ABSTRACT
Ian Watt was educated at Cambridge University. His research on the eighteenth-century novel was interrupted by World War II, most of which he spent as a prisoner of war in the Far East. Since the War he has taught at Cambridge, Berkeley, and East Anglia and is now Professor of English at Stanford University, California. 'The First Paragraph of The Ambassadors: an explication' was originally a conference paper, and when first published in Essays in Criticism in 1960 carried the following note by the author:
Watt The first paragraph of The Ambassadors: an explication
COMMENTARY: David Lodge, 'Strether by the River', in Language of Fiction (1966) Ian Watt, 'Serious reflections on The Rise of the Novel', Novel i (1968), 205-18
When I was asked if I would do a piece of explication at this conference, I was deep in Henry James, and beginning The Ambassadors: so the passage chose itself; but just what was explication, and how did one do it to prose? I take it that whereas explanation, from explanare, suggests a mere making plain by spreading out, explication, from explicare, implies a progressive unfolding of a series of literary implications, and thus partakes of our modern preference for multiplicity in method and meaning: explanation assumes an ultimate simplicity, explication assumes complexity.
