:The Natural Laws of Plot: How Things Happen in Realist Novels

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewThe Natural Laws of Plot: How Things Happen in Realist Novels. Yoon Sun Lee. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023. Pp. 258.Cynthia WallCynthia WallUniversity of Virginia Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreIf a body impinge upon another, and by its force change the motion of the other, that body also … will undergo an equal change, in its own motion.(Isaac Newton, Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica [1687])1Newtonian physics is just one of the many new empiricisms employed in learned depth in The Natural Laws of Plot to argue that the plots of novels are as much if not more embedded in their own landscapes, “rely[ing] more deeply and intricately on an environing world to carry along any action” (2), as they are involved with narrative and characters. “Things have shadows and textures, as well as depths and surfaces,” and fictional events are shaped by the “real world of physical forces and laws” (3). Bodies impinge on bodies, motion changes bodies, matter mixes and moves. The real world kept discovering and describing new physical forces and laws, and the well-read British public (and its novelists) kept abreast of and internalized those discoveries as new ways of understanding “how things happen.” The chapters progress through the period, matching up canonical authors’ narrative strategies with natural philosophers and theories: Daniel-Defovian causality and Newtonian physics; the characters of Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson and the types and orders of Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon; Ann Radcliffe, Frances Burney, and chemistry; a molecular Jane Austen; Maria Edgeworth, Anna Lætitia Barbauld, Humphry Davy, and “mechanical objectivity”; Walter Scott, Erasmus Darwin, and vertigo. Throughout, the originally mingled concepts later identified as “objectivity” and “subjectivity” get disentangled, both historically and ideologically. In every historical, scientific, and narratological shift, the “external world” is always, like my uncle Toby’s map of Namur, “far more than an inert backdrop to action. It provides the laws that are then twisted into plot and pinned to the ground” (60).The first chapter, “Novels, Novel-Theory, and the History of Objectivity,” argues that objectivity is not “a way of telling the story with a certain detachment or from a third-person point of view” but “something that has to be built into the plot of the novel” (1) and that will change its appearance dramatically over time, in rhythm with the changing contours of natural philosophy, from the necessary subjectivity—the reliance “on their own accumulated experience, their knowledge, skill, and instincts” (9)—of the early empiricists to the active suppression of the self into the nineteenth century.2 “The novel emerged in tandem” (11) not only with changing perceptions of subjective identity but also with its own discourse about itself: “The novel was a problem for itself from the beginning” (11). While Clara Reeve, in The Progress of Romance (1785), distinguished the novel as “‘a picture of real life and manners, and of the times in which it was written,’” from the romance, which “‘describes what never happened nor is likely to happen’” (quoted on 12), Barbauld and Scott expanded on what Lee sees as a “certain dissatisfaction” (12) they all had digesting this sense of realism. Barbauld notes that the formal coherence of plot in most eighteenth-century novels leads the reader to predict the ending and relish the neat tidyings of loose ends, whereas “‘in real life our reasonable expectations are often disappointed’” (quoted on 13). Scott in fact approves of Defoe’s novels precisely because “‘The incidents are huddled together like paving-stones discharged from a cart, and have as little connexion between the one and the other’” (quoted on 14). Lee concludes, “There seem to be two kinds of possible plot-interest, then: one in which, through the author’s artful planning, we focus on discovering the relations between events widely separated in the novel’s discourse. In the other, we are absorbed in the event itself, the more inconsequential the better, in the way its unfolding suggests something about the world or ‘the real tendencies of things,’ to use Barbauld’s expression. This latter kind of interest seems to be peculiar to the novel, as Scott and others envisioned it at the beginning of the nineteenth century” (16).The second chapter, “Matter, Motion, and the Physical World of the Novel,” explores the ways that the “objective, regular behavior of matter in space and time is fundamental to realist plots and the way that the latter work themselves out” (35). Plot is much more than “intentional human movements” (34); it includes the minute chain of events that cause the window sash in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) to slam down on the young protagonist and, er, cut things short (33–34). The chapter traces the familiar links between empiricism and the novel but offers as its new claim that the empiricist view of the world provides a “baseline ontology” for the new shapes of novel plots, as captured in John Desagulier’s summary of Cartesian causality: “changes in plot happen because of changes in ‘Situation, Distance … Structure, and Cohesion,’ as well as the spaces between and within bodies” (39).“Defoe’s Outstretched World” celebrates the paving stone model of plot, in which events are conceived “in terms of forces that push, pull, move around, or stabilize the pieces of the world”; thus “physical plot underlies the actions, emotions, and reflections of the characters,” sometimes encouraging them, but more often “undercut[ting] them repeatedly, taking away something that was thought to be settled” (63). Defoe’s important contribution to plot, Lee argues, “isn’t concerned with the inner structure of decision, which he retains. In Robinson Crusoe [1719] rather, it has to do with the relation between action, knowledge, and time, the scale at which they are shown to interact, and, most of all, the specification of intermediating causes as things that produce reliable, precisely calculable physical effects in the external world” (72). Lee cites Defoe’s expert familiarity with early modern science as demonstrated in the General History of Discoveries and Improvements in Useful Arts (1725–26) and the detailed descriptions of experiments made by Robert Boyle and Newton; Defoe’s plots are interesting precisely because things that seem to happen randomly, such as Crusoe’s “miraculous” barley, can be traced back cause by logical cause.Fielding and Richardson are the centerpieces in “Place, Type, and Order: Plot as Natural History.” The “classical idea of plot as formal unity” (84) encounters a new “model of knowledge” in which natural philosophy would “[bring] together disparate phenomena so that gradations of similarity and difference became clearly visible”; the result is “a narrative deeply committed to the idea of order, and to the realm of the visible” (83–84). Fielding’s individuals relate to their types (or “species,” in Fielding’s word); in Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–48), the rake Robert Lovelace is continuously “testing” the virtue of Clarissa to see if she is in fact her very own species. What criteria would be enough? Both Fielding and Richardson “are driven by the need to ascertain the relationship between their protagonists and the type or species to which they apparently belong” (99).Chapter 5, “Tracing Change and Testing Substances: Intimate Objectivity,” brings the plots of Radcliffe and Burney into the realm of chemistry. “Their plots seem less interested in questions of agency, of who made what happen, than in questions of composition, of how something behaves because of what kind of substance it is” (107–8). The ductility of the protagonist in Burney’s Camilla “is what Camilla is” (123, emphasis added); the colors in Radcliffe’s famous descriptions come under the microscope (124). (Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker [1771] gets a good treatment here because of its fascination with mixtures.)Miss Bates’s little monologues in Austen’s Emma (1815) demonstrate the “Molecular Possibility in Austen’s Plot” in chapter 6, “exhibit[ing] a field of minute, chaotic, incessant movements in which rivets, apples, and spectacles, the actions of eating and recommending bounce around, collide without losing any of their motion, and come back again, swirling around endlessly” (131). Indeed, Emma treats her country friend Harriet’s mind with the “detachment of a scientist,” considering it as “a material arrangement” in which one piece could be inserted in place of another to fill vacancies or displace attention—“the model is mechanical” (148).The next chapter takes up this model and its relation to “quixotism,” which “ties the shape of the plot to the distorted beliefs and perceptions of its protagonist,” highlighting the newly reconceived “dangers of subjectivity” (151). Edgeworth’s Belinda (1800) follows in the wake of Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752): “Quixoticism becomes internalized and endemic,” not so much mistaking windmills for giants or men for adorers but for “failing to perceive oneself” (161). Edgeworth’s literature for children, Lee argues, “form[s] a bridge between the novel and natural philosophy at a moment when both were involved in this transition in the model of knowledge” (166). The experimental node in this chapter is the chemist Humphry Davy, who attained “an unprecedented popularity” as a “celebrity scientist” (161); his “experiments with nitrous oxide read almost like journeys into a pure, enclosed interior space of subjectivity” (163). Those experiments, like the new plots, “generat[e] a kind of suspense,” which in the novel becomes “an urgent experience of contiguity” (165). The argument works plausibly, for me, until it stumbles over William Godwin’s peculiar Gothic novel Caleb Williams (1796). “The plot seems not to know what to do with objects” (175) as they often remain unexplained. “The plot cannot even seem to convince itself and collapses aporetically, as shown in the two endings Godwin writes” (176). “The novel is left without a means of verifying, opening up or shutting down subjectivity” (176). Yet from another point of view, all of this precisely captures, in a gothically metaphoric way, the “realist” criteria of Barbauld and Scott: we do not always know what things mean, and “‘in real life our reasonable expectations are often disappointed.’” In other words, Godwin’s subtitle: Things as They Are.The last chapter, “Historical Vertigo and the Laws of Animal Motion,” focuses on Scott’s Waverley novels as examples in the turn toward “normaliz[ing] quixotism” and “posing subjectivity against objective truth” (183). “The historical novel’s plot looks for deeply buried forces that suddenly become manifest in certain conjunctures, driving that change and testing human subjects” (184). And the deeply buried forces here are connected to new theories about the “everyday experience of movement” (185), “a kind of quixotism of the body” (186), called vection or vertigo, a subjective, physiological sensation projecting movement onto the surroundings. Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life (1795–96) becomes the partner here, as this work, like the “modern” novel in Scott’s view, studies and explains the minutiae of everyday life (189). And these detailed experiences, particularly the vertiginous ones, link to notions of empire as well: “the phenomenon of losing the ability to tell whether you’re moving or the world is moving, is the type of vection that Scott uses in Waverley to describe the experience of historical transition. The plot of many Waverley novels might be summarized in this sentence from Darwin: ‘When we are surrounded with unusual motions, we lose our perpendicularity’” (191). This is the source of the new “deep realism” (194): history is perceived as too large, too deep, too forceful, too much out of our control or comprehension; “it pushes and pulls, smooths the way or trips you up” (206).Lee closes her work with an epilogue, “Plot, History, and Totality in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth,” to bring her analysis into our contemporary relevance. “How do these connections between the novel and natural philosophy change? Do they disappear?” (207). Zadie Smith herself declared: “‘It is not the writer’s job … to tell us how somebody felt about something, it’s to tell us how the world works’” (quoted on 208). And with its own full collection of dates and events and scientific experiments, as well as its deliberate reduplications of those events, the novel draws attention to its plot as agent: “‘Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories’” (quoted on 210). Smith’s novel makes the modern case for Lee’s historical argument.My one serious resistance to Lee’s impressive book is that it (along with Barbauld and Scott) assumes too much of a non-eighteenth-century sense of realism in its “certain dissatisfactions” with the formal coherence of eighteenth-century novels. For one thing, this overlooks or dismisses the Puritan legacy of finding detailed meaning in and divine connection between the smallest things, the smallest events (see, e.g., J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels [1990]). Nor does it seem to understand the devout sensibilities of Richardson and Fielding (“providence” is cited half a dozen times, but always in a cursory sort of way: “Fate, destiny, or providence may offer a semblance of an answer, but not a sufficient one for the realist novel” [7]). Samuel Johnson could remind them all that the “dangers” of the “realist” novel are precisely as threatening as those of the stage: “It is false, that any representation is mistaken for reality; that any dramatick fable in its materiality was ever credible, or, for a single moment, was ever credited.”3 Sure, there are a few gullible Arabellas and Partridges always among us, but (to paraphrase Johnson) the truth is that the reader is always in her senses, and knows, from the first page to the last, that the novel is only a novel, and that the characters are only characters.4 In fact, many of the scientific conclusions related in this book seem to offer satisfactorily coherent wholes, with all the smaller bits gathered into the larger pattern, as in John Desagulier’s description of gravity: “‘a heavy Body by its Descent moves the Axis of a Wheel, that carries round another by its Teeth, which by the Intermediation of other Wheels and Pinions, carries round a hand upon a Dial-Plate to measure Time, or for other Uses’” (A Course of Experimental Philosophy [1734], quoted on 140); or in Georges Cuvier’s sense of biolological logic: “‘Every organized being forms a whole, a unique and closed system, in which all the parts correspond mutually, and contribute to the same definitive action’” (“Preliminary Discourse” [1812], quoted on 155).But I go back and underline the word “impressive.” In its scope, its research, its originality, it is an important paving stone, so to speak, in our understanding of the novel. Lee’s book disarticulates plot from narrative and character, but she does not leave us with a macerated skeleton: plot is fused, living, into description and motion, matter and space, shaped by the forces that were seen shaping the (shall we say it?) real world.Notes1. Isaac Newton, Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, trans. Andrew Motte, 3 vols. (1687; London, 1803), 1:15.2. This book amply details its overlap with and indebtedness to other past and recent scholars investigating relations between the novel and natural philosophy in the period; so after pointing here to Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, as well as to Michel Foucault, I won’t cite the rest of the multitudes throughout.3. Samuel Johnson, preface to The Plays of William Shakespeare […], 2nd ed., 10 vols. (London, 1778), 1:xxvi.4. Ibid., 1:xxvii. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Ahead of Print Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/727803 HistoryPublished online October 04, 2023 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected].PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.