![]() ![]() It is a safe world, because a simple one. ![]() No one is actually in danger of being beaten to death. Thus the rapid, farce-like, overlit simplicity of the happenings in Fielding-people getting into the wrong beds, hurling chamberpots of piss at each other, attacking the wrong people with cudgels and nearly beating them to death. ![]() There is a kind of seriousness about human activity, and especially about the psychological and moral analysis of pride and abasement, that one sees in books such as Rameau's Nephew and Notes From Underground and even in The Portrait of a Lady, which at least in part derives from Richardson.Īnd, as in Cervantes, although much violence is done to the body, the essential rule of the weightless cartoon applies, in that no one can really be in danger. Richardson's influence on European romanticism was massive: on Diderot, on Pushkin, on Stendhal, on Proust. The labyrinthine belongs not to plot, but goes inward, into the human soul, and is inscribed in the advances and retreats, the feints and parries, the accommodations and resolutions, of the two central characters, Lovelace and Clarissa Harlowe. Plot expands and expires in Clarissa: there is a central, driving question-will Clarissa succumb?-and hardly a subplot of note in 1,300 pages. Richardson's minute epistolary method slows the novelistic examination of motive and desire to an agonizing lento, in which the individual perspective is everything. Broadly speaking, there are two great currents in the novel: one flows from Richardson and the other from Fielding. ![]()
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