Gavin Edwards,
Narrative Order, 1789–1819: Life and Story in an
Age of Revolution (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006),
viii + 207pp. ISBN 1-4039-9211-8; £47 / $69.95 (hb).
This informative and often densely argued
work brings together three main components in exploring a
range of texts spanning Samuel Johnson’s Life of
Savage (1744) to Walter Scott’s The Bride of
Lammermoor (1819), with a concentration on the revolutionary
years of the later eighteenth century. On the first front,
it charts a situation where the concept of orderly narrative,
involving a sequential movement from endings to beginnings,
came under a variety of pressures, with a resultant shift
from third-person accounts and the exhibition of ‘character’
to the first person and a prioritisation of ‘self’—in
broad terms from biography to autobiography. An integral part
of the argument here is a connection between narrative and
the idea of contract, an area which is also seen as becoming
increasingly problematical.
Along with
this, the book shows a sophisticated awareness of the complex
semantics of a range of keywords in the literature of the
period, their multiple and/or shifting meanings, and of how
certain words came under pressure through the dynamics of
social change. The third main component of the book lies in
its concentration on one cataclysmic historical event as a
means of accounting for the narrative and linguistic changes
described. Gavin Edwards acknowledges an allegiance ‘to
that tradition of analysis which credits the revolution in
France with an epoch-making (or period-making) role in British
literary culture’ (p. 10); though this stance is modified
by reference to other contributory elements, such as broad
social changes within Britain from the 1760, while at some
points the focus can become surprisingly specific (as in references
to the positions of Scott and Wordsworth in the invasion-wary
climate of 1805).
One of the
main strengths of the book lies in the tightness of the specific
‘case-study’ analyses of individual authors and
texts which constitute the main chapters. Here Edwards is
capable of quite brilliant exegesis, especially through an
ability to bring together dynamically different levels of
approach. The account of Johnson’s need to impose order
through a forward-moving narrative, which so doggedly resists
in the Life of Savage the impulse to return to and
change beginnings, is elucidated by a combination of factors,
ranging from Johnson’s own psychological intensities
to the context of contemporary Jacobitism and the desire to
return to a status quo ante. Edmund Burke, in turn,
directly responding to a revolutionary discourse where beginnings
become precedents or (more threateningly) endings and beginnings
collide, is seen as valorising instead middles and mediations.
The occupant of the entailed estate (a key motif) is thus
seen as being part of a kind of continual middle state of
‘passing through’, in this sense a ‘life-tenant’
rather than proprietor or owner. In an exceptionally fine
passage of linguistic analysis, ‘we’ is seen as
the controlling pronoun in Burke’s rhetoric, and the
present perfect the controlling tense.
Edwards then
consciously widens and complicates the picture with a fine
chapter on the British officer/writer Watkin Tench, whose
two publications describing the British colonisation of New
South Wales receive similarly sharp and wide-ranging analysis.
A focal point of the argument here is the complex relationship
between ‘journal’ and ‘narrative’
in Tench’s recording and writing up of material, especially
in view of the interlocking of their publication history with
the outbreak of revolution in France—though arguably
it is the situation in Australia itself, the untracked terrain
and the breakdown of normative social relations, which threatens
most starkly conventional forms of narrative ordering. After
a slightly more routine chapter on Godwin’s Caleb
Williams (1794), in which ‘character’, ‘narrative’,
and ‘family’ are among keywords under scrutiny,
Edwards provides a quite stunning commentary on the signification
of ‘moving accidents’ in a variety of Wordsworthian
texts. While Wordsworth’s allusion to the source passage
in Othello has evidently elicited a fair amount of
discussion amongst his critics, one doubts whether it has
been carried anywhere close to the level of semantic intensity
as found here. In particular, Edwards focuses on the three
meanings of ‘accident’: the Shakespearean one
of ‘incident’ or ‘event’, largely
defunct in Wordsworth’s day; the philosophical one of
‘chance’, or ‘not essential’; and
the more modern one of ‘mishap’. In a sequence
of fascinating analyses, Wordsworth’s texts are shown
to include aspects of all three meanings, often caught in
fluid states, the final possibility intriguingly offered by
Edwards being one where the ‘slighter’ modern
form overlays the more ‘heroic’ Shakespearean
one, the resultant model being not unlike that of the Freudian
consciousness/unconsciousness.
Following chapters
point to further undermining of narrative order: firstly in
the ‘conservative’ George Crabbe, in whose verse
the ‘parable’ is seen as wilting under the pressure
of irresistible changes in the social order; then in the more
‘radical’ Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley,
in whose fictions beginnings and ends are confused or denied,
contracts both attract and bind, first-person accounts override
the third-person narrative, and stories are told in a desperate
but often vain effort to form relations. The strengths and
potential dangers of Edwards’s approach are most strikingly
visible in the book’s final chapter. This begins by
speculating an affinity between The Bride of Lammermoor
(1819) and Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’
(published one year later), as representatives of two major
forms to emerge from the formal instabilities of the early
nineteenth century, the short lyrical poem and the historical
novel. The main weight in this chapter falls on the Bride,
the interpretation of which hinges on the preliminary chapter
involving a discussion between the rustic painter Dick Tinto
and the putative author Peter Pattieson, concerning the aesthetics
of narrative painting. Edwards from this launching-pad enters
into several potentially productive areas, such as the relationship
between sketch and finished product, one particularly insightful
observation here being how the reader is invited to anticipate
in the main story a movement from the first to the second.
Arguably however some of the connections made border on the
tendentious. Tinto’s exclamatory mention of ‘Sir
Joshua’ leads for example a little too smoothly into
an assumption that ‘Scott probably did have Reynolds’
Discourses in mind’ (p. 162)—an assumption
which is subsequently transferred into something more like
a certitude: ‘as I have suggested, Reynolds’ views
are very much in evidence throughout the argument between
narrator and painter’ (p. 165).
Similarly,
while it is a credit to Edwards that he is alive to the possible
significances of the narrative’s temporal setting round
about the 1707 Union between England and Scotland, it is perhaps
wrong to talk about ‘uncertainty’ on Scott’s
part as to whether the time is pre-1707 or not. The 1819 first
edition of the Bride is fairly clearly set before
the Union, and it is to the still extant Scottish Parliament
that Edgar Ravenswood is envisaging an appeal—references
to an appeal to the House of Lords, making the period unequivocally
post-1707, probably only entered into the 1830 Magnum Opus
text of the novel though Scott’s insecurities over accuracy.
The point might seem a purely technical one, but in fact a
realisation of the original pre-1707 setting can help liberate
a whole area of meaning from the novel, vital to Scott when
writing, in which the dual possibilities of marital union
in the novel parallel two alternative political unions, a
consensual federal union and an enforced incorporating union.
Edwards’s analysis certainly touches on such pivotal
oppositions, but it is to a position of the ‘undermining
of narrative meaning’ (p. 178) that one is finally led.
On a more particular front, there are signs that the writer’s
knowledge of Scott is not so advanced as in the case of other
authors discussed. It is surely an exaggeration to say that
‘many of Scott’s novels [are] narrated by Peter
Pattieson’ (p. 159); and it is almost certainly wrong
to talk of Ravenswood’s father as ‘the old Master
of Ravenswood’ (p. 172), since ‘Master of Ravenswood’
is a courtesy title applying only to Edgar his son (‘Master
of’ referring to the heir apparent of a Scottish barony).
In view of these and other oversights, one is inclined to
be sceptical about the proven status of some more sweeping
statements, e.g. the assertion (made twice) that the Bride
of Lammermoor is ‘Scott’s most Burkian novel’
(pp. 15, 161).
As a whole,
this is a brave, accomplished, and challenging book. Its concerns
have clearly been fomenting in the author’s mind for
some time, one symptom of this being the high degree of interrelationship
evident in the discussions of themes, authors, and works.
The texts are well selected and operate in relation to each
other in fruitful and sometimes surprising ways. At the same
time, it is very much a book which accentuates modern
interpretation as a primary level of activity, to the
extent that aspects such as contemporary readerships and publishing
conditions tend to be dealt with in a relatively cursory way.
In this respect, notwithstanding its strong historical agenda,
this book might ultimately tell us more about ourselves (or
a section of ourselves) than its purported subject.
Peter D. Garside
University of Edinburgh
