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The Modern Innovation

Situating the Novel in the Progression of Semantic Meaning

Benjamin Boyce, June 2, 2015

1. A New Fiction?

The modern novel, as it arose in 18th century England, is usually described as an

innovation over the medieval romance and the epic. Ian Watt ascribes to this new form

the qualities of individuality, empiricism, and uniqueness. These qualities were tied to

similar innovations in other realms of culture, such as science and philosophy, and were

rooted in

that vast transformation of Western civilization since the Renaissance which has
replaced the unified world picture of the Middle Ages with another very different
oneone which presents us, essentially, with a developing but unplanned
aggregate of particular individuals having particular experiences at particular
times and at particular places.1 (Emphasis added)

If the modern novel was an innovation on the romance and the epic, then how was

fiction modified to accommodate this particularity of experience, individuality, and

context?

I will be looking at literature as the construction of virtualized experience which

proceeds from a special use of language. My model proceeds from the sentence to the

modern novel, seeking to show the basic units of fiction, and how these units are used to

form statements of increasing subtlety and complexity.

1
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel; Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: U of
California, 1957. Page 31.
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2. In the Word was the Beginning

In Interpretation Theory2, Paul Ricoeur writes that semiotics, the science of signs,

proceeds from the separation of language from its use in discourse in order to study the

linguistic code which gives a specific structure to each of the linguistic systems, which

we know as the various languages spoken by different linguistic communities.3 However,

Ricoeur argues, language as a system of signs has only a virtual existence. What emerges

in actuality is the speech act, to which Ricoeur assigns an existential function as the

bearer of a meaning that transcends the isolation of the speaker from the listener, and

vice-versa.4

Through discourse, my experience is translated into meaning, which is carried to you

on the code of language; then you as my listener decode my meaning from our language,

and are then able to incorporate my meaning into your experience. The language we

share is anonymous; our statements, forged out of language, are non-anonymous,

personal instantiations of our linguistic code.

It is this leap from semiotics to semantics (from the self-sufficient meaning of signs

to the inter-subjective meaning of statements) that is the signature leap of the meaning-

making impulse that results in literature (among other forms of discourse). Semantics still

possesses a virtual existence, but its virtuality is substantiated by the meaning that a
2
Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning, Fort Worth, Texas,
Texas Christian University Press, 1973
3
Ricoeur, 1973, page 2
4
Mikhail Bakhtin pushes things a bit further: Discourse lives, as it were, beyond itself, in a
living impulse toward the object; if we detach ourselves completely from this impulse all we have
left is the naked corpse of the word, from which we can learn nothing at all about the social
situation or the fate of a given word in life. To study the word as such, ignoring the impulse that
reaches out beyond it, is just as senseless as to study psychological experience outside the context
of that real life toward which it was directed and by which it was determined. M Bakhtin
Discourse in the Novel, page 292; quote found in Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson.
Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford, CA: Stanford U, 1990. Page 58.
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speaker is conveying, by their particular and momentary manner of grammaticizing their

state and intention.

Insofar as the context of a statement is a conversation, the particular conversation

establishes the rules by which we can extract the intended meaning from the statements

within it. One needs to know how to take a statement before they can proceed to

interpret it: is it serious, or a joke? Is it a clarification or obfuscation? Is it a riddle to be

pondered or a solution to be applied?

It is in the stacking of statements that discourse proceeds; and proceeds to convey a

higher form of meaning, by using statements as the units which provide a higher field of

semantic conveyance. And though it might be conceivable to abstract all the various sorts

of conversations in order to study how statements may or may not form a self-referent

system of statement-level meaning similar to that of the semiotic code, even pursuing one

form of statement (such as the metaphor) is a daunting enough task. And yet, by

discussing types of statements, we might be able to ascertain the generic manner in which

statements manipulate meaning. Gary Saul Morson distinguishes between two types of

statements, the aphorism and the dictum, thus:

The rhetoric of the dictum tends to totality The dictum is certain [it]
demands we attend to it An aphorism, by contrast, seems to be found in
hiding [With the dictum] everything is present in the statement. It is complete
and the author, who is in full control of significance, knows exactly what it means.
We can develop it, apply it, take it as the key to many things, but we do not go
beyond it The dictum is a conclusion, the aphorism is a beginning. Part of the
whole is missing, as is always the case with truth itself The dictum says
Something. The Aphorism says Something Else.5

Using this dichotomy as a starting point for the procedure of the statement, we might

5
Morson, Gary Saul. "The Aphorism: Fragments from the Breakdown of Reason." New Literary
History 34.3 (2003): page 420-422 & 428.
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say that the two generic modes in which statements manipulate meaning is by contracting

it toward definite units of sense, on the one hand, and dilating meaning to produce a leap

or reaching-outward of significance, on the other.

Taken to the extreme, the most contracting statements belong to formal logic and

legal codes (which establish rigorous values and then make inferences or set precedents

according to these values); whilst the most dilating statements perhaps belong to humor

and poetry. A logical statement can be infinitely extended through critical analysis, as in

the case of Albert North Whitehead and Bertrand Russells Principia Mathematica6

which sought to establish the logical foundations on which all mathematical statements

could be provedit subsequently took them 379 pages to establish that one plus one does

in fact equal two.7 This proof does not alter the meaning of 1+1=2, but only extends it

into the system of which it is a part (being arithmetic); however, when we engage with a

poetic statementsuch as Wm. Blakes Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth.8we

proceed to its sense by allowing the non-logical tensions in the statement to not cancel

one another out, but rather form associative connections that we trace toward an

understanding that is tentative.9 We must guess what Blakes intended meaning is, in

order to make sense of his statement; whereas we must agree that 1+1=2 in order to make

6
Whitehead, Alfred North, and Bertrand Russell. Principia Mathematica. Cambridge: UP, 1925.
7
In 1931, Gdel's incompleteness theorem proved that any formal system will never be able to
prove its own completeness; either the system will be found to be inconsistent, or there will be
some truth which will not be able to be deduced from this system. Alternately, the more earnestly
I attempt to explain the humor of the statement A Freudian slip is when I say one thing but ****
my mother, the less humor is retained by the phrasegiving rise to the question of the relation
between the dilating statement (such as witticisms and metaphor) and the contracting mode of
rational explanation.
8
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 8.
9
As concerns the procedures for validation by which we test our guesses they are closer to a
logic of probability than to a logic of empirical verification. To show that an interpretation is
more probable in the light of what we know is something other than showing that a conclusion is
true. So in the relevant sense, validation is not verification. It is an argumentative discipline
comparable to the juridical procedures used in legal interpretation, a logic of uncertainty and of
qualitative probability. Ricoeur, pp. 78.
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sense of that formula.10 The sense-difference between these two statements might be

defined by orders of ambiguity, but we propose that in the conversation of literature,

ambiguity is employed to convey the non-anonymity of a specific subject who, in

producing unspecific sense, exerts themselves more personally into the semantic field.

However ambiguous or non-anonymous a statement is, its sense is nevertheless

constrained to a single point or point of view, be that view/point a dilation or contraction

of meaning. For subjectivity to be extended, it is required that there be room to express

the dynamics of how and why meaning is being manipulated in a non-anonymous and

ambiguous manner, which requires a series of statements to establish something of a

psychic fingerprint. In literature (being a virtual and non-anonymous instance of

discourse) the semanticization of a series of statements is purposed toward conveying a

virtualized subject encountering virtualized experience. The emergence of the virtual

experiencing subject emerges in the literary forms that are about the length of a page:

being the poem and the parable.

On the level of the page, a subject is presented from two directions: from an interior

and from an exterior point of view. For the interior viewpoint we will ascribe the form of

the poem; for the exterior viewpoint we will ascribe the form of the parable.

A poem produces sense on the most sensual level of language (its sounds and

imagery); and combining a deliberate use of language with a deliberate arrangement of

statements works to produce the exteriorization of an internal state, which is commonly

10
In descriptive writing you have to be careful of associative language. Youll find that analogy,
or likeness to something else, is very tricky to handle in description, because the differences are
as important as the resemblances. As for metaphor, where youre really saying this is that,
youre turning your back on logic and reason completely, because logically two things can never
be the same thing and still remain two things. The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive,
archaic forms of thought in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature,
but to show you a world completely absorbed by the human mind. Frye, Northrop. The Educated
Imagination, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1964. Page 32.
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referred to as a voice. The poetic form of a haiku, being so tightly controlled, affords very

little variability for the voice to acquire subjectivity. But already, on the level of the lyric

or the sonnet, we are able to hear the voice as a particular instance of subjective

experience.

The second principal unit of fiction is the parablenot in the sense of a story with a

specific meaning, but simply a parabola of happeninga sequence of and thens. The

parable sits opposite the poem in that it describes a series of happening which shapes the

virtual subject in action and in a context. The subject of a parable is dissociated from the

teller (in time by speaking of what happened to me, or in body by speaking of what

happened to him): the subject is spoken about rather than through, as is the case with a

poem. Both the poem and the parable present us with an experiencing subject in time, but

the poem is psychological, as the parable is causal.11 When these two forms are bound

together by a name there is the emergence of the next semantic field in fiction, being the

drama.

By setting a poetic subject on a parabolic arc and allowing that subjects voice to

respond to its changing situation, what is formed over the course of events is character;

characters then become the semiotic units being arranged to form statements within a

dramatic field.

The emergence of character as the semiotic unit of the semanticizing drama has wide

ranging effects, for here we see the encoding of social relations into the fictional realm.

11
Behind proverbs and aphorisms and psychological speculation and religious ritual lies the
memory of human experience strung out in time and subject to narrative treatment. Lyric poetry
implies a series of events in which the voice in the lyric is embedded or to which it is related. All
of this is to say that knowledge and discourse come out of human experience and that the
elemental way to process human experience verbally is to give an account of it more or less as it
really comes into being and it exists, embedded in the flow of time. Developing a story line is a
way of dealing with this flow. Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy, London, Routledge, 1988. Page
140
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The semantic field that arises in the drama is the social strata; dramas statement is one

of relationships being united or separated. Here, we must differentiate between the point

of a specific drama, and the field of its meaning. A dramas point can be tragic or

comedic, moral or satiric, climactic or anti-climactic, but the field of meaning which a

drama virtualizes in the realm of language is the constellation of characters into dynamic

relationships. In drama, humans are able to encode their understanding of how society

works and how the world worksvia relationships. And though anthropomorphism

can have pejorative connotations (as a nave form of understanding), within literature,

anthropomorphism is the imbuing of personhood onto non-personal subjects, and is an

empathetic move. It lifts the material, vegetal and animal kingdoms into a direct semantic

relationship with ourselves, allowing us to feel for (to relate on a personal level to) that

which doesnt have the same type or complexity of feelingand this is enabled by the

relationality inherent in the dramatic-semantic formby giving voice, intentionality, and

virtual personality to the fox and the hare, the kettle and the pot.

It is quite possible to abstract drama from its use, in order to analyze its various

formsleading us to a certain number of character types and plots.12 Approaching

drama in this way will provide us with a grab-bag of material from which all stories can

be reduced or from which assembled. However, to grapple with the semantic meaning of

drama, to get a handle on the ever escalating field of meaning which literature is
12
The website www.ipl.org provides various lists of plots, ranging from Foster-Harriss singular
all plots are based on conflict; with the extension into plots with 1) a happy ending, 2) an
unhappy ending, or 3) the literary plot, in which the critical event takes place at the beginning
rather than the end; from there, ipl.org lists the 7 basic plots (all having to do with various
forms of conflict); then Ronald Tobias twenty basic plots (ranging from Quest to Love to
Discovery, Sacrifice, Rivalry, The Riddle, and so on); and lastly Georges Polti's Tirty-Six
Dramatic Situations. ["The "Basic" Plots in Literature." Frequently Asked Reference Questions.
N.p., n.d. Web. 30 May 2015, http://www.ipl.org/div/farq/plotFARQ.html]
As for character types, theres the Protagonist and Antagonist, the Confidante, the
Dynamic/Flat/Foil Characters, and so on. We might also go into the archetypal characters, or the
various sorts of caricatures that recur in all sorts of fiction (the trickster, the virgin, etc., etc.).
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virtualizing, we must again turn toward use, in order to gauge the effect that drama has on

meaning.

The manner of dramas use can be stretched upon a dichotomy between formal and

informal. At its most formal, drama becomes ritual; at its most informal it becomes

entertainment.

As ritual, the enactment of a drama ties the subject through personal experience to his

immediate social unit. Rites of passage are dramatic forms in which a person is fit into a

certain role in the larger drama of clan life. The ritual drama identifies its practitioners as

semiotic units, which it articulates into a larger semantic whole, being the social-unit of

the tribe. The ritual drama thus defines the tribe through the relationships it establishes

between the individual units in the tribe, encouraging its members to think of other

members as necessary for personal meaning. In a sense, to lose a member of ones tribe

would be like losing a word, were you all a sentence. We see then how a formal drama

that is, a drama that is taken very seriously, or else literallyacts as a higher order

working of the same dynamics that are happening at the basic level of language, where it

emerges within discourse.

On the other hand, the informal dramas, those that are not to be taken too seriously,

also perform an important function, as the narrative pastime, the storytelling

entertainment, is the digesting aloud, as it were, of experiences which have been inspired

by life in the world.13 Additionally, an adept storyteller is able to convey very useful

information while still carrying her audiences attention alongindeed, the narrative

process14 is perhaps the most efficient means of passing information from one person to

13 A character dies so we dont have to. (ATTRIBUTION)

14
Process in the sense of processing, for literature is not simply representing the world, but
rather replicating the datum found in the world and recasting this datum into its own ontological
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the next.

To recap: we put words together to make statements. We put statements together to

make poems and parables. We put poems and parables together to form characters, and

put characters together make dramas. And then what? Well, and then we have a whole

bunch of dramainvolving a steadily increasing set of characters who are being steadily

rounded out within events that are extrapolated both forward and backward in time. This

dramatic sprawl has an urban analogue to it, as different versions of stories, different

causal chains, different origins and outcomes come into contact with eachother and begin

to mesh into larger unitscities into states, states in to empires.

All this while, as stories have been progressing from the statement, upward, the

authority of the author has been at work creating these semantic unities, and at the

threshold of the many dramas the author is called to expand their authority over a host

of dramatic units. There must be a mayor, or war-chief, or judge who organizes the

many-dramas, in order that the audience will not be jarred out of their inclusion in the

story. Furthermore, there tends to be a critical mass of dramas, which provides a prompt

for a singular poet to unify them into a broad, monoglossic statementwhich is

traditionally named the Epic.

If the semiotic units of the epic are dramas, then the semantic statement of the Epic

Poet is on the level of an Empire. In the case of Homer, we have a poetic voice which is

encoded on the level of the statement (by way of hexameter verse and recurrent epithets

which support the meter), through the subjective position of the actors (described as the

heroic tradition, but also including the mythic or divine actors), and unified by a grand

sphere. This processing we assert is so indicative to fiction that we as readers often overlook it,
even as everything that fiction accomplishes it accomplishes through this process of
virtualizationof abstracting the world into language, and then forming through language a
virtual world that is merely based on (and not strictly in) the world we think of as real.
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narrative parabola (the fall of Troy, Odysseus journey).

On the Epic-semantic field is rendered the cultural identity of the Greeks as a whole.

And whether or not Homer was historically real, it is the unifying authority of the Illiad

and the Odyssey that is of such force that it requires us to ascribe it to a singular poet.

Inversely, this poetic authority not only unifies drama, but it unifies a people, and the

power of an epic is such that it is capable of turning the artists who interact with it into

vehicles of its semanticizing force. The Ancient Greek poet, sculptor, painter, etc., found

in the Epics a unified vision in which their entire output could be placed. The Epic

becomes a tradition through which the identity of the artist interacts with the greater

identity of his people. The Epic is the arena where the semantic project of literature

speaks an entire culture.

Epics themselves can be arranged on a spectrum similar to that of dramaby

evaluating their use, or interpretation. Whereas a drama becomes ritual when taken very

seriously, an Epic becomes scripture, and the same way in which a ritual semanticizes its

participants into a social statement the scriptural Epic semanticizes its adherents into a

greater meaning-making unit. A religion such as Christianity, through the writings of St.

Paul, very explicitly ties its adherents to the drama (the Passion) of Christ, so that

metaphoricallyand yet somehow compellingly literallya Christian is considered a

part of the body of Christ, or a part of the body of the Bride of Christ. The Christian Bible

is an epic that, when internalized as scripture, converts its adherents into extensions of its

semanticizing force, calling them to read into their life the working-out of the Biblical

drama, as well as calling on them to convert others into this semantic structure.15

15
Eric Auerbach details the particular effectiveness of the New Testament in drawing the
individual into its semantic structure: What we witness is the awakening of a new heart and a
new spirit. All this applies not only to Peters denial but also to every other occurrence which is
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Taking such epics too seriously is, in modern times, frowned upon,16 and yet one

could argue that human beings use these grand narrative structures to at once make sense

of the world and to fashion a ground through which they may connect and feel at home

with other humans beyond their immediate street/neighborhood/city, etc. Additionally, by

touching on religion within this essay on fiction, it is not to be concluded that the truth

statements of religion are inherently fictitious; only that the way in which religions are

built is similarif not identicalto the way in which we build narratives of less serious

or more informal use.

related in the New Testament. Every one of them is concerned with the same question, the same
conflict with which every human being is basically confronted and which therefore remains
infinite and eternally pending. It sets mans whole world astirwhereas the entanglements of fate
and passion which Greco-Roman antiquity knows, always directly concern simply the individual,
the one person involved in them. It is only by virtue of the most general relations, that is, by
virtue of the fact that we too are human beings and thus are subject to fate and passion, that we
experience fear and pity. But Peter and the other characters in the New Testament are caught in
a universal movement of the depths which at first remains almost entirely below the surface and
only very graduallythe Acts of the Apostles show the beginnings of this development
emerges into the foreground of history, but which even now, from the beginning, lays claim to
being limitless and the direct concern of everybody, and which absorbs all merely personal
conflicts into itself. Auerbach, Erich. Fortuna. Approaches to the Novel. Ed. Robert Scholes
San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Co. 1961. Page 66.
16
Catherine Gallagher argues that it is precisely the modern capacity for provisional belief that
gives rise to the novels particular degree of fictionality: Modernity is fiction-friendly because it
encourages disbelief, speculation, and credit. The early novels thematic emphases on gullibility,
innocence deceived, rash promises extracted, and impetuous emotional and financial investments
of all kinds point to the habit of mind it discourages: faith. The reckless wholeheartedness of its
heroes and heroines, their guileless vulnerability, solicits our affectionate concern and thereby
activates our skepticism on their behalf. Hence, while sympathizing with innocent credulity, the
reader is trained in an attitude of disbelief, which is flattered as superior discernment Disbelief
is thus the condition of fictionality, prompting judgments not about the storys reality, but about
its believability, its plausibility. One is dissuaded from believing the literal truth of a
representation so that one can instead admire its likelihood and extend enough credit to buy into
the game. Such flexible mental states were the sine qua non of modern subjectivity. Gallagher,
Catherine. The Rise of Fictionality. The Novel. Ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2006. Page 345.
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To return to history (to move toward the modern novel), the prosaic literary forms of 17th

and 18th century Europe had achieved a stabilization (perhaps stagnation) in the form of

the romance. The romance being an idealized drama which concerned either the nobility

(e.g. the Arthurian romances) or the peasantry (e.g. the picaresque). The romance was a

working out of the medieval epic, having to do with love and honor or their opposites,17

and while the aesthetic quality may have had its low points or high points just as any

rendition of previous epics in other times and other cultures, I propose that with the

printing-press the ease of its production and reproduction is the main distinction between

the romance and the epic, and not any inherent semantic differencethat is, the romance

is not a semanticizing of the epic, nor a new manner of semanticizing dramait is the

extension of a certain epic frame, belonging to a Medieval value system (both ethic and

aesthetic). The romance doesnt do anything new, it just does more or less what the

Arthurian and Catholic grand stories were doing for the preceding centuries. With Don

Quixote we have a critique of the romance; showing how much the romance is no longer

relevant in the post-Enlightenment and post-Renaissance reality. And it is with Robinson

Crusoe that we have a new semantic form; a new way of semanticizing within the

narrative field, but Robinson Crusoe isnt following the exponential ordering that the epic

performs of the drama, and the drama performs of its characters, and characters do of

17
Krueger (the Cambridge Companion, 5) has noted rightly that For an elite minority,
romances were a vehicle for the construction of a social codechivalryand a mode of
sentimental refinementwhich some have called courtly loveby which noble audiences
defined their social identities and justifified their privileges, thus reinforcing gender and class
distinctions. It is also true that there is an essential connection between chivalrous endeavors and
love, but romance during this period is ever aware of the contradiction, or at least, of the
otherness between this model and the religious model and the resulting tragedy. The world of
romance is a frightful nightmare enclosed in a beautiful dream. Vavaro, Alberto. Medieval
French Romance. The Novel. Ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Page 160
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their situations and emotions, through poems and parables made of statements made of

words. Robinson Crusoe does not necessarily make a greater parabolic arc through which

it treats a number of epics as semiotic units, but rather it emerges within an Intra-Epic

field, where many Epics are vying for authority over the subject.

If a novel is a development in literature, then this model would indicate that the novel

is the semantic form which uses a variety of epics as its semiotic units. And yet a

semantic unity of a number of these massive units would collapse under the tensions

between the various authorities which semanticize the various epics, as well as the

massive amount of cultural data within any given number of epics. So that the modern

development in literature must be located in a container which will not reduce the epics

complexity or neutralize their conflicting authorities. This container must be the ground

through which these various epics interact, or, the interaction between these various epics

allows for the establishment of a ground for the expression of navigating them.

This ground, this container, is the modern subject, who is found between several

semanticizing epics: the church and the state, Nature and Culture, and so on. Each of

these epics (or ideologies, or corporations, etc.) are unified in and of themselves by a

singular authority which the subject is forced to balance with other authorities.18 Render

unto Caesar now not only applies to the distinction between the state and God, but as

well a wealth of ideological systems. In order for modern man to stand outside any

given epic (which he is compelled to do, being a modern man), he must locate the
18
The early novel concentrates not on true extremes (the unique or near unique) but rather on
people who slip beyond the norm and test the social fabric But even when acts are horrible or
characters heinous, the novel finds ways to comprehend them without violating our sense that we
are reading about recognizable people in a world we know The novels willingnessindeed,
incessant needto invade traditional areas of privacyand explore matters traditionally
considered too personal to be shared, leads to an entirely new understanding of the relationship
between public and private, a moving beyond, even, the ordinary reaches of personal
conversation and private discourse. Hunter, J. Paul. Before Novels. New York: W.W.Norton,
1990. Page 37.
 P a g e | 15

authority to evaluate the value of his behavior and experience within himself, as an agent

who agrees some with these systems, and not so much with those others. The modern

man, to realize his potential, must claim the role of Epic Poet, Prophet, and Priest for

himself; and the grand parabolic arc need only be his life, and the meter and rhyme of his

writ need only be his own thoughts, which through rigorous honesty creates a

document that resonates at the same ontological frequency of other modern personsthat

is, the modern authors project is to project authority through a subject who is very

similarly verisimilar to the modern readership; conserving the energy which would

otherwise be absorbed by the highly formal poetic interface (i.e. hexameter verse), and

freeing the subject to relate directly of his experience. This directness, with a loss of

aesthetic refinement19, affords a rendering of the world and the subject into fiction that is

at once fresh and rapidly digestible.

4. Conclusion

19
Watt speaks of the necessary directness of the novels use of language thus: On the one hand,
Defoe and Richardson make an uncompromising application of the realist point of view in
language and prose structure, and thereby forfeit other literary values. On the other hand,
Fieldings stylistic virtues tend to interfere with his technique as a novelist, because a patient
selectiveness of vision destroys our belief in the reality of report, or at least deviates our attention
from the content of the report to the skill of the reporter. There would seem to be some inherent
contradiction between the ancient and abiding literary values and the distinctive narrative
technique of the novel. (Watt, p. 95)
This observation of the necessary directness of reportage needs be modified to fit with the
Semantic Model, which does propose that the modern novel is inherently more direct than the
previous literary forms, only, this directness is not situated in the manner of the modern novels
style or its structure, but rather in the mediation which its virtualized subject performs between
their experience and the various forces which intrude upon it. In fact, because the novel exists in
an Intra-Epic field, these epics are baring down upon the modern subject indirectly, even
subconsciously, so that style and structure in novels later than Defoe and Richardsons are
themselves used to combat and modify these systems, and therefore establish the modern subject
as dominant over the epic forces which would appropriate her into themselves, as their extension,
mouthpiece, or victim.
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The Semantic Model laid out in this paper is not intended to explain modern literature in

toto, nor could it do such a thing, as it now stands. Rather, it is hoped that by describing

the manner in which literature is assembled, we can see the novel as indeed an innovation

in the way that meaning is conveyedthrough a highly developed manipulation of

textual elements which models a virtualized world full of forces ranging from immediate

physical sensations and mood swings, to haunted castles, island ecosystems, geopolitical

conflicts. The modern novel is a medium which, existing between epics, uses these epics

as scaffolding to erect an epic-sized individual; a modern subject making a modern sense

of things; where that making sense of things is a process of semanticizing and being

semanticized by forces which are as it were in the background, on the horizon, exerting

pressures which cause the subjects experience to take on a certain shape. This shape isnt

the shape of a parabola anymore, unless that parabola be the gabling on which has grown

this swollen vine producing a wealth of self at every stage of its arc.

Yet this question remains: what next? What comes next, after an author has

developed a style, accrued to herself a number of epithets & logical pivots in the form of

statements; after she has learnt the poetics of expression and the trajectories of plot; after

she has tuned her ear to character and her eye to social relationships; after she has

proliferated a unique lore and then unified this into an epicand after she has done all

that, and then worked her way to a modern subject, who struggles his way through the

space between her epics and her world and other epics and other worldsis there an

innovation to be grappled withis there a further field? Would she use various genres as

her semiotic units, to breach into that uncharted plane of meaning? I am convinced there

is innovation to be had, and not at the expense of relevance. I am drawn to this quote by

Wittgenstein, for in it I hear the greatest possibility for a new literature: My work
 P a g e | 17

consists of two parts, the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is

precisely this second part that is the important one.20

Literatures progress has always come from between words, from between images &

thoughts, from between statements and actions, from between characters, between

dramas, between epicsas though fiction were a fabric, as if text were a textile, that

clothes one thing in order to undress21 another.

20
Paul Engelmann, Letters From Wittgenstein With a Memoir, Tr. L. Furtmller, Ed. B.F.
McGuinness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967), page 143.
21
That is, address.
 P a g e | 18

Works Cited

Auerbach, Erich. Fortuna. Approaches to the Novel. Ed. Robert Scholes San Francisco:
Chandler Publishing Co. 1961.

Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1793.

Engelmann, Paul, Letters From Wittgenstein With a Memoir, Tr. L. Furtmller, Ed. B.F.
McGuinness. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967.

Frye, Northrop. The Educated Imagination, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1964.

Gallagher, Catherine. The Rise of Fictionality. The Novel. Ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2006.

Hunter, J. Paul. Before Novels. New York: W.W.Norton, 1990.

Morson, Gary Saul. "The Aphorism: Fragments from the Breakdown of Reason." New Literary
History 34.3 (2003):

Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford, CA:
Stanford U, 1990.

Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy, London, Routledge, 1988.

Ricoeur, Paul. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning, Fort Worth, Texas,
Texas Christian University Press, 1973

Vavaro, Alberto. Medieval French Romance. The Novel. Ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2006.

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel; Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: U of
California, 1957.

Whitehead, Alfred North, and Bertrand Russell. Principia Mathematica. Cambridge: UP, 1925

"The "Basic" Plots in Literature." Frequently Asked Reference Questions. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 May
2015, http://www.ipl.org/div/farq/plotFARQ.html