The Novel
Page 26
21 But for two vigorous, erudite defenses of it, read Wilson’s Allegories of Love and Armstrong-Roche’s more recent Cervantes’ Epic Novel.
22 See Johnson’s “Of Witches and Bitches” on this point (16 and n25) as it relates to Cervantes’ novella.
23 Instead of La demanda del Sancto Grial the text reads “Brial,” an old Spanish word for a silk skirt or petticoat.
24 I realized too late that, before embarking on a study of early modern literature, one should first read Horace’s Ars Poetica (c. 18 bce). Building on Aristotle’s Poetics (c. 335 bce), the Roman poet wrote the rulebook that all educated novelists of this period followed—poetica encompasses literature, not just poetry—as evident from the ubiquitous citations of his poetic essay.
25 This is the third time in a row I’ve used “adventuress,” but I’m trying to revive this charming descriptive noun.
26 As Justina has never been fully translated into English—only a Reader’s Digest version in John Stevens’ Spanish Libertines (1–65) published in 1707—I’m relying principally on Damiani’s book-length study and whatever I’ve been able to glean from his critical edition of the Spanish original.
27 Parker, for one, finds it hard to believe a 24-year-old could have written this and proposes a date after 1620 (57), but most critics date it anywhere between 1604 and 1608. The bookseller who published it, Roberto Duport, added a phony preface by Quevedo, which among other things rails against customers who browse without buying. It concludes, “Dear Reader, may God protect you from bad books, police, and nagging, moon-faced, fair-haired women.” Amen to that. (All quotations are from Alpert’s underannotated British translation, and will be cited by book/chapter. The preface appears on p. 83.)
28 Though it purports to be González’s autobiography, it was more likely written by a member of the Spanish court in Brussels, possibly Jerónimo de Bran. (The novel was first published in nearby Antwerp.) Stevens’ somewhat abridged translation occupies pp. 255–528 of his Spanish Libertines, and will be cited by chapter.
29 From his prologue to a 1971 edition of the novel, as translated by Dunn in The Spanish Picaresque Novel (110). A great admirer of early Spanish fiction, Goytisolo includes Guzman, Quevedo, and Don Gregorio Guadaña as characters in his inventive novel A Cock-eyed Comedy (2000).
30 Part 1, chap. 13 in Langton’s 1816 translation, which is considered unreliable but is the only one available; hereafter cited by part/chapter.
31 This is one instance where the translator seems to have retained the original flavor of Espinel’s prose; in his preface he notes with disapproval, “It was the custom in the author’s days sometimes to indulge in a play of words that no longer accords with the taste of the present age,” and by ignoring such wordplay he deprives Espinel’s novel of its linguistic fizz.
32 The first half was translated into English by Thomas Rodd in 1803, but the second half has never been translated; for that I’ve relied on chapter 8 of Carrasco-Urgoiti’s Moorish Novel.
33 Preface to the 1850 edition of Irving’s Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (1829), p. 411 in the splendid Twayne edition. For this similar hybrid of fiction and history, Irving likewise invented a narrator, and in a letter described his work as “something of an experiment . . . [s]omething that was to be between a history and a romance” (xxii). But it sticks much closer to history than The Civil Wars does.
34 Page 4 in the excellent Trueblood–Honig translation, hereafter cited by act/scene except for editorial matter, which includes a lengthy “Conversation between the Translators” on pp. 275–302. (Among scholars, it is common to refer to Lope de Vega by his first name; I’m not being overly familiar.) Jorge Ferreira de Vasconcelos (1515?–84) of Portugal wrote several novels in dramatic form in the 1540s and ’50s.
35 Experience and Artistic Expression in Lope de Vega, 2–3.
36 See bibliography for details. (I’m excluding books and essays on specific verse novels.) Addison is especially good on the explosion of examples ever since Vikram Seth revitalized the genre in 1986 with The Golden Gate, a charming and clever novel.
37 Unbelievable: three days after I typed that, I discovered that André Gide called Paradise Lost a novel in his Imaginary Interviews (1944). He meant that genres like poetry and drama are intended for group audiences, whereas the novel is intended for individuals; “Milton’s poem [sic] speaks to each of those individuals separately, and that is why I described it as a novel” (66). But he also says the novel “is not a genre, strictly speaking, because it has no laws of its own” (62), which is true enough. And for that reason, “There is more to be done with it, much more, than anyone has attempted in the past” (73).
38 Fischer, Romantic Verse Narrative, 147.
39 Quoted in Stanley Mitchell’s introduction to his recent translation, xiv.
40 Like Cervantes, Basile also wrote an adaptation of Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Story, published posthumously as Del Teagene (1637).
41 Page 8 in Boyer’s translation, hereafter cited by page. In this first volume she anglicized some characters’ names (Lysis, Phyllis, Matilda), but in the second she reverted to the Spanish forms, and for consistency I’ll use the latter throughout. Her titles are modern variants; Zayas’s original titles were “Exemplary Novellas about Love” and “Second Part of the Entertaining and Honest Soirée.”
42 Both volumes are filled with Zayas’s own poems and lyrics.
43 For what little is known, see pp. 17–35 of Margaret Greer’s Maria de Zayas, an exhaustive study of the writer and her work.
44 A modern reader’s gaydar would be flashing by this point, but female solidarity rather than lesbianism seems to be what Zayas had in mind. In one tale, a would-be seducer disguises himself as a female to get close to his target and professes love for her over a year’s time, which she and her maids find incredulous. “Who’s ever seen a woman fall in love with another woman?” he asks when he reveals himself (227). In another story, a woman catches her husband in bed with his male page, so at least Zayas was aware of those “gross and abominable pleasures” (265).
45 John Sturrock, in his introduction (x) to an abridged selection from her two volumes.
46 Kassier, The Truth Disguised, 1–2—an excellent, compact study of The Master Critic.
47 Only part 1 of the novel has been translated, and that in an unreliable rendition by Paul Rycault done in 1681; henceforth cited by chapter.
48 The protagonist of Ibn Tufayl’s novel Hayy ibn Yaqzan (12th cent.), also raised by animals on a deserted island, reaches the same conclusion; in his translator’s note Rycault suggests it’s conceivable the erudite Gracián knew this work, especially since it was written in Spain. In his introduction, Gracián admits his major inspirations were Homer’s Odyssey, Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Story, Alemán’s Guzman, and John Barclay’s Euphormio’s Satyricon.
49 Freidman’s “Afterword” to Spadaccini and Talens’s Rhetoric and Politics, 355.
50 Selected Non-Fictions, 23–24. Borges wrote a poem about him too.
51 See his Art of Worldly Wisdom (Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia, 1647), which compresses his views into 300 brief sections. It was admired by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and is available in a variety of editions.
52 D. W. Jefferson, “Tristram Shandy and the Tradition of Learned Wit” (1951), quoted (and updated) in my “Alexander Theroux’s Darconville’s Cat and the Tradition of Learned Wit,” 233.
53 Translated in Haidt’s Seduction and Sacrilege, 49.
54 From Thomas Nugent’s 1772 translation, book 1, chapter 4 (hereafter cited by book/chapter). Nugent omits two chapters in book 2—a sustained attack on a forgotten Portuguese book of theology—but otherwise his rendition is faithful and fun to read. He appends only a few explanatory notes; for a text as allusive as this, the serious reader has to consult an annotated Spanish edition (like José Jurado’s magisterial, 975-page tome) to learn the identities of Pecenelus, Pagninus, Vatablus, et al.
55 T
ranslator Nugent joins in on the fun in 6.2, after a character recites a ludicrous Latin decima (a 10-line poem), whose translation the Nuge shirks in a footnote: “Do so much, kind reader, as just to put this extempore of the reverend father beneficiary, and another you will meet with presently (the purport of both which is only to tell the author of the Latin decimas that he is a fool and an ass) into English verse with echoes, whilst I step forward and prepare the next chapter for your entertainment.”
56 Part 1 of Friar Gerund was published in 1757 but was soon suppressed (the concluding part 2 didn’t appear until 1768); Sterne began writing Tristram Shandy in 1759, so it’s unlikely he ever read, much less was influenced by, Isla’s novel. For more on the similarities between Isla’s novel and those of Sterne and Fielding, see Polt’s “The Ironic Narrator in the Novel.”
57 Schellinger’s Encyclopedia of the Novel, 1265. Mónica Bolufer challenges this view in “Poisonous Plants or Schools of Virtue? The Second ‘Rise’ of the Novel in Eighteenth-Century Spain” (pp. 199–214 in Mander’s Remapping the Rise of the European Novel), but her examples sound trivial and derivative. She admits “resistance to novelty was stronger in Spain, and the weight of tradition heavier” (200) than elsewhere in Europe.
58 Observations like that prevented the novella from gaining the censors’ approval for publication; it circulated widely in manuscript, but was not published until 1789, seven years after Cadalso’s death.
59 His first novel, a utopian work entitled Observations of a Dutch Officer in the Newly Discovered Kingdom of Felicity, is lost; a second one, Moroccan Letters—an epistolary novel modeled on Montesquieu’s Persian Letters and Goldsmith’s Chinese Letters (aka Citizen of the World)—was published posthumously in 1793 but has never been translated into English.
60 Rebecca Haidt (whose book on Isla was cited a few notes back), “The Enlightenment and Fictional Form,” in Turner and López de Martínez’s Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Novel, 43. Her essay provides a good overview of other 18th-century Spanish novels, though, as noted earlier, they sound derivative and minor.
61 Chap. 1 in Haldane’s online translation, hereafter cited by chapter (which are his creation, not in the original).
62 Translated by Florence M. Weinberg in her book Gargantua in a Convex Mirror, 11. See also Glowa’s fine book on Fischart, which provides a detailed plot summary of his novel (111–15).
63 Page 12 of his introduction; P. F.’s translation, with his departures from the original in boldface, occupies pp. 91–184. The original German novel is available in a translation by H. G. Haile entitled The History of Doctor Johann Faustus.
64 Richard Newald (1957), quoted and translated by Kenneth Negus in his Grimmelshausen, 93. Reproductions of the frontispiece can be seen in the books of Bjornson (171), Menhennet (64), and Otto (332).
65 Book 1, chap. 14 in Mitchell’s British translation, hereafter cited by book/chapter.
66 I’m guessing such language is why Simplicissimus wasn’t translated into English until 1912, and not in unexpurgated form until 1986. I’m also guessing this is why the novel has never been included in any line of classics (Everyman’s Library, Modern Library, Penguin and Oxford classics—all have excluded it from their ranks).
67 Sylphs were associated with air; it’s odd that Grimmelshausen would feature them rather than nymphs (or nixies, as they’re called in German folklore) or even gnomes, who represent the subterranean world in Paracelsus’s scheme (see next chapter, n62).
68 Chap. 15 in Adair’s unabridged translation of Simplicissimus, which includes the Continuation as book 6. I didn’t cite this for books 1–5 because the translation is a little stiff and doesn’t catch Grimmelshausen’s playful, punning style as well as Mitchell does. It does, however, have an invaluable set of annotations to the learned novel.
69 For stylistic consistency, I’m going to continue using Mitchell’s translations (cited by chapter), though there’s an excellent earlier translation entitled The Runagate Courage. (“Runagate,” an archaic form of “renegade,” is an attempt to translate Landstörtzerin, a thieving vagabond.)
70 “In German Courasche is army slang, a rough equivalent of the English word guts, denoting the raw physical courage of the male animal”—introduction to The Runagate Courage, 20.
71 The translators of The Runagate Courage (1965) render his name Hopalong: “the German is Springinsfeld, literally ‘jump in the field,’ and it is used to describe a carefree, flighty youth” (111n3). They couldn’t have used Skippy? In the book title, seltzame means “strange, odd.” “Tearaway” is a British term for a reckless, irresponsible teenager.
72 See Negus, 121–43, and chap. 7 of Menhennet’s Grimmelshausen the Storyteller. These and other critics agree that the overtly religious conclusion of the cycle is a letdown.
73 Quoted on p. xi of Adair’s introduction.
74 That bizarre situation—involving a castle burglary with an inside man dressed as a woman—is reworked in Summer Tales.
75 Book 5, chap. 6 in Russell’s translation, hereafter cited by book/chapter.
76 Book 1, chap. 6 in the Jordan/Hardin translation, which is abridged “by approximately twenty percent as a concession to modern tastes” (9). Verdammt!
77 “Tracking Herr Schnabel,” in Radio Dialogs II, 52 (punctuation sic). Schmidt goes on to note that Schnabel evidently based his island on Tristan da Cunha in the south Atlantic, uninhabited at the time, but which later developed along lines remarkably similar to those Schnabel envisioned—life imitating art.
78 One of the earliest attempts to refute mythology by offering rational explanations for them. Critics note “that Palaephatus’s book was well known throughout the eighteenth century, and we may assume that Wieland’s ideal reader would be sufficiently familiar with it to understand the fun here” (W. Daniel Wilson, 63n36).
79 Book 1, chap. 6 in the anonymous 1773 translation, the first and last time Don Sylvio was translated into English. Ernest A. Baker’s 1904 edition is based on it, but omits the essential preface. It’s an outrage there isn’t a modern translation available of this major German novel.
80 Paul Scarron’s Roman Comique (1651) will be discussed in the next chapter; the Bachelor of Salamanca (1736–38) is a translation/adaption by Lesage of a minor novel by Castillo Solórzano (see p. 28 above); the Foundling is Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), and Candide and Gargantua you know.
81 Page xv of the translator’s preface to the 1773 edition (hereafter cited by book/chapter), the first and last time Agathon was published in English despite its reputation as Wieland’s greatest novel. Though uncredited, the translator has been identified as John Richardson, who probably translated Don Sylvio as well. He translated the first version of Agathon; Wieland published revised, expanded editions in 1773 and 1794.
82 The narrator compares Agathon to the protagonist of Sir Charles Grandison (10.5), and seems to have Clarissa in mind when he bitterly complains “it appears to be a mark of a hard and cruel heart, which finds a pleasure in the anguish and tears of his innocent readers, when a man has taken all the pains he can to prejudice us in favour of the hero or heroine of a surprizing history, merely to bring us at last to as calamitous a catastrophe as a melancholy misanthropic imagination can possibly conceive, and to overwhelm us with distress the more sensibly felt, and less easily endured, as brought upon us by the arbitrary will of the writer” (11.1).
83 Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767), as translated/quoted in McCarthy, 77.
84 Section 1 in Wintersted’s 1771 translation (hereafter cited by section), yet another Wieland novel never revived in English.
85 The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995), 185.
86 In the chapter of A Sentimental Journey entitled “A Fragment,” lifted from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (lifted in turn from Lucian), Sterne also deals with the Abderites.
87 See McCarthy and Shookman for accounts of The Private History of Peregrimus Proteus (Geheime Geschi
chte des Philosophen Peregrimus Proteus, 1788–89), Agathodämon (1799), and his three epistolary novels, Aristipp (1801–2), Menander und Glycerion (1804), and Krates und Hipparchia (1805). In his wonderful radio program on Wieland, Schmidt praises “the inimitable grand mosaic” of Aristipp and claims it “is both the only
88 Book 1, chap. 1 of Dutton’s unabridged translation (1798). There’s a modern translation by John Russell in the same volume as his Wilhelmine, but it represents only a quarter of the 420-page novel. The surname Nothanker, added by Nicolai, means “anchor” in German and refers to the decoration on the engagement ring that Sebaldus gave Wilhelmine in Thümmel’s novella.
89 Little has been written in English on Nicolai as an author, but there’s a fine book by Pamela Selwyn entitled Everyday Life in the German Book Trade: Friedrich Nicolai as Bookseller and Publisher in the Age of Enlightenment, which indicates Nicolai knew whereof he speaks.
90 A printing term for 23 sheets of paper. Cf. Richter’s Invisible Lodge: “Really, I should have filled an alphabet, or twenty-three sheets, with this scene” (chap. 33).
91 German theologians. Semler especially was one of the founders of biblical textual criticism, which treats so-called sacred writings as historical documents, not divinely inspired but cunningly contrived by men no different from the zealous Protestants who persecute Sebaldus.
92 Under the influence of Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, Thümmel later wrote a lengthy Journal of Sentimental Travels in the Southern Provinces of France (1791–1805; abridged English translation 1821), but it’s generally considered overly derivative of Sterne; to the translator of Wilhelmine “it seems a less than felicitous mixing of fiction and travelogue that is of interest mainly for its depiction of life in France immediately before the Revolution” (viii).