Descartes, individualism and the rise of the novel

Ian Watt:

"The greatness of Descartes was primarily one of method, of the thoroughness of his determination to accept nothing on trust; his Discourse on Method (1637) and his Meditations did much to bring about the modern assumption whereby the pursuit of truth is conceived of as a wholly individual matter, logically independent of the tradition of past thought, and indeed as more likely to be arrived at by a departure from it.

The novel is the form of literature which most fully reflects this individualist and innovating reorientation. Previous literary forms had reflected the general tendency of their cultures to make conformity to traditional practice the major test of truth: the plots of a classical and renaissance epic, for example, were based on past history or fable, and the merits of the author's treatment were judged largely according to a view of literary decorum derived from the accepted models in the genre. This literary traditionalism was first and most fully challenged by the novel, whose primary criterion was truth to individual experience - individual experience which is always unique and therefore new. The novel is thus the logical literary vehicle of a culture which, in the last few centuries, has set an unprecedented value on originality, on the novel; and it is therefore well named."

...

"When Defoe … began to write fiction he took little notice of the dominant critical theory of the day, which still inclined towards the use of traditional plots; instead he merely allowed his narrative order to flow spontaneously from his own sense of what his protagonists might plausibly do next. In doing so Defoe initiated an important new tendency in fiction: his total subordination of the plot to the pattern of the autobiographical memoire is as defiant an assertion of the primacy of individual experience in the novel as Descartes's cogito ergo sum was in philosophy."

Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, Peregrine, 1956, p. 13, 15

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		from The History of Philosophy in the 17th & 18th Centuries:The Understructure of the Enlightenment
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