by Steven Moore
THE NOVEL
An Alternative History
BOOKS BY STEVEN MOORE
A Reader’s Guide to William Gaddis’s “The Recognitions” (1982)
William Gaddis (1989)
Ronald Firbank: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Materials (1996)
The Novel, An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600 (2010)
BOOKS EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY STEVEN MOORE
In Recognition of William Gaddis (with John Kuehl, 1984)
The Vampire in Verse: An Anthology (1985)
Edward Dahlberg, Samuel Beckett’s Wake and Other Uncollected Prose (1989)
Ronald Firbank, Complete Short Stories (1990)
Ronald Firbank, Complete Plays (1994)
The Complete Fiction of W. M. Spackman (1997)
Beerspit Night and Cursing: The Correspondence of Charles Bukowski and Sheri Martinelli (2001)
Chandler Brossard, Over the Rainbow? Hardly (2005)
The Letters of William Gaddis (2013)
THE NOVEL
An Alternative History
1600 to 1800
STEVEN MOORE
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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First published 2013
Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
© Steven Moore, 2013
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No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author.
ePub ISBN: 978-1-6235-6740-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Moore, Steven, 1951–
The novel: an alternative history, 1600–1800/Steven Moore.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4411-8869-4 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Fiction–History and criticism. I. Title.
PN3451.M67 2013
809.3–dc23
2013007972
Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Contents
Preface
Chapter 1 The European Novel
Spanish Fiction
German Fiction
Latin Fiction
Chapter 2 The French Novel
Chapter 3 The Eastern Novel
Chinese Fiction
Korean Fiction
Japanese Fiction
Tibetan Fiction
Persian Fiction
Indian Fiction
Chapter 4 The English Novel
Chapter 5 The American Novel
Bibliography
Chronological Index of Novels Discussed
General Index
Preface
Yet once again, ye Muses! once again
Saddle the Hyppogryf! and wing my way
Where regions of romance their charms display.
—Wieland’s Oberon
Since this volume picks up where the previous one left off, I’ll ask the reader to refer to that volume’s truculent introduction for my premises and methodology. For reasons explained there, I cast my net fairly wide into the ocean of story for the first volume and dragged in “anything that remotely resembled a novel,” but promised to tighten the net in the next volume. However, I decided it was too soon to focus only on unconventional, experimental novels, as I had planned. As Frank Zappa used to say, “Without deviation (from the norm), ‘progress’ is not possible,” but “In order for one to deviate successfully, one has to have at least a passing acquaintance with whatever norm one expects to deviate from” (185). The novel settled into a norm during this early-modern period, and as a result, this volume examines more “normal” novels than the previous one did, all the better to contrast and appreciate the deviations from the norm.
Though this period did not witness the birth of the novel, as once believed, it did see an explosive growth spurt, both in the number of novels produced and the number of people who read them. Writers became more adventurous as they adapted this old genre to new uses, trying out new forms and genres, R&D’ing new techniques, pushing the envelope of realism, and shifting the focus from public actions to private thoughts, from sociology to psychology. Thousands of novels were published during this period all around the world, yet I suspect most readers’ familiarity with pre-1800 European fiction is limited to Don Quixote, Candide, The Sorrows of Young Werther, maybe The Princess of Clèves, Dangerous Liaisons, and/or Jacques the Fatalist, and the names, if not the works, of Rousseau and Sade. Even one’s familiarity with pre-1800 English novels might be limited to a half-dozen classics (Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Pamela, Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy). And forget about Oriental fiction. Separating the wheat from the chaff leaves hundreds of little-known novels that not only provide a context for those dozen or so classics, but are interesting in their own right and for their contributions to the art of the novel. So my history remains fairly comprehensive up until 1800, aside from a few countries (like Italy, Holland, and Russia) that produced too few original novels during this period to warrant inclusion.
By 1600 the novel was a familiar enough genre that I did not feel the need this time to haul in quasi novelistic narratives as I did in the previous volume. (Sorry, Epic of Mwindo; another time, Nart Sagas from the Caucasus.) The novel is a protean genre that evades any critic’s confining definition, but this time I more often color inside the lines when it comes to classification. Novelist John Barth once suggested that Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) could be considered a novel, and some Beckett critics have said the same about René Descartes’s Discourse on the Method (1637), but by the 17th century the novel was a sufficiently recognized genre that these authors could have tweaked their books to fit that category, had they so desired. So while not necessarily disagreeing with these ingenious reclassifications, I won’t be including such works. My elastic definition of the novel – the same as Webster’s: a book-length work of fiction – stretches wide enough to include some works not usually classified as novels, but not as many as last time.
Regarding nomenclature: I’ll be using terms of nationality in their broadest senses. In chapter 4 on the English novel, for example, “English” includes all inhabitants of the British Isles who wrote in English, whether they hailed from England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, or the Isle of Man. Similarly, when I write of German novelists, I mean those who wrote in German, regardless of whether they lived in Bavaria, Prussia, Saxony, Austria, or Schaumberg-Lippe. Novelists are sorted by the language they wrote in, so the Swiss Rousseau and the Italian Casanova are both included in the chapter on the French novel, and those who, for reasons of their own, wrote in Latin get their own partition at the terminus of cap. I (as they might put it). Though 1600–1800 is the announced date range, in the case of the Germans it was necessary to start a little earlier, and elsewhere I follow a few 18th-century novelists into the first decades of the 19th for reasons explained in the text. Throughout the book I have lightly modernized quotations from early-modern texts, but only what textual scholars call accidentals (spelling, punctuation, capitalization, italics, etc.), not substantives (the words themselves) – meaning I modernize “chirurgion” to “surgeon,” but I don’t change it to “doctor” or �
��physician.” Most of the modernizing involves the deletion of superfluous commas, which make older authors sound like they suffered from a speech impediment, or were easily winded. (“Emily gave a last look to that splendid city, but her mind was then occupied by considering the probable events, that awaited her, in the scenes, to which she was removing, and with conjectures, concerning the motive of this sudden journey” – from Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho.) Back then, typesetters, not authors, decided how texts should be set, and most authors wanted their texts to follow standard practices of the day – many were wayward spellers anyway – and undoubtedly they would want them updated to follow the standard practices of our day, rather than look like fusty antiques. When contemporary publishers bring out a new translation of an early-modern novel like Candide, they don’t spell and punctuate it per 18th-century practices, and I see no reason why English novels of that period should retain the cobwebs of outdated conventions, except in special cases where an author (like Sterne) deliberately flouts the conventions. As often as possible, I cite novels not by page number but by chapter number (or volume/chapter, or by letter number in epistolary novels) to facilitate reference to other editions and, in the case of translations, to the originals.
Acknowledgments: Haaris Naqvi continues to be the best editor I’ve ever had; my sincerest thanks to him and the team at Bloomsbury. The multilingual John Soutter translated some foreign passages for me. Dr. Margery Palmer McCulloch (Scottish Literary Review) kindly sent me two otherwise unobtainable essays. For various suggestive remarks, I want to thank Karen Elizabeth Gordon, Thomas McGonigle, Julián Ríos, and Helmut Schwarzer. Special thanks go to John Galbraith Simmons for sharing his and his wife’s unpublished translation of Sade’s Aline and Valcour.
Completion of this book was not made possible by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, nor the American Council of Learned Societies, all of which rejected my grant applications at a time when I was out of work and really needed the money.
The section on Don Quixote first appeared as “When Knighthood Was in Error” in the online journal College Hill Review 5 (Spring 2010).
CHAPTER 1
The European Novel
SPANISH FICTION
By the year 1600, the novel was an old, old genre. A well-read writer like Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616), for example, was familiar with at least a few of the ancient Greek novels–he would model his last novel, Persiles and Sigismunda, on the greatest of them, Heliodorus’s Ethiopian Story–and knew of the lowbrow Milesian tales and racy Roman novels like Petronius’s Satyricon and Apuleius’ Golden Ass. He read Italian and was familiar with Boccaccio’s frame-tale novel Decameron and many of the novellas cranked out by later Italian writers. He had read novels produced by other nationalities on the Iberian Peninsula such as the Moors and Catalans, and he spent enough time among Muslims to hear some of their adventure novels and frame-tale narratives. (He made a Muslim the “author” of his most famous novel.) He had read a huge number of novels churned out by his countrymen: pastorals, picaresques, and of course the wildly popular novels of chivalry, based on earlier Arthurian models. He admired a few of these, such as the Catalan Tirant lo Blanc, and was jealous of the financial success of Mateo Alemán’s Guzman of Alfarache, a long picaresque novel that appeared in 1599.
Cervantes’ own writing career hadn’t amounted to much. His first novel, Galatea (1585), was an attempt to cash in on the fad for pastoral novels; his is one of the most complex examples of the genre, a nonlinear narrative containing many embedded stories, reams of poetry, and forays into other genres such as the adventure tale and court intrigue, along with more violence than in most pastorals. Galatea was popular in its day, but a promised sequel never appeared, the fad faded, and nowadays it is read only by specialists. The very heterogeneity of its material suggests Cervantes found the pastoral genre too confining, or at least unsuited to his real talents. He had better luck with novellas, which he began writing in the 1590s, though they wouldn’t be published until the following century. But these lean works would have to compete in the marketplace with fat novels of chivalry, which were still popular at the end of the 16th century thanks to endless sequels recycling a few brand-name knights like Amadis and Palmerin. In 1601, the beginning of a new century, Cervantes felt it was high time to revive his failing career and to redirect faltering Spanish fiction, and perhaps even redefine Spanish culture in general. Plus he needed the money.
Don Quixote is such a richly suggestive text that it has understandably inspired countless, often contradictory interpretations, ranging from esoteric readings “demonstrating,” for example, that it is a cabalistic Jewish text or an allegory of Spanish politics, to sappy notions that Don Quixote is just a lovable idealist who believes in himself and follows his heart. But esoteric readings are usually private obsessions imposed on a text, not logically deduced from it, and to regard the knight as an unflappable optimist is a road that leads straight to a claims-adjuster braying “The Impossible Dream” in an amateur dinner-theater production of Man of La Mancha. No character in literature has been more misunderstood than Don Quixote, usually because readers latch on to one aspect of his character and ignore Cervantes’ multiple ironies, stripping the benighted knight of his 16th-century context and dressing him in their own ideals and aspirations. Thus he was merely a comic character until the English turned him into a philanthropist, Romantics turned him into a tragic hero, orthodox Christians proclaimed him an unorthdox Christ figure (and Sancho too!), and the dinner-theater crowd applauded him as a lovable eccentric with a good heart. In a novel that is primarily about the dangers of self-delusion, it’s best to begin with the basics to avoid deluding ourselves about the nature of this wily text.
First, Don Quixote is not one long novel but two separate works.1 El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha was published in January 1605, and though it enjoyed considerable success, Cervantes turned to other writing projects for the next decade. He pursued the novella form and in 1613 published a dozen of them under the title Exemplary Stories (Novelas ejemplares); in 1614 he published a long narrative poem called The Voyage to Parnassus (El Viaje del Parnaso), and the following year brought out a big volume of his plays and theatrical interludes. Only after a spurious sequel to DQ1 appeared in 1614 did Cervantes complete his own, which was published late in 1615, about six months before he died.
Whatever else it may be, DQ1 is unquestionably about the art of fiction, both writing it and (mis)reading it. It contains more discussions of books, literary theory, and advice on writing than any novel I know. It is not so much an attack on novels of chivalry as an attack on bad writing, which is apparent from two key chapters that neatly bookend the novel: the sixth chapter, and the sixth chapter from the end (1.47). Chapter 6 contains the famous “inquisition” of the novels that drove a country squire named Alonso Quijana loco—crazy enough to rename himself Don Quixote of La Mancha and to spend two days in July 1589 terrorizing the neighborhood.2 He knocks one innocent muleteer unconscious, splits the skull of a second, causes a boy to be beaten almost to death, then attempts to murder a merchant before earning a well-deserved beat-down himself. After a neighbor drags the raving madman home, Quijana’s niece and housekeeper blame his beloved novels of chivalry for driving him insane and convince the town barber and priest to burn them all. But they consign to the flames only the bad ones, the ones written in “perverse and complicated language,” the ones that are foolishly unrealistic and/or “silly and arrogant.” The ignorant women want to burn them all, but the discriminating men set aside those that are unique (rather than derivative), those whose adventures “are excellent and very artful,” written in language that “is courtly and clear,” and particularly those that are realistic. It’s worth repeating Cervantes had nothing against novels of chivalry, only bad ones, and bad literature in general, as chapter 6 indicates when the barber and priest move on to examine Quijana’s collection of pastoral novels and p
oetry anthologies. (His books of epic poetry wind up in the bonfire by accident.)
This distinction is amplified near the end in chapter 47, when a cathedral canon from Toledo—whom Nabokov pegs as “Cervantes himself in disguise”3—joins the group transporting the lunatic home in a cage after a further month’s mayhem. After the canon learns the source of Quijana’s insanity, he agrees that most novels of chivalry are foolish, unoriginal, unrealistic, and make no claim to art:
I have seen no book of chivalry that creates a complete tale, a body with all its members intact, so that the middle corresponds to the beginning, and the end to the beginning and the middle; instead, they are composed with so many members that the intention seems to be to shape a chimera or monster rather than to create a well-proportioned figure. Furthermore, the style is fatiguing, the action incredible, the love lascivious, the courtesies clumsy, the battles long, the language foolish, the journeys nonsensical, and, finally, since they are totally lacking in intelligent artifice, they deserve to be banished, like unproductive people, from Christian nations.
His objections are more aesthetic than ethical, and he goes on to say that, in the hands of a great writer more concerned with “intelligent artifice” than shock and awe, even novels of chivalry can be high art: first, because their traditional subject matter is an “opportunity for display” for “a good mind, providing a broad and spacious field where one’s pen could write unhindered” and unfurl everything a writer knows:
The writer can show his conversance with astrology, his excellence as a cosmographer, his knowledge of music, his intelligence in matters of state, and perhaps he will have the opportunity to demonstrate his talents as a necromancer, if he should wish to. He can display the guile of Ulysses, the piety of Aeneas, the valor of Achilles, the misfortunes of Hector, the treachery of Sinon, the friendship of Euryalus, the liberality of Alexander, the valor of Caesar, the clemency and truthfulness of Trajan, the fidelity of Zopyrus, the prudence of Cato, in short, all of those characteristics that make a noble man perfect, sometimes placing them all in one individual, sometimes dividing them among several.