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The Novel and the Nation
5 3
our voyeuristic bur keenly felt passion; it also heightens their/our love for
the possible nation in v^hich the affair could be consummated.
These
novels are very different, but they share the project o f national reconcilia
tion; the coherence o f this special genre comes “from their common need
to reconcile and amalgamate national constituencies, and from the strategy
to cast the previously unreconciled parties, races, classes, or regions as lov
ers who are naturally attracted and right for each other.
In Franco Moretti’s Atlas o f the European Novel, i8oo-ipoo, empha
sis falls on ways in which “the novel functions as the symbolic form o f the
nation state. . . . [I]t’s a form that (unlike an anthem or a monument) not
only does not conceal the nation’s internal differences but manages to turn
them into a story" {Atlas, 20). Abstract and enigmatic, the new nation-state
was a problem. Readers “needed a symbolic form capable o f making sense
o f the nation-state,” but before Jane Austen “no one had really come up
with it” {Atlas, 20). “Well, the nation-state found the novel. And vice-ver
sa: the novel found the nation-state. And being the only form that could
represent it, it became an essential component o f our modern culture”
{Atlas, 17). Jane Austen’s novels narrate a national marriage market, tak
ing local gentry and joining them to a national elite; historical novels, with
their concern for boundaries and differences that are subjects o f conten
tion, represent internal unevenness in nations and its erasure; picaresque
novels, with their roads and inns where strangers meet, drink, and tell sto
ries o f their adventures, “define the nation as the new space o f ‘familiar
ity,’ where human beings re-cognize each other as members o f the same
wide group” ; and the Bildungsroman provides a new articulation o f nation
al space, stressing the contrast between the provinces and the metropolis
(old versus young, unfashionable versus fashionable) and the lure o f the
metropolis for the young o f the provinces. In exploring these different re
lations, Moretti argues that the meeting o f the novel and the nation-state
“was far from inevitable. The novel didn’t simply find the nation as an ob
vious, pre-formed fictional space: it had to wrest it from other geographical
matrices that were just as capable o f generating narrative— and that indeed
clashed with each other throughout the eighteenth century” {Atlas, 53).
11. Sommer, Foundational Fictions, 48.
12. Sommer, “Irresistible Romance,” 81.
13. Moretti, At/as, 18, 40, 51, 64-65.
The novel o f the nation had to wrest supremacy from supranational genres
such as the Robinsonade and the conte philosophique, for example.
While pursuing Anderson’s insight, Moretti thus ends up with a dif
ferent claim. What we seem to find is that the more interested one be
comes in the ways particular sorts o f novels, with their plots and their
imagined worlds, might advance, sustain, or legitimate the operations of
nation building, the richer and more detailed become one’s arguments
about novel and nation, but at the cost o f losing that general claim about
the novelistic organization o f time that was alleged to be the condition of
possibility o f imagining a nation. The more detailed the critical accounts
o f novels and their possible effects, the less powerful and encompassing the
general theory o f the novel. I return to this problem below.
Ill
After the presentation o f the space o f a community and the represen
tation o f the world o f a nation, the third aspect o f the novel pertinent to
Anderson’s claim is its address to the reader. His discussion o f print capi
talism links novels and newspapers in a way that is not obvious but that is
fleshed out somewhat by Roddey Reid. Describing a new public discourse,
whose effects were feared at the time, Reid declares, “prose fiction had a
particularly powerful role to play as a social actor in constructing a dis
course that rewrote the social body and cast social relations o f post-revolu
tionary France into a language o f family and sexuality. Moreover, I argue
that it was this language that was to serve as the foundation for what Bene
dict Anderson has termed modern, discursively based ‘imagined commu
nities o f national i d e n t i t y . I n France in the 1840s “the new public sphere
produced by the commercial print media granted the laboring classes a
14.
Roddey Reid, Families in Jeopardy: Regulating the Social Body in France,
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