| The narrative structure of the eighteenth-century European novel develops within the context of a cluster of concurrent cultural changes--especially a changing understanding of the self and its relation to authority. In Sensibility, a cultural movement flourishing in Britain, France, and Germany ca. 1760-1810, a new moral self develops, distrustful of speech and the possibility of self-representation. The result is a crisis in authority--both in terms of the traditional moral authority of reason as well as the authority of the word, whether written or spoken. This growing concern about the limits of language helps shape the late-eighteenth-century novel and the general conception of authorship.; A distrust of the referential and communicative power of words and of the possibility of representation forces the author to develop "a rhetoric of silence" in order to represent what can no longer be articulated directly--that is, to preserve natural expression from the censorship of the authority of words, logic, grammar, and closure. Novelists of Sensibility develop a consciously fragmented narrative, where the protagonist tells his own story but relies on a second narrative frame--namely his fictionalized "editor"--for the (fictional) publication or discovery of his writings. This technique allows the hero to be sufficiently disorganized and skeptical of the corrupting influence of planning, prudence, and practical concerns, and, at the same time, it accounts for the hero's private story being, in fact, coherent and published. This double effect allows an audience suspicious of the authority and authorship to sympathize with the unorganized and therefore sincere hero. These narrative changes were initiated by Samuel Richardson, formulated and popularized by Laurence Sterne and Henry Mackenzie, exemplified and rejected by J. W. von Goethe; and modified by Jane Austen.; This narrative structure curiously parallels a concurrent taste in architecture--namely, fake ruins, or "follies." These purposely truncated monuments force the architect to pose as an archaeologist, much as the authors of Sensibility must pretend to have discovered their texts instead of having purposely written and published them. These parallel phenomena in the novel and landscape architecture reveal a prevailing mid-eighteenth-century ambivalence towards authority. |
