Response to Robert Alter, “Political Fiction”

I’d like to pursue a connection that Robert Alter makes early in his lecture and use it to look at some of the implications of his argument and examples. It has to do with the kind of narrative commentary found in Stendhal and not in the David story, and that Alter thinks, surely rightly, is something that Stendhal “picked up from Fielding.” It is in one of those commentaries by Fielding, which Alter knows very well, since he wrote an excellent book on that author, that we get a remarkable comic anticipation of one of the governing ideas of his lecture: the idea that “the special purchase that fiction has on politics is through character.” I’m thinking of Fielding’s “praise of biography” in the chapter introducing Book III of Joseph Andrews. The jokes begin right away, since by “biography,” Fielding means novels: true stories about fictional people as distinct from fantasies about real countries, the sort of thing we usually call history. The latter set includes books with titles like, in Fielding’s instances, “the History of England, the History of France, of Spain, etc.” These historians, Fielding suggests, get the time and place right but almost everything else wrong. They