The True Story of the Novel (Text Only)

Margaret Anne Doody

• Publisher: Fontana Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780006863793
• eBook ISBN: 9780008240653
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia sociale

PART ONE

The Ancient Novel

CHAPTER I

The Ancient Novel

Let us leave it to the Reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried.

—Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

[I will stitch together for you various fables in this Milesian conversation, and will soothe your benevolent ears with a sweet murmuring—that is, if you do not disdain to look at an Egyptian papyrus written upon with a sharp Nile-reed pen—so that you may marvel at the figures and fortunes of men transformed into other shapes and then in a reciprocal intertwining changed back again.]

—Apuleius, Asinus Aureus

At ego tibi sermone isto Milesio varias fabulas conseram auresque tuas benivolas lepido susurro permulceam—modo si papyrum Aegyptiam argutia Nilotici calami inscriptam non spreveris inspicere—flguras fortunasque hominum in alias imagines conversas et in se rursum mutuo nexu refectas ut mireris.

Romance and the Novel are one. The separation between them is part of a problem, not part of a solution. The enquiry of this book includes (ultimately) an enquiry into the reasons why we have wanted since the eighteenth century to keep these two apart. The Anglo-Saxon tradition in particular since the mid-eighteenth century has exhibited a constant anxiety that fiction should adhere to the criteria posed by “realism,” and the standard of “realism” has often prevented British and American critics from taking a good square look at the Novel. “Romance” is a dismissive term, especially in English usage; other European languages have admitted the unity of Romance and Novel: a novel is le roman, der Roman, il romanzo. Only the English speakers have maintained a perpetually stern attitude to despised Romance. “Romance” has been used to describe a mood or mode rather than a genre, strictly speaking; Northrop Frye has pursued this use à l’outrance. I am indebted to his work and admire that of Patricia Parker in Inescapable Romance, but I have very different interests. When the term is not being used to allude to a rather cloudy literary mode characterized by wishful thinking—and best left to Shakespeare in his late plays—“Romance” is despicable, a term reserved for a certain low section of the bookstore appealing to women only. “Romance” is most often used in literary studies to allude to forms conveying literary pleasure the critic thinks readers would be better off without. It describes works that fail to meet the requirements of realism. But realism has faded away like the Cheshire cat, leaving its smile of reason behind; when novels by admired novelists deal with barons living in trees and with girls born with green hair it is time to drop the pretense that the primary demand of a long work of prose fiction is that it should be “realistic.”

As the supposed distinction between Romance and Novel has in the past been employed somewhat disingenuously (and exploited not without purpose), and as the emphasis on that supposed distinction has often done more harm than good, I propose to do without it altogether. I shall call all the works I am dealing with “novels,” as that is the term we feel most positively about, and the word “novel” is an encouraging word, describing something inviting to a reader. I am employing few and simple criteria of classification. A work is a novel if it is fictional, if it is in prose, and if it is of a certain length. Even these criteria are somewhat elastic (as explained in the Introduction), although the difference between poetic and prose narrative is of importance. Poetic narrative does not spring from quite the same sources or use the same techniques and tropes as prose narrative; in the end, they seem to serve different gods. A more troubling concept is the “fictional,” for there is a very real sense in which all history and most written discourse is fictional (from fingere, to shape, mold or model); that is, it is something made or made up. It is disturbing to realize that we know about Julius Caesar in the same way that we know about Don Quixote. That is, both are mediated to us chiefly through texts—with a few graphic illustrations thrown in, which also (like dramatizations) become texts in turn. As we shall see, novels have always been playing around with history and history-writing, cultivating the “True Life Novel.”¹ Characters in a work of fiction are often historical personages—or, to refine upon the point, bear historical names. At any moment a new novel can emanate from the idea of Napoleon, and historians proper (i.e., persons likely to be found in Departments of History) are powerless to prevent it.

The story of the Novel, its history and its nature, has often been told, but the story was told differently in the late Renaissance from the way in which it was told by the beginning of the nineteenth century. From the Renaissance to the early eighteenth century a less abridged and restricted history of the novel had considerable currency. In Part II, I shall deal with critical opinions about the novel in the Renaissance. Here I shall cite only one major critic, Pierre-Daniel Huet, Bishop of Avranches. Huet is an important critic of the Novel, at large and in detail. His treatise first appeared as a preface to Zayde (1670), a novel by Mme de Lafayette. Huet’s discussion, amplified, was published as Traité de l’origine des romans (Treatise on the Origin of Novels), and went through edition after edition; the first English translation was published in 1672. Huet is one of the most vocal of modern enthusiasts for the novel. He says that he read Honoré d’Urfé’s L’Astrée (1607–1628) in his youth and, having reread it, appreciates it even more. Huet’s attitude is not at all rule-bound; his view of the value of probability does not entail adherence to a strict idea of realism. Huet believes that we are creatures naturally inclined to love fiction: “In my opinion, it comes from the fact that the faculties of our soul being of too great an extent and too vast a capacity to be filled with present objects, the soul seeks in the past and in the future, in truth and in lies, in imaginary spaces and even in the impossible, something to occupy and exercise them” (192–193).² The human soul will never be satisfied only with what is present, or even only with what is possible. The tendency of Huet’s compatriots and contemporaries to devise rules for literature he treats with some skepticism. “These rules are known to so few people, that good judges are perhaps rarer than good Novelists [Romanciers] or good Poets.… The art of narration, which everybody practices and which so few people understand, is easier to understand than to practice well.”³ Huet is more interested in the pleasures that novels, ancient as well as modern, can offer, and he concerns himself with tracing a continuous history of prose fiction. He acknowledges that it did not begin in France or Spain: “It is neither in Provence, nor in Spain, as many believe, that we must hope to find the first beginnings of this agreeable amusement of good idle folk [des honnêtes paresseux]. We must go to seek them in the most distant countries, and in the most remote antiquity” (2).⁴

But, Huet insists, even when we have got back to the most remote antiquity we have not found the origin of the novel if we expect it to be simply Greek or Roman. Where do novels come from?

We must look for their first origin in the nature and spirit of man, man the inventive, lover of novelties and fictions, desirous to learn and to communicate what he has invented and what he has learned; and this inclination is common to all mankind in all eras, and in all places: but the Orientals have always appeared much more strongly possessed of it than others, and so their example has made such an impression on the most ingenious and polite of Occidental nations. When I say “Orientals,” I mean the Egyptians, the Arabs, the Persians, the Indians, and the Syrians. You will admit it without doubt, once I have shown you that the majority of the great Novelists of antiquity [grands Romanciers de l’antiquité] came from these peoples. (12–13) ⁵

It is the Eastern peoples—les Orientaux—who show to the fullest extent the human capacities for quickness of thought, speech, and imagination, and it is these qualities, put best to use first by “les Orientaux” that gave us our novel, of which the first practitioners were largely Syrians, Persians, Egyptians and so on.

Huet is not without some of those prejudices that Edward Said has bitterly summed up in Orientalism.⁶ Huet thought that “Oriental” fiction was uncultivated and luxuriant, and that the Greeks or the Greek language gave better form to Eastern expression, bringing the form under the rule of the epic and joining the diverse parts into one perfect body of harmonious construction. Yet he is consistently emphatic about the imaginative power, sense of beauty, and wit to be found in the “Eastern” peoples, who gave us literature of all kinds, including fables, not to speak of the stories of Job, Esther, Judith, and the Song of Songs. The Milesian fables, so often alluded to (and of which no examples survive) were produced, Huet thinks, by a people in Ionia who had first learned from the Persians the art of making novels, if rather risqué ones. Among the “Eastern” and “foreign” sources of course Africa is included. Huet is sometimes not very complimentary about “African” style. The Africans, “these rhyming peoples” (ces peuples rimeurs), introduced rhyme to European poetry, and are fond of jingles of sound. You find in African authors a certain stiffness and affectation, he says—St. Augustine is an example among nonfiction writers, and Apuleius among the novelists. Yes, Huet has his prejudices at times, but they do not interfere with his knowledge or his enjoyment. The big thing about Huet’s Traité is that he sets the novel in a large context; he insists upon its polyglot energies, its multiracial origins. It is wonderfully refreshing to read Huet after reading Ian Watt. Huet really likes almost all the antique novels, and he is one of the first (and few) critics to compare ancient novels with recent ones.

Classicists who study the ancient novel customarily cite Huet, though scholars of modern literatures tend to ignore him. Huet’s essential point is not disputed by modern scholars, although knowledge has grown with fresh discoveries of papyri. The Novel was produced in antiquity by people from non-Greek and non-Roman areas, by writers who came from the Near East and from Africa. The Novel, that is, is a “foreign” import—or rather, it is the product of combination, of contact between Southern Europe, Western Asia, and Northern Africa. And behind these regions, the regions of Greece and Syria and Ethiopia and Egypt, there lie other areas, hinterlands not without influence. We can assume the possibility of story and style filtering in from the Balkans and the Celtic lands in the West, from Persia and India in the East, from the Sudan and Kush and Katanga in the South. The homeland of the Western Novel is the Mediterranean, and it is a multiracial, multilingual, mixed Mediterranean.

An influential American classicist, Ben Edwin Perry in his book The Ancient Romances (1967), memorably defended the essential Greekness of the literature, as well as the idea of individual authorship, as against the claims of Mediterranean mixtures and communal or general developments. He wrote what has become almost an epigram in certain circles: “The first romance was deliberately planned and written by an individual author, its inventor. He conceived it on a Tuesday afternoon in July, or some other day or month of the year” (175). Perry had come to detest the idea of literary development, of anonymous cooperation that submerges the Author—even though he himself has his theory of origins to promote: “Greek Romance is essentially Hellenistic drama in narrative form” (78). Perry sniffs with Nietzsche at the decline of a culture into cosmopolitan and democratic-tending messiness:

Whatever in literary or dramatic art is meant to be accommodated to the understanding and taste of the cosmopolitan masses is thereby debased in proportion to the degree in which it is popularly exploited. Quality cannot be spread abroad in a big world.… Literature made popular in an open society, such as that of the Hellenized age or the present, is progressively externalized, mechanized, sensationalized, and impoverished.… That which reaches out for everything loses its own shape … the novel … is the open form par excellence for the open society. (47)

Perry was perhaps reacting against the ideas current among the young in the 1960s. One Romanticism opposes another. Perry’s typical response is a far cry from Huet’s, with its candid enthusiasm for the various humanity of the Mediterranean shores. Perry’s form of romanticism leads him to espouse the cause of the lonely independent author. Yet, though Perry wants the “origin” to be the creative individual, the romantic unit, it seems scarcely worthwhile to be the unhappy genius who is the origin of so foul a form. Reading Perry’s book, one sees how difficult it has been until recently in classical studies to get the ancient novel accepted: “externalized, mechanized, sensationalized, and impoverished”—Perry might be talking of daytime TV rather than of the ancestors of Don Quijote and Wuthering Heights.

We never, of course, encounter a founding author, the “He” who “conceived it” (but could he gestate it?) on the Tuesday in July or any other time. The Father of the Novel … we may seek “him” in vain. Some have claimed that role for various writers, chiefly Xenophon and Chariton. Xenophon’s Cyropaedia (400 B.C.) seems something of a special case, although its influential presence in the novel tradition (up to Tristram Shandy) cannot be ignored. Huet said that the novel as we know it did not begin until after Alexander the Great, and most modern scholars agree with him. Chariton’s Chaireas and Kallirrhoé appears at present to have the best claim to be the earliest surviving complete work—but dating may change at any time.

The “origins” of the novel, as Huet pointed out, lie in the various cultures of the Mediterranean basin. This very believable view has encouraged a number of scholars to investigate certain specific phenomena in relation to the Novel; the only problem with these searches is that individual scholars tend to wed themselves to specific “sources” as providing absolute answers. A number of seekers after Quellen have proposed origins: Platonic dialogue (Nietzsche); Euripides, New Comedy, and Hellenistic drama (Perry, after Nietzsche); school exercise, love-elegy, and travel story (Erwin Rohde); history and historical biography (Ludvíkovský); fables, fabliaux, and oral stories (Sophie Trenkner); Sumerian myths of fertility and divine kingship (Graham Anderson).⁷ There is no reason to deny any of these—and obviously these multitudinous “sources” do not contradict the insights of Huet. Some very interesting suggestions are offered by Karl Kerényi in Die Griechisch-Orientalische Romanliteratur in religionsgeschichtlicher Beleuchtung, which could be rendered as Greco-Oriental Novels in the Light of Religious Writings (1927); and by Reinhold Merkelbach in Roman und Mysterium in der Antike (1962). Both posit a religious origin for the novel. Kerényi suggested that the literary novel still carried traces of Isis-worship and unfolded from the story (or stories) of Isis and Osiris. Merkelbach elaborates upon Kerényi’s theory by relating the novel to the several mystery religions, including the cults of Dionysius, Isis, and Mithras. Perry dismisses the work of both of these scholars with a loud sneer: “This is all nonsense to me” (336). It is not nonsense to me, however, and the theories of Kerényi and Merkelbach will be discussed later.

Who read the earliest novels? Who were the everyday men and women who pushed themselves into view in the works of fiction and saw their lives reflected and interpreted in these novels? And when did they start reading novels? The evidence is unsatisfactory and diffuse. The number of papyrus fragments of novels that have turned up in Egypt leads scholars to believe that novel-reading (and perhaps novel-writing) was popular among Egyptians in the second century A.D. and later. The tone of the Satyricon (by an author who died in A.D. 65), however, makes one wonder if there were not by the Age of Nero a great many novel-readers on the mainland of Italy. The Satyricon’s parodic comedy and stylistic playfulness would be lost on a readership with no idea of the patterns of Greek narrative prose fiction. The heyday of the Greek novel in antiquity has traditionally been related to the “Second Sophistic” (so called by Philostratus in his Lives of the Sophists, in the third century) since Erwin Rohde first discussed the movement and the novels in 1876. The “Second Sophistic,” less a period than a s...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Praise
• Dedication
• Contents
• Chronological Listing
• Preface
• Introduction: In Search of the Ancient Novel
• Part One: The Ancient Novel
• Part Two: The Influence of the Ancient Novel
• Part Three: Tropes of the Novel
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Other Books By
• About the Publisher