Abstract
Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic is a rarity among academic monographs in that it can equally be described as a rigorous work of scholarship and a page-turner. Marina MacKay offers a gripping account of Watt’s experience in the Second World War, first as a British officer during the ill-fated Battle for Singapore and then as a Prisoner of War in the notorious labour camps on the Burma–Thailand Railway. While Watt rarely wrote about his imprisonment, and never in reference to his scholarship, MacKay makes a compelling case that the trauma of those years ‘is coded in the whole body of his criticism’ (p. 9). Wartime Critic is part of Oxford University Press’s Mid-Century Studies series which examines major artistic and intellectual movements of the tumultuous decades surrounding the Second World War. The book is part biography of a major literary figure and part biography of an intellectual community forced to reconceive the Humanities in the aftermath of the War. MacKay’s project is to historicise Watt’s scholarship within mid-century discourses on the apparent failure of liberal humanism. She organises her book around Watt’s monumental study The Rise of the Novel (1957), which continues to provoke ‘serious, if exasperated’ engagement from literary historians and scholars of the eighteenth century (p. 17). Yet, MacKay is neither among those who wish to elevate nor demolish Watt’s now-contentious claim that the novel is defined by its ‘narrative realism’ or, indeed, that it can be said to have risen. Rather, she approaches Watt as an intellectual of his time and offers Wartime Critic as a narrative ‘less about the mid-eighteenth century than of the mid-twentieth’ (p. 19).
Each of the first four chapters explores a different aspect of how years spent as a prison labourer helped shape Watt’s critical perspective. Chapter One reconstructs the grim details of the Burma–Thailand Railway. MacKay conveys the deplorable conditions in the Japanese work-camps by way of survivor accounts more detailed than Watt himself wrote and she infers his subjective experience through his later scholarship on Joseph Conrad. ‘Throughout his work’, she writes, Watt always described admiringly Conrad’s conservative faith in the virtues of duty,renunciation, and solidarity, even while acknowledging that in the face of such atrocities as those Conrad had witnessed in the Belgian Congo the famous Conradian ideals of “restraint” and “fidelity” […] constitute only a “meagre moral armament”. (p. 33)
In his section on Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722), Watt argues that the novel shaped, and was shaped by, a rising ethos of individualism. According to MacKay, Watt’s emphasis on individual experience often gives the impression of him as a ‘literary-historical spokesman for a Whiggish, Bildungsroman-like narrative of the progressive enfranchisement of the modern individual’ (p. 61). To the contrary, she notes, Watt saw this individualist turn as ‘something much more frightening in its capacity to uproot and isolate people, setting them against one another as competitors and rivals’ (p. 61). Here, MacKay offers a highly original, and convincing, reading of Watt’s chapter, arguing that it aligns Crusoe, and especially Flanders, with the surprisingly sympathetic figure of the prison-camp entrepreneur. Defoe’s protagonists are not champions of an indifferent, individualistic, paradigm; they win our sympathy by thriving in spite of it. Chapter Three addresses Watt’s disparaging treatment of Pamela (1740), which he takes as an early instance of the mass media repackaging personal fantasy as marketable ‘pseudo-realism’ (p. 100), as he termed it. Reading his treatment of Richardson alongside his damning critique of The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), MacKay argues that his problems with Pamela are less about the courtship novel per se than the crass culture industry it exemplified. In spite of his misgivings about Richardson, however, MacKay detects an affinity with the imprisoned Clarissa (1748) and a more nuanced understanding of selfhood in the novel than is generally acknowledged. The last chapter in this section offers a solution to the seemingly incongruous inclusion of Fielding in a book about narrative realism. MacKay contends that the ‘realism of assessment’ Watt identifies in Fielding is significant for representing the ‘social and moral consensus over the individualistic and interior perspectives of Defoe and Richardson’ (p. 122). She reads this section alongside the prison-camp writing of Watt’s contemporaries, asserting he saw Fielding as an advocate for a disciplined civic order, which could serve as a bulwark against the kind of chaos that culminated in the War.
The last section turns to the state, and stakes, of literary scholarship in the post-war era. This was a time that English departments may look back on with nostalgia for the cultural prestige they once held. Even then, however, there was a sense that traditional criticism, with its emphasis on descriptive accuracy about ‘serious’ texts, was losing ground to abstract theorising about universal structures. Watt was appalled by structuralist and post-structuralist modes, which he regarded ‘as verbal abstraction in the service of mystification’ (p. 152). Chapter Five steps back from Watt’s labour-camp experience and places him in a movement of writers concerned about the potentially fascist implications of abstruse prose. This is the chapter least likely to encounter the objection that the book draws too strong a connection between Watt’s prison-camp experience and his theory of the novel. MacKay is careful not to overstate the relationship, but the nature of her biography cannot help but imply causation. Despite this potential quibble, Wartime Critic remains a first-rate work of scholarship on an inherently fascinating life and period of intellectual history. The book’s greatest strength is its fresh approach to a canonical and often embattled text. MacKay reminds us that Rise of the Novel is no less a product of its historical moment than are the eighteenth-century texts that it historicises. In so doing, she encourages a renewed understanding of Watt’s theoretical approach and revitalises a brilliant work that genre scholarship often relegates to the role of foil.