eighteenth-century novel and the nineteenth-century novel, from the genre's rise to its triumph (in conventional terms), from a society organized by custom and tradition to one organized around the individual subject's development, from outside to inside. This transitional function cannot in itself explain Austen's appeal, but her position in literary history as great innovator and her position in the canon as great novelist are related; discussions of the former inevitably seem to end up as discussions of the latter. For Watt, because Austen has a foot in the psychological world of Richardson and a foot in the sociological world of Fielding she is uniquely capable of negotiating that most fundamental contradiction of novelistic discourse, between subjectivity and objectivity, between the individual subject position and collectivity. Despite the increasing transparency of her narrative, and its increasingly subjective form, Austen retains an authoritative narrative voice that checks the subjectivity of her protagonists.
The most famous discussion of Austen's narrative virtuosity and its perfect harmony between exteriority and interiority is Wayne Booth's analysis of Emma. In The Rhetoric of Fiction, Booth emphasizes the ironic distance the narrator has to maintain in order to ensure the reader's sympathy with Emma despite her many faults, and Austen achieves this by using 'the heroine herself as a kind of -296- narrator.' Seen entirely from the outside, Emma would be distasteful; but seen from the inside she can be comically sympathetic, for we can see through all her self- deception. But despite the sympathy, we long for her reform, because of the reliable narrator who establishes the social norm: 'her most important role is to reinforce both aspects of the double vision that operates throughout the book: our inside view of Emma's worth and our objective view of her great faults.' In a passage of profound admiration, Booth concludes that Austen's combination of transparency and authority produces human truth and perfection:
When we read this novel, we accept her [' Jane Austen' or the narrator] as representing everything we admire most… She is, in short, a perfect human being, within the concept of perfection established by the book she writes; she even recognizes that human perfection of the kind she exemplifies is not quite attainable in real life… The «omniscience» is thus a much more remarkable thing than is ordinarily implied by the term. All good novelists know all about their characters-all that they need to know. And the question of how their narrators are to find out all that they need to know, the question of 'authority,' is a relatively simple one. The real choice is much more profound than this would imply. It is a choice of the moral, not merely the technical, angle of vision from which the story is to be told.
The object of admiration here has come a long way from free indirect discourse, for it is no longer Austen's representation but her interpretation, not her showing of the world but her judgment of it. What is being celebrated is a specific vision of order, authority, and judgment, and what is not fully acknowledged is the historical specificity of that order, authority, and judgment. Austen represents the world as it ought to be, but we have to add that what we mean by this is the way one individual may have wanted it to be in 1816. In equating this one vision with perfection, we negate or occlude the historical tendrils that root a text in its time. These tendrils include assumptions about class, gender, and sexuality-a whole set of assumptions that we may no longer find appropriate in deciding what makes one indvidual better than another.
Marilyn Butler makes the argument about Austen's connection between character and morality from a historical perspective, seeing Austen as a conservative opponent to Romanticism and the French Revolution: 'Where the heroine is fallible, the novel as a whole can be said to enact the conservative case; where the heroine is exemplary, she models it.' This is a reasonable argument, but on the level of form it is
-297- exactly backward, because whatever the personal politics of the novelist, the novel as such cannot enact the conservative case. Produced by the Enlightenment, novelistic discourse enacts the liberal dilemma: preserving individual freedom-not so much protecting it from the tyranny of a despotic state as preventing it from encroaching on the individual freedoms of others. The essential tension of novelistic discourse-between the individual and the collective-is always resolved by or collapsed into subjectivity because the novel explains the social by way of the individual-as Lukács argues, the world is but a frame to situate the individual: 'The novel tells of the adventure of interiority; the content of the novel is the story of the soul that goes to find itself, that seeks adventures in order to be proved and tested by them, and by proving itself, to find its own essence.' Austen's novels are no different in this respect, for each assumes the outward form of a biography of a problematic individual-'The development of man is still the thread upon which the whole world of the novel is strung'-but they are among the last to retain an authoritative narrator who assumes the collective voice of judgment with its inevitable irony. Despite their separate and individual protagonists, Austen's novels evoke a powerful nostalgia for a past when collective judgment perhaps seemed possible and desirable. But it is not simply the keenness of judgment that readers find so appealing in Austen's novels; it is rather the sense of balance between the individual and the social. Austen's innovations in narrative technique enable a dialectic between interiority and exteriority, individual and collective; her novels present the illusion of perfect balance, negotiating the fundamental social contradiction of her time, and not coincidentally of the novel itself.
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Walter Scott: Narrative, History, Synthesis
ONE of the great comic moments in eighteenth-century fiction occurs in the early chapters of Samuel Richardson's last novel, Sir Charles Grandison. Delivered a wrathful carte from the double-dyed villain from whom he rescued a lady in peril, the double-dyed hero responds tranquilly, yes, I'll meet him-for breakfast.
We don't usually think of Sir Charles Grandison as a comedian, far less an ironist. Yet he is in fact quite aware that his disruption of the approved code for settling things, establishing Right by Might Between Men, will stop the breath of all hearers somewhere between laughter and horror. Lest the laughter dismantle his manhood and shake his domestic authority, Sir Charles hastens to add that he will wear his sword to that breakfast-undrawn, loosened, for defense only. He modestly indicates that in the past his sword, when sanctioned by its defensive role only, has bested all comers.
Commenting two generations later on his key predecessor, Walter Scott noted that readers could not identify with Richardson's prudent paragon because the novelist had endowed him with such unvarying firmness of character and perfection of education, rooted in such absolute worldly and familial security, that his revolutionary refusals had no force. In the thousand pages of his existence Sir Charles's major actions are always to waive action, to hang fire-while his rakish and stupid father sets up a mistress, tyrannizes his daughters, and wastes the estate; while the macho young aristocrats of two continents challenge him to duels; while the dark lady and the fair lady who each have his affections await his determining move. History lies sleeping around -300- him, offering no
