Uncertain fictions: fictional forms addressing philosophical uncertainty in the enlightenment; Lamb

2011-12-08In the Eighteenth Century, as English men and women disputed the longstanding authority of the monarchy and the church, reorienting themselves spiritually and politically in the century following The Great Revolution, Enlightenment thinking also manifested more broadly in philosophical questions: What is the world as it is versus the world as it seems? Is the sensible world and its phenomena independent of the human mind? What is a person? How is one person not another person? How do I know what I know? To what extent do I create the very phenomena I sense? Is a person in the mind or in the body? In the memory? Where does a person go when asleep? When drunk? Conscious? Unconscious? ❧ All of these are questions that were addressed by eighteenth-century thinkers of natural science, politics, spirituality and—as this project claims and explores—verbal representational works of art; for the poetic and prose forms with which eighteenth-century writers chose to represent the world are inextricably bound up with an author’s postulations about character, narration, mimesis. In particular, this project examines how these aforementioned philosophical questions piqued Enlightenment writers of what is now generally—and anachronistically—called “fiction.” ❧ This project is not concerned so much with these aforementioned questions or with any philosophical approaches to resolving them as it is with the way that the questions themselves manifested—sometimes in particular forms of narration, or in particular presentations of character—in the very forms of early, experimental “fictions.” From the satires of Pope and Swift through the fictional experiments of Laurence Sterne, Henry Fielding, and Jane Austen, the page quickly and indisputably became a place where authors and readers alike might postulate resolutions to some of these philosophical questions. ❧ The extent to which fiction can be a place for political and philosophical argument—at least in terms of the questions raised above—seems almost to disappear by the time of Jane Austen. If not wholly missing from the narrative style Ian Watt dubbed “formal realism,” Austen’s narrative style (how she manages to position the narrator in relation to the fictional characters as well as to the reader) brushes past these aforementioned epistemological and ontological questions. Indeed, the style avoids these questions so thoroughly that it should come as no surprise that the very same questions wait for us in the wings of only a few “experimental” novels in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And to this extent, we might say, indeed, that the Eighteenth Century and its crisis of Enlightenment have not yet been resolved. ❧ Lamb traces the self-discovery of David Lamb, a narcissistic middle- aged man with a tendency toward dishonesty, in the weeks following the disintegration of his marriage and the death of his father. Hoping to regain some faith in his own goodness, he turns his attention to Tommie, an awkward and unpopular eleven-year-old girl. Lamb is convinced that he can help her avoid a destiny of apathy and emptiness, and even comes to believe that his devotion to Tommie is in her best interest. But when Lamb decides to abduct a willing Tommie for a road trip from Chicago to the Rockies, planning to initiate her into the beauty of the mountain wilderness, they are both shaken in ways neither of them expects