themselves wiser than their parents and guardians, whom they -2- treat with contempt and ridicule.' Hortensius indicts novels for transforming the cultural function of reading from providing solid moral nourishment to catering to exotic tastes; from preparing a woman for the ordinary rational address of a plain good man to leading her to expect a proposal from a hero out of romance; and from reinforcing reliance upon parents and guardians to promoting a belief in the subject's autonomy. Taken together, novels have disfigured the reader's body: the taste, passions, and judgment of stomach, heart, and mind. Here, as so often in the polemics that surround novels, the reader is characterized as a susceptible female whose moral life is at risk. By strong implication, she is most responsible for transmitting the virus of novel reading.
From the vantage point of the late twentieth century, and after nearly nine decades of film and five of television, the alarm provoked by novel reading may seem hyperbolic or even quaint. But a condescendingly modernist «pro-pleasure» position renders the alarm with novel reading, and its effects on early modern culture, unintelligible. Though it is difficult to credit the specific object of the alarm of the eighteenthcentury critics of novels-after all, we recommend to students some of the very novels these early modern critics inveighed against- given our current anxieties about the cultural effects of slasher films, rap music, MTV, and soap operas, it seems contradictory to dismiss those who worried about the effects of novels when they were new. But there are fundamental obstacles to deciphering the eighteenth century's anxious discourse on the pleasures of novels. After psychoanalysis, most concede the difficulty of knowing why one experiences pleasure; it is even more difficult to define the content or cause of the pleasure of eighteenth-century novel readers. However, we can trace certain clear effects of the campaign against these unlicensed pleasures. First, cultural critics sketched the profile of the culture-destroying pleasure seeker who haunts the modern era: the obsessive, unrestrained, closeted consumer of fantasy. Then, novelists like Richardson and Fielding, accepting the cogency of this critique, developed replacement fictions as a cure for the novel-addicted reader. In doing so, they aimed to deflect and reform, improve and justify the pleasures of a new species of elevated novel.
Since Plato's attack on the poets, philosophers and cultural critics had worried the effects of an audience's absorption in fictional entertainment. During the early eighteenth century the market gave this old cul -3- tural issue new urgency. Although there had been a trade in books for centuries, several developments gave the circulation of novels unprecedented cultural force. At a time when state censorship in England was subsiding and technological advances were making all printed matter more affordable, the market in printed books offered a site for the production and consumption of a very broad spectrum of entertainment. Published anonymously, or by parvenu authors supported by no patron of rank, novels appeared as anonymous and irresponsible creations, conceived with only one guiding intention: to pander to any desire that would produce a sale. Novels not only violated the spirit of seriousness expected of readers of books like The Pilgrim's Progress or Paradise Lost; they made no pretense to making any lasting contribution to culture. Novels were the first «disposable» books, written in anticipation of their own obsolescence and in acceptance of their own transient function as part of a culture of serial entertainments. Although only a small part of print culture in the early decades of the eighteenth century, novels appear to have been the most high-profile, fashionable, and fast-moving segment of the market. The vogue for novels helped to constitute a market culture-in the modern sense of commodities for purchase by the individual. In short, novels desanctified the book. Little wonder that novels were figured as an uncontrollable menace to culture.
Many of the vices attributed to the novel are also characteristics of the market: both breed imitation, gratify desire, and are oblivious to their moral effects. The market appears as a machine evidencing an uncanny automatism. Once they had become 'the thing,' nothing could stop novels on the market. In critiquing novels, cultural critics deplored the market's powerful, autonomous effect upon culture. Coventry's description of the imitations provoked by the success of Fielding's novels develops a general rule about success and emulation in a market-driven culture: 'It is very certain, that whenever any thing new, of what kind soever, is started by one man, and appears with great success in the world, it quickly produces several in the same taste.' Producers for the market have become mere factors of the market. Using the by now clichéd terms for describing the Grub Street hacks, Clara Reeve emphasizes how the accelerating multiplicity of novels complicates her own efforts at the classification and criticism of romances and novels. Rampant production also allows bad imitations to proliferate and engenders new institutions to deliver novels indiscriminately into the hands of every reader: 'The press groaned under the weight of Novels, which sprung up like mush -4- rooms every year… [Novels] did but now begin to increase upon us, but ten years more multiplied them tenfold. Every work of merit produced a swarm of imitators, till they became a public evil, and the institution of Circulating libraries, conveyed them in the cheapest manner to every bodies hand.' An uncontrolled multiplicity threatens to metastasize culture. For the scholar surveying the production of many ages, the market has the effect of blurring the distinctness and expressive readability of culture. Thus in his
If, according to a formula developed in the writings of the French cultural critic Michel Foucault, power operates less by repressing or censoring than by producing new 'reality,' new 'domains of objects and rituals of truth,' then the success of novels on the market changed culture by producing a need to read. Clara Reeve describes this newly incited desire: 'People must read something, they cannot always be engaged by dry disquisitions, the mind requires some amusement.' Between uncritical surrender to novel reading and a wholesale rejection of novels in favor of «serious» reading, Richardson and Fielding traced a third pathway for the novel. In Reeve's words, the strategy was to 'write an antidote to the bad effects' of novels 'under the disguise' of being novels. This requires a cunning pharmacology. When Lady Echlin, Richardson's most morally exacting correspondent, warns that 'the best instruction you can give, blended with love intrigue, will never answer your good intention,' Richardson replies with a celebrated reformulation of the old demand that art should both amuse and instruct: 'Instruction, Madam, is the Pill; Amusement is the Gilding. Writings that do not touch the Passions of the Light and Airy, will hardly ever reach the heart.' Coventry describes the manner in which Fielding, 'who sees all the little movements by which human nature is actuated,' intervenes in the market for novels. 'The disease became epidemical, but there were no hopes of a cure, 'till Mr. Fielding endeavour'd to show the World, that pure Nature could furnish out as agreeable entertainment, as those airy non-entical forms they had long ador'd, and persuaded the ladies to leave this extravagance to their Abi -5- gails with their cast cloaths.' Thus the «disease» of romance, associated with the craze for new fashions, can be «cured» only by cutting new paths toward pleasure. Then the old novels, with their corrupting pleasures, can be passed on, along with old dresses, to the lady's servant.
It is beyond the scope of this chapter to give a detailed account of how the popularity of the «histories» published by Richardson and Fielding in the 1740s effected an upward revaluation of the novel in Britain. However, the key elements of their successful strategy are implicit in the metaphors of the antidote, the vaccine, and the gilded pill. First, a broad spectrum of earlier writings-romances, novellas, and secret histories written on the Continent and in Britain-are characterized as essentially equivalent. Deemed licentious, fantasy-ridden, and debased, they are decried as a cultural disease. Next, Richardson and Fielding produce substitute fictions to absorb the reader. Although Richardson and Fielding wrote antinovels, they didn't write nonnovels. Just as a vaccine can achieve its antidotal function only by introducing a mild form of a disease into the body of the patient, their novels incorporated many elements of the dangerous old novels of Behn, Manley, and Haywood into this 'new species' of fiction. By including improving discourse familiar from conduct books, spiritual autobiography, and the periodical essay, the «histories» of Richardson and Fielding could appear radically 'new.'
Cervantes'
