1 - Sketches of Rural Character: Mary Russell Mitford’s ‘Fugitive Pieces’

Summary

In Figures of Literary Discourse, Gérard Genette appears to attack plot's stranglehold on criticism: literary texts, he argues, comprise many elements that compete with the forward movement of plot. Narratorial asides that express subjective opinions or observations are ‘alien’ to narrative. Yet Genette quickly backs away from the full implications of this observation because he cannot, finally, imagine any text in which description and narration would be opposed. Plot must take precedence over minutiae, excessive literary word painting and digressive authorial chatter because, he insists, ‘description might be conceived independently of narration, but in fact it is never found in a so to speak free state’ (Genette 1982: 134). Plot, therefore, makes a sequential narrative possible. As Peter Brooks has argued, it ‘moves us forward as readers of the narrative text’ (Brooks 1985: 35).

It is thus to plot that critics have turned in their attempts to account for the interpellative power of literature. Precisely because it generates, as Brooks puts it, ‘the play of desire … that makes us turn pages and strive toward narrative ends’ (Brooks 1985: xiii), plot produces readers as ideological subjects. Through its boundedness, plot orders the psyche and demarcates the limits of desire. This theory of plot relies, however, on an ahistorical conception of reading. As Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund have pointed out about serialisation, narratological and reader-reception studies ‘have traditionally discounted the extended time frame and periodic structure it imposed on narrative’ (Hughes and Lund 1995: 143). For the Victorians, who ‘read their literature piecemeal’ (Patten 2006: 11), it was almost impossible to read for plot. Novels were published in separate volumes; they were released in parts spanning the course of several months, a year or longer; and they appeared episodically, whether weekly or monthly, in the pages of periodicals.

To the theories of reading concerned with serialised novels in the Victorian period, several critics have recently argued, Richard Sha and Amanpal Garcha in particular, that we should add a model that accounts for the pleasures readers in the Romantic era derived from the sketch. A pre-eminent genre of the early nineteenth century in which, pace Genette, description does not serve an auxiliary function, the sketch requires a different model of reading precisely because it has no rhythm.