| In Tom Jones, Fielding's "narrative voice" is self-reflexive and hyper-aware that he is shaping a literary text. He draws attention to the conventions of narrative and calls the narrating and reading processes into question. The novel was published in 1749, at a period in literary history when the communal ties between the story-teller and his audience were waning in favor of the commercial exchange between the author and the reader of novels. Unlike the face-to-face dialogue between the story-teller and his audience, the novel's structure entails solitary authors writing toward solitary readers. The anxieties generated by this shift into print culture force the author and the reader of novels to confront a "reading-toward-death," an eschatological approach to narrative defined according to each individual's ontological investment in the novel—one's "being-in-the-text." The narrator of Tom Jones figures his ontological presence as the patriarchal "host" of the text. In doing so, he invokes the concept of "hospitality." As the phallocentric keeper of the Word, the narrator attempts to the "hosted" reader to the emblem of the Father which characterizes his discourse. |
