In literature, scenes orient readers, structuring their experience of the fiction, focusing their desires and providing an identifiable location for specific events and exchanges (âthat scene whereâŠâ). They play an equally important structuring role for the writer, too. As Leigh Michaels explains in On Writing Romance: How to Craft a Novel That Sells (2007), âwriting a book doesnât look like such an overwhelming project if you think of the task in terms of constructing the individual scenes that make up the storyâeach one just a few pages in lengthâ (p. 108). But when did scenes become a fundamental structuring principle for the novel? The genre of popular romance is in fact important here: when contemporary writers emphasise the practical and theoretical centrality of scene, they repeat what could be taken as the originary scene of the romance novel itself: that moment in which Eliza Haywood transformed older forms of prose narrative by introducing the scenic form into the literary marketplace of the early eighteenth century.
Haywood is perhaps the first popular novelist, in a recognisably modern sense. A bestseller, a writer by profession, suspiciously prolific, a canny creator and consumer of generic patterns and formulae, a writer who affirmed the heteronomous principle of literary production so fully that she opened her own bookshop under the title âSign of Fameâ in Covent Garden: one can multiply the intersections of Haywoodâs work with the descriptive and evaluative categories of twenty-first-century conceptions of popular fiction; as, indeed, numerous literary historians have. By the 1720s one of the necessary conditions of the popular novelâthe literary marketâwas well established (McDowell 1989). Haywoodâs first novel, Love in Excess (1719â20), is widely considered to be one of the first bestsellers in the history of the English novel; set alongside the other two bestsellers of the first half of the eighteenth centuryâRobinson Crusoe (1719) and Gulliverâs Travels (1726)âit is an early example of the emergence of mass art (Richetti 1969, p. 5). Yet because writers earned so little for their texts, and because the literary field was so turbulent, it was not enough to build a career around periodic bestsellers (see Turner 1992; Ballaster 1992, p. 72; and McDowell 1998). As âa professional writer in a competitive marketâ, Catherine Ingrassia writes, Haywood âhad to produce salable commodities at a consistently rapid pace to sustain her relationship to booksellersâ (1998, p. 78). It is a point forcefully allegorised in Haywoodâs novella Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze (1725), where the anonymous protagonistâs âinventing Brainâ proliferates fictions in order to control and sustain the desire of her lover, the unfaithful reader (Haywood 2004, p. 53).
However, it also underlines an important aspect of the commodity character of the early novel. William Warner argues that early novels were âthe first disposable books, written in anticipation of their own obsolescence and in acceptance of their own transient function as part of a print culture of serial entertainmentsâ (1994, p. 4). They were fast-moving consumer goods, a feature that left its mark on both the quantity and quality of Haywoodâs work. In terms of quantity, she was astonishingly prolific: âthe most voluminous female writer this kingdom has ever producedâ, as her contemporary David Erskine Baker put it (1764, n.p.). Ros Ballaster estimates that in the 1720s alone, Haywood published a new novel every three months (1992, p. 159). At the level of form, however, the commodification of the early novel generates fiction that is formulaic: easy to produce, already familiar, easy to consume (Backsheider 2000, p. 21; Warner 1998, p. 112â16; Richetti 2012, p. 27â28). It sharpens the distinction of genre as well. Haywoodâs relation to her genreâthe amatory novelâwas precise and sophisticated, enabling her to conserve its distinctive literary position between didactic love fiction and pornography (Ballaster 1992, p. 32; Richetti 1969).
I want to develop this last set of claims, turning around the relation of the craft and form of the novel to the literary market insofar as they do not yet appreciate what is so formulaic about the amatory novel. If we think in terms of the scene here, we might focus not so much on the repetition of amorous scenes or sex scenes as an obligatory part of the genre, but rather on the intensely iterative and stereotyped nature of the scenic form as such. This kind of repetition is not only the mark of a technical discovery that maximises the productive capacity of the writer, it also governs the process of consumption. To make this argument, I want to return to Ros Ballasterâs thesis in her foundational work, Seductive Forms (1992). As the title suggests, her central claim is that the form of a seduction narrative is inseparable from its content: âThe telling of a story of seduction is also a mode of seductionâ (p. 24). For Ballaster, form most often just means plot, and plot grasped at its most basic level as a linked series of events. What I want to argue here, however, is that Haywoodâs transformation of the evental narrative into scenic plot was the foundational element that enabled her narratives to work as agents of seduction in the marketplace itself.
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To claim that Haywood was one of the first to exploit the full potential of the scenic form is not to suggest that she invented it. The scene has a surprisingly complex history. It began to appear in prose narratives as early as the eighth century, and its power and strangeness were immediately apparent. As JoaquĂn Pizarro explains, in contrast to typical modes of medieval narration, the âfunction of the scene is in no way causal or explanatoryâ; rather, its function is to create the illusion of an immersion in the world of the story: âit is fundamentally about the decision on the part of the narrator to let the story speak for itself, that is, to efface himself as much as possible and create the illusion that we are witnessing the events he describesâ (1989, p. 13). The unit of the scene, then, constitutes a rupture or a cut in the texture of narrative. It isolates a segment of action from those around it and narrates that segment in the âscenic modeâ; that is, it shows rather than tells, creating the immersive illusion of mimesis from within the constraints of diegesis. Throughout the middle ages, though, these moments of immersive illusion are rare. Scenes erupt at certain key moments of a work, usually late in the text, and immediately fade back into more familiar narrative textures. The frequency of these scenic moments increases rapidly across the early modern period (see Fludernik 1996), but it is not until the eighteenth century that the scene becomes a structural principle for the narrative as such.
This is particularly the case in England. While there is a long tradition of scenic writing in European prose romanceâbeginning as early as the thirteenth-century Lancelot-Grail and taken up in the late fifteenth in the Amadis de Gaula as well as the Spanish dialogue novel, and used consistently in Don Quixote (1605)âthe major Anglophone writers of prose narrative during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuriesâDeloney, Greene, Head, Bunyanâdid not write or even apparently conceive of their works as a linked series of scenes. For some, like William Congreve at the end of the seventeenth century, the very idea was a fundamental misunderstanding of the principles of poetics. Consider the preface to Congreveâs only novel, Incognita (1692). In a well-known passage, he sharply distinguishes romance from the novel before bringing them together again under that tradition which is their common origin and end point. All traditions, he writes, âmust indisputably give place to the Dramaâ (2011, p. 4). He notes, however, that this does not mean narrated stories should attempt to reproduce the illusion of present action. On the contrary, it means there âis no possibility of giving that life to the Writing or Repetition of a story which it has in the actionâ (p. 5). In drama, he explains, âMinerva walks upon the stage before usâ; in person, as it were. Narrative, by contrast, is ârepetitionâ: it repeats, from a distance, the âlifeâ of action, the âreal presenceâ of the stage (p. 5). The argument turns on a proliferation of sharply distinguished binaries: mimesis and diegesis, presence and absence, drama and narration. It would be against the very principle of narrative, then, to create the illusion of mimesis in diegesis, and for this reason Congreve concludes by declaring that he âresolved in another beauty to imitate Dramatick Writing, namely, in the Design, Contexture, and the Result of the Plotâ (p. 5). If Incognita, and Congreveâs understanding of the novel as such, insist that it is an imitation of dramatic form, this imitation unfolds only at the level of plot and the sequencing of action. What is explicitly forbidden is the attempt to create, diegetically, the illusion of mimesisâone of the basic marks of scenic writing.
Indeed, neither of the other bestsellers contemporaneous with Love in Excess is composed scenically. This might not be surprising in the case of Swiftâs Gulliverâs Travels, despite its memorable scenes and despite the fact that one of Gulliverâs first reflections on Lilliput is that its prospect is as entertaining as the âpainted Scene of a City in a Theatreâ (Swift 2012, p. 74). The aim of Swiftian satire is not to induce immersion, but to turn humour and imagination into principles of judgement, evaluation and critiqueâwhich is to say, forms of distance in service of âthe publick spiritâ (Swift and Sheridan 1992, p. 62). It is for a similar reason that the dominant form of the amatory tradition before Haywood consistently pulls back from full scenic presentation: the generic force of the roman Ă clef is to index the narrative to purportedly real historical events and actors, thus disrupting the continuity of the fiction.
The claim that Robinson Crusoe is not scenic is perhaps more surprising: some of its scenes, such as the footprint scene, are among the most iconic in the Anglophone novel. The footprint scene, however, is not a scene. It is not a framed event, set off from those around it; nor is the event dilated and slowed down to the point that it enters the open-ended present of the scenic mode. It is, rather, a singular event linked, in a broader sequence, to other events, none of which approaches the dilation of the scenic. One might argue that the absence of an anticipatory frame has an aesthetic functionâthat the footprint erupts within our perception just as it did in Crusoeâsâbut that argument would have to contend with the fact that the rest of the work operates in the same way: one event or task after another. Of the many things about Defoeâs fiction that Ian Watt famously criticised, this is one that drew special attention. Every narrative, Watt says, oscillates between scene and summary:
Wattâs expectation is anachronistic: the tendency to minimise summary and to maximise scene only becomes an implicit norm of the novel at the end of the eighteenth century, and it only becomes an explicit evaluative principle at the end of the nineteenth. Nevertheless, it is based on the recognition that the structural logic of Defoeâs events is not that of the scene.[T]he tendency of most novelists is to reduce these latter synopses to a minimum and to focus as much attention as possible on a few fully realised scenes; but this is not the case with Defoe. His story is told in over a hundred realised scenes whose average length is less than two pages, and an equally large number of passages containing rapid and often perfunctory connective synopses. (1963, p. 100)
Haywoodâs Love in Excess occupies a distinct position, then, alongside the two other bestsellers of the early eighteenth century. Its distinction is not only a function of its amatory content; it is just as much a function of the structural logic of the text (and the kind of experience that form makes possible). It is with Love in Excess that the English novel begins to be organised and developed as nothing but a linked series of scenes, a structure that constitutes a distinct species in the ecosystem of the literary field during this period. In order to elaborate the ways in which the scene can function as an agent of seduction, however, it is necessary to turn to a closer analysis of the form itself.
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The scenic form is a complex structure that synthesises two distinct formal features. On the one hand, when we speak of a scene we often mean a discrete moment in the text, one that is clearly framed and set apart from the scenes before and after it. One the other, we mean those passages narrated in the scenic mode, moments that the narrator repeats in the open and lived time of the present rather than the condensed, abstract and fixed time of summary. Consider again Pizzaroâs definition quoted earlier. On the one hand, he speaks of the scene, the unit of the scene, the discrete narrative event. On the other hand, he speaks of the narratorâs act of self-erasure, which is to say a modal shift or modification of the act of narration. This distinction between unit and mode is important for reasons beyond analytical clarity. It gives precision to the historical shift I am sketching here. There is no doubt that much prose narrative between the eighth century and the eighteenth unfolds eventally, as a linked series of more or less amplified or abbreviated events. But those moments at which the narrative refuses the act of summary, erases the position of the narrator, and immerses the reader in the time and intensity of the dramatic action, are rare. And yet it is precisely these two togetherâframe and modeâthat coordinate the readerâs attention so effectively. It is the scene, in other words, that turns Haywoodâs seductive forms into forms that are seductive.
The clearest way of indicating what I mean is by an example. One of the most interesting moments in Love in Excess is the climactic scene of Part I: interesting not because it is exemplary of the scenic form that would come to dominate the novel later on, but because it simultaneously points in that direction while recalling older models of narrative form. The position of this scene is important. Haywoodâs novel is carefully organised as a totality in a way that derivative novels like Samuel Richardsonâs Pamela (1740) are not. Each of the novelâs three parts corresponds to a moment in the education of the hero, Count Dâelmont. When the novel begins, Dâelmont has returned to Paris from the War of Spanish Succession and news of his âbrave actionsâ has been bru...