The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740

By Michael McKeon

“This may well be the most important study of the development of prose fiction in England since Ian Watt’s classic Rise of the Novel, on which it builds.” —Library Journal

The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, combines historical analysis and readings of extraordinarily diverse texts to reconceive the foundations of the dominant genre of the modern era. Now, on the fifteenth anniversary of its initial publication, The Origins of the English Novel stands as essential reading. The anniversary edition features a new introduction in which the author reflects on the considerable response and commentary the book has attracted since its publication by describing dialectical method and by applying it to early modern notions of gender.

Challenging prevailing theories that tie the origins of the novel to the ascendancy of “realism” and the “middle class,” McKeon argues that this new genre arose in response to the profound instability of literary and social categories. Between 1600 and 1740, momentous changes took place in European attitudes toward truth in narrative and toward virtue in the individual and the social order. The novel emerged, McKeon contends, as a cultural instrument designed to engage the epistemological and social crises of the age.

“This book is a formidable attempt to articulate issues of almost imponderable centrality for modern life and literature. McKeon proposes with quite breathtaking ambition and considerable intellectual flourish to redefine the novel’s key role in those immense cultural transformations that produce the modern world.” —Studies in the Novel

“A magisterial work of history and analysis.” —Arts and Letters

“A powerful and solid work that will dominate discussion of its subject for a long time to come.” —The New York Review of Books

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 13, 2003
• ISBN: 9780801877995

Book preview

THE ORIGINS OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL, 1600–1740

FIFTEENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION, WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR

THE ORIGINS OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 1600–1740

MICHAEL MCKEON

THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS

Baltimore and London

This book has been brought to publication with the generous assistance of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

© 1987, 2002 The Johns Hopkins University Press

All rights reserved. Published 2002

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Originally published, 1987

Johns Hopkins Paperbacks edition, 1988

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

The Johns Hopkins University Press

2715 North Charles Street

Baltimore, Maryland 21218–4319

www.press.jhu.edu

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

McKeon, Michael, 1943–

The origins of the English novel, 1600–1740 / Michael McKeon; with a new introduction by the author.—15th anniversary ed.

p.  cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0–8018-6995–1 (alk. paper)—ISBN 0–8018-6959–5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. English fiction—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism.

2. English fiction—18th century—History and criticism. I. Title.

PR841 .M3 2002

823.009—dc21      2002016072

To Muriel, Peter, and Richard

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction to the Fifteenth Anniversary Edition

Introduction: Dialectical Method in Literary History

PART I  QUESTIONS OF TRUTH

Chapter One  The Destabilization of Generic Categories

1  Romance as a Simple Abstraction

2  Precursor Revolutions: The Greek Enlightenment

3  Precursor Revolutions: The Twelfth-Century Renaissance

4  Historicism and the Historical Revolution

5  The Claim to Historicity

6  Naive Empiricism and Extreme Skepticism

7  Romance, Antiromance, True History

Chapter Two  The Evidence of the Senses: Secularization and Epistemological Crisis

1  The Contradictory Unity of the New Philosophy

2  Natural History as a Narrative Model

3  Religion versus Science and the Problem of Mediation

4  The Literalizing of Revelation

5  Apparition Narratives

Chapter Three  Histories of the Individual

1  From Saint’s Life to Spiritual Biography

2  From Picaresque to Criminal Biography

3  From Christian Pilgrimage to Scientific Travel

4  The Empirical Style Becomes Problematic

5  The Emergence of Extreme Skepticism

6  Toward Realism, the Aesthetic, and Human Creativity

PART II  QUESTIONS OF VIRTUE

Chapter Four  The Destabilization of Social Categories

1  Aristocratic Ideology

2  Precursor Revolutions: The Greek Enlightenment

3  Precursor Revolutions: The Twelfth-Century Renaissance

4  Progressive Ideology and the Transvaluation of Honor

5  The Rise of the Gentry

6  From Status to Class

7  The Persistence of the Aristocracy

8  The Formation of Conservative Ideology

9  Understanding Status Inconsistency

Chapter Five  Absolutism and Capitalist Ideology: The Volatility of Reform

1  The Absolute Prince Absolutized

2  Sword and Robe

3  Protestants and Capitalists

4  Evaluating Human Appetites

5  Progressive Ideology and Conservative Ideology

Chapter Six  Stories of Virtue

1  Novelistic Narrative as Historical Explanation

2  Historical Models for Progressive Narratives

3  Historical Models for Conservative Narratives

4  Ideological Implications of Generic Models

5  The Gendering of Ideology

6  The Conflation of Truth and Virtue

PART III  THE DIALECTICAL CONSTITUTION OF THE NOVEL

Chapter Seven  Romance Transformations (I): Cervantes and the Disenchantment of the World

Chapter Eight  Romance Transformations (II): Bunyan and the Literalization of Allegory

Chapter Nine  Parables of the Younger Son (I): Defoe and the Naturalization of Desire

Chapter Ten  Parables of the Younger Son (II): Swift and the Containment of Desire

Chapter Eleven  The Institutionalization of Conflict (I): Richardson and the Domestication of Service

Chapter Twelve  The Institutionalization of Conflict (II): Fielding and the Instrumentality of Belief

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, and Boston University for generous financial aid at various stages in the long life of this project.

Two decades ago, Hugh Amory introduced me to the problems of early modern narrative that, having occupied my thoughts for many years, now finally receive some airing in the following pages. More recently, I have been indebted to a number of people for helping me think more critically about the several dimensions of my argument. Individual chapters benefited from the diverse critical and scholarly powers of Larry Breiner, Bill Cain, Rudi Cardona, Richard Greaves, Gene Green, Jim Iffland, Richard Neugebauer, Max Novak, Ruth Perry, and Ian Watt. More extended sections of the book received valuable readings from Doug Canfield, Jerry Christensen, Timo Gilmore, and Erica Harth. Keith Stavely gave the entire manuscript his painstaking attention during a period when he was hard at work on his own book. Papers based upon parts of this study elicited useful assistance from Barbara Harman, Abdul Jan Mohamed, Annabel Patterson, and Fritz Ringer. Early and late, I have received much-appreciated readings and encouragement from Fred Jameson, Earl Miner, and Pat Spacks. I am grateful to John Pearson and Penny Moudrianakis—the former for accomplished word processing, the latter for accomplished copyediting—for improvements to the manuscript that go far beyond the mechanical. To my wife, Carolyn Williams, I owe the greatest gift: uncompromising intellectual and unlimited emotional support.

Introduction to the Fifteenth Anniversary Edition

The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 has occasioned a considerable amount of response and commentary in the decade and a half since it was first printed. From time to time I’ve published replies aimed at clarifying its purpose and forestalling misconceptions about its argument.¹ The reissue of Origins on its fifteenth anniversary provides an occasion to reflect more broadly on what I’ve learned from its reception thus far. This new introduction will concentrate on two major issues. First, I’ll address questions about the method of study pursued in this work. Second, I’ll amplify my understanding of the role gender difference plays in the origins of the English novel.

METHOD

Like all history, literary history aims to understand its object of study in both its continuity and its discontinuity. That is, history undertakes to treat its object as it displays both the continuity of an integral entity and, within that continuity, the discontinuity that confirms its existence over time and space, its capacity to change without changing into something else. This crucial duality of historical existence requires of historical method a technique of shuttling back and forth between the two dimensions of the object so as to account, at any given moment but also over the long term, for the fact that it consists not in one or the other dimension but in their relation. The nation-state, the institution of kingship, the doctrine of divine right, the Stuart monarchy, the reign of Charles II, the personhood of Charles Stuart—however diverse in nature and scale, these historical things have in common the duality of historical existence and in this respect, at least, require a common method of understanding. The same must be said of those historical things we’d be inclined to designate literary in character.

Historians have devised various ways of achieving this methodological end. In Origins I’ve pursued a dialectical method of literary history, and my original introduction (which now follows this one) describes what I take to be the benefits of dialectical method. Perhaps the most important of these is the fact that dialectics makes explicit the duality that inheres in historical existence. Dialectical thought conceives things as both wholes and parts. To take a simple example, Stuart monarchy is a whole that consists of both continuity and discontinuity; but it also can be subdivided in an indefinite number of ways. It can be seen as composed of the reigns of James I, Charles I, Charles II, and James II, as well as constituted by the way in which other distinguishable parts—like the theory and practice of political authority, or politics and religion, or domestic and foreign affairs, or state and civil society—stand in relation to each other. Or how they stand apart: for dialectical method also insists on the importance of conceiving what are parts from one perspective as, from another, integral wholes. From such a viewpoint, Charles II becomes not one part of a larger relation but an object of study in himself that can be comprehended, say, in the relationship between his public and his private capacities, or between his traditionality and his modernity, or between his early life in exile and his later life as king.

To speak in these terms suggests that dialectical method is a useful means for understanding historical existence not only in its fundamental capacity to disclose the duality of continuity and discontinuity but also more broadly in its capacity to conceive things from a number of different perspectives that are partial in the literal sense of being parts of a larger, more comprehensive whole. Indeed, the dialectical method of comprehending things as both parts and wholes is fruitful in application to nonhistorical things as well. The flower in my backyard may be understood as a part of the natural world, as part of the class of beautiful objects, as part of a garden, as a species of perishable private property—not to mention as it coheres as a whole in itself, enclosing a universe of microorganisms, an architectonic representation of reciprocity, etc. Indeed, one can’t think in these terms for long without bridging the gap between the natural and the cultural parts of existence in any number of ways.

Speaking in the broadest terms available, dialectics is therefore a way of understanding things under conditions in which there is no single privileged view, and it presumes, if not an infinite, then at least an indefinite, array of parts and wholes. Understanding is by its nature limited and partial. Dialectics explicitly acknowledges and exploits this partiality within the mechanism of its procedure. Rather than repudiating the partial as erroneous, dialectical method employs it as a guide to what, by the very terms of the partial, has thus far been exempted from understanding. In my view dialectical reason is always constitutive: it is the bridge, forever extended and improved, which analytical reason throws out over an abyss; it is unable to see the further shore but it knows that it is there.² Dialectics uses the fact of partiality to identify the range of what has been ruled out by the given terms of inquiry and what must be brought into account if understanding is to be augmented. This formulation helps explain why dialectics is often associated with negation. By defining what is, dialectics throws into relief both what (therefore) is not and the terms in which what is may be augmented by what it negates. Dialectical method is "[interpretation of that-which-is in terms of that-which-is-not, confrontation of the given facts with that which they exclude … that-which-is repels that-which-is-not and, in doing so, repels its own real possibilities… . The absent must be made present because the greater part of truth is in that which is absent."³

The augmentation of understanding that is the aim of dialectics is to some degree an additive and quantitative increase. To understand Charles II we’re well advised to conceive him in something like the multiplicity of terms I suggest above—not only as a whole consisting of distinct, even seemingly incompatible, parts but also as a component within disparate greater wholes. But proceeding as it does from the premise that all understanding is limited, dialectical method is necessarily a relational rather than an absolute inquiry, itself limited by two principal factors.

First, the particular interplay of parts and wholes deployed by any specific project of dialectical understanding is predetermined by the nature of the inquiry at hand. This is only most obviously so in the case of formally or professionally distinct inquiries (flowers elicit different sorts of questions from gardeners, aestheticians, botanists, and florists). In this respect, dialectical method is (like all methods of inquiry) teleological in that it inevitably delimits and conditions the answers it gets by the kinds of question it asks. Second, the dialectical method of analysis and synthesis, of dividing wholes into parts and disclosing parts as wholes, although open-ended in its potential, is limited in application by the dialectician’s aim to do justice to the nature of the object under study This is both a subjective and an objective process, guided by intuitive insight but also by close attention to the empirical phenomenon in view. Socrates describes dialectical analysis as the ability to divide into species according to natural inclinations, avoiding the attempt to shatter the unity of a natural part, as a clumsy butcher might do.⁴ Plato’s anatomical figure evokes the philosophical ambition to attain something like a natural precision in understanding the nature of things even as its figurativeness prohibits the literal notion of a singular natural standard of knowledge, a notion that would be inconsistent with dialectical method in general and Platonic philosophy in particular. In the understanding of historical entities, the skill of the dexterous butcher is displayed by the historian whose knowledge of, and experience with, the material under study is full enough to allow a judicious assessment of where the cuts are most plausibly made and where they are not.

This is to deny an absolute standard of objective precision without also denying the requirement of empirical objectivity in historical knowledge. One must not confuse the scintillation of ideas with dialectic.⁵ The circularity characteristic of all hermeneutic endeavor comes from the fact that interpretation can’t avoid positing as premise what it derives as result. To begin with the whole presupposes a knowledge of the parts by virtue of which it gains its wholeness, whereas to begin with the parts presupposes a knowledge of the whole that gives them their partiality. By explicitly incorporating circularity into its procedure—by deploying method as a discontinuous series of perspectival shifts between parts and wholes rather than as a seamless continuum—dialectics opens up a space within the circle where the objectivity of empirical evidence has, for each perspective in the series if not for the series itself, an authentic logic of verification.

Origins proceeds by working dialectically not only between continuity and discontinuity but also between generality and particularity. On the one hand, it collects in concrete detail a large mass of evidence—a large number of parts—deemed relevant to the problem of understanding the origins of the English novel. On the other hand, Origins offers an abstract solution to that problem by generalizing broad relations of categories on the basis of the concrete evidence. The most important of these categorial relations are briefly rehearsed in my original introduction, abstracted from the concrete contexts in which they’re formulated within the body of the book so as to provide the reader with a thread through the argument. Two analogous relations in particular schematize the emergence of the English novel, and it will be useful at this point to rehearse them yet more briefly. On the level of narrative epistemology, the traditional idealism of romance is criticized by a standard of naive empiricism, which is itself challenged by a more extreme mode of skepticism that turns against naive empiricism its own weapons, demystifying it by the same epistemological standards that naive empiricism employs against romance. On the level of socio-ethical ideology, the aristocratic belief that birth determines worth is deessentialized by the progressive belief that worth is determined by internal merit and rewarded by external success, a position in turn challenged by the conservative view that the new aristocracy championed by progressivism is no less arbitrary and unjust than the old.⁶

The logic of these two analogous relations is dialectical in several senses of the term. As schematic wholes, they entail an abstraction from the concrete plurality of parts that each aims to comprehend within a highly compressed three-part relation. Moreover, the three component parts of each abstracted whole stand in negative relation to one another: each new stage entails a negation of the previous ones in that each critique defines the limitations of, and in that process goes beyond, the character of what’s previously given. In addition, my argument is that the novel emerges into cultural consciousness at the moment when the two analogous, epistemological and socio-ethical, relations are seen by writers and readers to be versions of each other, distinct parts of a greater whole. Another way of saying this is that at a certain moment, novelistic narrative becomes recognized as such in the way its form (or epistemological concerns) can be seen to correspond with its content (or socio-ethical concerns). At this point, during the 1740s, the novel has emerged as a genre in that its abstract generic identity has become discernible as the discursive whole that organizes the disparate instances of narrative discourse—the disparate parts—that heretofore have lacked a totalizing generic categorization.

When, long before the 1740s, the analogous categorial relations that play such an important role in the emergence of the English novel first begin to be conceivable and abstractable in cultural discourse, their logic is fundamentally sequential and chronological. That is, extreme skepticism is a response to naive empiricism as naive empiricism originates in the critique of romance idealism; conservative ideology responds to progressive ideology as progressive ideology begins in the critique of aristocratic ideology. As a coherent and ongoing genre, however, the novel is constituted by the simultaneous interplay of these several categories, none of which possess a chronological priority or finality. Any given novel may well be dominated by the character of one category in particular within the respective dimensions of the epistemological and the socio-ethical: in general terms Samuel Richardson’s Pamela may justly be described as a naive empiricist and progressivist narrative. But a less abstracted reading that aims to account more closely for the parts that the whole subsumes will also acknowledge in Pamela those elements of epistemological idealism and skepticism, of aristocratic and conservative ideology, that are obscured by the exercise in general description.

Seen in isolation, abstractions like romance idealism or conservative ideology run the risk of appearing autonomous and reified, even of having a life and agency of their own. In a similar fashion, the broad description of Pamela as a naive empiricist and progressivist text involves the risk of seeming partial and reductive. Although the tendency has diminished in recent years, the idea of abstraction (and the related idea of totalization) still meets with suspicion, as though understanding could proceed in its absence. A basic premise of dialectical method is that all categorizations are operational and conditional rather than once and for all and absolute—that they are parts of a larger process from which they may be abstracted only provisionally. Abstraction is a necessary component of all rationality. Its virtue, that of explanatory breadth and range, balances the antithetical and reciprocal virtue of concretion, that of descriptive precision. Dialectical rationality explicitly conceives abstraction and concretion as parts of a larger whole that derive their force negatively, over against each other’s operation. And the adequacy of the abstraction—of the whole—can be assessed only by reference to the empirical evidence—the parts—that it undertakes to enclose.

As the reader may have sensed, I’ve registered these caveats in order to aid in addressing some of the more common misconceptions that arose in response to Origins on its first publication. Some of my original readers took my abstract formulations of the shape of my argument to be a dogmatic and a priori claim insusceptible to empirical testing—rather than, as I intended, an inference derived from, and referrable to, a large body of evidence. This misunderstanding owes at least in part, I think, to the bad repute dialectics acquired in the Cold-War setting of Anglo-American culture during the latter half of the twentieth century. The argument of Origins concludes in the 1740s because its aim is to provide a prehistory of the novel, an account of how the generic category itself came into cultural consciousness. But some readers took this to imply that in the 1740s, the English novel came to the end of its development, and that henceforth new novels were bound to repeat in strict terms the paradigm that had already been laid out for them. Some took me to be arguing that the three-part epistemological and socio-ethical sequences were to be endlessly recapitulated in the future. Others thought those sequences were meant to be seen as developmental in a fully hierarchical sense of the term, and that the novel, having attained its highest achievement with the extreme skepticism and the conservative ideology of Henry Fielding, would simply perpetuate versions of his skepticism and conservatism. Here the misunderstanding may derive from a common view of three-part dialectics on the familiar Hegelian model: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. This way of reading Hegel’s triad as though it were like an Aristotelian plot in possessing a definitive—even, inevitable—ending is in my view also a misunderstanding, since it imposes on Hegel precisely that element of fixity that dialectical method exists to overcome. In Hegel’s philosophy, on the contrary, theses are also residual syntheses, and syntheses are also emergent theses.

It’s through this sort of misconception that my work has been criticized for being teleological in the sense of imposing closure on a purportedly open historical narration.⁷ And it’s relevant to observe here that the argument of Origins is most crucially about not the specific authors it takes up but the generic category whose powerful efficacy was first defined by that multiplicity of specific narrative practices. In these terms, the genre of the novel is a technique designed to engage epistemological and socio-ethical problems simultaneously, but with no more particular commitment than that. And for this reason I conceive its emergence not as embodied within a single text or two, whether Robinson Crusoe or Pamela or Shamela, but as an abstract field of narrative possibility shaped by the dialectical engagement of its component parts—that is, by a range of texts of diverse, even oppositional, commitments which in generic terms were nonetheless all intelligible to contemporaries as engaged in a common enterprise. By the 1740s, then, the novel has come into cultural consciousness not as a skeptical or a conservative genre but as a generic instrument for propounding an expanse of epistemological and socio-ethical problems whose breadth encloses the field of possibility defined by the dialectical relations between naive empiricism and extreme skepticism and between progressive and conservative ideology.

To speak of the prehistory of an entity returns us to the basic notion of the duality of historical existence—but with the added ambition of pinpointing when any given duality, like the genre of the novel, comes into view. The notion of origins becomes useful when it’s conceived not absolutely but as a way of entering into the prehistory of a thing—of attending to the component parts that in their partiality preexist the coherence of the thing itself, or of attending to the thing itself before it’s been separated out from its containing whole. If all things partake simultaneously of continuity and discontinuity, my aim in Origins is to grasp the novel in the process of assuming a historical existence, of changing from a multiplicity of other things (that is, of things it is not) to a thing in itself, something that has the capacity to change without changing into something else. Once spoken of as a distinguishable literary form, the novel has emerged as a whole whose parts, insofar as they’re constitutive of that form, have lost their former continuity as components of other things or as other wholes in themselves. (This is in the end a terminological emergence; but the explicit recognition signaled by the fact of a broad cultural agreement on a name and its application tends to follow upon a more crucial act of conceptual agreement. By my account, the English novel emerges in the 1740s as a discernible genre, but the emergence of the novel as its definitive name does not occur until the early decades of the following century.⁸ ) The promise of dialectical method is that it can make visible this historical moment when the generic coalescence of the novel can be seen both in its residual inseparability from other things and in its emergent coherence as a thing in itself. By the same token, debates about whether the early modern novel is, generically speaking, fundamentally continuous or discontinuous with precedent forms—whether it’s a partial development of an ongoing generic whole (epic, romance, the ancient novel) or a new generic whole—are most likely to achieve consensus when conducted in terms that have something like this dialectical reach and flexibility.⁹

Thus far I’ve been concerned with explaining my use of a dialectical method in Origins by reference to the suppleness with which it adjudicates between different categorial perspectives in understanding its given object of study. But dialectics has a more particular justification in the present instance. For my object of study here is the emergence of a new generic category at a moment in English—and more broadly, in Western—history when attitudes toward categorization itself are in the process of an epochal transition. The two events are of course related: the problems in epistemological and socio-ethical understanding whose navigation is the novel’s central concern are an aspect of the long-term process of the modern division of knowledge. The modernity of this process is evident throughout our culture—in the familiar academic division of knowledge into the several disciplines; in the crowning separation out of the arts from the sciences; in the separation between church and state, religion and politics; in the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere over against political, religious, and moral judgment; etc. To recite these familiar postulates of modern culture is not to endorse their truth but to affirm their cultural ascendancy, a condition that becomes most evident to us when we contrast modern with traditional ways of categorizing the different modes of knowledge in relation to one another. Broadly speaking, the difference between tradition and modernity in this regard is the difference between a system of knowledge that distinguishes between categories without countenancing their separability and a system of knowledge organized according to fully separated and compartmentalized bodies of knowledge.¹⁰

One way of appreciating the intimate connection between the novel and modernity is by seeing the novel as a cultural instrument designed to mediate the transition to modernity by mediating the transition to a system of (relatively) separated-out knowledge. The transition takes different forms depending on whether our concern is with the epistemological or the socioethical realm of experience. In Origins I take up the former as questions of truth and the latter as questions of virtue.

Although traditional cultures distinguish between different species of truth, they conceive the domain of truth as undivided in the sense that it’s superintended by an overarching standard of spiritual or cosmic veracity that dominates and saturates all other standards. In the culture of the European middle ages, for example, Christian theology and its attendant moral system isn’t simply the most important mode of understanding; it tacitly (if also at times with a parodic inflection) infiltrates and colors all lesser ones with its distinctive character and authority. In a related fashion, medieval scholars distinguish between a broad spectrum of kinds of discourse, but they also assume that rhetorical purposes and moral criteria pervade and totalize that entire spectrum. The questions of truth that are important to a study of the origins of the novel are therefore coextensive with the early modern secularization crisis; but their implications are also specifically generic. Medieval usage knows the genres of both romance and history, but since these discourses share a controlling rhetorical and moral purpose, they can’t be separated from each other with any degree of consistency or assurance, and the modern epistemological impulse to ensure against their entanglement is foreign to medieval writers. What happens in the early modern period (and this is the story I relate in Part One of Origins) is the gradual separation out of empirical standards of veracity as the normative mode of truth-telling in the modern world. By claiming its own historicity, the new genre of the novel incorporates, but also tests, the emergent dominance of the empirical, with the result that, over the long term, a new standard of artistic veracity, that of realism or the aesthetic, comes to be separated out from both the empirical and the spiritual species of truth. Formerly conceived as parts of a greater whole, in modern culture each of these categories takes on the character of an autonomous whole. In this respect, the origins of the novel entail a search for an epistemology that mediates between science and religion and that is peculiarly suited to the kind of judgment we bring to the experience of fiction.

The early modern crisis in standards of truth is paralleled by a crisis in attitudes toward how social relations are most aptly and justly organized. I call these questions of virtue because social justice and appositeness tend to be rationalized according to the presumed or demonstrated fit between externals and internals, between social place on the one hand and personal merit, deserts, or virtue on the other. In conceiving worth to be a function of birth, traditional cultures attribute to ancestry and lineage—to status—the crucial determinant role in the signification of virtue. A tacit belief in the essential justice of a social hierarchy stratified by status is the fundamental characteristic of what I call aristocratic ideology, an ideology that distinguishes between several social markers—power, wealth, status—but that binds together these potentially disparate conditions under the aegis of hereditary status, the whole whose parts are distinguishable but not separable from each other.

Under pressure from a number of factors (treated in Part Two of Origins)—demographic change, agrarian capitalism, social mobility, civil war, Puritan doctrine, individualist discourse—early modern English people experienced a crisis of status inconsistency. They learned to question the tacit presumption that worth follows birth, separating out merit or virtue as independent variables whose association with elevated status was, strictly speaking, arbitrary, and they reconceived social identity as an amalgam of parts (power, wealth, status) rather than as a presumptive whole. Over the long term, the traditional status orientation toward social relations was replaced by the modern class orientation toward social relations. It’s not the qualitative standard of family lineage and the discrimination between nobility and commoners but the quantitative standard of income and the discrimination between middle and lower classes that dominate our modern sense of how social relations are most authoritatively described. But the replacement of status by class didn’t substitute one essentializing dominance by another. For if class has become the standard measure of social distinction, the modern separation out of class from the other social markers ensures that social identity is experienced as a complex constellation of parts rather than as a coherent and self-consistent whole. By the same token, the emergent novel undertakes not a straightforward defense of class (let alone of the middle class) but an experimental inquiry into the ethical implications of contemporary social change. Deprived of a normative and overarching basis in an external standard of birth, with the aid of the novel modernity elaborates a fluid model of social identity composed of disparate factors and submerged in the shifting, internal dynamics of subjectivity and self.

Much modern criticism relies on a model of ideology that attributes to literature the basic function of reinforcing a dominant or hegemonic socio-cultural norm, conceiving literature as a regulatory system of containment that only in unusual cases can be mobilized in the counterhegemonic direction of resistance. Although these are not its chosen terms, dialectical method would treat containment and resistance more dialectically: less exclusively as antagonistic wholes than as (also) parts of a greater whole whose coherence precludes the routine isolation—common in this sort of criticism—of a definitive ideological dominance. The need for such an approach exists most clearly, no doubt, in the study of historical moments (like that of the origins of the novel) when fundamental change is manifestly underway. But for dialectical method, all periods are transitional, hence dependent on modes of study finely attuned to the thoroughgoing intricacy with which containment and resistance, as parts of a socio-cultural whole, are mutually constitutive. By this way of thinking, moreover, the social function of literature in particular, a singularly acute species of ideology, consists less either in regulation or in deregulation than in an investigative inquiry into their interpenetration.¹¹ This isn’t to challenge the generally held assumption of a correlation between the middle class and the novel but rather to emphasize that the work of understanding only begins with that assumption, especially during the eighteenth century. What looks to us, perhaps even now too automatically, like the regulatory dominance of both the middle class and the novel seemed to many contemporaries more like a liberating release from the regulatory dominance of a prior social dispensation. The partiality of historical hindsight finds its necessary dialectical counterpoise in the view from the past.

GENDER

In the foregoing pages I’ve suggested that dialectics is a suitable method of study not only because its supple mobility between differential categories of parts and wholes provides a penetrating mechanism for understanding history but also because, at the specific moment with which Origins is concerned, English people were experiencing a fundamental shift in attitudes toward categorization itself that we might call the early modern division of knowledge—a shift whose understanding demands a method reflexively attentive to the ramifications of categorial thinking. What about the early modern categories of sex and gender?

Origins devotes considerable space to issues of gender in accounting for the emergence of the English novel. It could hardly be otherwise: both contemporaries and modern scholars remark on the role played by women in writing and reading novelistic narratives, and the narratives themselves, disparate though their plots may be, are nonetheless filled with self-conscious and suggestive attention to relations between the sexes. This becomes a central focus of Origins when I arrive, toward its conclusion, at the competition between Richardson and Fielding, whose authorial rivalry turns so crucially on gender matters; but earlier readings of narratives by Richard Greene, Thomas Deloney, Mary Carleton, Aphra Behn, Mary Davys, Eliza Haywood, Delarivier Manley, and William Congreve amply lay the ground for this emphasis. And yet in my version of the way the subject matter of the emergent novel coalesces, issues of sex and gender are explicitly subordinated to those of status and class. If status inconsistency, why not equally gender inconsistency?

It’s important to see that this is crucially a chronological subordination. As implied by one of my section headings—The Gendering of Ideology—the ideological crisis entailed in the separation out of social status from personal virtue was first of all gender neutral; by my account, gender first enters the field of ideological contention that grounds the origins of the novel in support and complication of progressive and conservative ideologies rather than as a fundamentally independent point of argument.¹² The importance of chronology is implicit in the fact that my prehistory of the English novel ends in the 1740s. Contemporaries’ anxiety about the harmful effects of novels on a specifically female reading public comes to a head in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Before that the anxiety is legible enough, but it tends to lump together women, male commoners, and the young as a single category of concern.¹³ It’s as though during the first half of the century, gender difference has not yet been sufficiently separated out from status difference to receive direct attention.

As this observation suggests, questions of gender may be illuminated by a dialectical inquiry of the sort I’ve already outlined with respect to questions of truth and virtue. By the end of the eighteenth century, the centrality of the feminine gender to modern conceptions of inner virtue has become so evident that its neglect makes questions of virtue unaskable. One hundred years earlier this isn’t so. Fed by a number of sources (and crucially, by doctrines of Protestant conscience) that make no distinction between the male and the female instance, the developing idea of inner virtue is gender neutral at this time (and therefore, in a patriarchal culture, more likely to be associated with men than with women).¹⁴ How can we use dialectical method to understand the way the categories of sex, gender, status, and class shift in their significance, and in their relationship, during the eighteenth century?

Modern Western culture is so fully devoted to the notion that personal identity is grounded in sex and gender that the force of this conviction becomes palpable only when we compare our own culture to those of other times and places. Before the modern period, the category of personal identity itself lacks the substance it has for us because people tend to conceive of themselves less as individual persons who join together to make social wholes than as components of social wholes that are already given. Character is primarily a fact of kinship, family, clan, tribe, lineage. Components of character that don’t appear to us strictly a function of kinship are, in traditional cultures,¹⁵ either implied by kin group (like race, or political and religious affiliation) or deeply embedded (like physical appearance or sex) within that determinant social matrix. Needless to say, traditional cultures not only distinguish between the sexes, they also organize social practices so as to acknowledge and accommodate the procreative implications of that distinction. But the female capacity for childbirth is construed, in these cultures, in a social rather than an individual direction, as the enabling condition of kinship collectivity rather than as a marker of sexual difference as such. In modern culture, we tend to think of ourselves as first of all individuals defined by the natural fact of sex. The physical capacity to bear children is the most important biological indicator of female identity, which is grounded in natural difference and, with male identity, provides the differential substratum for human personality. Gender ambiguously denotes both this natural difference between female and male and the culturally imposed and culturally variable difference between the feminine and the masculine, those complex modes of social being that correspond to biological sex but (and here lies the modern utility of the term) aren’t naturally determined by it.

If these generalizations are given at least provisional assent,¹⁶ we may ask how the development of the modern system of sexual categorization stands in relation to the modern development of social categorization as I’ve sketched it in the foregoing pages. A moment’s reflection will suggest that the two developments are mirror images of each other. In the century between 1650 and 1750, the traditional and tacit belief in the naturalness of status difference was being scrutinized and criticized under the cold light of both progressive and conservative argument. In its stead, the conviction was coalescing that social place is a complex amalgam of birth, education, and achievement, that it is not a stable precondition but a fluid process, and that the quantitative and contingent standards of class rather than the qualitative and natural standards of status provide its most sensitive register. During the same period, biological sex was being separated out from the broad range of cultural variables in which it traditionally had been embedded. The ongoing subordination of women to men was undergoing a paradigm shift. From being conceived as lesser versions of men on a hierarchical continuum of similarity, women would come to be understood, in the modern world, as fundamentally—that is, naturally—different from men. Over the course of several centuries, in other words, the authority of the natural in the constitution of what people are was transferred from birth to sex, from the realm of the social to the realm of the sexual.¹⁷

The novel emerges in the midst of this process, and the problems it engages are colored, at least at first, by the character of this transitional context, this part of the larger whole. In late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century England, the inequities of status difference have become patent, and status inconsistency—the disparity between the parts of social standing that hitherto had been conceivable as a seamless whole—is at the forefront of cultural awareness. But gender inconsistency is not, because the modern system of gender difference—the necessary basis for any comparable sense of disparity—is only in the early stages of stabilization. Women and men still tend to see themselves in terms of their social, political, and legal status more than in terms of their sexual being. The residually powerful conviction that makes the subordination of women intelligible, precisely because it ascribes them a relative inferiority to rather than an absolute difference from men, provides no secure basis for the perception of social injustice. And yet the balance is delicate. Fielding’s indignation at Pamela is clearly a reaction to the spectacle not of sexual but of social chaos (his acute sensitivity to the pornographic powers of sexual arousal in Richardson’s novel is another matter entirely). Yet in Joseph Andrews, his second parodic response to Pamela, Fielding cannily changes the sex of the protagonist as if to sidestep the problems raised by the recognition that the case of women involves a special instance of inconsistency. Again, contemporaries know the difference between men and women; but distinction is only in the process of becoming separation. The battle of the sexes and the querelle des femmes persist, as they have throughout the middle ages. But feminism—the critique, but also the product, of the modern system of gender difference—is (in writers like Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell) only emergent; the terms of dispute are set by the problem of social status. True, such dispute is increasingly sensitive to the intuition that sexual difference has consequences for the ethical issues with which questions of virtue are preoccupied. But the ideological labor of the early novel is much less clearly motivated by gender difficulties than is that of the novel a century later. In an exception that’s notably alive to gender difficulties, Behn’s Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister, the progressive vindication of women in particular that becomes possible through their separation out by gender difference is notably blunted by an aristocratic, gender-neutral skepticism about all who diverge from the hierarchical authority of fathers.

In the narratives with whose study Origins comes to a close we can see with some clarity the ambivalence of this historical moment. The plot of Richardson’s Pamela, in particular, is remarkable for the acuteness with which it adumbrates the shape of what is and what’s to come.¹⁸ The first two-thirds of Pamela are concerned with the combative relationship between Mr. B., a representative of the rural gentry, and his common maidservant Pamela. Under these premarital circumstances Pamela’s subordination to Mr. B. is double, as a woman and as a commoner, and the degree to which the former condition is tacitly embedded in the latter is clear in the way this part of the plot concentrates on status inconsistency as both Pamela’s personal dilemma and the main obstacle to marriage. The explicit effect of the marriage is to divide Pamela’s double subordination, to separate out her status as a commoner from her condition as a woman: for although marriage elevates her social status, Pamela remains subordinate because she remains a woman. The last third of Pamela exists to acknowledge the persistence of her subordination—both as a positive reassurance that upward mobility leaves the institution of marriage unthreatened, and as a nagging acknowledgment that the progressive logic of social justice, on which the plot has thus far proceeded, must be suspended in the case of woman as such.

The disembedding of sexual from social subordination has a powerfully radical potential that’s only just intimated by the apparition of a protofeminist alliance between Pamela and Lady Davers that briefly disturbs the marital alliance of Pamela and Lady Davers’s brother. And it’s useful to see that this separation out of the sexual from the social is linked with two other, analogous, separations that pertain to each of these categories in their capacity as, not parts of a greater whole (the social as it embeds the sexual), but wholes in themselves. On the one hand, the separation out of the sexual from the social is enabled by the separation out, within the realm of the social, of (class) merit from status—a development that’s entailed in Pamela’s successful rise from commoner to gentry on the grounds of her demonstrable inner virtue. On the other hand, the separation out of the sexual from the social prepares for the separation out, within the realm of the sexual, of sex from gender.

Before it clouds over again, the dispute between the male Mr. B. and the female Lady Davers within the ranks of the nobility brilliantly illuminates the absolute sexual basis for the latter’s subordination even under the aegis of a progressive ideology But the dispute also reveals the separability of the natural from the cultural conditions of subordination—of sex from gender—on the basis of which feminism would learn to ask why the real but limited facts of biological difference should dictate the widely ramified subordination of women that obtains in modern culture. Pamela’s ending, in other words, is an episode in the prehistory of the modern category of gender. The early modern division of knowledge makes manifest and explicit the powerful natural basis on which the subordination of women has always more tacitly rested, even as it makes available to future generations a powerful culturalist argument against the subordination of women. Before the 1740s, however, the questions of virtue that the novel emerges to engage tend to be asked in social rather than sexual terms because before the 1740s, English culture still tended to subsume the sexual within the social.

1. See Response to William Warner: A Defense of Dialectical Method in Literary History, diacritics, 19, no. 1 (Spring, 1989), 83–96; Reply to Ralph Rader, Narrative, 1, no. 1 (Jan., 1993), 84–90.

2. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 246.

3. Herbert Marcuse, A Note on Dialectic, preface to Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), x.

4. Plato, Phaedrus, 265, trans. W. C. Helmbold and W G. Rabinowitz (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), 55.

5. Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 48.

6. The precise meaning of these categories will be explained and demonstrated in the main body of the book. My aim here is to address not their content but the formal logic with which dialectical method brings these categories into and out of relationship with one another.

7. In yet another sense of the term, however, Origins embraces as central to its purpose the teleology that implicitly and necessarily defines all study that investigates the past sources of present entities—i.e., that knows the end in advance (in this case, the ascendancy of the novel genre in the modern period).

8. As several reviewers pointed out, Origins at times wrongly situates the stabilization of the terminology itself in the middle of the eighteenth century (e.g., see below, 25).

9. For my effort to approach this question directly, see below, 26–39, 133–50, on precursor revolutions.

10. The difference between tradition and modernity is an abstract formulation whose application to chronology isn’t definitive. In its most common usage—and the one I follow in Origins—it differentiates the periods in Western history before and after the watershed of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. But in more local contexts it can be seen to apply to other chronologies as well—e.g., to the period in classical antiquity marked by the rise of pre-Socratic and Platonic philosophy—and the ways of knowing that are schematically differentiated under the abstract rubric tradition versus modernity can be felt to coexist in the cultural practice of many local contexts. For dialectical rationality to be not simply desirable but even thinkable in a culture—Plato’s, Hegel’s, Marx’s—presupposes that the modern sense that categories are fully separable is sufficiently pressing to make intelligible the goal of conceiving free-standing categorial wholes as also parts of larger wholes. Traditional attitudes toward the relation between categories emphasize wholes over parts, the coherence of the system of knowledge over its partibility, precluding the separation out on which the motive of dialectical reconnection is dependent. For a fuller account of these matters, see Michael McKeon, ed., Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 803–8, 856–57.

11. There’s an irony here. The socio-cultural emphasis of much recent criticism has been fueled by a poststructuralist—and specifically, a Foucauldian—politics of reading, whose benefits have been actively advanced over, among other things, the putative crudity of Marxist ideology theory. In drawing upon Marx as much as on anyone, dialectical method provides a corrective to this still-prevalent kind of criticism, whose reductiveness resembles nothing so much as that which used to be associated with a vulgar Marxism.

12. See below, 255. This entry is perhaps most clearly evident in the progressive critique of aristocratic ideology’s inherently patriarchal attitudes: see below, 156–59.

13. See Michael McKeon, Prose Fiction: Great Britain, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 4: The Eighteenth Century, ed. H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 247–49.

14. Scholars err in assuming that from its earliest emergence women in particular have been associated with the peculiarly modern capacity for inner virtue. The consequence of this failure in dialectical understanding—i.e., the failure to recognize that in 1700, the categorial whole of gender had not yet undergone the partialization necessary to sustain the feminization of inner virtue that’s normative by 1850—is a distortion of the history of both domestic ideology and the domestic novel.

15. Abstracting tradition against modernity, I here treat as parts (medieval England, ancient Rome, aboriginal Australia) of a single whole what in other contexts obviously would need to be separated out as wholes in themselves.

16. For a fuller argument, see Michael McKeon, Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660–1760, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 28, no. 3 (Spring, 1995), 295–322.

17. It’s important to recognize, however, that although the close attention paid by traditional social systems to complex rules of marriage, succession, inheritance, and descent makes conspicuous the naturalizing force of kinship ties, the authority of the natural in modern culture is of a far higher order (here the modern ascendancy of empirical epistemology, which I’ve treated under the heading Questions of Truth, plays an obvious role).

18. For a fuller reading see below, chap. II.

Introduction: Dialectical Method in Literary History

The aim of this introduction is to provide a broad theoretical basis for the chapters that follow. I begin by describing the most important problems associated with current accounts of the rise of the novel; I review the contribution of several theorists to the clarification of these problems; and I conclude by summarizing, in advance, the terms of my attempted solution. A developing theme of this discussion is the idea that genre theory cannot be divorced from the history of genres, from the understanding of genres in history. Another way of saying this is that the theory of genre must be a dialectical theory of genre. Although dialectical method is therefore important to the procedure of the entire book, in the following chapters it will be experienced, I think, as a relatively subliminal presence. Readers who wish to move quickly to the historical and critical center of this study will receive adequate guidance on my theoretical aims from the first and last sections of the introduction. Those interested in a more thorough articulation of the problems and their proposed solutions are invited to read the intervening sections as well.

1

The most successful attempt to explain the origins of the English novel has been, for many years now, the work of Ian Watt.¹ Any effort to extend this work—to engage the difficult problems that The Rise of the Novel either failed to resolve or, through its very brilliance, has thrown into high relief—would do well to recall first the grounds of Watt’s achievement. These are entailed in the central argument that the distinguishing feature of the novel is its formal realism, a set of narrative procedures which are so commonly found together in the novel, and so rarely in other literary genres, that they may be regarded as typical of the form itself … The lowest common denominator of the novel genre as a whole [is] its formal realism (32, 34). Watt specifies the novel’s distinctive narrative procedures with subtlety and precision: the repudiation of traditional plots and figurative eloquence; the particularization of character and background, of naming, temporality, causation, and physical environment (13–30). Yet in isolating its formal features as strictly definitive of the new genre, Watt simultaneously argues their intimate, analogous relation to other developments of the early modern period that extend beyond the realm of literary form.

This contextual dimension of the argument he elaborates on several levels. Most immediately, Watt proposes a close analogy between the epistemological premises of formal realism and those of philosophical realism, the modern tradition of realism inaugurated by Descartes and Locke (11–12 and chap. 1 passim). Less directly but with an insistence that pervades the entire book, Watt is concerned to argue a connection between the rise of the novel and the transformation of the social context of early eighteenth-century England. The philosophical, the novelistic, and the socioeconomic are united during this period in their validation of individual experience, of one or another sort of individualism, which is manifested in the realm of the social by a number of inseparable phenomena: the development of capitalism and of economic specialization, the spread of a secularized Protestantism, the increasing dominance of the commercial and industrial classes, and the growth of a reading public (61). Watt associates these phenomena with the middle class (e.g., 48, 59, 61), and he thereby encourages us to understand his thesis as a singularly persuasive treatment of a venerable theme: the historical coincidence of the rise of the middle class and the rise of the novel.

The force of Watt’s argument has been evident to all readers. To what sorts of criticism has it seemed, in the quarter-century since its publication, most vulnerable? Although commentary has been very extensive, it can be summarized under two related headings.² Many critics have pointed out that even though Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding explicitly subvert the idea and ethos of romance, they nonetheless draw upon many of its stock situations and conventions. The general problem of romance in all three novelists is related to the particular problem of spirituality, equally antithetical to the secularizing premises of formal realism, in Defoe. Watt is judicious and illuminating on the ambivalence of Defoe’s Calvinist otherworldliness, but in the end he is obliged by his thesis to treat as the function of a mechanical and merely editorial policy the spiritualizing presence that overshadows and infiltrates much of Robinson Crusoe’s adventures (81). Moreover (an observation that does not so much contradict as complicate Watt’s thesis), romance continues to suffuse the period itself. The Restoration and the early eighteenth century experienced an enormous outpouring of fiction that, by Watt’s and most other standards, must surely be associated with the anti-individualist and idealizing tradition of romance. Finally, there is the corollary problem that even those ancient and medieval forms that define our notion of what romance amounts to can be shown to reflect, critics have claimed, some major features of formal realism.³

Watt is well aware of the way that Fielding in particular evades the specifications of formal realism, and he has provided some hints of how his original and more comprehensive theoretical framework for The Rise of the Novel would have done Fielding greater justice by treating formal realism as a less dominant formal criterion.⁴ But this leaves us in something of a dilemma. For Watt’s thesis is attractive in great measure because of the precision with which he associates formal realism with the novel, and the plausibility with which he ties the rise of the novel to contextual developments that bear a clear analogy to formal realism. If we want Fielding, we must dissipate and weaken the explanatory framework by requiring it to accommodate romance elements and the anti-individualist tendencies they imply. If we want the explanatory framework, we must be prepared to exclude much of Fielding from the rise of the novel. In other words, one central problem that Watt’s unusually persuasive argument has helped to uncover is that of the persistence of romance, both within the novel and concurrently with its rise. And behind this lurks a yet more fundamental problem, the inadequacy of our theoretical distinction between novel and romance.

My subject to this point has been Watt’s vulnerability in delimiting the formal characteristics of the novel. The second major feature of his thesis that has remained problematic concerns the contextual aspect of the argument, the rise of the middle class. Where is the evidence, critics have asked, for the dominance of the middle class in the early eighteenth century? How was it distinguished—by contemporaries and in reality—from the traditional social categories of the aristocracy and gentry, especially as the nobility of early modern England was itself transformed by cultural attitudes and material activities that bear a clear relation to the new individualism? What, indeed, are we to make, in this context, of the familiar type of middle-class upstart whose middle-class identity is defined by nothing so much as a self-negating impulse, a will to be assimilated into the aristocracy? On the other hand, what are we to make of the unsettling argument that middle-class individualism originated not in eighteenth- but in thirteenth-century England? So far as the theory of the novel is concerned, the most troublesome figure once again seems to be Fielding. If the formal features of his novels are enmeshed in the romance tradition, form, content, and Fielding’s own biography might appear to suggest a sympathy with the social perspective not of an emerging middle class but of a nobility particularized as the declining gentry. Watt has acknowledged the degree to which the new literary form of the novel not only subverts, but also expresses, social norms that are still traditional in the early eighteenth century.⁵ But if this is so, our view of both the middle class and the novel has been seriously obscured. Of course the obscurity is reciprocal; and for our purposes, the real casualty is a highly suggestive theory of the rise of the novel that would correlate two categories, neither of which can be made to have any definitional stability.⁶

But the problem of the persistence of romance and the aristocracy, like that of the preexistence of the novel and the middle class, may be made more tractable simply through the process of reformulation. For it begins to appear that we are dealing with two different versions of the same difficulty, and that what is required is a theory not just of the rise of the novel but of how categories, whether literary or social, exist in history: how they first coalesce by being understood in terms of—as transformations of—other forms that have thus far been taken to define the field of possibility. What sort of guidance does genre theory provide for the pursuit of such an understanding?

2

In recent years the most influential contributions have been made by what might be called the archetypalist theory of genre. Archetypalist theory is composed of several not entirely compatible strands of modern thought about myth and the nature of the archaic mind. The term itself is most closely associated with the view of myth as the imitation and repetition of divine models or archetypes. In the words of Mircea Eliade, the regeneration of the archetype suspends or abolishes time, duration, and history, for he who reproduces the exemplary gesture … finds himself transported into the mythical epoch in which its revelation took place. Through the periodic annulment of time, primitive humanity gives its experience the transcendent and sacred value of a primordial past, which, in the act of re-creation, loses its pastness. Archaic people thus escape the disvalued temporality and ongoingness of history, and live in a continual present which is coextensive with the presentness of the great, founding acts of cosmic Creation and human origins.⁷

Claude Lévi-Strauss brings to the study of myth the interests of the structural anthropologist rather than those of the student of comparative religion, but if his work therefore diverges from Eliade’s in many respects,