A Summary On Ian Watt’s Chapter 1 From “The Rise of the Novel”

We all love novels, don’t we? But apart from reading your favorite novel the 118th time and setting it aside have any of us ever tried to embark upon the origins of this wonderful literary device?

Maybe we haven’t because life is pretty busy for all of us, our work our chores everything robs us of sitting peacefully and think sometimes.

However, if you are curious as of what lies behind the origin of the “novel” you are in luck. Ian Watt has done it for you in his wonderful book “The Rise of the Novel”.

Now, if you are way too busy to read an entire book on the origins of the novel you are in luck, “again”. This time courtesy of your author, that is me.

What I have done here is breakdown Ian Watt’s work into bite-size chunks for those who are curious about the origins of the novel. Today I’m dealing with Ian Watt’s first chapter “Realism and the Novel Form”.

Long back, in the 18th century around 300 years back, your grandad's dad might have owned a signed copy of the book and must have fried his brains trying to read through the book, anyhow I know I have.

In the 18th century, the form called novel was born in the hearts of a select group of writers, Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. The fun fact is that they had not a lot in common, yet carved out a beautiful form of literary art.

While discussing the origin story of the novel, we cannot ignore the elephant in the room, an invisible elephant though that might have played the key role during that era in the creation of this new form of literary art.

It was a realism that characterized the novel from its predecessors. When I say realism don’t stone me by accusing that it is the opposite of idealism, they aren’t the exact opposites.

We can define realism to be an attempt that tried to picture the aspect of human experience, all of them.

It is alive and running in the manner of representation of life. A novel is then an approach to scientifically view “life”.

To better understand what comes after this, we have to stress upon the middle ages or rather the universal ideas that were thought to be the “true reality”. However, one person could not accept this notion, Descartes! Descartes hypothesized reality as it is something perceived by an individual and is strictly not cohesive to the previous ideas on reality.

Looking at the development of the novel from a bird’s eye view we can see that it reflects upon the changes brought upon philosophy.

The truly wonderful aspect here is that this origin at a level could detach itself from “history” and consequently could detach from the conventions of a literary genre, the result was superb, the novel was created as a “novel” idea.

All of this aided the novel to have very few conversions that a literary critic can wield to analyze the novel.

The novel, in addition to this, was able to stay off the traditional plots. This wasn’t the case of works of earlier genres. Novels in that sense are more “genuine”.

This uniqueness and genuinity contributed heavily to the realism of the novel. This demanded the plots, characters, and situations within a novel to become original.

What is the purpose of a novel one might ask? The novel essentially brings a divide between literature and abstraction. To put it in simple terms, “it is an entertainment thing”.

Also, the presence of realism intact in the novel meant that the novel had to characterization and the overall setting of the novel became important as well.

Where the characters of literary works that predated the novel were given a universal appeal, the novels brought in characters who had “realistic names”.

Locke felt that people’s history was an aid to their self-definition. And this was an idea that the novel embodied in the finest of detail. In a novel, a character’s history and exploration serve as the milestone of the topic of the novel.

Rather than remaining engulfed in the void of abstract events, novels represent the events contained within the solid framework of time and space and it pertains to specific characters.

It is interesting to note that novels tend to change characters over time but time itself is portrayed carefully as realism requires doing so.

Also. the way characters get randomized and their non-coherence to specific moral identities are also noteworthy. The novel thus is liberated from the constraints of time.

The plot can take place anytime, anywhere, centering, or decentering any character(s). There exist an interest in the realistic nature of daily life in the novel which was previously not present in literary works.

To cite an example, love stories in the era of the novel had no time constraint and could take place in real-time.

There is strict adherence to the time-scheme and space.

As final words, one can state that the novel is a never-ending journey to convey the realistic and genuine accounts of human experiences. This is a genre where there is an inherent “realism”!

Thank you!

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