SOURCE: "Narrative Authority and the Controlling Consciousness in Fielding's Tom Jones," in her Character and Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Comic Fiction, University of Georgia Press, 1992, pp. 65-82.

No one has ever seriously argued that there is no evidence of consciousness in Tom Jones. The narrator is clearly a thinking being, and throughout the introductory chapters we find ourselves as readers actively involved with the process of his thought.¹ When, in chapter I of book 11, Fielding says, "The Slander of a Book is, in Truth, the Slander of the Author" (2: 569), we are quite prepared to admit the personal identification. The personality of the "narrator" author so dominates the text that his imposing presence continually inserts itself between us and the characters of the novel, and not only, as noted before, in his generic self-consciousness. He is simply always there, and we are simply too aware of him to experience the psychological realities of his characters.² We feel their consciousnesses necessarily remain remote, available only in the most general of senses, perceptible in the isolated moment in time and not throughout the contiguous, ongoing moments of time that produce what Locke refers to and what empirical fiction celebrates as the train of ideas.³

Quite often, the momentary reflections to which we are privy do suggest psychological complexity of character. For example, when Jones receives Sophia's letter promising never to marry another man, though she will not be able to correspond further with Tom himself, his mind reels, we are told, under the conflicting emotions of "Joy and Grief." However, the immediacy of Tom's confusion is quickly deflected by a narrative flourish: a comparison of Tom's emotions to those that "divide the Mind of a good Man, when he peruses the Will of his deceased Friend, in which a large Legacy, which his Distresses make the more welcome, is bequeathed to him" (2: 851).⁴ In this case, and in others like it, pause and stasis replace contiguity. In other words, reflection is by and large the narrator's province; during moments of reflection, the character's time is suspended in favor of the teller's time. The moment of consciousness—that is, the present moment as it emerges from the past and precipitates the future—is the narrator's moment and not the characters'.⁵

However, to say that Tom Jones is concerned with the consciousness of the narrator admittedly seems to require a special definition of consciousness; for a thinking being of this narrator's stamp and a being of consciousness, as we generally understand him or her to be, seem two entirely different things.⁶ While we have a fairly complete understanding of the narrator's thoughts about the novel, about character, about truth, and about morality, and while we even see development in this thought, a certain "working through" of the problem of aesthetic distance and an expounding of the problematics of aesthetic response, what we miss is his ordering of his own experience into a story. Sometimes—as in his description of Sophia as resembling "one whose Image never can depart from my Breast" (1: 156)—we are momentarily reminded of the story of Fielding's own life; but these glimpses, like the brief forays into the reflections of the characters, are disruptive and disrupted. They constitute pause and stasis rather than contiguity.⁷ They set up the characters as a source of narrative mediation. The story of Tom and Sophia is conceived in terms of, and is therefore momentarily displaced by, the history of Henry and Charlotte Fielding in much the same way that Fielding's thoughts about the mind experiencing joy and grief displace Tom's emotional response to Sophia's letter.

In short, Tom Jones does not seem like a novel of consciousness on any level because we find disjunction where we expect conjunction. As the very organization of the work suggests, narrative and reflection seem to occupy two different and irreconcilable planes in this fictional world.⁸ In fact, everywhere in Tom Jones is contrast; on every level opposition seems to define meaning. Reflection alternates with narrative; the serious clashes with the comic; and a character makes his or her way through the narrative in contrastive alliance with or overt defiance of others: Sophia and Molly, Thwackum and Square, Tom and Blifil, Allworthy and Western, Partridge and Tom, Nightingale and Tom, the Man of the Hill and Tom. Such pairings establish and elaborate character through implicit or explicit points of differentiation.⁹ In fact, it is our awareness of the disjunctive property of this work that has encouraged our practice of reading the narrative as allegory.¹⁰ However, allegory is, we must admit, a conjunctive form of disjunctive expression, for the literal is simply put aside in favor of the symbolic, and, while Tom Jones might call upon allegory in the end to achieve a semblance of fusion as the history draws to a close, if we try to read the entire novel as symbol we involve ourselves in a task of little certainty or, for that matter, usefulness.¹¹Tom Jones revels in disjunction, contrast, and polarization, not merely to define meaning, truth, or essence, but to defy it as well.

The principle of contrast "runs through all the Works of the Creation," Fielding tells us, seemingly advancing a notion that meaning is worked out through dichotomous categorization or binary oppositions, a notion characteristic—we might think—of a mind in search of fixed principles. Fielding's definition of beauty, for example, seems to suggest a highly authoritative habit of mind. As he defines it, beauty means beauty only as it is suggested by an awareness of its opposite. Were it "possible for a Man to have seen only" day and summer, for example, "he would have a very imperfect Idea of their Beauty" (1: 212). The beauty of day and summer is perceived, even perceptible, only through an awareness of the terrors of night and winter. The insidiousness of conceptualizations that posit definition of one thing through devaluation of another is clear, as is the means by which such conceptualizations support the order of hierarchy, patriarchy, and authority in general.

With relation to Tom Jones, however, we cannot stop here, because Fielding does not do so. He shifts subject and tone to disjoin and defuse the very idea of perceptual certainty even as he establishes it: "But to avoid too serious an Air: Can it be doubted, but that the finest Woman in the World would lose all Benefit of her Charms, in the Eye of a Man who had never seen one of another Cast? The Ladies themselves seem so sensible of this, that they are all industrious to procure Foils; nay, they will become Foils to themselves: for I have observed (at Bath particularly) that they endeavour to appear as ugly as possible in the Morning, in order to set off that Beauty which they intend to shew you in the Evening" (1: 212). In asserting experientiality and in finally shifting the locus of contrast to the selfsame entity, Fielding ironically undercuts the notion of essential differentiation that he has asserted in the preceding passage. Further, he introduces an example of mastery and manipulation that seems to challenge his own claim to be opening "a new Vein of Knowledge, which, if it hath been discovered, hath not, to our Remembrance, been wrought on by any antient or modern Writer" (1: 212). He may be explicating the principle of contrast for the first time, but, by his own admission, women have long been basing their creative acts upon the principle, which they seem to understand better than he. Finally, in the implied satirical thrust of such a comment, the whole idea of contrast as an index of order is so severely undermined, it begins to break apart under the strain. The disintegration is completed by a discussion of the way dullness sets off brilliance in "great" works of literature: "Soporific Parts are so many Scenes of Serious artfully interwoven, in order to contrast and set off the rest; and this is the true Meaning of a late facetious Writer, who told the Public, that whenever he was dull, they might be assured there was a Design in it" (1: 215).

With this, we are almost ready to abandon the notion of contrast altogether, when Fielding closes with a reminder of the subject with which he began: the difference between the serious and the comic—that is, his prefaces and his narrative—a difference we must admit, though not so clearly any more a difference articulable in polarized language, in terms of opposition or blatant contrast. We are finally left concluding, at least tentatively, what he said we would not have to conclude: that "there are sound and good Reasons at the Bottom, tho' we are unfortunately not able to see so far" (1: 210).

As Eric Rothstein has explained it, Tom Jones insists that we accept the authority of Fielding by leaving us no other authority upon which to depend. The narrative voice, Rothstein maintains, systematically undermines all rival authorities, from Lyttelton to Allworthy to Prudence to expectations founded on the recognition of generic conventions and themes:

Tom Jones frees itself from the tyranny of the preestablished, whether the authority of prior literary works, the conditions of narrative that make prudence possible, or figures of social power. Fielding proffers his own world alone as the "real," the measure of propositions about ethics and "human nature" (in that his readers, so his didactic claims insist, can project its patterns of action to their everyday lives). As a work of art, it dispels the rule of rules in favor of the rule of taste, in keeping with much aesthetic thought of its time. And taste, a matter of finesse and connoisseurship in judgment, requires a tone of urbanity, of a wisdom filtered from much experience, of a nice balance between involvement and distance.… Fielding must affirm social, moral, and literary canons so that we trust him and he must also exploit or transcend these canons so that we have nothing to trust unmediated by him. ("Virtues of Authority" 123)

Of course, such a center is less stable than we would like, for the narrator is as unreliable as he is authoritative. He is all we have, but not necessarily all we would wish.¹²

Both our uncertainty about character and our dependence on the narrator in Tom Jones seem to derive from the self-containment, the self-referentiality, of the text. In spite of allusions to historical reality, or maybe in part because of these allusions, which have the effect of heightening fictionality rather than establishing credibility, Tom Jones resists textual transcendence. The characters are part of the narrative and do not have reality apart from the narrative. Of course, the same must be said, and has been said, of all novelistic characters: they are constructs of language, existing, not in time, but in text. Yet I would argue that, for Tom Jones, "text" or narrative is not merely the written word; it is also conceptualization, the ordering of experience, here no less fictional than either the texts of our own lives or the stories we tell of others.

In fact, the one very real sense in which the narrator of Tom Jones can be said to have a conscious life is insofar as that life is characterized by his preoccupation with the history of Tom Jones and with the narrative (if we, like Wayne C. Booth, want to see it as such) of his relationship with his readers.¹³ Narrative in Tom Jones is consciousness: that is, it is a consciousness of character, a definition of interiority as interest and involvement in the lives of others. What Fielding's novel seeks to do is establish an awareness of both the degree of certainty and the kind of uncertainty that such narrative represents.

The novel is full of narrative moments, present moments that fuse past and future in a pattern revealing the character of the ordering consciousness even while interpreting the characters of others. In these moments, it is clear that the act of narrative is an act of reading, that the reader is in fact a writer as well.¹⁴ Upon meeting Jones on the road to London, Partridge listens to Tom's narration of his story, and he responds by an imaginative rendering of circumstances neither authored nor authorized by Tom himself:

When Partridge came to ruminate on the Relation he had heard from Jones, he could not reconcile to himself, that Mr. Allworthy should turn his Son (for so he most firmly believed him to be) out of Doors, for any Reason which he had heard assigned. He concluded therefore, that the whole was a Fiction, and that Jones, of whom he had often from his Correspondents heard the wildest Character, had in reality run away from his Father. It came into his Head, therefore, that if he could prevail with the young Gentleman to return back to his Father, he should by that Means render a Service to Allworthy, which would obliterate all his former Anger; nay, indeed he conceived that very Anger was, counterfeited, and that Allworthy had sacrificed him to his own Reputation. (1: 426-27)

Partridge's "reading" of events differs profoundly from Tom's, from the narrator's, and from ours, partly because Tom has omitted "a Circumstance or two, namely, every thing which passed on that Day in which he had fought with Thwackum" (1: 419). Of course, in this situation Partridge is markedly like us, for we, too, are constantly being told by the narrator that some circumstance or other has been passed over silently until he thinks it "proper to communicate it" (1: 230). The principle this episode avowedly illustrates is the following: "Let a Man be never so honest, the Account of his own Conduct will, in Spite of himself, be so very favourable, that his Vices will come purified through his Lips, and, like foul Liquors well strained, will leave all their Foulness behind" (1: 420). A man's narration of his own story, the narrator continues, is so different from the account his enemy would give "that we scarce can recognize the Facts to be one and the same" (1: 420). Partridge's response, however, suggests that listeners respond so differently to a tale that the same could also be said of them.¹⁵

Tom Jones is replete with examples of what we might call the other as self. In fact, characters are more often defined by their responses to others than by the narrator's "objective" commentary.¹⁶ This is true of major characters as well as minor characters: Jones's treatment of Black George, his attitude toward Allworthy, and his behavior toward Molly so clearly establish his generosity, loyalty, and impetuosity that the narrator's remarks become corroboratory rather than informative, and Sophia's judgment about Blifil, her responsiveness to Tom, and her respect for her father serve to characterize her more significantly than anything the narrator ever says. In fact, throughout Tom Jones, character is customarily established through relational descriptions that at once define individual psychology and assert social identity. The synthetic brilliance of the novel resides in the deceptively casual narrative merging of the individual and the others with whom he lives.

Consider, for example, the narrative moment wherein Mrs. Wilkins discovers "the Father of the Foundling." It is a typically Fieldingesque moment, characterized as it is by an elaborate and elaborated pause in the flow of the narrative to "trace [the discovery] from the Fountain-head," a movement backward in time to "lay open … previous Matters," as Fielding "shall be obliged to reveal all the Secrets of a little Family, with which my Reader is at present entirely unacquainted" (1: 81). This is how Fielding describes his narrative strategy, and, in fact, it is the strategy of all four narrative acts that define the moment.

Wilkins's discovery is itself a narrative act, and it is about a narrative act as well. In Wilkins's story, Mrs. Partridge is the focal character, for her belief in her husband's guilt is what ultimately establishes his paternal responsibility. The story of Partridge's conviction is, as it were, the story of his wife's conviction, her narrative about her husband and Jenny Jones and about her growing belief in their complicity. As we learn the events of the story, Wilkins is displaced as narrator by Fielding, who begins by establishing the character of the more important narrator, Mrs. Partridge. She is a shrew, Fielding tells us, one of the "Followers of Xantippe," a woman possessed of a jealous disposition (1: 86). She expects her personal domestic history to include conjugal betrayal. Her narrative expectations yield the particular configuration her personal history acquires, both in her active organization of the events of her life (her refusal to hire a pretty female servant) and in her response to those events over which she feels she has no control (her reading of Jenny Jones's supper-table smile as one of romantic complicity rather than intellectual derision).

In fact, both active and passive behaviors are interpretative and reflect Mrs. Partridge's psychology, her individual way of ordering information and interpreting experiential reality. Fielding makes it quite clear that Mrs. Partridge's narratology is causal, comprehensive, and cumulative. When she hears at the chandler's shop that Jenny Jones had been "brought to bed of two Bastards," she mentally arranges the events of the past, as she sees them, into a pattern consistent with the outcome:

Nothing can be so quick and sudden as the Operations of the Mind, especially when Hope, or Fear, or Jealousy to which the two others are but Journeymen, set it to work. It occurred instantly to her, that Jenny had scarce ever been out of her own House, while she lived with her. The leaning over the Chair, the sudden starting up, the Latin, the Smile, and many other Things rushed upon her all at once. The Satisfaction her Husband expressed in the Departure of Jenny, appeared now to be only dissembled; again, in the same Instant, to be real; but yet to confirm her Jealousy, proceeding from Satiety, and a hundred other bad Causes. In a Word, she was convinced of her Husband's Guilt, and immediately left the Assembly in Confusion. (1: 88)

"In Confusion" is rather deceptive, however; for Mrs. Partridge is now less confused than she has been for quite a while. By selecting carefully, she has been able to fit the details of her husband's behavior toward Jenny Jones into the narrative she had planned to write all along. Further, to achieve coherence and to clarify causality, she must ignore certain details that cast doubt on her interpretation. There is, for example, the most salient matter of the young "Lad near Eighteen" who also lived in the Partridges' house and who enjoyed with Jenny "sufficient Intimacy to found a reasonable Suspicion." Interestingly, when Fielding offers this detail, we compose our own narrative. At least on first reading, we join to the idea of Jenny as mother the notion of her compeer as father, solving (we think) the mystery of Tom's birth within the first hundred pages of the novel. Of course, our narrative, in its causal logic, its cumulative completeness, its delimiting finality, is as self-deceptive as Mrs. Partridge's narrative.

Mrs. Wilkins's involvement in the narrative act also illustrates the way events can be—indeed, must be—recalled and restructured when the need to incorporate new narrative details arises. When she first hears the story of the Partridges' quarrel, Mrs. Wilkins does not recognize in it the "Father of the Foundling." A crucial piece of information has been obscured: the cause of the quarrel has been misreported by the chandler-shop (or some such) gossips.¹⁷ When, "by Accident," Mrs. Wilkins gets "a true Scent of the … Story, though long after it had happened, [she] failed not to satisfy herself thoroughly of all the Particulars" (1: 92). As a consequence, she revises the narrative, which has become, to her mind, a tale worth telling.

Narrative is interpretation, Fielding insists; it is the ordering of that which cries out for order but which rejects order as soon as it is imposed. Narrative acts in Tom Jones, of which Mrs. Partridge's is a representative sample, have the effect of questioning narrative authority, even in the act of asserting it. The fictionality of the narrative itself is thus underscored; but, at the same time, the narrative speaks to the perceptual truth of the ordering consciousness. It is a momentary truth, in a sense, for further information might lead to a reordering, yet it is also an enduring truth, for it proceeds from habitual modes of conceptualization which, even if they lack the permanence of essence, speak to a kind of predictability. There is, however, another dimension to the relationship between character and consciousness, and that dimension has to do with audience. While Mrs. Partridge is a reader of events, Allworthy is a reader of narrative; and, like ours, his knowledge is confined to what the narrator—first Mrs. Wilkins and later Mrs. Partridge—is willing to tell. And while it may be true, as Rothstein says, that he should not admit a wife's evidence against her own husband, his confusion is really a result of Jenny's earlier admission of maternity, which no magistrate would be likely to discount.¹⁸ To seek further for the father, assuming Jenny to be the mother, would have been to find another innocent party and believe his guilt, as we do for a time on first reading. While the reader may be aware at all times of the discreteness of his or her own consciousness, this discreteness is somewhat undermined by the inability to refer to any but the narrator for the facts. In other words, we are virtually forced to share the perceptual bias of the narrator: what he tells us is all we know.

Fielding makes it quite clear that Mrs. Wilkins's motivation as a storyteller is self-interest and that she, like Mrs. Partridge, tells the story that suits her. Expecting Captain Blifil to outlive Allworthy and recognizing the "no great Good-will" the captain has for Tom, "she fancied it would be rendering him an agreeable Service, if she could make any Discoveries that might lessen the Affection which Mr. Allworthy seemed to have contracted for this Child" (1: 91). That the revelation does not have that effect suggests that the reader has some control over the narrative moment and that his authority is ultimately the only way narrative interpretation can gain currency. Scandal thrives on the indiscriminate reader who credits everything he or she hears; other listeners, such as Allworthy, in this case, refuse to draw the expected conclusion. Instead of dismissing "little Tommy," Allworthy "grew every Day fonder" of him, much to Captain Blifil's disgust. Allworthy, it seems, has his own version of the story of Tom Jones.

What Fielding suggests is that each individual is commonly a reader of action and character and a maker of narrative, and, as he asserts in "An Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men," what we think of others does emerge from and determine our definition of self. His aim in this essay, he says, is to "arm [the innocent] against Imposition," "against those who can injure us … by obtaining our good Opinion" (153, 164). Imposition can be of two sorts, Fielding acknowledges: not only might others misrepresent themselves to us, but we might also misapprehend others by imposing what we know to be true of ourselves on them. As Fielding notes, the honest and upright are easy to deceive, because they believe others to be like them: "That open Disposition, which is the surest Indication of an honest and upright Heart, chiefly renders us liable to be imposed on by Craft and Deceit" (156). Most of Fielding's essay is devoted to countering this sort of imposition: he warns the innocent to beware of the other, to develop a skeptical awareness of the telling disjunctions between appearance and reality, word and deed. Although Fielding argues, for example, that the austerity of countenance that passes for wisdom hides pride, ill-nature, and cunning, that there is, in other words, a disjunctive relationship between physiognomy and personality, he also asserts that interpretation resolves the seeming contradiction: "The Passions of Men do commonly imprint sufficient Marks on the Countenance; and it is owing chiefly to want of Skill in the Observer, that Physiognomy is of so little Use and Credit in the World" (157). A skilled, penetrating interpreter will read correctly. He or she will have no trouble recognizing "that a constant, settled, glavering, sneering Smile in the Countenance, is so far from indicating Goodness, that it may be with much Confidence depended on as an Assurance of the contrary" (160).

Interpretation, however, can be hampered. Many lack the skills to read the denotative meaning of the sneer, the smile, the look of solemnity. Fielding acknowledges the difficulty of interpreting another's physical appearance and seeks to offer surer guidelines for recognizing behavior that signals danger. Again, the point is imposition. Flattery, professions of friendship on short acquaintance, profuse promises, prying curiosity, and slander of others are signs of an individual whose behavior might well endanger the ease and happiness of others. The most dangerous character, the one that illustrates most clearly the threatening aspects of life in society, is the hypocrite whose self, in effect, is other and who approaches all others as self: "The Business of such a Man's Life is to procure Praise, by acquiring and maintaining an undeserved Character; so is his utmost Care employed to deprive those who have an honest Claim to the Character himself affects only, of all the Emoluments which could otherwise arise to them from it" (170).

Finally, narrative must be based on probability, and stories must be expected to follow predictable patterns. Although possibility is allowed, one must not count on it: "Nothing … can be more unjustifiable to our Prudence, than an Opinion that the Man whom we see act the Part of a Villain to others, should on some minute Change of Person, Time, Place, or other Circumstance, behave like an honest and just Man to ourselves" (176). While repentance is possible, judging its sincerity is difficult; therefore, it is safest to assume "that a Man whom we once knew to be a Villain, remains a Villain still" (176).

The narrative expectations implicit in Fielding's advice to the innocent reveal a tragic, not a comic, perception, a fear of narrow definition by another that is personally threatening and probably ruinous. The importance of the individual is acknowledged and decried as social relationships are presented in terms of the subsuming of one identity in another. Fielding does hold out the possibility of objectivity, of being able to avoid imposition by recognizing the disjunction of self and other through interpretation that admits the possibility of multiple meanings. In discussing the hypocrite, for example, Fielding cites the description of this character from the Gospel of Saint Matthew, quoting it thus: "It strains off a Gnat, and swallows a Camel" (168). In a note, Fielding explains that this is a correction of the more usual translation "strain at a Gnat, i.e. struggle in swallowing"; and he goes on to explain that the Greek word actually refers to a "Cullender," the idea being "that though they pretend their Consciences are so fine, that a Gnat is with Difficulty strained through them, yet they can, if they please, open them wide enough to admit a Camel" (168 n. 3). Speaking both to the inside (conscience) and the outside (behavior), yet not in the same translation (disjunction), the phrase itself becomes a metaphor for individual personality, for social relationship, for narrative as interpretation. The synthesizing force is the interpreter, who admits both possibilities, though interpretation requires choice, preference, meaning, at least of a transitory nature.¹⁹

Still, narrative authority is never really objective, though it aims for objectivity, and never fully knowledgeable, though it values and seeks truth. In "A Clear State of the Case of Elizabeth Canning," Fielding demonstrates the full range of tensions that inform the relationship between an individual consciousness, the character of another, and narrative authority. The document is in a sense a personal justification, a defense of the ruling Fielding had given in favor of eighteen-year-old Elizabeth Canning's claim that she had been kidnapped and held by Mary Squires. Her story had been called into question by commentators to whom certain aspects of her self-defense seemed improbable. In establishing their probability, Fielding offers a defense, answers objections, includes two first-person, corroboratory accounts, and reminds readers of the difficulty of attaining a guilty verdict in the "admirable" and "amiable" judicial system he represents (223). Interestingly, however, throughout his justification runs a self-portraiture that admits the possibility of error. Fielding, for all practical purposes, credits Elizabeth Canning's narrative, yet he includes as a kind of counterpoint another narrative that he fully credits as he cannot fully credit hers. That narrative is the narrative of his own growing conviction of the guilt of Mary Squires.

Fielding's self-portrait in "The Case of Elizabeth Canning" emphasizes his fallibility in such a way that it establishes his objectivity. When he introduces himself into the narrative, after reviewing the Canning story from the point of view of those who disbelieve her and answering their objections, we find him in a domestic setting and about to take tea with his wife, who lays aside the papers on the case when they first arrive and then retrieves them when the solicitor comes to discuss the case. Fielding emphasizes his exhaustion, "almost fatigued to death, with several tedious examinations at that time," and his desire to "refresh myself with a day or two's interval in the country, where I had not been, unless on a Sunday, for a long time" (239). After first declining the case, he yields because of "the importunities of Mr. Salt," "curiosity," and "compassion" (239). His conviction is born of the corroboratory evidence of Canning and Virtue Hall, whose narratives, differing in point of view, agree in point of fact.

The final three pages of Fielding's defense are composed of self-assessment and a recognition of the difficulty of judging another: "The only error I can ever be possibly charged with in this case is an error in sagacity.… In this case … one of the most simple girls I ever saw, if she be a wicked one, hath been too hard for me.… To be placed above the reach of deceit is to be placed above the rank of a human being; sure I am that make no pretension to be of that rank; indeed I have been often deceived in my opinion of men, and have served and recommended to others those persons whom I have afterwards discovered to be totally worthless" (252-54). The essay concludes with an open-endedness ("This is the light in which I see this case at present"), with a desire that "the government… authorise some proper persons to examine to the very bottom, a matter in which the honour of our national justice is so deeply concerned," and with a postscript presenting further evidence, some that Fielding had forgotten and some new evidence that has cemented Fielding's conviction by "corroborating the whole evidence of Canning, and contradicting the alibi defence of the gipsy woman" (254-55). Although in the end Fielding remains convinced of his interpretation of the events of the Canning case, he takes care to distinguish himself from those who "though.… perhaps, heard the cause at first with the impartiality of upright judges, [but who] when they have once given their opinion, … are too apt to become warm advocates, and even interested parties in defence of that opinion" (226). Fielding's own interpretation, for all its consistency, insists on its inconclusiveness, partiality, and temporality.

Like "An Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men," "A Clear State of the Case of Elizabeth Canning" speaks to a tension between narrative and identity that narratives of causality, narratives of consciousness, customarily elide. Yet both essays proceed from the seductiveness of such elision, the desire to believe, to find coherence, to close up, to regard interpretation as truth. Resisting the temptation involves, not a denial of consciousness, but an admission of consciousnesses, alternative interpretations, other narratives. The truly objective point of view must admit its partiality, present other possibilities, and defer to a higher authority, which, in Fielding's world, of course, is ultimately God. As the creative act of fictionalizing in a sense mocks the creative act of the Godhead, we might assume the analogy to obtain, thereby making the narrator the final authority of Tom Jones, as Roth stein and others have suggested. But the creative act of fictionalizing is shared by narrator, characters, and readers, so that ultimate authority seems to be denied even the author here, whose focus on others and whose self-conscious portrayal of self as other establishes identity as temporal and temporary rather than eternal and enduring. In other words, while Tom Jones values essence over existence, it, like "Characters of Men" and "The Case of Elizabeth Canning," finds expression for the latter only.

In Tom Jones, Fielding does not so much struggle with the tension between self and other, essence and expression, as he celebrates it, exploits it, and explodes it. He loves a paradox, and, in the process of creating his well-made, tightly ordered narrative, he undermines the whole notion of order and narrative. There are broad hints throughout the novel that a healthy skepticism toward language representation, particularly metaphor, is advisable if truth is in any way the aim of expression. Take, for example, the narrator's examination of the world-as-a-stage metaphor. "The World hath been often compared to the Theatre," Fielding observes, so often, in fact, that "some Words proper to the Theatre, and which were, at first, metaphorically applied to the World, are now indiscriminately and literally spoken of both" (1: 323). As Fielding notes, figure has supplanted meaning, and all the more ludicrously, as the meaning that has been supplanted was figural in the first place: "The theatrical Stage is nothing more than a Representation … of what really exists." But, then again, what does really exist? "The larger Part of Mankind … [are but] Actors … personating Characters no more their own, and to which, in Fact, they have no better Title, than the Player hath to be in Earnest thought the King or Emperor whom he represents." Interestingly, Fielding concludes, "Thus the Hypocrite may be said to be a Player; and indeed the Greeks called them both by one and the same Name" (1: 324), pointing to the conclusion that representation, whether in art, language, or life, should be regarded with some skepticism.

Having illustrated that the dichotomy with which he began is in fact no dichotomy at all, as art and life are equally representational, bearing equal claims to truth and sharing the same propensity to fiction, Fielding adds another twist. The representational world, the world of figure, whatever that figure may be, while itself an other with relation to the essence it represents, also finds itself defined by other and in danger, as is all essence, of being defined solely by other. Fielding cautions against this danger, using the story of Black George to do so. The audience will interpret Black George's behavior according to their own various predilections, he asserts: the upper gallery is vociferous, the boxes polite, the pit divided. Of course, Fielding is having great fun here expressing himself figuratively and revealing his own assessment of society through analysis and classification based on his own experience. For the individual, however, he seems to recommend narrative, the suspended moment that admits of contiguous action and the possibility of change. On Black George's behalf, he pleads that we realize a "single bad Act no more constitutes a Villain in Life, than a single bad Part on the Stage" (1: 328). Of course, Black George is not in life. He is in art. He is not an actor in the world but a character in a narrative. The analogy breaks down by ignoring the authorial presence, on the one hand, and by usurping it, on the other. Fielding alone is qualified to judge the behavior of Black George; he alone is admitted "behind the Scenes of this great Theatre of Nature," a fact, he claims, that should be true of all authors of anything but "Dictionaries and Spelling-Books" (1: 327). We are back once more to language. While Fielding's point is clearly that interpreters should be possessed of the truth while list makers need only fact, we might ask ourselves just what author finds himself or herself backstage in life. The reason Fielding can condemn Black George's behavior without censuring the man is that he has contrived the narrative.

Representation is in some ways all we have of reality, Tom Jones asserts; it is and should be recognized as an interpretation of reality, but it is an interpretative stance that should be regarded as important, not simply dismissed as incomplete. One of the great comic scenes of Tom Jones invokes Partridge's response to Hamlet. Unable to keep in view the distinction between the play and life, Partridge, in his confusion, is a figure of fun. He has not the sophisticated distance of a playgoer such as Tom, who brings to the performance an aesthetic sensibility capable of judging the actors, the staging, the audience response. In other words, Tom's is a metadramatic sensibility of such sophistication that he finds little or no interaction between the play and his own emotional reality. Partridge, on the other hand, responds quite naturally, as he is "unimproved.… but likewise unadulterated by Art" (2: 852); he affords great pleasure to the rest of the audience, for whom the play appears to have lost its significance. Partridge is the evening's entertainment, as Tom had known he would be all along.

Rothstein reads this scene as challenging the authority of dramatic representation and predictable (tragic) plot in favor of the narrative authority that creates chaotically ("Virtues of Authority" 119-23). The parallels and differences he points to certainly establish destabilization. But the challenge is analogous as well as exclusive. Any representation can lose its validity and vitality and does so when it becomes or is perceived too clearly as artifice. For Partridge, the best actor is the one who most seems to be acting, the one who makes the audience ever aware of the difference between himself and his role. The actor who really seems to be the character is, of course, the most skilled, but Partridge, who confuses representation and reality at this point, cannot so judge him. While we laugh at his judgment, we also recognize that we do so because we possess the disjunction he requires of his actors. And his fear of ghosts suggests the danger of our ever conjoining what our imaginations can so readily, in this instance, distinguish.

Tom Jones is about the threat inherent in things that seem other than what they are and the inevitability, even the desirability, of their doing so. While the narrative places much emphasis on getting to the bottom of, discovering, seeing behind the scenes, revealing, and pursuing, just as often we have diversion, deferral, and distraction, a supplanting of the chain of causality with a validity of its own. Partridge, who diverts attention from the play, becomes himself the evening's entertainment; the actors, rather than the action or the characters, become the subject of discourse about the play; the play, rather than the reality upon which it is based, is the audience's concern; legend orders and then supplants fact.²⁰

Deferral or distraction is most readily recognized in all eighteenth-century novels in the interpolated narrative, where a character generally usurps narrative authority in self-representation. Tom Jones, of course, has the Man of the Hill and Mrs. Fitzpatrick, whose stories provide us with alternative narratives for Tom's and Sophia's histories. In general, we regard these alternatives as less attractive, largely because of the narrative authority that has determined that Tom and Sophia be the center of the narrative. Yet the histories, by focusing on the self as other, reveal the main narrative to be the narrator's own deferral to Tom, Sophia, Allworthy, and the rest. They represent the other as self, and, as such, they, like the narrator's representation of himself, are legitimately authorized but of limited and dubious reliability.

For all the questioning of the validity of narrative representation, however, Tom Jones argues its value. To entertain—to hold between—to divert, to please, is the narrator's primary concern. And, in the final analysis, the other by which the consciousness of the narrator is largely defined is the reader—not the critic, who maintains a distance between himself and the narrative, looking more at how than at what, but the reader, who shares with the author responsibility for the narrative. This responsibility arises from the impulse to narrate, to piece together a story largely causal, largely definitive, but at the same time subject to revision, reinterpretation, new combinations as new information presents itself. What Fielding does through his structuring of the narrative is allow us to participate in the writing of the story and the understanding of the characters.

Of course, in the end we discover how many of the narratives and the characters we created are not Fielding's narratives and characters. We learn that to interpret is to risk misinterpretation, for events and people lend themselves to variant readings. We see, if we look again to the beginning of the novel, that Bridget, for example, always behaved toward Tom as a loving mother, a mother who loved her son's father, would behave, though her actions were variously interpreted as jealousy or even lust (1: 92, 139-40). Upon a second reading, of course, the latter misinterpretation, encouraged by the narrator's sly speculations and reporting of the theories of others, anticipates the ending of Tom's story. It is a significant foreshadowing, for, in bracketing the novel, incest serves as a metaphor for narrative itself.²¹ In its self-reflexivity, its confusion of other and self, its dangerous inability to separate identity and experience, and its fundamental self-absorption, narrative is like incest. The act of narrating, like consciousness, is inescapable, and whether the self or another is the focal point of the narration, the same limitations obtain. The individual perception is colored by emotions, desires, idiosyncracies that govern the narrative structure. Momentary in nature, open-ended, arising from and existing in the present alone, narrative can seem continual, delimiting, and temporally comprehensive. But, as Tom Jones illustrates, it is not often what it seems.

Notes

¹ Henry James was an early celebrant of the mind of the narrator; see his preface to The Princess Casamassima. Seminal studies by Wayne Booth, Henry Knight Miller, and John Preston have made treatment of the narrator as thinking being a critical commonplace; see, respectively, The Rhetoric of Fiction (215-18), "The Voices of Henry Fielding," and The Created Self (114-32).

² Ian Watt complains about the narrator's intrusions producing "a distancing effect which prevents us from being … fully immersed in the lives of the characters" (285), and others, including Alan Dugald McKillop (129) and Bernard Harrison (45-49), make similar observations, though with less rancor.

³ See Locke, Essay, bk. 2, ch. 14 (184).

⁴ For discussions of the way other moments in the novel speak to the complexity of character, see Bernard Harrison's analysis of Blifil's conduct concerning Sophia's bird in book 4, chapter 3, and William Empson's discussion of Black George's behavior toward Tom in books 6 and 15 (44-46).

⁵ See chapter 7 [Character & Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Comic Fiction, by Elizabeth Kraft (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992)] for a more thorough discussion of the present, the novel, and consciousness.

⁶ See Henry Knight Miller ("Voices"), who sees the narrator as the hero of Tom Jones, "not because he displays for our delectation the intimate operations of a self-absorbed psyche, but rather because he has a unique view of objective reality" (267). See also Thomas Lockwood, who argues that "Fielding's presence in Tom Jones acts as a screen through which we see the story he calls the history of a foundling" (230).

⁷ Both F. Holmes Dudden (1: 145-48) and Wilbur L. Cross (208-9) use Tom Jones's description of Sophia as a fundamental source of information about Charlotte Craddock Fielding. On the critical tendency to try to match the characters of Tom Jones with real people, see J. Paul Hunter's remarks on the "Salisbury Tradition" (Occasional Form 124-29).

⁸ Many critics argue for connections between the narrative and the commentary, ranging from Lockwood and his assertion that the shifts are so rapid and frequent that the effect is one of unification (233) to Paulson and his exploration of thematic unity (95-99). Many readers, however, would agree with Henry Knight Miller's passing comment that the narrator and his characters seem to reside in different dimensions ("Voices" 262).

⁹ Rothstein describes the pre-1750 English novel as one that "moved by muted contrasts" to express an epistemology of plenitude: "What we see before us is a heterocosm, various and uncertain. The structure is loose, without a hierarchy implicit in the individual experiences. Our progress through it is tied to the order of mind, in that association of ideas binds event to event, character to character. Different casts of mind, sometimes those of different characters and sometimes those of the same character in different stages of enlightenment, regard the same (repeated, analogous) phenomena so as to provide a range of possibilities for the particulars we encounter" (Systems of Order 245). See also Hunter's discussion of the use of character groupings in his Occasional Form (169-72).

¹⁰ The most important proponent of the allegorical reading is, of course, Martin C. Battestin. See his introduction to the Wesleyan edition of the novel (xvii-xix) and his "Tom Jones: The Argument of Design."

¹¹ On the matter of the allegorical significance of Paradise Hall, however, Battestin himself has noted that the name "Paradise," "which I had always taken to be mere allegory, … is actually the name of that part of the Gould estate that lay closest to St. Benedict's Church, in which Fielding was baptized" ("Fielding's Muse" 53). An illustration of the problem with allegorical readings of the novel is the difficulty over Allworthy, whose "all-worthiness" is, and I imagine always will be, a matter of debate. For varying points of view, see Preston 124-28, Wright 159-62, Empson 37, and Rothstein, "Virtues of Authority" 100-107.

¹² See Preston's argument that Fielding posed as a bad writer "in order to unseat the bad reader" (116).

¹³ See Georges Poulet, "Criticism and the Experience of Interiority." In this essay, he refers, of course, to the act of reading, but the extent to which narrating and reading are analogous in Tom Jones will, I hope, be clear soon. On the narrative of the prefaces, Booth finds "a running account of the growing intimacy between the narrator and the reader, an account with a kind of plot of its own and a separate denouement" (Rhetoric 216).

¹⁴ See Norman N. Holland, "UNITY IDENTITY TEXT SELF," for the argument that "all of us, as we read, use the literary work to … replicate ourselves" (816) in what he goes on to describe (following Whitehead, Langer, Husserl, and others) as "an in-gathering and in-mixing of self and other" (820).

¹⁵ Alter comments on the discrepancies in Fielding's own readership: "At some points one almost wonders whether Fielding's popular following and modern detractors, on the one hand, and the more sophisticated of his admirers, on the other hand, have really read the same novelist" (Fielding 5).

¹⁶ See J. Paul Hunter on Squire Western (Occasional Form 178-79), Sheridan Baker on Bridget Allworthy, and William Empson on Tom Jones himself, though Empson's point has more to do with Sophia's and Allworthy's readings of Jones (43-44).

¹⁷ As the narrator tells us, "The Cause of this Quarrel was … variously reported; for, as some People said that Mrs. Partridge had caught her Husband in Bed with his Maid, so many other Reasons, of a very different Kind, went abroad. Nay, some transferred the Guilt to the Wife, and the Jealousy to the Husband" (1: 91).

¹⁸ Rothstein, "Virtues of Authority" 103.

¹⁹ As Fielding continues to discuss the scriptural portrayal of hypocrisy, he illustrates the multivalency of language in his literal, then figural, readings of certain passages (see especially 169).

²⁰ On the theme of pursuit, see Dorothy Van Ghent, who reads it as encouragement to the reader's perception of unity of design (71-72), and John Preston, who sees it as a suggestion of the instinctive but irrational impulses of man (105-6). On play and diversion, see especially Wright 74-104 and Damrosch 263-65.

²¹ The role of incest in Tom Jones has troubled some critics, most notably Empson, who concludes that it is just a "trick … to heighten the excitement at the end of the plot" (138-39). See Battestin's discussion of the biographical significance of incest as a motif in the works of both Sarah Fielding and Henry Fielding ("'Sin of Incest"').

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