The Novel

by Steven Moore

Well, not quite that new: like Dunton’s Voyage round the World, the narrator begins ab ovo on the day Camillo was conceived—“the 14th of August, 1685, a year memorable for the defeat of the Monmouth Rebellion” (15)—starting when he was still semen “in his father’s custody.” The narrator devotes the next eight pages to Camillo’s prenatal adventures as an animalcule, supplemented by two footnote-essays on obstetrics that the author plagiarized from Ephraim Chambers’s famous Cyclopædia (1728), the same source Sterne drew upon for his descriptions of Tristram Shandy’s embryonic days.211 Per the old belief that a pregnant woman transmits psychological qualities to her fetus, unborn Camillo develops timidity after his mother watches the execution of the Duke of Monmouth, and develops an obsession with vulvae after his mother looks longingly on that of a bed companion. The latter manifests itself as early as age 10, when Camillo looks up the skirt of his cherry-picking sister, and then at age 13 when he views and attempts to enter that of his cousin Maria, bloodying his penis somehow during a failed fornication, which inspires a three-page footnote on the properties of the hymen, supported with anthropological data from Peru and “the Indian nations of Carolina” (46n).

  At age 17, Camillo leaves for London to begin a grand tour of Europe, but instead his lascivious “governor” leads him on a grand tour of London’s brothels, including a raunchy strip club where Camillo watches a troupe of “posture girls” disrobe, climb atop a table, and assume obscene postures for their male customers, but nothing more. As Camillo gawks at the vulvae on view, that of one of the girls stands out: “The throne of love was covered with jet-black hair at least a quarter of a yard long, which she artfully spread asunder to display the entrance into the magic grotto” (131). One of them, “who seemed to be a girl of uncommon genius” (and perhaps the one with the uncommon pubic locks), tells the story of how she became a stripper, but insists she remains a virtuous person, for she doesn’t have sex with her customers. As in Fanny Hill, virtue is redefined here as integrity and self-respect, and the fact she makes a living posing in the nude is irrelevant. She stands (or undulates) in marked contrast to the novel’s other (clothed) women, most of whom are respectable on the outside but dissolute within; as Vivien Jones notes, the posture girl “makes a clear distinction between a moral self and the performing body. . . . The rakes respect the girl’s professional autonomy, and leave her to look for conventional prostitutes” (138–39). Camillo pursues various intrigues over the next few years, often involving masquerades and disguises, to which the annotator adds humorless, essayistic footnotes on philosophical and moral issues raised by Camillo’s hare-brained skirt-chasing.212 Near the end, Camillo reunites with his cousin Maria, now married, though that doesn’t prevent them from finally consummating their earlier love; but just when the author seems to be leading to a sentimental conclusion, we’re told Maria gets syphilis from her childhood admirer, which she passes on to her husband. Mocking those novels in which women marry former rakes, the author concludes instead with a scene in which a crossdressing woman whom Camillo had seduced and abandoned earlier tricks him into marrying her.

  Like Cleland, the erudite author often makes what appear to be allusions to La Mattrie’s Machine Man and dares to explore moral issues in what most would consider an immoral format. In this regard, both Fanny Hill and The History of the Human Heart resemble the French libertine novels of the 1740s by Crébillon, Duclos, d’Argens, and Diderot. Of the two English novels, The History of the Human Heart contains more sexual realism, though far fewer sex scenes, but it fell between the stools of reader expectations—too literary for the porn crowd, too explicit for the literati—and consequently, unlike its unforgettable posture girl, it never received the respect it deserves.

  The greatest English novel of the 1740s, and one of the greatest of all time, is The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749). Fielding followed Joseph Andrews with two short novels published in 1743—a one-note satire on “greatness” entitled Jonathan Wild and a visionary Journey from This World to the Next—and even wrote a novelette about a lesbian transvestite called The Female Heart (1746). But with Tom Jones he set out to write the definitive “comic epic in prose,” or as he calls it here, a “heroic, historical, prosaic poem” (4.1). It’s important to take Fielding at his word: Tom Jones is a comic epic in the tradition of Butler’s Hudibras (which is cited several times) and the hypothetical Margites mentioned in Joseph Andrews, not a realistic novel in the tradition of Moll Flanders or Roderick Random. It has realistic elements, to be sure, but unless one grasps that Fielding is updating the old genre of mock epic, not contributing to the newfangled one of the realist novel, one is liable to misjudge and denigrate its events as “the manipulated sequences of literature rather than the ordinary processes of life . . . somewhat at variance both with the dictates of formal realism and with the life of his time” (Watt, 253). Tom Jones is a work of art, not a slice of life, and Fielding’s “manipulation” of literary topoi is what makes it a masterpiece.

  In the previous chapter, I described Li Ruzhen’s Flowers in the Mirror as “a farewell party for the classic Chinese novel, one final blow-out commemorating all its characteristic features,” and that’s how Tom Jones can be read. Its story elements are not original but recapitulate those from classic Western literature: like Oedipus, Tom Jones is a foundling, and later will be told that he slept with this mother; like Amadis de Gaul, he is an upper-class bastard; like Adam in the beginning of Genesis, he is expelled from paradise by his adoptive father—Thomas Allworthy of Paradise Hall (Fielding isn’t subtle)—and like Esau later in Genesis, he has a sneaky brother named Blifil who tries to deprive him of his heritage; like Ulysses, Jones is a wanderer (the title page contains a quote from Homer’s Odyssey that translates “he saw the customs of many men”), and again like Oedipus and generations of later philosophical seekers, Jones’ ultimate goal is Western wisdom, which is the literal meaning of the name Sophia Western, the girl he joneses for; like Don Quixote, he has a comic sidekick (a man named Partridge who is said to be his father) and attends a puppet show; like Destiny in Scarron’s Comic Novel (a major influence), Jones gets into embarrassing situations in inns; like the hero of La Calprenède’s Cassandra, his excessive praise of Sophia “would have become the mouth of Oroondates himself” (16.9); and like thousands of couples in thousands of novels from Heliodorus’s Ethiopian Story on, Jones and Sophia face the usual hazards (perceived class differences, tyrannical fathers, romantic misunderstandings, rivals and enemies), which will keep things interesting until the eventual marriage at the end. Though the bulk of the novel is set in 1745 and refers to current events, Fielding was less interested in depicting “the ordinary processes of life” than in constructing an interactive theme park devoted to the extraordinary plots, characters, and themes of Western literature.

  Tom Jones reads like a rambling tale with self-indulgent digressions until one reaches the end and realizes how tightly constructed the novel is. Critic Frederick W. Hilles once drafted this helpful blueprint for Fielding’s theme park:213

  The first edition of Tom Jones was issued in six small volumes that drew attention to its structure in a way that modern one-volume editions don’t. Note how the novel is bookended by the story of Jones’s birth: book 1 gives out the false account that he is the by-blow of a local girl named Jenny Jones and his future companion, Mr. Partridge, while in the final book we are given the true explanation. Note the mathematical placement of the three women who temporarily seduce Jones away from Sophia. (And it’s important to note that he’s not a rake, just a normal guy who can’t say no when a woman throws herself at him; as he tells Sophia near the end, “The delicacy of your sex cannot conceive the grossness of ours, nor how little one sort of amour has to do with the heart” [18.12].) Note the balanced placement of the two interpolated tales (inserted per romance-genre convention): the first is related by a disappointed hermit called “The Man of the Hill” to Jones, the second by a disappointed wife named Mrs. Fitzpatr
ick to Sophia, both tales intended to warn the youngsters of the disappointments ahead in the adult world. Note the central location of the farcical events at the inn at Upton, where Sophia learns that Jones is in bed with another woman (his alleged mother), the central betrayal that delays their eventual union. Note the precise mirror-imaging of certain events, such as Sophia’s pursuit of Jones in book 7 and Jones’s pursuit of her in book 12. Real life doesn’t have this high degree of organization, but literature does, and as Fielding manipulates most of literature’s topoi into one ingenious masterplot, he also gives a master-class demonstration of how to write a novel worthy of the name literature.

  For many readers, the least appealing parts of Tom Jones are the prefatory chapters to each of its 18 books. “Skip the first chapter of each book during your first read,” one yahoo on Amazon.com adviced, “it probably won’t be on the test and it’s always just Henry’s latest blog on his most recent rant.” But a recognition of their role is essential to a full understanding of Fielding’s purpose and the historical significance of Tom Jones. Like many novelists of the early modern period, Fielding frequently cites Horace’s Ars Poetica; just as the Roman poet updated the Greek Aristotle’s Poetics for his age, Fielding is updating Horace for the 18th century, a time when the novel was still working its way up from lowbrow entertainment to highbrow art. In 1934, Richard Blackmur assembled the 18 prefaces Henry James wrote for the New York Edition of his collected fiction and published them as a book entitled The Art of the Novel; the 18 prefaces in Tom Jones could be published together under the same title. In them Fielding not only explains what he’s doing in his novel and why, but also provides an Ars Poetica for future novelists and, just as important, for readers of novels.

  He begins by explaining there are two types of authors—those who write for themselves (and hope others will appreciate them), and those who write for others—and that the excellence of a novel “consists less in the subject than in the author’s skill in well dressing it up” (1.1). He goes on to insist novelists can make up their own rules, especially when (like Fielding) they are founding “a new province of writing” (2.1); to insist on reader participation, filling in those things the author shouldn’t have to explain: he gives two examples for “readers of the lowest class. Much higher and harder exercises of judgment and penetration may reasonably be expected from the upper graduates in criticism” (3.1); to insist “every book ought to be read with the same spirit, and in the same manner, as it is writ,” and that “similes, descriptions, and other kind of poetical embellishments” are useful to refresh the mind and alert the reader to the entrance of major characters (4.1); to argue that the “dogmatical rules” of old-fashioned critics can be ignored by the modern novelist, because over time, “The laws of writing were no longer founded on the practice of the author, but on the dictates of the critic. . . . For these critics, being men of shallow capacities, very easily mistook mere form for substance. They acted as a judge would who should adhere to the lifeless letter of the law, and reject the spirit” (5.1);214 to suggest that if the reader, like some philosophers, doesn’t believe in love, then you should stop here rather “than to throw away any more of your time in reading what you can neither taste not comprehend” (6.1); that the reading public is like a theater audience in an 18th-century playhouse—the rabble up in the gallery, the educated in the pit below, and the inattentive elite in the private boxes—and that one shouldn’t condemn a play (or novel) for one bad scene or one miscast character (7.1); that novelists should avoid the marvelous and keep within “the bounds of probability”—though that doesn’t mean “his characters or his incidents should be trite, common, or vulgar”—and that characters should remain consistent (8.1); and he insists that only those capable of writing reflective, learned prefaces like these can produce “true and genuine” novels, while those who can only write the narrative parts of novels are peddling what is “false and counterfeit,” and are the ones who have given novels a bad name. The true novelist needs to possess genius, both book smarts and street smarts, and empathy (9.1).

  At the halfway point of the novel, Fielding warns readers and critics “not too hastily to condemn any of the incidents in this our history as impertinent and foreign to our main design because thou dost not immediately conceive in what manner such incident may conduce to that design” (my italics), nor “to condemn a character as a bad one because it is not a perfectly good one.” Surely alluding to Clarissa (some of which Fielding read in manuscript), he goes on to say, “If thou dost delight in these models of perfection, there are books enow written to gratify thy taste” (10.1).215 He chastises snarky book reviewers, especially those who slander and insult an author (11.1); discusses literary allusions versus plagiarism (12.1); playfully evokes the help of the muses for the final 6 books of his novel and reiterates the qualifications of a true novelist, especially a wide knowledge of human nature (13.1); expands on the novelist’s need for learning, not just genius and style (14.1); argues that taking the path of virtue is not, contrary to most teachings and novels, necessarily the “road to happiness” (15.1); enumerates the “emoluments” of prefaces, like these (16.1); elicits sympathy for the challenge novelists face resolving narrative complications, especially since they lack the advantage ancient writers had of deus ex machina solutions (17.1); and explains the need for the novelist to stick to “plain narrative” and to avoid “ludicrous observations” when writing the final chapters of a novel (18.1).

  These prefaces suggest that for select readers—those in the pit, not in the gallery or boxes—the real protagonist is not Tom Jones but Henry Fielding. This is especially apparent in the preface to book 17, when a concatenation of catastrophes has landed Jones in prison and the narrator pretends to sweat at the mess he’s created. Those in the peanut gallery wonder how Jones will get out, while those of us in the pit wonder how the author will get him out, never losing sight of the puppet-master manipulating the show. The resolution of the masterful plot is rightly heralded as one of the greatest feats in narrativity, making Fielding the true hero of this history: Jones is merely the eye-candy assistant a magician employs to distract us while he works his magic. The handsome foundling is a rather bland romantic hero—aside from his sexual imprudence, he’s “too good,” as a minor character tells him near the end (18.11)—and Sophia Western is merely a paper doll cut from the same pattern-book as earlier romantic heroines. Her fox-hunting father is a riot, but Allworthy is also a little too good to be true. Partridge is no Sancho Panza, and the rest of the large cast are stage-types rather than rounded characters (which is fine for a mock epic). The narrator is the one who steals the show, and he doesn’t confine himself to those prefatory chapters. Like a magician talking an audience through the performance of a trick, the narrator addresses the reader throughout the novel, sometimes chummily:

  Reader, take care, I have unadvisedly led thee to the top of as high a hill as Mr. Allworthy’s, and how to get thee down without breaking thy neck, I do not well know. However, let us e’en venture to slide down together, for Miss Bridget rings her bell, and Mr. Allworthy is summoned to breakfast, where I must attend and, if you please, shall be glad of your company. (1.4)

  sometimes apologetically:

  Before I proceed farther, I shall beg leave to obviate some misconstructions into which the zeal of some few readers may have led them, for I would not willingly give offence to any, especially to men who are warm in the cause of virtue or religion. (3.4)216

  sometimes belligerently:

  For the reader is greatly mistaken if he imagines that [Parson] Thwackum appeared to Mr. Allworthy in the same light as he doth to him in this history; and he is much deceived if he imagines that the most intimate acquaintance which he himself could have had with that divine would have informed him of those things which we, from our inspiration, are enabled to open and discover. Of readers who from such conceits as these condemn the wisdom or penetration of Mr. Allworthy, I shall not scruple to say
that they make a very bad and ungrateful use of that knowledge which we have communicated to them. (3.5)

  and sometimes encouragingly:

  And now, reader, as we are in haste to attend our heroine, we will leave to thy sagacity to apply all this to the Bœotian [dimwitted] writers and to those authors who are their opposites. This thou wilt be abundantly able to perform without our aid. Bestir thyself therefore on this occasion, for tho’ we will always lend thee proper assistance in difficult places—as we do not, like some others, expect thee to use the arts of divination to discover our meaning—yet we shall not indulge thy laziness where nothing but thy own attention is required; for thou art highly mistaken if thou dost imagine that we intended, when we began this great work, to leave thy sagacity nothing to do; or that, without sometimes exercising this talent, thou wilt be able to travel through our pages with any pleasure or profit to thyself. (11.9)

  This last one is especially important: among other things, Tom Jones is a tutorial on how to read great literature, which—unlike not-so-great entertainment—requires a certain amount of work on the reader’s part, a willingness to actively participate in constructing the novel’s meaning rather than an expectation to be passively spoon-fed. The prefatory chapter to book 3 is especially insistent on this point, where the narrator flatters the reader by occasionally leaving some matters unsaid in order to give him “an opportunity of employing that wonderful sagacity of which he is master, by filling up those vacant spaces of time with his own conjectures, for which purpose we have taken care to qualify him in the preceding pages” (3.1). The reader’s conjectures should be based on information provided “in the preceding pages,” and if the reader ignores or misinterprets that information, the narrator will rap his knuckles as in the belligerent passage quoted above. Superior novels require superior readers, and in his numerous asides (I’ve quoted only a fraction), Fielding teaches us how to become such readers.