The friendly companion: Toward a comic poetics in the nineteenth-century English novel (Henry Fielding, Sir Walter Scott, Scotland, Maria Edgeworth, George Gissing, Thomas Hardy)

Comedy and literary theory co-exist uneasily, especially in critical discussions of the realist novel. Since Erich Auerbach's masterful study of realism in Western literature, Mimesis, the comic has generally been exiled from the “serious” business of representing quotidian “reality” in literature. Indeed, Auerbach measures the nineteenth-century English novel against his standard of “seriousness” and disqualifies it as “realistic” primarily because of its didacticism and sentimentality.; However, the recent work of Ronald Paulson and other critics has begun to reconsider eighteenth-century comic theory as ideologically and aesthetically crucial to the formation of the English novel. Paulson's study argues that Addison and other eighteenth-century aestheticians deliberately constructed Whig political ideology in terms of amiable humor and disinterested sympathy, as opposed to savage Tory wit and satire. This ideology became dominant in both politics and literature and was widely disseminated in Whig periodicals and, beginning with Fielding, in the English novel. Moreover, Whig ideology developed alongside scientific empiricism and philosophical skepticism, challenging aesthetics to promulgate an epistemological model that substitutes a secular soteriology for a sacred one.; This study extends Paulson's idea of Whig ideology's aesthetic foundation in an effort to demonstrate its pervasive influence on the nineteenth century English novel from Edgeworth and Scott to Gissing and Hardy. At the same time, it engages and refutes Auerbach's basic thesis that “serious” literary realism and comic theory are incompatible. In readings of nineteenth-century English comic theory and twenty works of “realist” fiction, I argue that Whig comic disinterestedness continues to construct individual and social identity in a world increasingly threatened by materialist ideologies and discourses. The comic self that emerges from these fictions—the historical novel, the Bildungsroman, the condition of England novel, the novel of manners—is conscious of both its epistemologically contingent existence and its fundamentally aesthetic nature. Moreover, at the narrative level nineteenth-century English fiction enacts the comic self-consciousness it simultaneously proclaims. In other words, it models comic disinterestedness while representing “life as it is” in all of its “serious” and “tragic” dimensions. The comic paradoxically becomes the most serious discourse of all—the discourse of individual and collective survival.