural criticism and to experiment with notions of cultural change.