Ideology of the novel

I'd like to make a distinction that is very hard to actually draw, but which might make discussions of the novel, like Ian Watt's famous The Rise of the Novel, a little bit clearer. It would be a distinction between the novel and the ideology of the novel, such that I could say Watt's critical study has sometimes the novel, and sometimes the ideology of the novel as its object.

Take the following instance: early in the book Watt looks for features of the novel that would distinguish it from earlier narratives, and has the absolutely brilliant idea that one can see some of these features in the naming of characters. The names are less significant, allegorical, or just more contemporary: they are not names taken from the classical tradition, as in the Renaissance (though I'm sure this isn't entirely correct: Watt doesn't represent the era well), but rather names taken from the street outside. In other words, the fact we can hear Tristram's name as odd precisely shows the reversal that has gone on. What is prized is now the particular name, the singular and unique, over the general type-name. But he then oddly says that Fielding reverses this trend: his characters, like Allworthy and Square, are too significant. As he says:

Fielding had his eye as much on the general type as on the particular individual. This however, does not controvert the present argument, for it will surely be generally agreed that Fielding's practice in the naming, and indeed in the whole portrayal of his characters, is a departure from the usual tratment in the novel.
-The Rise of the Novel, 20.

He then goes on to say the following concerning this:

Although this custom [of using the particular, the ordinary name] was not always followed by some of the later eighteenth-century novelists... it was later established as part of the tradition of the form; and, as Henry James pointed out with respect to Trollope's fecund cleric Mr. Quiverful, the novelist can only break with the tradition at the cost of destroying the reader's belief in the literal reality of the character concerned.
-The Rise of the Novel, 20-21.

Here's what I would say: what we have here is a description of the ideology of the novel more than the novel. For it seems to me that the novelist can precisely break with the tradition here of "realistic" names and not destroy the reader's belief in the literal reality of the character. That is, the notion of "the reader's belief in the reality of the tale" is precisely something which the ideology of the novel seeks to make prominent, in the sense that it seeks to make it work in only one way--according to the economy described here, any departure from mimesis is rendered "unreal," or "non-literal." It seems that the novel itself is an object that admits of both possibilities: a departure from mimesis can be literal or non-literal. This is the case because the novel is fictional, or a function of fiction, before it is mimetic.

In short, certain descriptions of the novel actually describe what the novel wants us to think about its structure. (I'll write more on this in a bit.)