Lamb, Lynch, and Revising the Rise of the Novel

To what extent is character fixed? Jonathan Lamb suggests that the “temporal extension and flexibility necessary for the functioning of a person is not possible for a character,” thereby distinguishing his argument from previous interpretations that conflate character with person (278). Lamb adds further to the eighteenth-century understanding of fiction by tracing the idea of authorship as “productive of a kind of originality…unattached either to the cycles of exchange that define a character, or to the fictions of representation that define a person” (272-274). While I agree with Lamb’s basic argument that the category of character should be inflated to include person and author, I believe that his conception of (modified) character needs clarification. My issues with Lamb are twofold: Firstly, I believe that his claims rest on an understanding that character remains not only static, but stable, an idea that is not fully supported by the sources he cites. This matters crucially to the argument he later makes about Roxana, since Roxana is cast as an author by default, denied both “the sort of self-examination that forges a person out of a self” and the ability to act as a changeable character (Lamb 280).

Lamb moves rapidly through critical contributions to the character debate in eighteenth-century studies, finding that Deidre Lynch and Catherine Gallagher “have been able to emancipate early fiction from what they take to be its servile relation to empiricism and individualism” by “sticking to character and jettisoning person from their histories of the novel” (273). In doing so, however, he fails to mention a simple question that dominates the second half of Lynch’s book The Economy of Character: “Were round characters inside flat characters all along, signaling frantically to get out?” (123). Lynch uses the anachronistic terms “round” and “flat” to signal a confrontation between internal and external characterization that calls into question Lamb’s suggestion that “characters are signs whose value, even if it is a fictional value, is constant” (278). Character, in Lamb’s estimation, must be unchangeable in order to circulate in market culture. Yet Lynch’s argument on character focuses on Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random, which features a protagonist marked by his “exchangeability” and fluidity (123). It is indeed possible that Lamb might respond that Lynch is once again conflating character and person, but the fact remains that the anxieties driving the eighteenth-century conception of character resulted in unstable new compounds. To define character as fixed deprives the term of a history caught between new tastes and old movements (that is, novelty and allegory).

Lamb identifies a failed attempt at personhood in Roxana that hinges on the protagonist’s “habit of experiencing herself as a reflected thing, and not as a person consciously representing her own history” (281). Again, I would argue that Roxana’s ability to continually revise her character (since, after all, she is clear from the start that she intends to manipulate the reader) complicates this assumption. A moment of candid self-reflection in the midst of a storm—“what must I be? What must be my Portion?”—is dissolved moments later into the intellectual stupidity Lamb points out—“I had a Mind full of Horrour in the time of the Storm…but my Thoughts got no Vent” (Defoe 129). But must we toss aside the scraps of selfhood Roxana gives us? Robinson Crusoe, whom Lamb praises for “formally and deliberately plac[ing] himself at one remove from his self…” also succeeds in quelling disruptive emotion, gaining “as compleat a Victory over Conscience as any young Fellow that resolv’d not to be troubled with it, could desire” (9). If Roxana “secretly pursues the satisfactions of what Hobbes would call an author,” she does so by momentarily accessing what Lamb would term personhood and turning it on its head (283).

Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture and the Business of Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998.