The Fate of the Novel: A Reading of Ian Watt’s Formal Realism

The Fate of the Novel

What follow is a long-form reading of Ian Watt’s idea of “formal realism”: the narrative method by which the modern novel embodies the contingencies of lived experience. Starting with Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, posts trace how private reading, proper names, and a new sense of time reshape what fiction can claim about reality—and how those claims intersect (and sometimes clash) with philosophy, from Plato’s quarrel with poetry to modern debates about knowledge and selfhood.

Formal Realism

To call the novel “new” is to recognise that the modern sense of novel crystallised in the early eighteenth century, when writers such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding developed long fictional narratives that departed from romance and epic conventions[5]. Ian Watt credits these authors with inaugurating a literary form that we still call the novel, but his interest lies less in their social circumstances than in the philosophical implications of their work. Watt argues that the fate of the novel hinges on its association with formal realism, a term he coins to describe the narrative method by which the novel embodies the circumstantial contingencies of life. The heart of this essay is to examine what novels can say about reality, how they shape our reading experience, and whether they are compatible with philosophical inquiry. Watt’s distinction between literary form and philosophy is often overstated—he never writes, as has been claimed, that “philosophy is one thing and literature is another.” Nevertheless, his analysis invites reflection on Plato’s banishment of poets from the Republic and the struggle to reintegrate imaginative literature into philosophical discourse.

The novel cannot be a direct observation of the world; it cannot mirror Kant’s noumenal thing‑in‑itself. Instead, it constructs a claim on reality through narrative. Like the lyric or the play, it is bound to storytelling, yet it is a modern invention that asserts the autonomy of the subject over the epic’s reliance on divine decree. For Watt, what distinguishes the novel is not its subject matter but the way it presents reality. He notes that the novel raises “the problem of the correspondence between the literary work and the reality which it imitates,” an epistemological question that philosophers are well suited to analyse[2]. By focusing on how novels organise words to evoke a world, Watt shifts attention from mimetic accuracy to the form’s underlying logic. This emphasis aligns the novel with modern thought that emphasises individual access to truth and the correspondence between words and things.

The Experience of Reading Novels

According to Watt, the novel promises the closest correspondence between life and art; its formal realism overwhelms earlier narrative forms. Homer’s epics contain flashes of everyday detail, but such realism is rare, whereas the novel devotes itself to the circumstantial. This shift matters because it signals a new reading experience. The epic was part of an oral tradition: in ancient Greece, bards and rhapsodes performed poems like the Iliad and the Odyssey aloud, sometimes with musical accompaniment[6]. By contrast, the novel is read in solitude. While prose fiction long predates the eighteenth century—Satyricon was written centuries before Moll Flanders—the rise of the novel is tied to the emergence of silent, private reading. Scholars debate which work counts as the first novel—some cite Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605), others Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Richardson’s Pamela (1740) or Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719)—but the crucial shift is from public storytelling to introspective reading.

The Use of the Proper

One of the novel’s most manageable innovations is its use of proper names. Watt observes that eighteenth‑century novelists began naming characters as individuals rather than types. Proper names are paradoxical: they designate a particular person yet remain arbitrary and potentially shared by others. Hobbes explains the distinction succinctly: a proper name “bringeth to mind one thing only,” whereas universal names recall any one of many[7]. Earlier literature used descriptive or symbolic names—Odysseus (“wrathful”) and Oedipus (“swollen foot”)—that situated characters within mythic archetypes. Novels, however, favour combinations of first and last names that sound realistic and subtly suggest character: Pamela Andrews, Clarissa Harlowe, Robert Lovelace, Mrs. Sinclair and Sir Charles Grandison. Even when an alias such as “Moll Flanders” appears, it carries the weight of a full name. By individualising characters, novelists anticipate Lockean and Humean theories of personal identity, which locate identity in consciousness and memory rather than in fixed essences[3].

Reading and Individuality

Theatre‑goers who attended Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex or Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream already knew the plots; the dramatic form, like the epic, is meant to be performed. The novel, by contrast, invites each reader into a private world. Augustine’s Confessions records his surprise at seeing Ambrose read silently: “when Ambrose read, his eyes ran over the columns of writing and his heart searched out the meaning, but his voice and his tongue were at rest”[1]. Silent reading was not unknown, but it was notable enough for Augustine to comment on it. In medieval and early modern Europe, reading often involved vocalisation; only gradually did silent, introspective reading become common. The novel’s introspection builds on this shift. Novels immerse readers in the particulars of everyday life—bathing, laundry, eating a sour grape, making love on an unmade bed—and linger on the mundane. Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations illustrates this attention to detail when Pip traces his fingers over the raised letters on his parents’ tombstone and imagines their physical presence. Such scenes exemplify the novel’s repudiation of epic universals and its commitment to particularity.

What Realism Is Not

Watt famously contends that the novel’s realism does not reside in the kind of life it presents but in the way it presents it[2]. Historians have sometimes defined realism as fiction depicting the “seamy side” of life—Moll Flanders is a thief, Pamela a hypocrite, Tom Jones a fornicator—but Watt argues that this definition obscures the novel’s originality. Realism, in his sense, is not naturalism, scientific pragmatism or a mere truism that novels are slices of life. Rather, it is a narrative convention that treats the world of the novel as if it were based on evidence given by an eyewitness, emphasising verisimilitude in description, time and space. The novel thus distances itself from both idealised romance and confessional rhetoric; it seeks authenticity through form.

Philosophical Realism, a False Step

Medieval scholastic “realism” held that universals—classes, forms or abstractions—are the true realities, independent of sensory perception. Nominalists challenged this view, arguing that only particulars exist and that universals are names. This scholastic debate seems far removed from the novel’s aesthetic concerns. Watt nevertheless attempts to connect the novel’s rise to modern philosophical realism, suggesting that thinkers such as Locke, Descartes, Aristotle and even Plato share a commitment to truth discovered by the individual through his senses. This grouping is strained. Locke certainly emphasises sensory knowledge and argues that personal identity consists in the continuity of consciousness[3]. Aristotle distinguished between universals and particulars but did not adopt a modern empiricist position. Descartes, however, prioritises rational introspection over sense experience. His famous cogito—“I think, therefore I am”—comes after methodic doubt that suspends reliance on the senses. Aligning Descartes with empiricist realism mischaracterises his dualism and overlooks the idealist elements of his thought. Watt’s invocation of Plato and Aristotle may gesture toward a longer history of debates about universals and particulars, but the connection to the novel remains tenuous.

Why Descartes?

Watt sees in Descartes’ prose style a precursor to the novel’s narrative techniques. The Meditations and Discourse on Method are written in the first person and invite readers to follow an individual’s reasoning. Yet this does not make Descartes a realist in Watt’s sense. Cartesian philosophy predates the novel by a century; its sceptical method locates certainty in the mind rather than in the external world. While Descartes describes his environment—a warm room near a fire, the wax that changes shape—these narrative touches serve philosophical argument rather than imitation of everyday life. Kant’s transcendental philosophy, which mediates between empiricism and rationalism, may align more closely with the novel’s concern for how the mind organises experience. Watt’s attempt to find a direct genealogy from Descartes to Defoe obscures the novel’s more complex intellectual inheritance.

Locke’s theory of personal identity offers a more convincing link between philosophy and the novel. In Book 2, Chapter 27 of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke defines a person as “a thinking intelligent Being… which can consider itself as the same thinking thing in different times and places” and asserts that “consciousness always accompanies thinking, and ’tis that, that makes everyone to be, what he calls self”[3]. Identity persists as far as consciousness can be extended backwards to past actions and thoughts[3]. Novelists literalise this notion by tracing characters’ memories across time; Hume and later philosophers would complicate this further. Such psychological continuity undergirds the novel’s interest in character development.

The Novel’s Sense of Time

Watt notes that novels conceive time differently from earlier genres: they use past experiences as causes of present actions and discriminate time more minutely. Letters in Richardson’s Pamela and the date headings in Clarissa locate events precisely. Fielding satirises Richardson yet still constructs a coherent time scheme. Novels such as Joyce’s Ulysses or Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway compress a day into a stream of consciousness that evokes the flux of mental life. This differs from the “unity of time” developed by neoclassical critics from Aristotle’s Poetics; the unity of time holds that the action of a play should take place within a single revolution of the sun, roughly twenty‑four hours[4]. The novel, by contrast, is historical by nature; it spans years, even lifetimes, and dwells on memory. Ortega y Gasset calls the novel “sluggish and long” because it imitates the languorous passage of time. Later works such as Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants foreground memory and temporality. Sebald intersperses his narratives with photographs; in The Emigrants a train‑track image appears alongside the account of Paul Bereyter’s suicide. These images are not simply illustrations but evoke the punctum of memory—what Roland Barthes describes as the piercing detail. The novel thus integrates temporal flux into its very form.

Conclusion

Space, time, plot and character in the novel work together to create an authentic account of individual experience. Watt shows that eighteenth‑century novelists abandoned traditional plots, epic characters and rhetorical flourishes in favour of detailed description, psychological development and causal coherence[8]. Philosophers likewise turned to the individual—Locke’s consciousness, Hume’s bundle of perceptions, Kant’s transcendental subject. Yet aligning the novel directly with philosophical realism risks oversimplifying both domains. Nominalist scepticism about universals encouraged attention to particulars, but the novel’s realism also stems from commercial print culture, the rise of a reading public and a secular interest in private life. Before the novel, fiction was often praised for its rhetorical beauty rather than its reference to reality; the novel claims verisimilitude by imitating human experience while acknowledging the mediation of language. Plato’s allegory of the cave reminds us that all knowledge is mediated: the novel sits between idealism and realism, neither claiming direct access to reality nor retreating into pure mind. Its fate lies in continuing to explore this middle ground, giving form to the flux of life.

PDF Copy for Printing

Works Cited

Augustine. Confessions. Translated by [Translator], [Publisher], [Year]. Book 6, chapter 3, paragraph 3.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edited by Jack Lynch, 1651. Accessed via Jack Lynch’s edition, www.jacklynch.net/Texts/leviathan.html[7].

Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by [Editor], [Publisher], 1690. Book 2, chapter 27[3].

Mallam, Sally. “Oral Storytelling.” The Human Journey, Journey of the Human Mind Project, 2020, humanjourney.us/ideas/stories-and-story-telling/oral-storytelling/[6].

“Three Unities of Tragedy Plays: The Ancient Greek Dramatists.” Reflections blog, 17 Aug 2023, reflections.live/articles/12802/three-unities-of-tragedy-plays-the-ancient-greek-dramatists-especially-aristotle-in-his-well-known-work-poeti-11140-llevrxgh.html[4].

Stauffer, John. “Lecture Notes on James Fenimore Cooper.” The James Fenimore Cooper Society, 2001[8].

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. [Publisher], 1957. Chapters 1–2.

“Ian Watt and Moll Flanders.” COVE, editions.covecollective.org/content/ian-watt-and-moll-flanders[2].

Note: Missing publication details (publisher, year, translator or editor) should be supplied based on the specific editions used. All web sources were accessed on 4 Feb 2026.

[1] Was Silent Reading Unusual During Augustine's Time? : History of Information

https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php

[2] Ian Watt and Moll Flanders | COVE

https://editions.covecollective.org/content/ian-watt-and-moll-flanders

[3]  Locke on Personal Identity (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) 

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke-personal-identity/

[4] Three Unities of Tragedy Plays: The ancient Greek dramatists especially Aristotle in his well-known work 'Poeti' 

https://reflections.live/articles/12802/three-unities-of-tragedy-plays-the-ancient-greek-dramatists-especially-aristotle-in-his-well-known-work-poeti-11140-llevrxgh.html

[5] [8] Lecture Notes on James Fenimore Cooper

https://jfcoopersociety.org/content/04-crit/teaching/stauffer.htm

[6] Oral Storytelling - The Human Journey

https://humanjourney.us/ideas/stories-and-story-telling/oral-storytelling/

[7] Hobbes, Leviathan

https://jacklynch.net/Texts/leviathan.html

Story Time: Emotional Support Pickles and Chickens in the Classroom

What if classroom management didn’t start with charts and systems — but with something soft, weird, and surprisingly effective? Meet the emotional-support pickle: a small, sensory tool that helps students reset, refocus, and get back to learning. Sometimes the simplest solutions really do work.

You can purchase emotional-support pickles online—just search for “emotional support pickles” and “plushy”.

For my school's Secret Elf gift exchange (everyone buys a gift for a “secret” person), I received these ridiculous plush emotional-support pickles and chickens. They were gifted to me, by lot, from the sweek school office lady, "Ms. Lia". They’re oddly perfect for managing the emotional weather of a high-strung middle and high school classroom. I love my school, but some days I just need to hug my emotional-support pickles.

Everyone’s out here talking about fancy classroom-management systems and color-coded behavior charts and the newest acronym-of-the-week. And I’m like: listen. Get some emotional-support pickles. Put them in your classroom. Especially if you teach sixth or seventh grade like I do.

Kids love sensory stuff. They love something tangible. And if a plush pickle helps a kid settle their nervous system and get back to learning, then fine. Call it “emotional regulation.” I call it: the pickle works.

First, you’ll have your Velcro students—the ones who will attach themselves to that pickle like it’s a life raft. They will want it all day. Forever. In perpetuity.

Second, you’ll have… let’s call them the tiny chaos scientists. One or two. The ones who look at an emotional-support chicken and think, What if I took this apart and learned what’s inside?

So yes: you are the therapist in this situation. You are also the bodyguard. You have to protect the emotional-support pickle at all costs.

Note: I don’t make any profit from the sale of these plushies. This post is simply based on my own experience.

And honestly, you can substitute any school-appropriate plushy toy and get the same effect: an axolotl, reindeer, oyster—whatever works for your kids.

PDF Copy for Printing

Quote Post: Tracy Letts Writes A Beautiful Analogy on the Passing of Time and Human Desire

“My last refuge, my books: simple pleasures, like finding wild onions by the side of a road, or requited love.” 

― Tracy Letts, August: Osage County

At the threshold—Janus facing back and ahead—I’m placing this self-portrait with a line from Tracy Letts. © 2025 Stones of Erasmus

PDF Copy for Printing

It’s My Birthday — So, Here’s a Special Post

​

I feel like I have good people I love and know scattered across this crazy world. I’m scattered. So it works. Today is my birthday. It’s always an in-between day, but I’ve learned to stop worrying and love the bomb — I mean — the day!

The People Who Take You There

I think people carry with them certain memories—especially from early childhood into adolescence—that surface later in adult life, unbidden and strangely intact. Not the big moments. Not the milestones. But the people who were simply there.

I definitely had a coloring book
like this when I was a kid in the 80s!

One of those memories for me is getting on the school bus in LaPlace, Louisiana. I must have been in third, fourth, or fifth grade. LaPlace was—and still is—a small hamlet pressed up against the Mississippi River, defined less by buildings than by the levee system that holds the water at bay. The Bonnet Carré Spillway, that vast and mostly invisible protector, loomed in the background of daily life. Flooding was always a possibility. Order was something you trusted other people to maintain.

Every morning and afternoon, I got on the bus driven by a man named Mr. Barry.

That is the memory.

Mr. Barry was a quiet man, probably in his forties—or at least that’s how I remember him. He was dark brown, with a face worn gently by time, gray-black hair thinning at the crown. He didn’t say much. I don’t remember conversations. I don’t remember jokes or discipline or instruction. What I remember is his presence.

On cold days, I can see him sitting in the driver’s seat before we boarded, eating out of a lunch container—not a tin exactly, but a proper lunch box. Inside was red beans and rice. In Louisiana, that meal is more than food; it’s ritual, warmth, care. I somehow knew his wife—or someone who loved him—had made it. He ate it slowly, with relish, like it mattered.

I don’t even know when he ate it. Maybe between routes. Maybe in the afternoon before the ride home. Memory doesn’t care much for logistics. It keeps what it wants.

Mr. Barry wore jeans, usually a collared shirt with a T-shirt underneath—sometimes red-and-black checked. Once the bus got moving, he’d turn on the radio. Rock and roll, whatever was on FM at the time. Occasionally, in the mornings, the news. There were only so many stations then. The world arrived filtered and faint.

Here’s the strange part: I don’t remember how he drove. I don’t remember a single thing about his skill behind the wheel. I don’t remember rules or reprimands or even the sound of his voice. But I remember him. His face. His name. The constancy of seeing him every day.

He probably didn’t know my name.

And yet, decades later, I carry him.

In high school, I had another bus driver: Mr. Greg. He was different—more talkative, lanky, tall, with a mustache and an easy smile. He played country music. He was also a police officer in Madisonville, Louisiana, where I lived at the time. I knew more about him. I saw him occasionally outside the bus, sometimes in his patrol car. He had a brother who also drove a bus, though I can’t remember his name.

Mr. Greg had rules—bus drivers always do. Sit down. Don’t move. Don’t test the limits of a vehicle that is both transportation and controlled chaos. Bus driving is hard. You’re responsible for dozens of children while piloting something the size of a small building. You’re caretaker and authority and witness, all at once.

I don’t know where either of these men are now. Mr. Barry could be in his sixties, his nineties, or gone altogether. Mr. Greg is probably in his fifties or sixties. Time gets slippery when you start measuring it against your own life. I’m now roughly the age I once imagined Mr. Barry to be. Or maybe older. Or maybe not.

And that’s the point.

We spend so much time worrying about what will matter—what we’ll be remembered for, what impact we’re making, whether our actions register. But memory doesn’t work that way. People remember presence. Consistency. Care. The way someone showed up, quietly, day after day.

Mr. Barry and Mr. Greg probably have no idea they live in my mind. They weren’t teachers. They weren’t family. They weren’t friends. They were simply the men who took me from home to school and back again, safely, repeatedly, without drama.

And yet they carry a kind of solace for me now—a reminder of a time when I had less agency, less freedom, and other people quite literally carried me where I needed to go.

I know for certain I could never be a bus driver. That job requires patience, endurance, and a tolerance for chaos I do not possess.

So this is a quiet thank-you—to Mr. Barry, to Mr. Greg, and to all the people whose labor is invisible but essential. To the ones who never make speeches but leave an imprint anyway.

You never really know who will remember you.

And maybe that’s the grace of it.

PDF Copy for Printing

Teaching on the Edge of “Goodbye, Mr. Chips”

I used to think teaching looked like a scene out of the novel-made-classic movie — the musical version I like is Goodbye, Mr. Chips, with Peter O’Toole in the title role. Mr. Chips is dapper. He nibbles biscuits, dispenses quiet wisdom through action, and his students adore him. That was my gestalt of teaching, a script I absorbed in childhood. I idolized my teachers — middle school, high school, even college — as if they could make order out of chaos (or show me the pattern inside the chaos, which is sometimes even better).

I became a teacher at twenty-eight, after a decade in the arms of Mother Church — first a seminarian, then a religious brother. I left that life for a parallel calling. And I’m still here, now in my forties, a little more tired, a little more rushed. The backstage parts of the job take up a lot of oxygen — grading, uploading this file and that one, posting grades, reading emails, responding to some of them. It’s office work except teaching isn’t an office job — it’s a command performance. The show thrills me; it also wrings me out.

This morning I cried in the shower. It was cold. My commute from Queens to my school in Washington Heights is about an hour and a half. I don’t love that part. I check my email and skim the news on my phone, but mostly it feels like time I can’t get back.

I started this year with gusto. Classic me — the Energizer Bunny. I’m either all-systems-go or in a deep morass of my own patheticness. People tend to like me when I’m bouncy and ready to wrangle sixth- and seventh-graders — the tribe I travel with these days. Teaching happens in the moment, but it demands a plan — lesson arcs, pacing calendars, data cycles. And yet my favorite moments are the improvised ones: a student’s random share, a series of unfortunate (and comic) events, that flash when a question sparks real curiosity. That’s the stuff that keeps me in it — kids doing, being, thinking, and seeing.

It’s my first time teaching in a public school after years in private — tuition-free places and tuition-paid ones. I got my certification after I’d already been in classrooms for a while. The shift to the public sphere is a whole story on its own. What I can say is: my students talk. They interrupt. They test boundaries. We’re nearing Christmas, and the behaviors have a pulse. That tracks. I should feel blessed — three more weeks and then hibernation. But I feel anxious.

Part of it is last year, which was a disaster. Let’s leave it there. Part of it is now: I’m learning two curricula, juggling four classes, and directing drama club (we meet once a week, which should be manageable, right?). I have a parent advocating hard for her seventh-grade son to get into a private school for eighth — which I respect — while I try to keep everyone learning today. I’m teaching everything new, following a set curriculum that still requires a million tweaks to fit the real humans in front of me. It drives me a little mad.

So I write. My therapist says writing is therapy; this is that. I’m not a naturally organized person. I survive on intuition. Sometimes I collapse under the pressure. I took a sick day today — I needed to breathe — and now I’m second-guessing the choice. My armor plate has shifted. I don’t feel as confident as I “should.” I’m not kind to myself; I can be brutal. When I stumble, the echo chamber inside me amplifies the mistake.

I’m not a perfectionist — far from it. I’m the teacher typing the slide deck minutes before students walk in. But like Mr. Chips, I believe in the humanity of this work. I’m teaching actual human beings — kids with desires and wishes, different from mine, but real. In the story, Mr. Chips falls in love. I always thought Goodbye, Mr. Chips felt a little queer-coded. There are plenty of us — gay men who found a home in the profession. When people ask (and they ask a lot), I sometimes joke that I’m saving myself for Mr. Right. I’ll even make up a beau — Marc Antony — no relation to the historical figure. He’s also been A.G. Millington or Uncle Faroger. It’s a little neurodivergent of me, maybe, to chat with my alter egos. It’s only a problem if they talk back, right?

My salve is Friday after school. New York City does something to me on Fridays — a little joie de vivre. I’ll walk along 37th Avenue in Queens, duck into a bodega, or browse a 99-cent store. I’ll treat myself to a café au lait (no sugar!) and remember that joy still sneaks in, even when I’m running on fumes.

Here’s what I know from my own mistakes: teaching isn’t osmosis. Papers don’t grade themselves. Lessons don’t float from the ether. But learning can be wondrous. I’ve built Stones of Erasmus from that conviction — it started “just for fun,” and in the pandemic it became a haven for the kinds of lessons I crave: resources that bring arts and letters to life, that challenge me and my students to go deeper. On my best days, I design the kind of work that makes adolescents sit up — not because it’s flashy, but because it’s alive with big ideas.

I’m still not Mr. Chips — I don’t want to be. He’s a sweet fantasy, a tidy narrative where the biscuits are always warm and the Latin epigrams always land. My classroom is messier, louder, more human. And when it’s all too much — when the commute freezes me, when the schedule crowds in, when the curriculum needs more tweaking than time allows — I remember why I came: to spark wonder, to foster thinking, to help kids map the disorder and sometimes find the hidden order inside it.

So, goodbye to the fantasy — and hello to the practice. I’ll keep showing up, tweaking, failing, trying again, and laughing at my own slide-deck-at-the-bell chaos. And on the days I manage to create a little stillness amid the storm — a circle of tea, a shared poem, a question that lingers — I nod to that dapper gentleman in my imagination and whisper, with gratitude and a grin: Goodbye, Mr. Chips.

PDF Copy for Printing