Today, we are happy to bring you our conversation with Kelly Swartz, author of Maxims and the Mind: Unknowing in the Early Novel from Bacon to Austen

What inspired you to write this book? 

My scholarship focuses on the history of the novel in English, but I was trained as a poet. Perhaps because of this background, when I read long novels, I tend to focus on the shorter forms they contain. Prose fiction of the long eighteenth century is full of one short form in particular: the maxim. Maxims are pithy, easily extractable statements of apparent truth. For a modern reader, they are eminently skippable, but from the very beginning I saw something more.

I wrote this book to do justice to the many strange and often ironic maxims in early realist prose fiction. My goal was always to work against the tendency to dismiss maxims in early novels as vestiges of previous, more didactic narratives. By approaching maxims in novels as strange and misunderstood, I was able to construct a new account of how several early novelists thought about literary representations of inwardness and about fiction as a source of knowledge (or not) about the real world.

What did you learn and what are you hoping readers will learn from your book? 

Early in research for the book I learned that Francis Bacon, perhaps the most influential English natural philosopher leading up to the eighteenth century, had a strikingly idiosyncratic theory of aphorisms and how they could be used to inspire scientific inquiry. Bacon was skeptical of the individual human mind’s ability to comprehend nature, and he insisted that the new induction should involve many minds and unfold over generations. He suggested that a natural philosopher might record his observations as a collection of disconnected aphorisms, because this would prevent the too-early consolidation of a system and would thus keep the spirit of discovery and innovation alive for future readers. This technique of using disconnected generalizations to represent the gaps in present knowledge made its way into the early novel, where authors used it to signal the not-knowing of characters and even to question the increasingly popular accounts of how realist fictional narrative could create knowledge for readers.

What surprised you the most in the process of writing your book? 

Well, first, I remain surprised that in a book about the novel, one of the longest modern literary genres, I ended up writing so much about the maxim, one of the shortest!

I’m also surprised by the book’s ultimate emphasis on representations of not-knowing as forms of inwardness. As I was finishing the book, I stepped back and looked more broadly at the examples I’d selected of maxims in fictional narratives. I was surprised to realize how many of them came from characters who were writers. These characters did not reach for maxims when they wanted to seem smart or to persuade their audience to accept a claim. Rather, they reached for maxims when they had difficulty articulating their experience or when they felt something poignant they wanted to express but could not quite put into words. What this helped me see was how important a sense of incomplete knowledge or partial knowledge is to our experience of learning. I now think of the novel as a form that presents its mode of knowledge creation as collaborative. I argue that the early novel’s mode of knowledge production is more public and less private, more collective and less individualistic, than we have previously thought.

What’s your favorite anecdote from your book?

After Samuel Richardson finished his epistolary fiction Clarissa (1747-48) he decided to compile all the “wisdom” included in the narrative. This ballooned into A Collection of . . . Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Cautions, Aphorisms, Reflections, and Observations, Contained in the History of Clarissa, which he appended to the novel’s third edition. The maxims in the collection are distilled from the story and arranged under alphabetized headings such as “Marriage” or “Prosperity. Success. Riches.” Can you imagine if a novelist appended something like this to her novel today?

Yet despite Richardson’s anxiety that people would read Clarissa for plot and miss the morals—an anxiety that fueled the creation of the collection—he also used maxims experimentally within his fiction. After the character Lovelace rapes Clarissa, for example, Clarissa momentarily gives up her first-person perspective and turns to literary maxims to put her grief and pain into words. This fascinating and vexed moment in a very famous novel has generated decades of excellent scholarship. In my book, I focus on how these familiar literary generalizations open up Clarissa’s experience to readers without suggesting that to do so is to offer a reader complete knowledge of what happened to her or what she thinks.

What’s next? 

In my next project I plan to continue working at the intersection of eighteenth-century literature and philosophy, but with a greater emphasis on gender. I’ve recently started researching eighteenth-century British women writers who engaged with Stoic ideas in their private lives and through poetic form.

Stoicism is not typically associated with intense emotional or physical attachment. For the canonical Stoic philosophers—Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius—affective connections to other people, while a part of life, should give way to higher order human duties to reason, justice, and the divinely decreed natural order. Yet eighteenth-century writers such as Elizabeth Carter grappled with the relationship between reason and emotion, and used Stoic concepts to develop deeply pleasurable and imaginative spaces in which they might share fellowship with other women.