Book review: Steven Moore's The Novel: An Alternative History (1600-1800)
Reviewed by Roger Boylan
E. M. Forster defined a novel as “any fictitious prose work over 50,000 words.” Randall Jarrell thought it was “a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.” At least both would have agreed that the word count makes a difference. A novel is a long story, essentially, its very length rendering flaws inevitable, per Jarrell.
We tend to think of the novel as a more-or-less modern invention; the expression “Ancient Egyptian novel,” for example, seems a contradiction in terms. For this, we have etymology to thank. The word “novel” is a transliteration of the Italian novella (piece of news, chit-chat, tale), meaning a structured, realistic story, along the lines of Boccaccio’s Decameron.Although the use of novella in Italian dates back to the Middle Ages, the English word “novel” is little attested in its current sense until the eighteenth century, and this has led many critics and readers to believe that the thing itself only dates from then, too. Pamela(1740), a 600-page romance by Samuel Richardson, is usually considered the first fully realized English novel, with Richardson following in the footsteps of the seventeenth-century Spaniard Miguel de Cervantes, who gets the palm as the first real novelist and Don Quixote full honors as the first real novel. (Supposedly Richardson worried that the novel would turn out to be a fad.)
Enter Steven Moore. He believes the novel is as old as human civilization and devoted the more-than 700 pages of his 2010 survey The Novel: An Alternative History (Beginnings to 1600) and the thousand-plus pages of its sequel, The Novel: An Alternative History 1600–1800, to telling us why. His passion for his case is evident. In an interview, he says of the book, “It is essentially a defense of contemporary avant-garde fiction, which is my specialty. I wanted to show that such fiction is not an aberration that started with Ulyssesin 1922, as some conservative critics complain, but has always existed.” And he meansalways: Volume 1 begins with the Ancient Egyptians, in the second millennium BCE.
Moore is the opposite of the “conservative critics” he deplores. He holds no brief for theory, or literary criticism in general. He is more of an archeologist who, in his massive dig, unearths evidence that “experimental” fiction has been around as long as storytelling itself. He dismisses conventional wisdom. For instance, the venerable Cervantes-as-first-novelist theory, he says bluntly, is “Wrong. The novel has been around since at least the fourth century BCE (Xenophon’s Cyropaedia) and flourished in the Mediterranean area until the coming of the Christian Dark Ages.”
Anyone who thinks linguistic extravagance in novels began with Ulysses in 1922 hasn’t done his homework. . . . may I introduce Messrs. Petronius, Apuleius, Achilles Tatius, Subandhu, the anonymous Irish author of The Battle of Magh Rath, Alharizi, Fujiwara Teika, Gurgani, Nizami, Kakuichi, Colonna, Rabelais, Wu Chengen, Grange, Lyly, Sidney, Nashe, Suranna, the Scoffing Scholar of Lanling, Cervantes, López de Úbeda, Quevedo, Tung Yueh, Swift, Gracián, Cao Xuequin, Sterne, Li Ruzhen, Melville, Lautréamont, Carroll, Meredith, Huysmans, Wilde, Rolfe, Firbank, Bely, et al.?
This sets the Moorean tone: caustic, learned, witty.
After reading Volume 1, I was apprehensive that he might have lost his touch in Volume 2. Not a bit of it. With a showman’s flair, he raises the curtain on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a time not only of revolution and war but also of great literature. The middle class was starting to come into its own and indulge an appetite for popular entertainment, at the forefront of which was the novel.
As Moore puts it, “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.” This could be taken to imply that many of the novels he celebrated in Volume 1 were in fact something else, an opinion held by some critics such as Denis Donoghue, who disputes Moore’s claim that writers were turning out novels 2,500 years ago: epics, yes, parables, odes, and ballads, but not novels. “My elastic definition of the novel . . . stretches wide enough to include some works not usually classified as novels,” Moore concedes. I don’t know; he pretty much convinced me in Volume 1.
In any case we can all agree that by the seventeenth century the novel was firmly established as “a convenient vehicle not only for spinning romances and adventures, but for extolling religious virtues, for telling bawdy tales, for envisioning utopias, for exploring philosophical views, for teaching manners, and even for criticizing novels.” To a certain extent, the best-known novels of the age—Candide, Tristram Shandy, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Tom Jones, Robinson Crusoe, Don Quixote, etc.—do all these things. And Moore persuades us that if they were worth reading then, they are even more worth reading now. He knows his stuff; he’s really read ’em all, 400 novels for this book alone... read more:
