Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder

305 Pages·2014·3.072 MB·English

by  Sarah Tindal Kareem

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION AND THE
REINVENTION OF WONDER

Eighteenth-Century
Fiction and the
Reinvention of Wonder
SARAH TINDAL KAREEM
1
1
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For my mother, Heloise Kareem, and in memory
of my father, Jafar Kareem

Preface
This book probably owes its existence to the fact that I had to read David
Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) when I was
sixteen for my A level philosophy class. Reading the Enquiry inspired a
mental game that I would play as my friend Tamsin and I walked every
week from Tufnell Park, London, to our class at William Ellis School in
Parliament Hill: could I make myself believe, for even a fraction of a sec-
ond, that the very next paving stone, or the next, or the next, might give
way, might not be there to meet my foot, because cause and effect was
just “constant conjunction,” in Hume’s terms, and there was no saying
whether any of the things I unthinkingly took for granted (like paving
stones providing stable ground beneath my feet) would continue to pro-
duce their longstanding effects (Enquiry 28).
I could sort of, nearly, barely, make myself think it, and it was thrill-
ing. I offer up this memory, implausible or sentimental as it may sound,
because it gets quickly to several ideas at the heart of this book: the idea
of wonder at the real, everyday world, and the relationship of both skep-
ticism and of reading to this type of wonder. In graduate school I real-
ized that what compelled me in particular was how literary texts imagined
wonder as an experience that they might solicit (as Hume puts it, the
“particular situation of the Imagination and of the Passions, which is sup-
posed” by a text (Philosophical Essays 37)). Nonetheless, as I puzzled over
eighteenth-century fiction, with its determined ordinariness but also fre-
quent exhortations to wonder, I also thought back to my own heightened
sense of the paving stone’s contingency. Was it in such a sense of contin-
gency that wonder might reside in a modern, secular age? If so, could this
be a legacy of Hume’s Enlightenment skepticism? And could it tell us
something, too, about the strange contortions of belief solicited by the
period’s fiction?
The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has been a major voice in recent
conversations about secularization and, in particular, the eighteenth cen-
tury’s relationship to the modern world. One important aspect of Taylor’s
argument is that modern secularization includes the view that “belief
falls within our agency”—meaning that you can choose to be Catholic,
Scientologist, or yogi as you please (Miles 2). Consider the example of
a second-grade yearbook from a California public school, in which each
child described himself or herself by filling in a series of blanks: favorite
food: pizza; color of hair: brown; and finally, about half way down the
viii Preface
list: “believes in: Santa.” When I questioned the seven-year-old author
of this particular entry, he explained that he did not believe in Santa, but
that for that question alone the teacher had presented the class with two
choices: God or Santa. “So I chose Santa,” he explained, a little sheep-
ishly. Sure enough, when I flipped through the yearbook, I found that
almost every child had professed a belief in either God or Santa (God: 16;
Santa: 10, for the record) with the exception of three iconoclasts who had
veered off script (“the world”; “being nice”; “Elijah”).
This example gets to the heart of Taylor’s concept of secularism in
the modern world: you can believe in anything (God, Santa; even, if
you must, the world) as long as you believe in something. But if this is an
assumption that modernity in its North American form nurtures (partly,
indeed, through school exercises like the one described), the conclusion
that we might infer that belief is ubiquitous neglects what is arguably
also a key feature of the phenomenology of modern belief—and also one
exemplified in the answer “Santa”; what Peter E. Gordon characterizes as
the “modernist’s vertiginous sense of contingency,” the “ironist’s faith,”
the “divided consciousness of simultaneously believing and not believing”
(Gordon 655).1 It is this aspect of modernity that concerns me here, and
its genesis in the crises of belief precipitated by the Enlightenment’s provi-
sion of alternate explanatory frameworks for interpreting the world and
human nature’s role in it, frameworks frequently incompatible with those
that had served previous generations so well. In the eighteenth century,
the discourse of wonder provided a nuanced descriptive vocabulary with
which to chart the multiple ways in which belief and disbelief might inter-
sect, while fiction’s emergence as a distinct discursive category requiring
its own carefully attuned timbre of belief provided a space in which the
drama of belief and disbelief’s myriad possible cominglings could be both
experienced and observed in action.
This book has taken far, far, longer for me to write than I ever imagined
possible, and as a result my debts are many and long overdue. This book
began as a doctoral dissertation in the Department of English at Harvard
University, where much of the initial writing was undertaken with the
support of an Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship.
My deepest thanks must go to my advisor, Leo Damrosch, for his stead-
fast encouragement and for exemplifying an elegance and thoughtfulness
in writing about fiction and philosophy to which I can only aspire. My
other committee members, Robert Kiely, Philip Fisher, and Mary Baine
1 For a hilariously evocative description of “cognitive impenetrability” in action—in this
case, what it feels like to be an “agnostic-atheist hybrid” by the author Dan Savage—see
<http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/379/transcript>
Preface ix
Campbell, each also played a significant role in the project’s development,
and I offer them my heartfelt thanks. Thanks for early encouragement,
inspiration, and advice is also due to Lynn Festa, John Guillory, Stephen
Greenblatt, Jesse Matz, Leah Price, and Werner Sollors. After graduating,
I was the fortunate recipient of a series of postdoctoral fellowships that
allowed me to have conversations with exactly the people I needed to. At
the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, I am for-
ever grateful to Lorraine Daston, as well as to all those who participated
in Project Knowledge and Belief and who provided critical feedback on
the first draft of Chapter 4, especially Mechthild Fend. At UCLA, where
I held an Ahmanson-Getty fellowship at the Center for Seventeenth- and
Eighteenth-Century Studies and an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral
Fellowship at UCLA’s Humanities Consortium, I must thank Max Novak
for allowing me to be a part of the “Age of Projects” program, and for
his generous mentorship, Peter Reill, for fostering such a lively spirit
of collegiality at the Center and at the Clark library, and Vince Pecora,
for his encouragement and sage advice. I was lucky during these years
to enjoy the camaraderie of a wonderful cohort of fellows: David Boyd
Hancock, Martin Gierl, Ellen Koehler, Kimberly Latta, Marc Lerner,
Alison O’Byrne, and Stefania Tutino.
There is a theme emerging in these acknowledgments and it is of
extraordinary good fortune piled upon good fortune. In the tradition of
eighteenth-century novels, there is still a good deal left to tell. A Harper
fellowship with the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at the University
of Chicago came in the nick of time, and Robin Valenza, Lara Cohen, and
Liesl Olson offered much appreciated support during two sleep-deprived
years in Chicago. Since returning to UCLA in 2007, the project came
together in its final form, guided and inspired by my colleagues. For their
unflagging support, my deepest thanks must go to Felicity Nussbaum and
Helen Deutsch, both of whom have read and reread whatever and when-
ever I have asked them, and have been honest with me when I most needed
to hear it. I have taken their advice and the book is better (and shorter, for
which we can all be grateful) because of it. Thanks for advice and support
are also due to Joe Bristow, Matthew Fisher, Barbara Fuchs, Saree Makdisi,
Kirstie McClure, Anne Mellor, Anne Gilliland, and Mary Terrall. Special
thanks are due to Jonathan Grossman, who read the introduction at a
crucial juncture and helped me see how to make it work. Thanks of a dif-
ferent order are due to Mitchum Huehls and Marissa López who from day
one have been a constant source not only of friendship and good advice,
but of the very necessities of life: countless meals, child care, stiff drinks,
and even, on one memorable camping trip, shelter. Beyond UCLA, many
others have offered support and encouragement: in particular, I’d like to