Chapter 1 - Richardson's economies of scale

Summary

What Cleanth Brooks anathematized fifty years ago as “the heresy of paraphrase” remains impossible to escape in literary critics' daily practice. Plot summary, on the one hand, and quoting out of context, on the other, continue to underpin our arguments – if only because, for example, it would be impossible for me to reproduce verbatim all eight volumes of Clarissa as evidence for what this chapter argues. Sheer bulk lays Richardson open to summary. The impossibility of fitting all eight volumes of Clarissa or seven of Grandison into the human mind at once turns readers into editors. The first collection of excerpts from Clarissa appeared only three years after the novel itself; the first plot summary, four years later. Ever since then, the shifting division of labor between Richardson's anthologists and his abridgers has registered successive generations' unspoken assumptions about the most effcient way to convey information, and indeed about what counts as information at all. Condensations define some modes of discourse as functional, others as decorative. They predict which aspects of a text will provoke curiosity or boredom. They impute to some audiences a vulgar greed for plot, to others a painstaking appreciation of style. In skimming, the former abridge; in skipping, the latter anthologize.