The Novel
Page 86
115 Vedantism is a branch of Hindu philosophy based on the Upanishads; Vaisnavism emphasizes religious devotion as the way to escape the cycle of birth and death to be united with Vishnu.
116 I’m not aware of an English translation, so I’ve relied on the plot summary in Sudha Rani’s monograph on Citracampu (116–18).
117 I’ll be citing Zakir’s recent translation (by page). “Mir” is a title (like “Amir”), not a personal name.
118 Born into a family of distinguished retainers at the Mughal court, he was driven from his hometown of Delhi when it was attacked by a rival king, wound up in Azimabad, where he saw “both good days and bad” (xiv), then left his family behind there to find employment in Calcutta, where he was hired as a translator at Fort William College, turning out educational materials for officers of the British East India Company, including A Tale of Four Dervishes.
119 Pages 352–53, hereafter cited by page since the chapters are unnumbered. The 900-page novel consists of four books of around 30 chapters each.
120 Naushervan takes his name from Anushirvan (or Khosrau I, ruled 531–79), one of the greatest Persian emperors and nothing like the novel’s “irresolute and fickle” king (332).
121 This incident is based on the historical Hamza’s death at the battle of Uhud; the woman, Hinda bint Utbah, thus avenged her relatives whom Hamza had killed a year earlier at the battle of Badr. The historical sources say she had one of her slaves throw a javelin at Hamza, but in the novel she cuts out the middleman and does it herself.
122 “Thing in ‘E’ ” by the Savage Resurrection (1968).
123 Paraphrased by Frances Pritchett (from a personal communication) in the extremely useful introduction to her abridged translation The Romance Tradition in Urdu: Adventures from the Dastan of Amir Hamzah, 27.
CHAPTER 4
The English Novel
I’faith, ’tis an Occasion of no small Satisfaction to commence this Enquiry into the Romances & Fictions of the English—& their antick Neighbors, the Irish & the Scotch—free at last from the Tyranny of scurvy Translators—& to reacquaint myself with the earliest Works that engender’d my Love for the Novel. O Swift, O Fielding, O Sterne, I hail thee after too long an Absence, keen to revel once more in your rare Inventions and pricking Raillery, along with those of your less-fam’d Countrymen. Prithee look kindly on these Efforts of yr humble Servant to blazon your Glories to the gaping Publick.
Right then. At the beginning of the 17th century, English novelists had essentially two paths before them: the high road of literary romance, or the low road of pop fiction. King of the high road was Sidney’s Arcadia: the posthumous edition of 1593 was “the best-loved book in the English language” until 1745, according to one critic.1 The spell of Sidney’s blend of heroic romance and political allegory was recharged in the 1620s with the appearance of Barclay’s Argenis, and again at midcentury with translations of French romans héroïques. This was an imported genre, as we’ve seen, derived from Continental romances and ancient Greek novels. The other road beckoning to English novelists began at the local market of jestbooks, cony-catching pamphlets, chapbooks about working-class heroes, crime capers, Menippean satires such as Thomas Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller, and bourgeois novels like those of Thomas Deloney. I’ll be changing lanes often during this chapter, but let’s start off on this low road of homegrown fiction.
One can track the formal transition from jestbook to comic novel in a curious novella by Robert Armin (1563?–1615), a goldsmith-turned-actor who played comic roles in Shakespeare’s theatrical troupe. (It’s said the role of Feste in Twelfth Night was written for him.) In 1600 he published a chapbook entitled Fool upon Fool, consisting of anecdotes about six well-known jesters (including the famous Will Sommers, Henry VIII’s comic relief), each prefaced with a bit of verse. He reprinted it in 1605 with a few changes, then after a stroke of inspiration reworked it as A Nest of Ninnies in 1608. Armin added a frame in which a party girl with a hangover staggers one morning over to the shack of an amateur Puritan philosopher named Sotto (“as one besotted,” the narrator jokes) for advice and consolation. Having “sold all for a glass prospective [crystal ball] because he would wisely see into all men but himself,” Sotto conjures up these six jesters to show the girl their gibes and gambols.2 After each set of anecdotes, Sotto interprets them in humorless allegorical terms, warning the girl – allegorically called “the World,” perhaps after the Tarot card of that name depicting a naked, dancing woman – to abandon her wanton ways. But she sees through his misreadings and, after arguing over the interpretation of the sixth jester’s story, “flings out of his cell like a girl at barley-break. . . . away she gads and never looks behind her” (71).
Armin converted his simple collection of jester anecdotes into an intriguing critifiction about the act of interpretation—of life as well as of texts. To alert us that he was writing something more ambitious than a jestbook, Armin alternated styles: that of the anecdotes is relatively simple (after you blow 400 years of dust off the language) and realistic, whereas the frame is couched in cadenced, metaphoric Jacobean prose. It begins:
The World wanton sick, as one surfeiting on sin (in morning pleasures, noon banquets, after riots, night’s moriscoes [dances], midnight’s modicums, and abundance of trash tricked up to all turbulent revelings), is now leaning on her elbow, devising what Doctor may deliver her, what physic may free her, and what antidotes may anticipate so dangerous a dilemma. She now begins to grow bucksome as a lightning before death, and gad she will. Riches, her chamberlain, could not keep her in; Beauty, her bedfellow, was bold to persuade her; and sleepy Security, mother of all mischief—tut, her prayers was but mere prattle. Out she would, tucks up her trinkets like a Dutch Tannakin sliding to market on the ice, and away she flings. (19)
I’m reminded of Nora Flood seeking rhetorical comfort from Dr. Matthew O’Connor in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. Armin imitates the dazzling style of Shakespeare’s witty fools in these passages, and even Sotto preaches in wonderfully imagistic language: “By the second [anecdote, about a jester who gets muddy] the clean fools of this world are patterned, who so neatly stand upon their ruffs and scutes that the brain is now lodged in the foot, and thereupon comes it that many make their head their foot—and employment is the drudge to prodigality, made saucy through the mud of their their own minds where they so often stick fast that Banks his horse with all his strength and cunning cannot draw them out” (54–55).
A Nest of Ninnies not only dramatizes opposing philosophies of life—the woman’s hedonism versus the man’s puritanism—but opposing methods of interpretation. The woman interprets some of the jesters’ irresponsible actions as applicable to her lifestyle, recognizes others as “mere mirth without mischief” (54), and makes critical distinctions (“this pleases well to see one so naturally silly to be simply subtle” [69]); the man interprets every prank and pratfall as a religious parable, ignoring their primary function (“mere mirth”). The novella itself is a parable about reading and interpreting fiction: one can read the anecdotes, smile, and move on; one can pause and carefully extract further meaning from some of them; or one can overinterpret them all through the cloudy crystal ball of ideology. At any rate, the experience cheers the World up, the primary function of comic fiction; as Sotto says of his narrative method, “we mingle mirth with matter to make a please-plaster for melancholy” (48), and in the novella’s final line Armin aligns the comic novelist with the court fool: a professional jester, but one who often knows better than his master what’s what.3
The transition from jestbook to comic novel is complete in an anonymous book published a year earlier, Dobson’s Dry Bobs (1607). “Dry bobs” originally meant light blows, ones that don’t break the skin, but by this time it also meant witty pranks, and this 100-page novel concerns a number of pranks pulled by young George Dobson of Durham from childhood through college. What separates Dobson’s Dry Bobs from other jestbooks and makes it a novel is its p
sychological depth and attention to detail. Before we even get to the pranks, the author sets the scene: The sister/housekeeper of an old bachelor named Thomas Pentley is alarmed at how he’s squandering his fortune, which she and her sister had hoped to inherit, and thus convinces him to take in his nephew George to raise as his heir. Thomas pegs the boy as “knavish” the moment he sees him, which the well-educated author elaborates with arguments from social determinism. Citing the proverb “That which is bred in the bone will [come out in] the flesh” and Horace’s observation “Naturam expellas furcas licet usque recurret” [You may drive out Nature with a pitchfork, yet she will ever hurry back—Epistle 1.10], the author notes how George’s natural tendency for mischief is exacerbated by the ill treatment he receives from his classmates, city kids who mock his country ways.4 There follows a lengthy passage in which George debates with himself whether he should give in to his instinct for revenge or restrain himself for his uncle’s benefit:
Long he rested doubtful whether course to make choice of, and after much discuss and consideration he conceived that to relinquish his uncle and other his friends in such a sort were not his best booty [remedy], for one way he should thereby deprive himself of all their kind affection and do more damage and disgrace to them all, and his own good name, than all their mischievous devises could be able to effect. . . . Again, whither to run or direct his course he knew not, unless it were home to his mother, who he was persuaded would return him back with a very vengeance. And then (said he) with what face can I look upon my uncle, or any other person of my acquaintance? And to go to any other place, alas who will entertain or receive me, every stranger will suppose the truth that I am run from my friends and that therefore I am the more apt to do the same from them. If I shall taste any asperity or eager usage, this will be their imagination of me, and hereupon every man will be afraid to admit me into his house, and what then will ensue of me? If not, either to starve, beg, or steal: so that this course, upon these considerations, he rejected, as in no case to be prosecuted. (3)
Note how the author switches from third-person free indirect discourse to first-person monologue and back as George weighs his options, including his realization “they were a multitude, and he only one,” which adds a tragic dimension alien to jestbooks. For those who define the novel in sociological rather than formal terms—such as Ioan Williams, who regards “the novel as a distinctively modern, that is, a post-Renaissance form, which came into being at the point when consciousness of the individual as an end in himself and not merely as part of a larger social, political or metaphysical entity, introduced a new element into European thought” (xi)—Dobson’s Dry Bobs is England’s first modern novel (not to mention England’s first public-school novel, for what that’s worth).
George decides to play it both ways, to revenge himself on his schoolmates, but in such a clever manner as to maintain innocence in his uncle’s eyes. From this point on, the author focuses on George’s many pranks, but continues to provide the psychological motivations for them, and plots them with an attention to detail that goes far beyond the anecdotal jestbooks of the time. As a teenager, George’s pranks become more mean-spirited and directed against his long-suffering uncle, but he manages to graduate and go to Cambridge; there, he keeps out of trouble for the first three years, but reverts to his knavery to win various formal debates. Caught and expelled from college, he becomes a country servant and sinks to his lowest level—beating half to death a woman who interfered with his dalliance with a milkmaid—and is saved from the gallows by his uncle Thomas. In an unconvincing ending, in which the author abandons social determinism for the formal expectations of the comic genre, George returns to Durham, mends his ways, inherits his uncle’s estate after his death, and becomes a respected canon. But as Avril O’Brien says of the ending, we should cut the author some slack: “Considering the state of novelistic art at the turn of the century, and remembering that nearly every change in the pattern of the novel was a major innovation simply because the novel was, at the time, such a new vehicle for artistic expression, this structural defect should not be regarded as the serious flaw that it would be in a nineteenth- or twentieth-century novel” (69).
Dobson’s Dry Bobs is remarkable not only for its psychological depths but for its almost documentary realism. (Reading this surprising novel is like stumbling across a primitive phonograph made in 1607.) Daily life in Durham is captured with lifelike fidelity—partly because many of the characters are based on folks who lived there in the 1560s, and the various settings can be traced on a map (provided in Horsman’s edition)—but partly because the author takes the time to flesh his characters out, especially Uncle Thomas, who is seen from the points of view of his sister, George, his friends, as well as from his own. Small-town life is engagingly conveyed, including the timeless conflict between townies and students. Though sophisticated and college-educated, the author doesn’t look down on his provincial characters or condemn the sexual escapades of an adulteress and a few “fisgigs” (sexually active flirts), unthinkable in the High Street fiction of the time, nor is the author out to shock when he tells us casually of a milkmaid who goes off “to pull a rose” (to urinate). There’s a contrast between the comic incidents and what editor Horsman calls “an unexpected elaboration of style and a frequent pedantry of language . . . with learned forms and meanings rare even in 1607” (xvii–xviii), the kind of comic clash in diction that P. G. Wodehouse milked his entire career. Dobson’s Dry Bobs is not a great novel—I doubt author intended it to be—but it is of great importance in the development of the English novel, for as the author patriotically boasts in his preface, “It is no foreign translation, but a homebred subject.”
Two other short novels—novelettes, really—are worth noting briefly to indicate the rapid expansion of genres in popular fiction at this time, more so in England than elsewhere. The anonymous History of Morindos (1609) is England’s first horror novel, a macabre tale of sex, witchcraft, and decadent sinning written in baroque, purple prose. The opening sentence sets both the scene and the tone: “When Spain was nursed in the milk of paganism, virtue not known, nor God honored, there lived a people so ripe in sin that the keen edge of shame’s sickle lay even ready whetted to reap them down for confusion’s harvest.”5 The Spanish king, Morindos, is (like George Dobson) bad to the bone: “His birth was fatal, for when the midwife pulled him from the cradle of his conception the earth quaked and heaven rained blood; his parents ominous, the one devoured by wolves, the other burnt to death by thunder; his youth full of unlucky chances, his age tyrannous and mischievous, and all his life subject to black deeds” (1). King Morindos leads a sensuous existence, feeding his “insatiate desires” on the bodies of concubines who first “danced before him naked in their cambric smocks, the more to enkindle lust’s fire” (1). One day a woman, “one of the Devil’s black saints,” arrives during these revels and presents a masque acted by infernal spirits. Sinfully ambitious and steeped in witchcraft, Madam Miracola has sold her soul to the devil to become queen, and easily seduces Morindos, for “her own body she embathed and suppled with a water of such enchantment that what man soever first set eye upon her” would be enthralled. Exchanging declarations that might have come from the horror plays of the time by Cyril Tourneur and John Webster, they plight their troth and, without the benefit of clergy, go to it, “he burning in lust, she aspiring a kingdom” (1; I am as unable to resist quoting from the text as Morindos is to resist Miracola’s supernatural charms). The sex is literally mindblowing, for it leaves Morindos speechless, blind, deaf, and “shapeless, and as a bear new-whelped, like a lump of flesh without fashion” (1). Thrilled to be queen, Miracola feeds her husband’s senseless body to demons in gratitude, learns from them there is a catch to their contract, and after 10 months gives birth to a monstrous brood: seven girls brought forth over seven days, a childbirth so painful that the queen tears out her eyes and remains bedridden for the next 21 years.
The seven
girls represent the seven deadly sins, and when they come of age the author devotes a chapter to the dramatization of each woman’s particular sin, decadent fairy tales of excess that go far beyond typical medieval treatments of this theme. With a Poe-like gift for the grotesque, the author wallows in murder, cannibalism, suicide, and ingenious tortures—all accompanied by croaking ravens, walking ghosts, and other “fatal prodigies.” Each woman dies horribly from her sin, at which time the queen, counting down the hours to her damnation as in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (which likewise features the seven deadlies), is finally seized by “the wrathful powers of black Hell” (11) and taken to, er, black Hell. It’s all gloriously over-the-top, a superb exercise in stylized horror that anticipates the Gothic novel of the 18th century. One critic has called it a “baroque masterpiece.”6
Attempting a different kind of stylistic tour de force, a young Robert Anton (1585–?) in 1613 published his Moriomachia, a burlesque of chivalric romances inspired by Beaumont and Fletcher’s comedy The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607) but also by Don Quixote, the first part of which had been published in Thomas Shelton’s English translation the previous year. Hijacking a minor chivalric novel by Henry Roberts entitled Pheander, the Maiden Knight (1595), Anton spins a silly tale of a bull that the Fairy Queen had metamorphosed into a man named Tom Pheander after she, mistaking the bull for a heifer, tried to milk his single “teat,” to the bull’s enjoyment. (The novelette is rife with salacious double entendres and scatological humor.) She sends him from Fairy Land to the island of Morotopia to begin his career in knight-errantry, and like Don Quixote he is declared a madman by some farmers whom he takes for enchanted knights and by a prostitute whom he mistakes for a virtuous virgin, which inspires one of the many snide couplets the narrator scatters through the text: