The Cambridge Companion to the Novel 1316609774, 9781316609774

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Chronology
Introduction
Part I What Is a Novel?
1 The Novel as Genre
2 Rises of the Novel, Ancient and Modern
3 Epic/Novel
4 The Novel as Encyclopedia
5 Realism and the Novel
6 Modernism and the Novel
Part II How Do Novels Work?
7 Novels and Characters
8 Novels and Readers
9 The Space of the Novel
10 The Novel and the Law
11 The Novel as Data
Part III Where is the Novel Going?
12 The Novel as Commodity
13 The Graphic Novel
14 The Novel in the Digital Age
15 The Novel as Planetary Form
Further Reading
Index

Citation preview

t h e c a m b ri d ge c o m p a n i o n to t h e n o v e l This Companion focuses on the novel as a global genre with a 2,000-year history. The first part includes an examination of the various genres out of which it emerged (epic, history, romance, the picaresque) and the different ways in which fiction and realism (magical, hyper, and social) were developed in response to specific political, social, and economic forces. The second part focuses on how the novel works, considering how it has played a crucial role in the formation of more abstract social, political, national, and familial identities. The third part considers what the novel has become and will continue to become in the twentyfirst century. It examines the recent interest in graphic novels as well as data, digitization, and the global literary marketplace’s role in shaping the future of the novel. This Companion will be a key resource for students and scholars studying the novel as a genre. Eric Bulson is Professor of English at Claremont Graduate University. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the New York Public Library. His books include Little Magazine, World Form (2017), Novels, Maps, Modernity: The Spatial Imagination, 1850–2000 (2007), and The Cambridge Introduction to James Joyce (2006). He is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, and in addition to publishing articles in journals such as Representations, New German Critique, and the Journal of Modern Literature, he is also the coeditor of the three-volume Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Global Modernist Magazines (2018). His next book, ‘Ulysses’ by Numbers: Counting Literature in a Digital World, will appear in 2019.

THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO

THE NOVEL EDITED BY

ERIC BULSON Claremont Graduate University

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107156210 doi: 10.1017/9781316659694 © Cambridge University Press 2018 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2018 Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. isbn 978-1-107-15621-0 Hardback isbn 978-1-316-60977-4 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

CONTENTS

page vii ix x

List of Contributors Acknowledgments Chronology Introduction eric bulson

1

part i

what is a novel?

1

The Novel as Genre vilashini cooppan

23

2

Rises of the Novel, Ancient and Modern alexander beecroft

43

3

Epic/Novel kent puckett

57

4

The Novel as Encyclopedia david james

74

5

Realism and the Novel michael sayeau

91

6

Modernism and the Novel c a t h e r i n e fl y n n part ii

7

Novels and Characters m a r t a fi g l e r o w i c z

104

how does the novel work? 123 v

contents 8

Novels and Readers suzanne keen

138

9

The Space of the Novel robert t. tally jr.

152

10 The Novel and the Law robert spoo

168

11 The Novel as Data mark algee-hewitt, erik fredner, and hannah walser

189

part iii

where is the novel going?

12 The Novel as Commodity priya joshi

219

13 The Graphic Novel jan baetens and hugo frey

238

14 The Novel in the Digital Age jessica pressman

254

15 The Novel as Planetary Form joseph keith

268

Further Reading Index

vi

284 287

CONTRIBUTORS

mark algee-hewitt Director of the Stanford Literary Lab and Assistant Professor of English and Digital Humanities at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA jan baetens Professor of Cultural and Literary Studies at the University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium alexander beecroft Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA eric bulson Professor of English at Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA, USA vilashini cooppan Associate Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA marta figlerowicz Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA catherine flynn Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA erik fredner Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA hugo frey Department Head and Chair in Cultural and Visual History at the University of Chichester, West Sussex, UK david james Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of English Literature at the University of Birmingham, UK priya joshi Professor of English, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA suzanne keen Thomas Broadus Professor of English and Dean of the College at Washington and Lee University, Lexington, VA, USA

vii

list of contributors joseph keith Associate Professor of English at Binghamton University, State University of New York, Binghamton, NY, USA jessica pressman Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, USA kent puckett Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA michael sayeau Lecturer in English at University College London, UK robert spoo Chapman Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tulsa, OK, USA robert t. tally jr. Professor of English at Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, USA hannah walser Junior Fellow at Harvard Society of Fellows, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

viii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful first and foremost to Ray Ryan for helping me gauge the scope, scale, and viability of such a vast topic when this Companion was the mere seed of an idea. Equally important, especially at the early design stage, were the anonymous readers who provided a number of brilliant suggestions about how best to manage the many entrances and exits of novel history, including a map alerting me to some booby traps. And, as always, I could count on Kent Puckett, a true theorist of the novel and trusted friend, who was there to provide sage advice when it was needed most. There would be no Companion, of course, without contributors, and I was fortunate enough to have eighteen of them agree to write original pieces on subjects so dear to their hearts and minds. Thanks, then, to everyone in the List of Contributors for making this happen. For the cleaning, compiling, and correcting of the entire manuscript, I am very much indebted to April Anderson. She has been central in helping me bring the plot of this Companion to a happy end so that others may now enjoy it. Finis.

ix

CHRONOLOGY

Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Precursors 50 b c e–50 c e 50–150 150–200 150–250 2nd century 350–375 1008 1150–55 1268–77

1304 14th century

1575

Chariton, Callirhoe Xenophon, Ephesiaka Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon Longus, Daphnis and Chloe Apuleius, Asinus aureus (English translation as The Golden Ass) Heliodorus, Aithiopika (English translation as The Ethiopian Romance) Murasaki Shikibu, Genji Monogatori (English translation as The Tale of Genji) Anonymous, Roman de Thèbes (English translation as The Story of Thebes) Ibn Tufail, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓaˉn (English translation as The Improvement of Human Reason: Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan) Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, Amadís de Gaula Anonymous, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Luo Guanzhong, Sanguo yanyi (English translation as Romance of the Three Kingdoms) Don Juan Manuel (1282–1348), Libro de los ejemplos del conde Lucanor y de Patronio (English translation as Tales of Count Lucanor) Modern Novels Fifteenth–Seventeenth Century

1592 x

Shi Nai’an, Shui-hu chuan (English translation as The Water Margin)

ch ronology

1596 1605–15 1606 1678

Wu Cheng’en, Hsi-yu chi (English translation as Journey to the West) Miguel de Cervantes, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha (English translation as Don Quixote) Anonymous, Jin Ping Mei (English translation as The Plum in the Golden Vase) John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World, to That Which is to Come Eighteenth Century

1719 1722

1726 1740 1742 1748

1749 1760–67 1761 1764 1766 1774

1791 1794 1795 1796 1797

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year Defoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded Henry Fielding, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams Richardson, Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady John Cleland, Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (English translation as Julie, or the New Heloise) Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (English translation as The Sorrows of Young Werther) Cao Xueqin, Hong Lou Meng (English translation as The Dream of the Red Chamber) Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (English translation as Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship) Denis Diderot, Jacques le fataliste et son maître (English translation as Jacques the Fatalist and His Master) Radcliffe, The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents xi

chronology

Nineteenth Century 1800 1803 1811 1813 1814 1815 1818 1820 1826 1827 1830

1831 1833

1835 1836 1838

1843 1845 1847 1847 1848 1850

xii

Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (published 1818) Austen, Sense and Sensibility Austen, Pride and Prejudice Sir Walter Scott, Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since Austen, Mansfield Park Austen, Emma Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus Scott, Ivanhoe James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 Alessandro Mazzoni, I promessi sposi (English translation as The Betrothed) Stendhal, Le rouge et le noir: chronique du XIXe siècle (English translation as The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of the 19th Century) Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris (English translation as The Hunchback of Notre Dame) Rodolphe Töpffer, Histoire de M. Jabot (English translation as The History of Mr. Jabot) Alexander Pushkin, Yevgeny Onegin (English translation as Eugene Onegin) Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot (English translation as Old Goriot) Charles Dickens, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club Dickens, Oliver Twist Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket Balzac, Illusions perdues (English translation as Lost Illusions) Alexandre Dumas, Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (English translation as The Count of Monte Cristo) Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights W. M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter: A Romance Dickens, David Copperfield

ch ronology

1851 1853 1852 1855 1856 1857 1859 1861 1862

1865 1867 1868–69 1869

1872 1875 1876 1877 1880

1881 1884 1885 1886

1887–88 1890

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale Dickens, Bleak House Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Mœurs de province (English translation as Madame Bovary, Provincial Ways) Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities Dickens, Great Expectations Hugo, Les Misérables Ivan Turgenev, Отцы и дѣти (English translation as Fathers and Sons) Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Fyodor Dostoevsky, Преступлéние и наказáние (English translation as Crime and Punishment) Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (Parts I and II) Leo Tolstoy, Война и мир (English translation as War and Peace) George Eliot, Daniel Deronda Flaubert, L’Éducation sentimentale (English translation as Sentimental Education) Eliot, Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life Trollope, The Way We Live Now Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Tolstoy, Анна Каренина (English translation as Anna Karenina) Dostoevsky, Бра ́ тья Карама ́ зовы (English translation as The Brothers Karamazov) Émile Zola, Nana Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham James, The Bostonians James, The Princess Cassamassima Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped Futabatei Shimei, Ukigumo (English translation as The Drifting Cloud) Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Knut Hamsun, Sult (English translation as Hunger) xiii

chronology

1891

1895 1897 1898 1899

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented George Gissing, New Grub Street Hardy, Jude the Obscure H. G. Wells, The Time Machine James, What Maisie Knew Bram Stoker, Dracula Wells, The War of the Worlds Kate Chopin, The Awakening Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness Twentieth Century

1900 1901 1903 1904 1905 1905–6 1908 1910 1913

1913–27 1915 1916 1918 1920 1921 1922 1923 xiv

Conrad, Lord Jim Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie Rudyard Kipling, Kim Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks James, The Ambassadors Jack London, The Call of the Wild James, The Golden Bowl Conrad, Nostromo Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth Soˉseki Natsume, Wagahai wa Neko de Aru (English translation as I Am a Cat) E. M. Forster, A Room with a View Forster, Howard’s End Willa Cather, O Pioneers! Muhammad Husayn Haykal, Zaynab: Manazir wa’akhlaq rifiyyah (English translation as Zaynab: Country Scenes and Morals) Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu (English translation as In Search of Lost Time) Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Wyndham Lewis, Tarr Wharton, The Age of Innocence Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction Joyce, Ulysses Italo Svevo, La coscienza di Zeno (English translation as Zeno’s Conscience)

ch ronology

1924 1925

1926 1927 1928 1928–40

1929

1930 –43 1936 1932 1933 1934 1936 1937

–49 1938 1939

1940 1941

Forster, A Passage to India Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress Franz Kafka, Der Prozess (English translation as The Trial, written 1914–15) F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby Kafka, Das Schloss (English translation as The Castle) Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises Forster, Aspects of the Novel Woolf, To the Lighthouse Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover Andre Breton, Nadja Mikhail Bulghakov, Ма ́ стер и Маргари ́ та (English translation as The Master and Margarita, published in 1967) Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury Nella Larsen, Passing Lynd Ward, Gods’ Man Faulkner, As I Lay Dying Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (English translation as The Man Without Qualities) John Dos Passos, U.S.A. Trilogy Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer Woolf, The Waves Djuna Barnes, Nightwood Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God Sadegh Hedayat, Book-e koor (English translation as The Blind Owl) J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings Samuel Beckett, Murphy Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage Joyce, Finnegans Wake Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath Richard Wright, Native Son Woolf, Between the Acts xv

chronology

1942 1943 1946 1947

1949 1951

1952 1953

1955 1956 1957

1958

1959

1960 1961 1962 xvi

Albert Camus, L’étranger (English translation as The Stranger) Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead George Orwell, Animal Farm Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo (English translation as If This Were a Man) Mann, Doktor Faustus: Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde (English translation as Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend) Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day Orwell, 1984 J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye Beckett, Molloy Beckett, Malone meurt (English translation as Malone Dies) Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man Amos Tutuola, The Palm-Wine Drinkard James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain Samuel Beckett, L’Innomable (English translation as The Unnameable) Beckett, Watt Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita Graham Greene, The Quiet American Samuel Selvon, The Lonely Londoners Jack Kerouac, On the Road Boris Pasternak, До ́ ктор Жива ́ го (English Translation as Doctor Zhivago) Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Il Gattopardo (English translation as The Leopard) Günter Grass, Die Blechtrommel (English translation as The Tin Drum) William S. Burroughs, The Naked Lunch John Updike, Rabbit, Run Joseph Heller, Catch-22 Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

ch ronology

1963

1964 1966 1967 1969 1973 1975 1977 1979 1980

1981 1983 1984

1985 1986–91 1987 1988 1989 1990

Carlos Fuentes, La muerte de Artemio Cruz (English translation as The Death of Artemio Cruz) Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook Nabokov, Pale Fire Julio Cortazar, Rayuela (English translation as Hopscotch) Thomas Pynchon, V. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar Mario Vargas Llosa, La ciudad y los perros (English translation as The Time of the Hero) Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child Bellow, Herzog Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cien años de soleded (English translation as One Hundred Years of Solitude) Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow Toni Morrison, Sula Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Voprosy literatury I estetiji (English translation as The Dialogic Imagination, 1981) Morrison, Song of Solomon V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians Umberto Eco, Il nome della rosa (English translation as The Name of the Rose) Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children Alice Walker, The Color Purple Martin Amis, Money: A Suicide Note Milan Kundera, Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí (English translation as The Unbearable Lightness of Being) William Gibson, Neuromancer Don Delillo, White Noise Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale Morrison, Beloved Paul Auster, New York Trilogy Rushdie, The Satanic Verses Penelope Fitzgerald, The Beginning of Spring Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried W. G. Sebald, Schwindel. Gefühle (English translation as Vertigo) xvii

chronology

1996 1997 –2007 1998

1999

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest Delillo, Underworld Philip Roth, American Pastoral J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter, vols. 1–7 Orhan Pamuk, Benim Adım Kırmızı (English translation as My Name is Red) Roberto Bolaño, Los Detectives Salvajes (English translation as The Savage Detectives) J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace Twenty-First Century

2000 2001

2002 2004 2006 2007

2009–11 2011–14

xviii

Zadie Smith, White Teeth Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz Ian McEwan, Atonement Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections Elena Ferrante, I giorni dell’ abbandano (English translation as The Days of Abandonment) Roberto Bolaño, 2666 Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic Cormac McCarthy, The Road Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis Karl Knausgard, Min Kamp (English translation as My Struggle) Elena Ferrante, L’amica geniale, vols. 1–4 (English translation as My Brilliant Friend)

ERI C BUL S ON

Introduction The novel is sogged with humanity. —E. M. Forster

“His studies are not very deep,” one character says about another in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, “he is only reading a novel.”1 Just imagine if that same critical judgment about novels and novel readers were accurate today! Not only would it be assumed that we all read novels merely to pass the time but also with the assumption that they don’t have much to teach us in the first place. We’d only be reading a novel, and that’s it. The real knowledge about life and living, we’d be told, lies elsewhere, maybe in the great epics of bygone ages, intensely private lyric poems, or sweeping dramas where all the world’s a stage. The novel, of course, still has its detractors, but no one can deny that this literary genre runs “very deep.” Part of that depth comes from the fact that “the novel,” a term ironically rooted in the Latin word for new (novum), is actually rather old. In fact, by some accounts it goes back 4,000 years to the narrative fictions of ancient Egypt, with examples appearing subsequently as far afield as Hellenistic Greece, the histories and romances of medieval China and France, and the subgenres of modern England, Russia, Brazil, Nigeria, Japan, and the United States. And if the forms of the novel are indeed many, they are evidence enough that there has been an ongoing desire across cultures and over millennia to tell fictional stories in prose about life. Milan Kundera defines the novel as “the great prose form in which an author examines, by means of experimental selves (characters), the great themes of existence.”2 It is one of the few places, in fact, that human beings can go to find other voices, other stories, other locations that help them contemplate who, what, and where they are, and it all happens, strangely enough, with plots and characters that are fictional, in places real and imagined, and they exist in our minds long after the last page has been turned. But if novels give authors and readers this incredible opportunity to access the “great themes of existence” without reducing them to cliché, that’s 1

eric bulson

because they have the power, as Walter Benjamin once observed, to give “evidence of the profound perplexity of the living,” leading E. M. Forster to the conclusion that the novel is “sogged with humanity.” “We may hate humanity,” he continues, “but if it is exorcised or even purified the novel wilts; little is left but a bunch of words.”3 The prospect of tackling the big questions about existence, living, and humanity is a tall order for any genre, not least for the one to which we still turn for its entertainment value. People reach for novels, not collections of verse, when boarding a flight, commuting to work, or getting ready for bed. The suggestion that we might be reading for fun, even when it’s “work” for the student or critic or editor, does not mean we are doing something wrong. Rather, it’s a sign that the novel is doing something right. Living in the digital age where the distractions of other media forms abound, the simple act of immersing ourselves in a novel, whether in print or on a screen, remains a unique experience, in part, because it transports us somewhere else to encounter people we’ve never met and places we’ve never been. And why not be entertained if, along the way, we also encounter what György Lukács called the “inexpressible meaning of life”?4 The history of the novel, in fact, is littered with attempts to express this “inexpressible meaning” that cannot be condensed into a single message or sound bite. And by putting time itself in a narratable form and combining it with the fictional lives of characters, novelists make it possible for us to understand “the unity” of the past, present, and future in our own lives. This is one of the things that makes the novel so important to everyone regardless of where they’re from or who they think they are. It is, to borrow Frederic Jameson’s memorable phrase, “a machine for living in a certain kind of temporality.”5 No one can escape time, but by reading titles new and old it’s the closest we can get to time travel, which, in a way, also makes the novel a time machine. And we can’t forget, of course, that the novel, by many accounts, begins with the story of a man who prefers to live in a fictional past according to the laws of an outmoded chivalric code he has picked up from romances such as Lazarillo de Tormes and Amadís de Gaula. The problem, however, is that he also confuses clouds of dust with charging armies, windmills with giants, a peasant woman with a princess, and a washing basin with an enchanted helmet. But as much as everyone else might think he’s crazy, he’s the one having all the fun, wandering the countryside with his nag, having adventures with his dim-witted sidekick, and never paying a hotel bill (a rule, he claims, that belongs to those who follow the chivalric code). The saddest part of this whole story of the character we know as Don Quixote de la Mancha is that when he returns home, not to die, at least in Part I, but to surrender to the 2

Introduction

boring reality of so many of the others around him, the book burners and donothings, who have lost, if they ever had it, the ability to enjoy the magic to be found in the world all around them. Reading novels, you might say, is one way to imagine, and temporarily inhabit, other worlds and temporalities, but it can also help us to navigate our own, finding, along the way, moments of companionship but also instruction about how we feel, what we think, where we live, who we live among, even who we are, and what we do.6 The chronology provided at the front of The Cambridge Companion to the Novel includes more than 250 titles and is intended to provide some necessary coordinates for the novel’s broad historical and geographic sweep. Some periods and subgenres will be more enticing than others, but this is just as true for so many of the great theorists of the novel, all of them with lists of their own. Mikhail Bakhtin, for instance, preferred Greek and Hellenistic novels along with some nineteenthcentury Russian classics (Dostoevsky at the top); Lukács adored nineteenth-century European historical novels (with a strong distaste for Joyce); Ian Watt, preoccupied with the novel’s rise, singled out eighteenth-century British realist novels; and Pascale Casanova, though fascinated by the novel’s global reach, has a soft spot for Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. Whatever trajectories you decide to follow, remember that each novel in the Companion’s chronology has a history of its own. Some are distinguished by their status as first novels in different countries, others for their invention of techniques of representation, and still others for exhibiting all the best qualities of the novel at a particular moment in time. What should be most apparent by now is the fact that “the novel” prides itself on being new, ever in motion, not fixed in one place or even defined by one size. That, in effect, is what makes pinning this genre down such a daunting task. The novel doesn’t just move around the world over time; it changes shape internally as it goes, often responding to particular literary traditions and print and nonprint cultures, and it can involve such things as how a plot begins or ends, what events seem possible or impossible in between, what kinds of characters can and cannot appear, and where the action can and cannot take place (at sea, in a drawing room, on a street, in the high plains, or out on the high seas). And what makes this reading experience all worthwhile is the simple fact that we might forget all about the technical and formal aspects, losing ourselves for a period of time, but, as the essays in The Cambridge Companion to the Novel also demonstrate, we can greatly enhance our appreciation by thinking more critically about how any of this was possible in the first place by focusing not just on what novels are about 3

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but also on how they manage to pull off so many tricks with time, space, characters, narrators, and the representation of fictional events. Consider, for starters, the case of Dorothea Brooke, one of the many disillusioned characters in George Eliot’s masterpiece Middlemarch. On arriving in Rome as a newlywed from the “prosaic neighbourhood” of a fictional town from which the novel gets its title, Dorothea’s regret at marrying a much older and hopelessly unsympathetic man she doesn’t love is so profound that she can hardly process her disappointment. Lucky for us, though, the narrator tells us what’s going on inside her head and heart, and it’s all juxtaposed with the backdrop of the eternal city in a series of elaborately constructed sentences that deserve to be quoted in full: Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold monotonous light of an alien world; all this vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation, at first jarred her as with an electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with that ache of belonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotion.7

In this breathtaking passage, brimming with energy and insight about the clash between young and old civilizations, the full depth of a single character’s mixed emotions is revealed. The narrator doesn’t just tell us, for instance, that Dorothea was sad, confused, overwhelmed, lost, or, let’s face it, emphatically not in love with her husband. Rather, this narrator makes the experience itself transmissible in the words and syntax, “this vast wreck of ambitious ideals” providing access points into a better understanding of Dorothea’s own soul at the moment in which she is beginning to acknowledge that she’s made a mistake. Her life is not what she thought it could, or perhaps should, be. And how many novels, in fact, deal with this same problem of lost illusions? Honoré de Balzac wrote a novel with that title, Illusions perdues, but it is a problem that everyone faces at some point in their lives, not just Dorothea, but also me, the one writing this Introduction, and you, the one reading it. From the beginning, the novel has been a particularly productive genre for exploring these intense moments of discovery, solitude, isolation, and collapse. Robinson Crusoe is among them, the first British novel with a protagonist who ends up on a deserted island after a shipwreck. Far from the shores of England, he is also trying to figure out how he might survive:

4

Introduction I never so much as troubl’d my self, to consider what I should do with my self when I came thither; what would become of me if I fell into the hands of savages; or how I should escape from them if they attempted me; no, nor so much as how it was possible for me to reach the coast, and not be attempted by some or other of them, without any possibility of delivering myself; and if I should not fall into their hands, what I should do for provision, or whither I should bend my course; none of these thoughts, I say, so much as came in my way.8

You don’t need to be stuck on an island far away from home to empathize with Crusoe’s plight. In a passage punctuated by so many I-ME-MYs, he is in the process of working through his own anxiety about the future and in so doing plan a course of action for an unspecified amount of time. Alone with his thoughts (before coming across a human footprint in the sand), Crusoe doesn’t have the luxury of wondering what novel to take with him to pass the time if stranded on a deserted island. Rather, his life is the novel, and it is one, in fact, that reminds all of us of what’s at stake when plotting our own “course.” In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, we actually get inside the heads of characters, and in so doing we access their thoughts, dreams, fears, and desires sometimes through interior monologue, other times free indirect discourse. Unlike Crusoe with his first-person narration, Mrs. Ramsay can wander around in the garden next to her husband of many years talking, and suddenly, for a split second, her mind wanders off. “All the great men she had ever known, she thought, deciding that a rabbit must have got in, were like that, and it was good for young men (though the atmosphere of lecture rooms was stuffy and depressing to her beyond endurance almost), simply to hear him, simply to look at him. But without shooting rabbits, how was one to keep them down? she wondered. It might be a rabbit; it might be a mole. Some creature anyhow was ruining her Evening Primroses.”9 The rabbit that hops into the sentence, and eventually around the paragraph, doesn’t just interrupt what’s going on inside Mrs. Ramsay’s head. It is, even more than that, a bit of commentary on the need to look around you so that you don’t lose sight of the world outside. It’s also a reminder about the fragility of life, the rabbit, here and then gone, and taking Mrs. Ramsay, as that white rabbit does Alice, down into the hole of her own mind. The novel has never shied away from the complexity and messiness of what’s going on in people’s heads. And this can be made all the more complicated when they are caught in extraordinary circumstances. This is what happens, for instance, when Prince Andrew gets caught during an explosion on a battlefield in War and Peace. “What’s this?,” he wonders, “Am I falling? My legs are giving way.” Laid out on the ground amid all the 5

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confusion, Andrew can see nothing but the sky above him. That’s enough, in fact, for him to zoom out on everything, the war, the deaths, even his own pain, and find something bigger. “How differently do those clouds glide across that lofty infinite sky! How was it I did not see that lofty sky before? And how happy I am to have found it at last! Yes! All is vanity, all falsehood, except that infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing, but that. But even if it does not exist, there is nothing but quiet and peace. Thank God! . . .”10 Ending in an ellipsis that may well be Andrew trailing off into a state of unconsciousness, this is the moment that will redefine his life. That glimpse of the “infinite sky” is enough to make him realize not only the meaninglessness of a war, which has now left him seriously wounded, but also of human existence unable to see itself as part of a larger cosmos far more important than the goings on of the “great men” down on Earth. But if Prince Andrew’s moment of clarity about life comes from the sky above, for Tyrone Slothrop, the protagonist of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, it takes a much darker journey into a toilet down below: The light down here is dark gray and rather faint. For some time he has been aware of shit, elaborately crusted along the sides of this ceramic (or by now, iron) tunnel he’s in: shit nothing can flush away mixed with hard-water minerals into a deliberate brown barnacling of his route, patterns thick with meaning, Burma shave signs of the toilet world, icky and sticky, cryptic and glyptic, these shapes loom and pass smoothly as he continues down the long cloudy waste line, the sounds of “Cherokee” still pulsing very dimly above, playing him to the sea.11

As unbelievable as this journey below might seem (what individual, after all, can travel through septic systems), it pushes the realism of the novel far beyond its limits into a place where it is possible to see that nonsense even has its own meaning. And that, in effect, is what the novel has always done to stay new, the many experiments with characters, plots, settings, and narrative devices employed to explain what and where life happens. And sometimes life goes on in the most unbelievable places of all, and it involves characters who are not, strictly speaking, human. Moby Dick is among them, a white whale getting chased around the world’s five oceans by one salty captain and his brainwashed crew. Though tracked for more than a year (and 90 percent of the novel), Moby Dick manages to remain out of sight, but when he finally does breach, the novel climaxes, but not before Ahab gets his final words in: Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! 6

Introduction Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!12

Remember, at this exact moment in time, one so many have been waiting for impatiently, we have a fictional character talking to a fictional animal who can’t hear or understand him. And yet, still, Melville has managed to generate a soliloquy seething with hate that is as great as any to be found in Shakespeare’s plays. Ahab has devoted his “whole foregone life” to chasing down one whale, and faced with the possibility that the end is nigh, he pauses to put his hate into words. Moby Dick, of course, can’t hear them, but as readers, we can, and in that moment, both epic and pathetic, we see Ahab at his most vulnerable, vengeful, and alone, right before he gets thrown into the water, tangled to death by his own rope. Novels are not encyclopedias containing all the world’s knowledge, but that doesn’t keep them from trying to pack everything in. David James (Chapter 4) believes that this has something to do with the fact that the novel has an elastic structure, moving along from beginning to end like a wave, picking up whatever comes its way. It is a process, in fact, that has caused a great deal of genre confusion over the centuries, with readers scratching their heads or falling asleep when faced with, say, a sequence of chapters on cetology (Moby-Dick) or an extended meditation on history (the two Epilogues in War and Peace). This tendency to make the novel appear as something bigger than itself, an epic or an encyclopedia, is also one of its many virtues, a trick that can make it “seem well ahead of its time.” There’s also a way that the novel’s encyclopedic ambitions can be interpreted as a critique of totalizing forms of knowledge gathering, the kind used to transform everything into data or reduce the complexity of life and experience into rigidly defined categories. This may be so, but James also suspects that living in an age of information excess facilitated by the World Wide Web and novels, contemporary and classic alike, can function as “antiglut therapy,” providing opportunities for deep concentration. Long before this threat of Web saturation existed, Lukács identified the novel as the literary genre best suited to express an alienated condition he called “transcendental homelessness.” His Theory of the Novel, first drafted in 1914, was motivated by a world war and written, he later reflected, “in a mood of permanent despair over the state of the world.”13 Faced with the possibility that Western civilization was ending, Lukács argued that the 7

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novel was “the epic of a world abandoned by God,” a fragmented form reflecting an existential isolation that had been in the making for centuries and incapable of unifying human experience within a larger social, political, or even cosmic order. Unlike the epic, where form and content were identical and contained characters integrated with the world around them, the novel was incomplete and never a place where solitary protagonists could feel at home.14 This epic/novel binary has been an incredibly productive heuristic device, and theorists of the novel since Lukács, including Mikhail Bakhtin, Erich Auerbach, Franco Moretti, and Wai Chee Dimock, have used it to try to understand how major morphologic changes across time can help us to understand the nature of human experience and the representations of political, social worlds we must all inhabit. What makes the novel “epic,” as Kent Puckett (Chapter 3) explains, is the desire to “represent a whole world, to reveal connections between people, things, and events, to reveal the significance of things” while also recognizing “the fundamental impossibility of doing exactly that.” Put another way, some of the most monumental modern novels, such as Faust, Ulysses, and Cien años de soledad, are failed epics not because they are unable to achieve the qualities of a literary greatness associated with the Odyssey or the Iliad but rather because the scope and scale of the narrative structure, the use of linear time, the modes of narration, and characterization make that prospect of synthesizing experience into a coherent worldview impossible. Leopold Bloom, for instance, has no place in the Ithaca of Homer, and Achilles could never be found walking the streets of Dublin. The kinds of characters that appear in the modern novel can, indeed, seem larger than life, sometimes caught in a web of extraordinary events or stranded in exotic lands. But the history of the novel is also filled with nobodies, who are barely getting by, and often involve plots where nothing “epic” happens. But the mere fact that these nobodies can have names such as Moll Flanders, Huck Finn, Julien Sorel, Alyosha Karamazov, and Lizzy Bennett or that they have stories worth telling is itself a major development in the history of the genre. Ian Watt suspects that this interest in highly individualized characters has something to do with the rise of industrialization and Protestantism, the former valorizing specialized skills of the individual, the latter the existence of an inward moral compass. “Robin Crusoe,” he reminds us, “is certainly the first novel in the sense that it is the first fictional narrative in which an ordinary person’s daily activities are the center of continuous literary attention.”15 The novel has never shied away from the “daily activities” of ordinary fictionalized individuals. In fact, this preoccupation with everyday life 8

Introduction

proved foundational to some of the novel’s most radical experiments in the early twentieth century. Modernism is filled with novels about ordinary people and events, and though dramatic occurrences can happen, the focus by and large is on the way characters perceive and remember their experiences from day to day. Innovations such as interior monologue didn’t just make it possible to record everydayness in real time; it allowed novelists to bend time, thereby allowing their characters to revisit people, places, and events from the past. Proust’s 4,000-page In Search of Lost Time is one of the most remarkable realizations of this subjectively perceived time. Catherine Flynn (Chapter 6), in fact, demonstrates how the recurrence of a musical motif from the fictional composer Vinteuil circulates throughout the novel and is meaningful less for its sound than for the way it can “cut across narrative and logical modes of organization” unifying disparate events and moments of perception across different temporal registers. And if In Search of Lost Time is about fictional characters circling back to the past in their minds, it also provides an intense temporal experience for readers, reminding them of the reality of evanescent moments, the ones that give life meaning while time marches on. So far I’ve defined the novel within and against other literary genres to foreground the fact that it never existed in isolation. In fact, as Mikhail Bakhtin first observed, the novel has been the great vacuum cleaner of genres because of its remarkable capacity to absorb whatever else was out there. By mixing so many different genres together, in fact, making prose fictions sound like histories or romances or epics with bits of verse thrown in, the novel always had the potential to reinvent itself as something else. The English word “novel” derives from the Italian novella, a term used in the fourteenth century to define the kinds of short stories collected in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron. These were “little stories,” but the term itself can also be translated as “news,” which makes sense when you consider that they included bits of information about the world. Novels are news, too, because they function as convenient containers for transporting stories about shipwrecks and marriages, court intrigue and battles, philosophical meditations and murders, revolutions and love affairs. Novels are long (E. M. Forster claimed that 50,000 words was the absolute minimum) because these pieces of news are often made up of characters and modes of narration without any prescribed limits on where the plots should begin and end. Novels are modern because they have evolved alongside technologies of mass reproduction and consumption, which made possible the formation of a more expansive literary marketplace (filled with editors, critics, translators, and an expansive literate public). And novels are fictional because they tell 9

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stories about people, places, and events that are not, strictly speaking, real or true. The novels discussed earlier do not contain all these qualities in equal measure. What they share in common is the fact that they are all fictions: Slothrop doesn’t go down a toilet, Prince Andrew doesn’t get wounded in battle, and Mrs. Ramsay never sees that rabbit. And yet these are the kinds of moments that make novels not only memorable but also true. They are all stories based on probable events with people, places, and situations that can seem oddly familiar, and they depend for their power on what is called “realism.” Michael Sayeau (Chapter 5) points out that realism is a complicated category, in part, because reality itself is relative and has depended for its effect on different kinds of techniques and modes of representation at different points in history. Consider, for example, that moment with Ahab alone: where is the realism in that? Well, he is on a boat, he is holding a harpoon, he is at sea, and he is speaking. If he were part of a narrative that takes place nowhere and were caught speaking gibberish into a void, no one would expect the scene to feel realistic, and yet, with the accumulation of those concrete details, it is the category of reality itself, as Roland Barthes once put it, that gets signified.16 Ahab and that boat are not really there, in other words, but they signal that reality is in progress within a specific story. And no matter how much novelists push the limits of realism into the realm of absurdity, it is still one of the ways that the experience itself can seem more immediate and meaningful. The fictionality of novels has relied on realist techniques from its earliest Western beginnings, and as Catherine Gallagher argues, it has played a major role in the interaction between novels and readers. “Novels,” she explains, “promoted a disposition of ironic credulity enabled by optimistic incredulity; one is dissuaded from believing the literal truth of a representation so that one can instead admire its likelihood and extend enough credit to buy into the game. Such flexible mental states were the sine qua non of modern subjectivity.”17 Considered along these lines, the experience of novel reading requires that a pact gets made. Readers may know these plots didn’t really happen, that these characters aren’t really there, but that doesn’t make them any less believable. “Ironic credulity,” in fact, requires that readers maintain the will to believe in spite of their skepticism, with the added implication that the identification with fictional selves is itself part of the invention of modern subjectivity. Readers can be skeptical or ironic during these encounters with realist fictions, but, as Suzanne Keen (Chapter 8) explains, it is empathy that can keep them coming back for more. Novels don’t just want us to believe that a certain sequence of events unfolded or that these real and imagined places 10

Introduction

and people exist (even if it’s only between two covers); they also ask that we feel something in the process, and that’s an important part of their allure. What makes this transaction even more complicated is the fact that it’s not so easy to identify who the reader is; there is the “implied reader,” the one the narrator addresses directly or indirectly, and there is the “real reader,” the flesh and blood body with a brain that the author and the narrator have never known, who consumes the story. Novelists cannot control how their real readers will respond, of course, but for Keen, the development of narrative strategies and tropes has played a critical role in the success or failure of the novel as a global genre. “Novels that fail to evoke readers’ empathy, or choose not to invite it,” she writes, “are less likely to engage distant readerships.” Postcolonial Anglophone novels have been so commercially successful at this task, in part, she argues, because they provide “intensities of character identification and immersion in fictional worlds.” For some critics, though, these strong empathetic responses that generate global sales are made possible from a manipulation of emotions and ready-made plots, encouraging what Timothy Brennan calls a form of “writing by numbers,” producing novels devoid of authentic emotional experience.18 It’s often the case that certain narrative techniques and modes of characterization will change over time because the earlier versions become less effective, and while some readers may still cry over the death of Little Nell, others will find it unconvincing and exaggerated. Readers, of course, are not the same everywhere or at any time. They change with the generations, but so too do the characters that they can identify with or choose to ignore. But what is a character in the first place? Where does a character come from, and what makes some more convincing than others? The very term “character,” Marta Figlerowicz (Chapter 7) reminds us, “signifies, at once, a person (or a personality) and the stroke of a pen.” To be a character in a novel implies that a personality is somehow present, but it is also one generated by the pen itself. The trick for novels has involved navigating between characters that can seem like real individuals (with souls and hearts) and those that are merely one-dimensional types, but they are also part of communities or networks (even when they’re reclusive), and their interactions can be influenced by the number of other characters in the mix. There’s no single recipe for character building, and the history of the novel has involved the construction of so many different kinds, some coming to life through external descriptions, others through internalized eavesdropping. But the more that characters from novels can seem like us and the more their worlds seem to resemble ours, then it is also time, Figlerowicz suggests, to reflect on how much of our own identities are bound up with fictional projections and wishful thinking. 11

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Characters can’t exist in a vacuum. They need spaces in which to live, work, play, sleep, travel, have sex, eat, and die. Some of these spaces include buildings that can be visualized down to a nail in the wall, others are left entirely nondescript, but both kinds are capable of inviting readers in or keeping them at bay. Whatever the case, Ortega y Gasset claims that this space, complete with smells and rhythms, is the “essence of the novel,” providing a kind of sense memory long after the plot itself has concluded.19 Robert Tally (Chapter 9) argues, in fact, that novelistic spaces are also plots, providing directions on where readers should look and what they should see. Novels unfold over time and without the use of images, but they are maps in their own right, and reading itself, which involves piecing together orientational signposts, is an exercise in literary cartography. To treat the space of the novel, then, as a set of extraneous details that characters simply pass through on the way to more important things means to miss out on what is so dynamic about it. Does it matter, for instance, that Ulysses is set in Dublin, a real city with real street names, or that Faulkner organizes the fictional town of Yoknapatawpha County around the topography of a real location in Lafayette County, Mississippi? How does the overabundance of generic, nonspecific landmarks affect what happens to Joseph K. in The Castle? Answering these kinds of questions about novelistic towns, cities, streets, and landscapes can require paying attention to their narrative possibilities but also how they change over time to accommodate shifts in perception that are bound up with complicated processes identified with capitalism, imperialism, and globalization. To read a space in the novel, Tally reminds us, means to navigate the ideologies through which it was produced, thereby making it possible to understand our own location in the real world we inhabit. Focusing on what a novel is has involved coming to terms with its epic/ encyclopedic ambitions and realist impulses while also taking into account the role of characters, readers, and settings. It’s equally necessary to have some understanding of where the novel comes from. Critics are increasingly turning their attention to its status as a world form, one that goes back at least as far as Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Romance [Aethiopica] in the third century c e , moving through Japan in the eleventh century with Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji [Genji Monogatori], maturing in China in the sixteenth century with the anonymously composed The Plum in the Golden Vase [Chin P’ing Mei], and ending up in Nigeria in the 1950s with Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard and Colombia in the late 1960s with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude [Cien ãnos di soledad]. Instead of any 12

Introduction

monolithic “rise of the novel,” as Ian Watt once called it, one that begins in England in the eighteenth century with Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding, it has become just as urgent to identify the novel’s Hellenistic routes and Asian, South American, and African itineraries. What separates The Cambridge Companion to the Novel from the others in this series is its recognition of the “rises of the novel.” Doing so encourages a comparative perspective on the novel’s history and geography and makes it possible to imagine how novels can be part of complex national traditions while also having a supranational dimension that allows them to travel from one country and continent to another. Moving ahead, then, I want to add one more definition to that list I compiled earlier: the novel is global. The Cambridge Companion to the Novel, in fact, is bookended by two essays devoted to an analysis of the possibilities and limits of both a global and planetary perspective. “Why,” Vilashini Cooppan asks in Chapter 1 of this volume, “does it move so stealthily and powerfully across the globe?” One reason, she explains, is that the novel is “always in the mode of becoming other”; it is an infinitely adaptable genre, perpetually in flux, making the entire project of genre definition grapple with the perpetual threat of its own obsolescence. As soon as novel theorists have pinned it down, there are always new examples from other places on the horizon, and there’s no evidence to suggest that the novel as a genre is reaching a point of exhaustion. In fact, that “heterogeneity” and “heterochronicity,” Priya Joshi contends (Chapter 12), is the reason “novelistic genre cannot be thought of as a singular thing.” Novels may comprise a distinct genre, but they have circulated over the centuries as commodities in codex format, getting printed and sold in order to be read, shelved, reread, and occasionally pulped. England and France have particularly expansive histories, with long and established networks of editors, critics, and publishers who have capitalized on the novel’s status as a commodity with the potential for a “global presence.” Any comprehensive understanding of the relationship between the novel and the world requires coming to terms with the sociological contexts involving production costs, circulation history, and taste not just at home but also as it travels to audiences elsewhere. “As a commodity,” Joshi observes, “the novel is an outlaw of a special kind, vaulting over established borders, sneaking around barriers of taste and tastemakers, and thwarting exchange-rate mechanisms as it travels globally, equally a refugee and a native, holding a key to unclaimed histories and unwritten futures.” These rates of exchange will rise and fall, along with the public’s taste for specific genres, narrative devices, and styles. What’s consistent everywhere is the novel’s material presence, even in its digital format, and the fact that novels will continue to get written and read by audiences who need to buy them 13

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and publishers, many of them with global networks, who still need to produce and distribute them. This desire to think globally about the novel is not new. In fact, you could say it is an ancient problem that continues to haunt us even as the globe itself shrinks. Guidance, however, can be sought from Mikhail Bakhtin, one of the first novel theorists at the beginning of the twentieth century, who was acutely aware that the novel was not a distinctly modern form. Rather, it grew out of and in response to drama and the epic, and these ancient examples were a particularly productive site for understanding such things as the “chronotope,” or “timespace,” a term he used to identify the different temporal and spatial relationships in a plot. The ancient novels are increasingly being accepted as an indispensable part of the novel’s DNA.20 “If we look beyond the Eurocentric understandings of the novel,” Alexander Beecroft (Chapter 2) argues, “and think more broadly and globally about fictional prose narratives, it becomes possible to sketch at least the outlines of a global history stretching back roughly four thousand years.” In doing so, it’s necessary to recalibrate our definition of what the novel was and how it has been modified in different cultures. Not yet a consumable object in codex form with a clear generic category, the ancient novel is best defined as “narrative fiction,” by which Beecroft means not just the length of a particular prose story but also the techniques employed to drive that story forward over an extended period of time. Any hopes for developing a theory that is able to accommodate the rises of the novel on such a scale, he explains, will involve developing comparative models that examine how different narrative techniques can generate plots “without relying on repetition or on digressions to achieve length.” With Beecroft’s timely recommendation in mind, consider, once again, the well-known distinction that Lukács made between the epic and the novel. Whole or fragmented, at home in the world or homeless: these are the two binaries that have been adapted by generations of novel critics who use them to theorize generic evolution, even though their historical veracity has been seriously questioned. Massimo Fusillo, for instance, makes a strong case that epics from the Hellenistic era are already novelistic (there are elements of Helidorus’ Ethiopian Romance already in Fielding and Richardson, not to mention Cervantes, an outspoken admirer), and Thomas Pavel argues that even if the so-called modern novel reflects a world of alienated individuals, fragmentation was always already part of an epic state of mind.21 And if the epic and the novel in the West are not as opposed to one another as so many of us have been led to believe, what are we to do with the countries that have 14

Introduction

novels without an epic tradition?22 This is true, for instance, in India, where the novel is a borrowed form, inherited from the British during colonization before getting adapted to accommodate stories and characters in other Indian languages.23 There are the ancient Indian epics, of course, but the novel itself did not develop organically out of or against them, as novel theorists such as Lukács and Bakhtin claim it did in the West. Another variation of the novel’s status as a borrowed form, and not an organic outgrowth of the epic, appeared in Brazil, where, as Roberto Schwarz explains, the Bildungsroman arrived from France.24 Instead of providing a generic model for the seamless transfer from one country (in Europe) to another (in South America), the Bildungsroman was unable to provide a realistic representation of a Brazilian experience because the social and political systems and national histories were so radically different from one another. The Chinese novel provides another interesting point of comparison. “Up to the eighteenth century,” Franco Moretti explains, “[it] was arguably greater in both quantity and quality than any in Europe, with the possible exception of France.”25 Chinese novels are certainly long with hundreds of characters (800,000 words and 975 characters in The Story of the Stone) and include the recipe of realism, fictionality, individuality, experiments with narrative time, and the representation of everyday life in plots that tended to span multiple generations. And though we are accustomed to think of novels as stirring up trouble with various political, religious, and legal institutions (Madame Bovary, Ulysses, and The Satanic Verses), the novel in China, which went by the term xiaoshuo (literally defined as “trivial writing”), was banned under the Ming and Qing Dynasties, along with prostitution and paranormal communication.26 Run-ins between the novel and the law are an integral part of this genre’s global history. In fact, the whole range of complex legal issues regarding obscenity, sedition, defamation, copyright, and authorship vary by country and culture, but together they have had a profound impact on how novels get written, published, distributed, and read. Robert Spoo (Chapter 10) argues that the novel’s propensity for realism made it particularly well suited for the kinds of narratives that could explore subjects considered offensive. In fact, he explains, “the novel’s rise required a society conditioned to receive the pleasures and provocations of fiction’s flirtation with the real,” and it was one that required a literate reading public that extended beyond Britain into its colonies and dominions. Legal cases against the novel abound, some of the most memorable, not surprisingly, involving salacious plots, including the masturbation scene in Ulysses, which triggered a case against the editors of the little magazine in the United States where it was first serialized. 15

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But more than simply titillating readers over the years or thumbing their noses at authority, these novels have disrupted public conceptions of morality. The case against Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is one of the most well-known examples, and it was motivated by a fundamental misunderstanding on behalf of the prosecution of free indirect discourse that created an ironic distance between the bad behavior of Emma Bovary and the narrator. Other novelists have been more explicit with their representations of sexual behavior (among them Joyce, Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Radclyffe Hall) and, in doing so, forced audiences and, of course, the various legal authorities and institutions eager to condemn them to think about what’s really at stake in the literary representation of natural human acts. Far from keeping these works out of circulation, these cases have generated underground networks for literary consumption and also provided opportunities for pirates and foreign publishers eager to take advantage of different copyright laws. Coming to terms with the novel’s global geography also requires rethinking some of the terms used to identify where it comes from and goes: transnationalism, postnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and globalization. More recently, critics such as Gayatri Spivak, Wai Chee Dimock, and Susan Stanford Friedman have urged that the “planetary” can provide one more alternative. Joseph Keith (Chapter 15) explains it is a concept enabling a mode of critical and historical analysis that moves us beyond not just national histories but also the economic determinism and geopolitical boundaries of globalization, which use the globe as the organizational metaphor of a separate and unequal literary field. To think of the novel as a planetary genre, in other words, forces the radical reconceptualization of its history and geography, and that, in turn, encourages a mode of reading that considers the place of a human collective, one facing the urgent threats posed by ecological disasters and catastrophic geologic events. Without the world, in other words, there is no novel. Novels are not just time machines that we inhabit temporarily; they are objects in time, and our continued interactions with them will be shaped by the ways they circulate, the remediated formats they assume and resist, and, of course, the stories they continue to tell. The so-called graphic novel has become wildly popular in the twenty-first century, with commercial publishers capitalizing on its ability to entertain a global audience of young and old readers alike. This is strange considering that it is almost two centuries old, going back to the “picture stories” of Swiss cartoonist and headmaster Rodolphe Töpffer, which he wrote by hand, printed, and distributed to his students for a laugh. Static images had been used to tell stories long before Töppfer, but this was one of the first times they were combined with words in 16

Introduction

a sequence of pages to generate an extended narrative that represented time, space, and character in some startling ways. Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey (Chapter 13) suspect that the staggering popularization of the medium and its global adaptability have a lot to do with its deceptively simplistic storytelling methods but also because of its ability to navigate between local audiences (independent publishers) and a global network of readers interested, for instance, in narratives about the holocaust (Art Spiegelman’s Maus), the Iranian revolution (Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis), the reunion of an alienated man-child with his father (Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth), and the coming out of a young woman (Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home). Baetens and Frey refuse to call the graphic novel a genre, preferring instead “medium,” because of its uncanny ability to adapt other media formats (television, radio, film, video games, and the Internet) while also adapting every available literary genre (history, autobiography, pulp fiction, biography, epic, lyric, and drama). A novel made entirely of words is not going to disappear any time soon. However, the dramatic arrival of the graphic novel has forced readers to think about some of the basic assumptions they continue to make about a genre they thought they knew. One could argue that we have Ulysses because Joyce couldn’t draw, but it’s more productive, I think, to remember that the novel has always been part of a much larger media ecology, one that has been forced in the past century to deal with such things as image saturation so common to a lived experience in the modern world. What continues to make graphic novels an antidote to image saturation is the fact that they still circulate in a codex, and no matter how chaotic the images themselves may be on a page or in a panel, readers have the freedom to linger, go back, and turn the page whenever they want. Putting images and words together to tell stories may be a modern way to think about and represent the world to ourselves, but Baetens and Frey also encourage us not to lose sight of the fact that graphic novels are a missing link between oral storytelling and storytelling in print that continue to depend for their effect on the oft-forgotten hand of the artist. The digital age has brought with it an opportunity for entirely new modes of storytelling, some of them on display in video games, others making their way into the domain of the novel. Jessica Pressman (Chapter 14) argues that rather than killing off the novel as we know it (in print between two covers), these born-digital and digitized examples provide opportunities to experiment with the form, materiality, and even the content of the genre in some remarkable ways while also redefining strategies for literary production, distribution, and reception. Consider, for example, the size of the novel. Earlier I discussed the novel’s encyclopedic ambitions without addressing a very practical question about the cost to produce, distribute, and sell it. 17

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Novels cost money, but what happens when size doesn’t matter, when the number of pages is really not an issue? The short answer is that you get a novel like Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar, which comes in twentyseven installments of 800 pages each. There are also “slim” digital novels such as The House of Paper, in which the main character, the one haunting the narrator, is a book object, and it belongs to the so-called “it-narrative” popular in the eighteenth century that trained readers to think of books as “commodities that could be used, shared, sold, and gifted.” And there are thousands of born-digital examples built on interactive media platforms that let readers navigate multiple plots simultaneously. But no matter how big, small, or interactive these digital novels become, there is a deep appreciation for the material history of the book in the digital age, one made particularly poignant when print itself is so clearly under siege. The novel may not be dead, but it is definitely data. In fact, you could even say that the twenty-first century marks one more moment in an endless innovation process that has been accelerated, this time around, by the wide availability of digitization processes that are transforming novels into numerically coded digital files that can be run through complex computational programs. This new data-driven critical approach is being used to help us understand such things as an author’s style (with word counts and their distribution), character systems (with social network analysis), the structure of the genre (with semantic and syntactical analyses), and even the emotional responses of readers (with textual analysis). Seeing novels not just as words but as quantifiable data sets makes it possible to consider what they are in the first place, what they do, and where they come from but also how they make us feel, where they travel, and how they can be read. As the members of the Stanford Literary Lab (Mark Algee-Hewitt, Eric Fredner, and Hannah Walser) demonstrate (Chapter 11), this quantitative turn is not just methodological. It can revolutionize the literary field by significantly enlarging the scale, bringing in new texts that have been forgotten, comparing texts mathematically within and across subgenres, and tracing word patterns in the corpus of a single author. Instead of working only with a handful of novels, then, to arrive at provisional conclusions, it is becoming possible to accommodate hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of different titles and in so doing allow for distant reading methods that provide a macro perspective not just on this or that genre but on literary history in general. This digital, data-driven turn in novel studies can help us return to some basic questions that have already been asked about plot, readers, characters, themes, and techniques but also to generate new ones that will invariably challenge us to think about what we’re doing when we read a novel in the first place. 18

Introduction

D. H. Lawrence was right: “The novel has a future.”27 But it’s definitely not the one he could have imagined, and I won’t pretend to have a crystal ball for literary-historical predictions. The novel’s past, though, provides enough of a map to realize two things: novels adapt to the concrete conditions of their time and place, and when they end, life goes on. The beauty of it all is that the time we do have in this world can be enriched by spending it with characters we’ve just met, other times with the ones we’ve known for quite a while (the Dorothea Brooks, Ahabs, Prince Andrews, and Mrs. Ramsays). There’s the added benefit of knowing that a community of readers, past and present, exists as well, and as the chapters that follow demonstrate, this community is there to remind us that even when we’re alone, novel reading does not have to be a solitary activity. With each twist in the plot and turn of the page, the universe of readers, characters, novelists, and other worlds expands, and with it we get to know ourselves and others. And if that’s not enough to make novel reading “very deep,” then, I’m afraid, nothing will. N O T ES 1. George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Bert Hornback, W.W. Norton, 1977, p. 69. 2. Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher, Faber, 1988. “La grande forme de la prose où l’auteur, à travers des ego expérimenteaux (personnages), examine jusqu’au bout quelques grands thèmes de l’existence.” Kundera, L’Art du roman, Gallimard, 1986, 178. 3. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1955, p. 24. 4. György Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock, MIT Press, 1971, p. 129. 5. Frederic Jameson, “No Magic, No Metaphor,” London Review of Books, vol. 39, no. 2, June 15, 2017, pp. 21–32. 6. Everyone will have a list of novels they cherish for just these reasons. That, in itself, helps to explain why those top 100 lists of the greatest novels ever written are always so contentious, making it possible for one list (“100 Best Novels in English”) to begin with James Joyce’s Ulysses and end with The Magnificent Ambersons, whereas another (“The Greatest Novels of All Time”) can put Don Quixote at the top and W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz at the bottom. The first list for best novels in English was chosen in 2009 by the editorial board of the Modern Library, its board of readers preferring to have Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in the number one slot and Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses at number 100. The second list, selected by Robert McCrum at The Guardian, was compiled in 2003. His list of the 100 greatest novels in English is bookended by Pilgrim’s Progress and the True History of the Kelly Gang. 7. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 134. 8. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. Angus Ross, Penguin, 1965, p. 156. 9. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, Harcourt, 1927, pp. 70–71. 10. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, ed. and trans. George Gibian, W.W. Norton, 1966, p. 244. 19

eric bulson 11. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, Penguin, 1973, p. 65. 12. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Northwestern University Press, 1988, pp. 571–72. 13. Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, p. 12. 14. Ibid., p. 92. 15. Ian Watt, Rise of the Novel, University of California Press, 1957, p. 74. 16. Roland Barthes, “Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard, University of California Press, 1989, pp. 141–48. 17. Catherine Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality,” in The Novel, vol. I, ed. Franco Moretti, Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 346. 18. Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now, Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 203. Brennan identifies the “fourth wave” of “third world metropolitan fiction,” but this concept extends to a wide variety of writers, many of them writing from Western metropolitan centers. 19. Quoted in Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach, ed. Michael McKeon, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000, pp. 307–8. 20. In “Epic and Novel,” he explains that his decision to focus on ancient novels was motivated by the fact that “when people talk about the ancient period of the novel they have traditionally in mind the ‘Greek novel’ alone,” adding further that “the ancient period of the novel is enormously significant for a proper understanding of the genre. But in ancient times the novel could not really develop all its potential; this potential only came to light in the modern world.” See The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Carly Emerson and Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press, 2001, pp. 39–40. 21. See Massimo Fusillo, “Modern Critical Theories and the Ancient Novel,” in The Novel in the Ancient World, ed. Gareth Schmeling, Brill, 1996, pp. 277–306; Thomas Pavel, The Lives of the Novel: A History, Princeton University Press, 2013. 22. See Andrew H. Plaks, “The Novel in Premodern China,” in The Novel, vol. I, ed. Franco Moretti, Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 195. 23. See Meenakshi Mukherjee, Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India, Oxford University Press, 1986. 24. Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, Routledge, 1992. 25. Franco Moretti, “The Novel: History and Theory,” New Left Review, vol. 52, July–August 2008, p. 118. 26. Henry Zhao, “Historiography and Fiction in Chinese Culture,” in The Novel, ed. Moretti, p. 79. 27. He continues: “Its future is to take the place of the gospels, philosophies, and the present day novel as we know it. It’s got to have the courage to tackle new propositions without using abstractions; it’s got to present us with new, really new feelings, a whole line of new emotion, which will get us out of the emotional rut. Instead of sniveling about what is and has been, or inventing new sensations in the old line, it’s got to break a way through, like a hole in the wall.” D. H. Lawrence, “The Future of the Novel” (1923), in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence: Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 155.

20

part i

What is a Novel?

1 VILASHINI C OOPPAN

The Novel as Genre

What is a novel? Perhaps the better question is what isn’t a novel? Henry James’ “large loose baggy monster” is, and indeed may always have been, the portmanteau of genres. The novel’s cannibal capacity to ingest a wide range of literary genres, modes, and forms makes of this generic monster a veritable Polyphemus, a one-eyed giant towering over literary studies, a law unto itself, strong-arming everything before it into its formal maw. As with the genre, so with its theorists – or so charge critics for whom the privileging of the novel over other genres amounts to critical myopia. In Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s trenchant phrasing, critiquing Franco Moretti’s novel-based theory of world literature, “why should the (novel in the) whole world be the task of every comparativist?”1 Earlier, Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism (1957) asserted that the “novelcentered view of prose fiction is a Ptolemaic perspective, which is now too complicated to be any longer workable, and some more relative and Copernican view must take its place.”2 Polyphemused, or Ptolemaic, critical theory that takes the novel as its ever-expanding center risks turning a single genre into a universal model. With this caution in mind, I nonetheless undertake here to excavate a theory of genre from a close consideration of the critical history of the novel. Theorists of the novel loom larger in what follows than novelists, despite the fact that whatever the theory of the novel is, it is certainly the direct consequence of novels themselves, those sociological, ideological, political, cultural, and aesthetic experiments in the representation of everyday life; historical sensibility; human subjectivity; gendered, sexualized, raced, classed, and national identity; and the engines of society. There are quite possibly as many versions of what the novel is as there are novelists and novel theorists. There is something in the novel for Marxists, feminists, historicists, queer theorists, deconstructionists, postcolonialists, psychoanalytic critics, and eighteenth-, nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-firstcenturyists, even classicists. 23

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Beginning with Ian Watt and finding admirably complex reiteration with Michael McKeon, the novel has often been described as the product of a historical tension between fact and fiction in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, something attested to by the frontispieces of early novels, with their claims to be “the veritable story of ______.”3 But the novel is so much more than fact or fiction, so much more than the story of their contest. The hallmark of the novel may well be its relative newness – novel, an unheard of wonder, a piece of unknown information, a report back from a world elsewhere, like the New World territories of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) or Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), or a world within, like the emergent interiority of bourgeois subjects reflected in the eighteenth-century epistolary novels of Samuel Richardson and Choderlos de Laclos or the nineteenth century’s fateful mix of self, society, property, and passion as chronicled by Austen, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, Eliot, Zola, James, and many more. But the novel, despite a newness retrospectively inflected with the rise of modernity, colonialism, capitalism, nationalism, individualism, and secularism, also spans a surprisingly long history, stretching back through the ancient Hellenistic proto-novels that follow The Odyssey (that most novelistic of epics), including Xenophon’s biographical Cyropaedia, The Alexander Romance falsely attributed to Calisthenes, Heliodorus’ exotic Ethiopian Story, the comedic-ribald wanderings of Apuleius’ The Golden Ass and Petronius’ Satyricon, and continuing through such global early foundations as The Tale of Genji, Don Quixote, Oroonoko, and La Princesse de Clèves, in all of which courtly romance and prose fiction joust, on toward its eighteenth-century consolidation, through the period of European colonialism and imperialism that saw the nineteenthcentury novel’s modular spread, and on to postmodern and postcolonial iterations of this global genre.4 So vast and various a genre cannot be indexed with any real thoroughness here, nor is a catalog of multiple accounts of the novel my major purpose. Rather, I hope to craft through a necessarily impressionistic survey of theory about the novel a portrait of a genre that is known one way (as A, as B) but operates as well in quite another way (as X, as Y) – like Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, so young and new on the surface, so old and abiding beneath. This duality, I will argue, is a hallmark of the novel and of genre too. Both are categories marked by dialectical form, that is, an interplay of contradictory forces. I began with the question, what is the novel? Perhaps the novel answers, like wily Odysseus wrapped in sheep’s clothing beneath the watchful eye of Polyphemus, to the name of “nobody.” Nobody’s novel describes a genre whose genius is to be everything and nothing, a category without which modern genre theory is unthinkable yet a category that swallows itself to the 24

The Novel as Genre

point of disappearance, something that can be understood as a proper name (The Novel) and as a series of proprietary names (The Novelists) yet which also operates, as Jacques Derrida suggests, as a generic law of perpetual transformation, and, not least of all, a genre that in small ways and large evades the critical gaze that would capture it. To attempt to define the novel as a genre is risky, even quixotic. The object of the analysis is so monstrously indefinite, so historically long and geographically broad, so diverse in its modes (realism, sentimentalism, naturalism, magical realism, postmodernism, localism, globalism), and so cannibal in its appetites that to hazard a taxonomic description is surely to court being swallowed by the object itself, as if in some Borgesian nightmare. We all tilt at windmills, however, and in that task we must reach for such aid as we can. This chapter might just as well have been titled (with apologies to Dr. Strangelove), “Genre: Or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Novel.” I am proposing, for scholars and lovers of the novel alike, the usefulness of genre as a category that helps us to understand not only the what and whence of the novel – its nature (and culture), its history (and future) – but also the novel’s whys. Why does this particular form of prose fiction do the things that it does? Why does it move so stealthily and powerfully across the globe? Why does it additionally move human beings, charging and channeling the mysteries of sentimental identification? Why does it condense, again and again, the historical sensibility of a moment, capturing what it is to live now, live here, live this way? Why does the novel, as a genre, occupy time and space and heart and mind in the ways that it does? And why should thinking through these whys change our grasp of the novel’s, and genre’s, what? To answer all these questions in detail is well outside the scope of this chapter. I pose them, however, to signal the possibilities of genre theory, to signpost where one might alight in the quest of critical genre theory. In The Ideology of Genre (1994), Thomas Beebee identifies “four stages of genre criticism – genre as rules, genre as species, genre as patterns of textual features, and genre as reader conventions [that] correspond to the four positions in the great debate about the location of textual meaning: in authorial intention, in the work’s historical or literary context, in the text itself, or in the reader.”5 Such stages follow the passage from classical genre theory (Aristotle above all), to the nineteenth-century phylogeny of genres (Ferdinand Brunetière), to narratologic formalism in the early twentieth century, through to postwar structuralism, reader-response criticism, and, I would add, poststructuralism. The analytic object I have called “Nobody’s Novel” cannot be read merely by naming its generic rules, its species or individual history, its formal attributes, or its variously housed “meaning.” Taking “nobody” 25

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as a sign for a deanthropomorphized history of the novel, in what follows I propose the virtues of taking a different approach to the novel and to genre theory itself. Certain scales of the human fall away as I index approaches that focus on the novel’s commodity status as a circulating good, a market force, a literary gold standard, even as other scales of the human continue to pulse – the novel’s capacity to structure subjectivity, to produce sentiment, and to “sediment history,” to borrow Fredric Jameson’s phrase.6 Nobody’s genre is one that takes a shape only to change its shape. As such, the novel offers a powerful invitation for genre theory that takes its cue from processual change rather than cumulative inheritance, from becoming rather than arriving, from Odyssean twists and turns rather than straight lines. A Swiftly Tilting Genre The Oxford English Dictionary defines “genre” as “1: kind, sort, species, style, category kind; 2: a category of artistic composition characterized by a particular style, form or content.” Genre encompasses both an object of analysis and the method, the particular sorting strategy, that allows said object to come into view. Because differentiation is indispensable to genre theory, many accounts of the novel describe its particularity, especially its much-vaunted newness, by comparing it to other genres, be it the epic, romance, and travel narrative with which Behn’s Oroonoko, the first novel in the English tradition, does battle, or the penitent’s confession, sermon, treatise on political economy, sailor’s yarn, and ship’s record that insert themselves into Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), the other contender for the title of first English novel. In both Oroonoko and Robinson Crusoe, these interweavings establish a network of connection that mirrors in generic form the capitalist world system coalescing into colonial form in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. We additionally invest the empirically differentiating category of genre with an almost mystical capacity to trace history and predict the future. As Claudio Guillén explains in Literature as System (1971): [T]he concept of genre looks forward and backward at the same time . . . Backward, toward the literary works that already exist. Forward, in the direction of the apprentice, the future writer, the informed critic. A genre is a descriptive statement, but, rather often, a declaration of faith as well. Looking toward the future, then, the conception of a particular genre may not only incite or make possible the writing of a new work; it may provoke, later on, the critic’s search for the total form of the same work.7 26

The Novel as Genre

Genre theory and genre theorists also navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of empirical measurement and occult possession, as can be seen in the dual tendencies to tell the story of the novel, on the one hand, as if it were a measurable scientific phenomenon, like the evolution of a species or the patterning of the stars, and, on the other hand, as if it were the story of our very selves, the stuff of dream and fantasy. As a sigil for generic history’s servants, consider the words of Cervantes himself in chapter 47 of Don Quixote, speaking as a canon from Toledo excoriating novels of chivalry: 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.8

The monstrous hybridity feared by the canon is nothing other than the novel’s (Cervantes’ but also everyone else’s) form: the “cut-n-mix” sampling of whatever material falls to hand, the inventive synthesis of old with new, fact with fiction, social with imaginative, political with personal. Both chimera and chameleon, the novel is defined by the ongoing nature of its hybridity. Mikhail Bakhtin’s paean to the perpetual newness and liveness of the novel captures it thus: “As form, the novel establishes as fluctuating yet firm balance between becoming and being; as the idea of becoming, it becomes a state. Thus the novel, by transforming itself into a normative being of becoming, surmounts itself.”9 In this presciently postmodern formulation, the novel is less essence than process, a genre that is always in the mode of becoming other, to paraphrase Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. For Bakhtin, the novel overcomes its overwhelming “lack of limits,” its “‘bad’ infinity,” through “recourse to the biographical form.” For Bakhtin, this means that the novel’s impossible effort as a “conceptual system” to capture life – the quixotic quest for totality – finds its resting point in a form, like that of “the individuality of a living being,” that straddles the divide between specific identity and worldly context.10 It is not merely that the novel concerns the lives of individuals (“the development of a man is still the thread upon which the whole world of the novel is strung and along which it unrolls”) but, more significantly, that the novel as a genre invites individualization, subjectification, and anthropomorphization.11 Why is the plot and scale of human time the one to which the theory of the novel turns? Why are we so quick to attribute a life to the novel or, for that matter, a birth and a death? Why are we so drawn to the taxonomy of proper names and particular places, as if the history of the novel could unfold like 27

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a biography or a sailor’s chart? Marthe Robert’s Origins of the Novel (1980) offers a fine example of the latter strain, diagnosing the generic equivalent of a Freudian primal scene in the novel’s history, something to which the novel returns again and again, namely, a gendered quest to find and tame otherness, otherwise known as Romance, with its adventure trials, conflicts, and resolutions. The chronological antecedent of Romance becomes for Robert the genre’s interiority, that which it cannot escape and compulsively repeats, “a pre-romanticised fancy, the outline of a plot which is not only the inexhaustible source of subsequent plots, but the one convention to which it is willing to submit.”12 For Robert, the novel is an unruly child that receives from literature as such no hard and fast directions or interdictions; be it popular or highbrow, old or new, classical or modern, its only rules are derived from the family setting whose unconscious desires it perpetuates; so that while its psychic content and motivations are completely pre-determined, it is totally free to choose one or more of the various structures and styles at its disposal.13

The anthropomorphic account of the novel is striking: why the impetus to tell the story of the novel as if the genre were human, possessed of a psyche, an unconscious, even agential choice? For Robert, “primal romance” is generic all: [M]ore than simply the psychological origins of the genre; it [primal romance] is the genre, with all its inexhaustible possibilities and congenital childishness, the false, frivolous grandiose, mean, subversive and gossipy genre of which each of us is indeed the issue . . . and which, moreover, recreates for each of us a remnant of our primal love and primal reality.14

In a rather different meditation on the novel’s housing of romance within its generic protocols, Michael McKeon asserts that “the origins of the English novel entail the positing of a ‘new’ generic category as a dialectical negation of a ‘traditional’ dominance – the romance, the aristocracy – whose character still saturates, as an antithetical but constitutive force, the texture of the category by which it is in the process of being replaced.”15 What McKeon calls the novel’s “definitional volatility” is in point of fact the volatility of genre itself as a category. So it is that “we may see that the early development of the novel is our great example of the way that the birth of genres results from a momentary negation of the present so intense that it attains the positive status of a new tradition . . . this broader dialectical reversal . . . [and] tendency to dissolve into its antithesis . . . encapsulates the dialectical nature of historical process itself at a critical moment in the emergence of the modern world.”16 Thanks to this diagnosis of the oscillations of generic time – the spectral haunting of the generic present by a never altogether 28

The Novel as Genre

sublated generic past – both the novel and the theory of the novel become engagements with nonlinear time. This is sharply different from Watt’s mere rise. Time, I would contend, is the hidden lever in the theory of novelistic genre, that which extends the incipient biographicalism in telling the “story” of the novel to a broader philosophical inquiry into the relationship between the novel, the subject, and the world. Genre is chronotopical, to use Bakhtin’s term for the process in which “time thickens out, takes on flesh, and becomes artistically visible, likewise space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history.”17 It is in the novel’s language where Bakhtin detects the flesh of time, locating the “germs of novelistic prose” in the “decentered language” that emerges in moments marked by the “decay and collapse of the religious, political and ideological authority connected with that language,” as, for instance, in the Hellenistic era, Imperial Rome, and the Middle Ages.18 Decentered language shapes meaning not by monological power but “by means of heteroglossia,” the many-voicedness that for Bakhtin comprises the material stuff of novelistic prose and its revolutionary effect. The Renaissance and Protestantism destroy the verbal and ideological centralization of the medieval era, ushering in the “Galilean language of the novel,” as opposed to the Ptolemaic linguistic consciousness of traditional styles.19 Don Quixote might then be positioned as Stephen Moore sees it: decisively split between the eponymous protagonist’s irrational belief in chivalric literature and Catholic religion (“A medieval man, he still believes in the Ptolemaic view of the universe and prefers prayer to perception”) and his companion Sancho’s pragmatic modernity, cast as the empiricism of an inquiring mind that wants to know.20 Don Quixote looks back to romance; Sancho looks forward to an essentially skeptical tradition (Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Gustave Flaubert, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and on to James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace). This essentially historical division, however, threatens to reinscribe novelistic genre in a tale whose temporality mimics that of linear history (to say nothing of progeniture). By focusing on the linguistic capacity for endless internal differentiation as the mark of the novel’s historical newness and its constitutive, perpetual break from authoritarianism, Bakhtin’s theory of novelistic genre tunes into a set of measures – language, time, space, form – that produces not a metronomical model in which the pendulum between ancients and moderns swings sometimes wide, sometimes narrow, nor a filiative model of novelistic fathers and sons, but rather a model more monstrous, inhuman even, in its image of a cannibal genre that heteroglossically digests the world. Such is the magnitude of the novel that it even swallows other genres. So where Northrop Frye disaggregates genre 29

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(romance, tragedy, comedy, irony), Bakhtin unifies it into the novel’s capacity to unite all genres and to serve as “an encyclopaedia of all types of literary language of the epoch.”21 Put differently, if Frye’s anatomy of criticism vivisects genre, Bakhtin’s account brings the novel to heterogeneous life, pulsing across two and a half millennia and, with a fine disregard for the spatiotemporal barriers of history, ever heeding and frequently anticipating the modernist call to make it new. The novel’s newness takes on a quite different cast in the hands of Walter Benjamin, who shrouds the genre in a mournful landscape of loss, memory, and melancholy. Benjamin’s essay, “The Storyteller,” urges us to “image the transformation of epic forms occurring in rhythms comparable to those of the change that has come over the earth’s surface in the course of thousands of centuries . . . it took the novel, whose beginnings go back to antiquity, hundreds of years before it encountered in the evolving middle class those elements which were favorable to its flowering.”22 Alluvial in its flow, the novel’s generic history is punctuated with sharp moments, for instance, the rise of the ideology of the individual. So, for Benjamin, “the birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual,” the latter’s rise concomitant with the decline of storytelling’s oral tradition and collective culture.23 Storytelling produces a community of experience, whereas the novel, because “the novelist has isolated himself,” becomes the record of a radical aloneness. The novel “gives evidence of the profound perplexity of the living,” and it is nothing other than Don Quixote, “the first great book of the genre,” that Benjamin cites as proof of the novel’s generic preoccupation with how the greatest, the boldest, the noblest in the end “do not contain the slightest scintilla of wisdom.”24 If the novel is didactic in forms such as the bildungsroman, it is merely an attempt to cover unending human confusion with the veneer of a forward-moving “social process.”25 The novel is magic, and not necessarily good magic. More like cheap sleight-of-hand or, in the metaphor Benjamin favors, modernity’s copy of something done better, more authentically (one is tempted to say more humanly) in the past. For all that novel and storytelling figure agonistically – the former the product of the atomized society of print capitalism, the latter the work of a lost culture of listening while “weaving and spinning” – what the two genres do share is the work of memory. For Benjamin, “memory is the epic faculty par excellence,” and epic itself, that “oldest form” of “the record kept by memory,” is “a kind of common denominator [that] includes the story and the novel.”26 Memory is what turns story and novel from historical antagonists to secret sharers. The “perpetuating remembrance” of the novel and the “short-lived reminiscence” of the story (which “preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of 30

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releasing it even after a long time”) are a present distinction that reveals a past connection, “the unity of their origin in memory having disappeared with the decline of the epic.”27 As an exercise in genre history, Benjamin’s essay turns on the diagnosis of something hidden within a particular form that reveals not its self-sameness but its ghostly doubleness, its coexistence with what precedes and follows it. “The Storyteller” also offers, against the sequential lines and breaks of genre history, a series of interpenetrating, crisscrossing lines, one as striking as that which Benjamin praises as the work of storytelling catalyzed by memory, the weaving of “the web which all stories together form in the end.”28 As inviting as it is to read the account in “The Storyteller” of the decline of storytelling’s Scheherezadian art as a chronicle of loss, ending, and spinning out, for which the novel serves as modernity’s lesser twin, it is equally possible to discern in the essay’s various resistances to such rise and fall, start and stop temporalities the shape of another kind of genre history, one that I will call nonlinear. The flow-forward/flashback movement of Benjamin’s biography of the novel reveals it, and genre too, as indubitably marked by time, not just moving through time but experienced as a negotiation of time, be it the large scale of social and species being or the work of memory or the apprehension of history. This account of preserved traces and spectral presences that remain even as they are recombined yields a particular orientation to the novel as genre. Benjamin’s account of the novel, like McKeon’s similarly dialectical one, situates it as a break with older forms of culture and narration yet also unravels the presence of the old that has been lost, the haunting Mnemosyne within. It is this ghost within the novel machine, this animate spirit behind narrative techne (art or craft), that invites a reading of its generic multiplicity. Genre’s technology is a virtual one, meaning that it regularly activates a potential that lies within it, like the alien in John Hurt’s belly or the swallowed men whose revenge Odysseus will take in blinding Polyphemus. Genre’s time does not simply grind forward in the style of historical progress. True, each new generic instance cannibalizes its predecessor; genres are monsters, and they eat their old. Yet genres, by virtue of their forward/back, stop/start machinery, regularly call into question the foundational assumptions that cause them to be named as such. Hence the classificatory confusion that is marked in certain postmodern fiction, with its encroaching footnotes, metacritical narrative voice, and language pyrotechnics, or in such contemporary developments as the digital novel in email, text, and IM form is, far from the “end” of the novel, a kind of look homeward (conjure what angels you will, Wolfe’s and Benjamin’s) to a past that keeps coming back. The line between Cervantes and Pynchon 31

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narrows, allowing us to see genre as a way to name an electric current of sorts, an energy flow that in the end survives and transcends critical capture. Jameson describes the process thus: This final moment of the generic operation, in which the working categories of genre are themselves historically deconstructed and abandoned, suggests a final axiom, according to which all generic categories, even the most time-hallowed and traditional, are ultimately to be understood (or “estranged”) as mere ad hoc, experimental constructs, devised for a specific textual occasion and abandoned like so much scaffolding when the analysis has done its work.29

If generic definition is doomed to obsolescence, if the good it does is oft interred with its bones, it nonetheless serves the useful purpose of showing exactly what a particular moment finds important – important enough to play content to a particular generic form. It is in this light that we might consider the antiauthoritarianism, individualism, nationalism, capitalism, domesticity, imperialism, subjectivity, empiricism, etc. that have so regularly been linked to the novel, like so many limpets on a strange creature of the briny sea. The novel is never just one thing. Even the taxonomy of singularity fails, as witness the narrative of the genre’s eighteenth-century origins in the fact/ fiction tension, chimerically grafted in Robinson Crusoe, or the account of the novel’s branching evolution into epistolary, gothic, and realist modes, the latter tending, on the one hand, to the historical (Scott, Balzac, Tolstoy) and, on the other, to the domestic (Austen, Eliot, Trollope), or the tale of modernism’s wholesale capture of the novel by, and for, language. The fact is that the novel was never fully tamed, never adequately contained within a definition, never readily consigned to this or that period of history. Thus a description like Steven Moore’s can only be caricatural (as Moore himself knows – it’s a warning not a beacon): “realistic narratives driven by a strong plot and peopled by well-rounded characters struggling with serious ethical issues, conveyed in language anybody can understand.”30 The novel is this thing, true, but it is so many other things beside and simultaneously. Tony Tanner takes adultery as both a central topic of and model for the novel, which “might almost be said to be a transgressive mode, inasmuch as it seemed to break, or mix, or adulterate the existing genre-expectations of the time.”31 Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Dorothea Brooke, and Catherine Linton are heroines of the novel and a telos for the novel. Their thrust is not to marriage as an end in itself but as a state that demands its undoing, its canceling, what Marxist criticism like Jameson’s calls its dialectical transformation. What Bakhtin calls “this most fluid of genres” is perhaps better conceived, like genre itself, as a flow rather than an end.32 We will not find the nature of 32

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the novel searching between a rock and a hard place but rather by riding the “wave,” to borrow one of Moretti’s units for world literary analysis, of its movement. The novel is not a critical shibboleth, a thing like Marlow’s empire, “something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to.”33 No idol and no ideal, the novel might be better analogized to the sea, that Conradian force of change, all ebbs and flows of space and time, a thing of global spread and emotional recall. Contemplating the “waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth” on the deck of the Nellie, Marlow says: “We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs forever, but in the august light of abiding memories.”34 To have “‘followed the sea,’” Marlow adds, is to be able “to evoke the great spirit of the past upon the lower reaches of the Thames.” “The sea is history,” writes Derek Walcott in a poem of the same name.35 Walcott’s lyric rewriting in Omeros of Homer’s Odyssey is an example of the way in which genres are haunted by their predecessors yet in that haunting perpetually remake themselves. Think too of the novelistic rewritings of Homer: Joyce’s Ulysses, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Wilson Harris’ Palace of the Peacock and the larger Guyana Quartet, Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, and Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey. As a figure for critical genre theory, to follow the sea is to see the presence of the past flashing forth, to use Benjamin’s figure,36 into the present, to see the novel not only for its newness but for its oldness too and not only as a category but also as a process. Here we would do well to remember Benjamin’s distinction in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” between mere historicism, which “gives the ‘eternal’ image of the past,” and dialectical historical materialism, which eschews such continuity in favor of stop-start rhythms. If historicism yields “universal history,” historical materialism enables “not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well” and in that moment of arrest (“where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions”) what is produced is a “shock.” This shock makes it possible to apprehend in the “cessation of happening” an opening toward something else, a future from which the past is neither mere antecedent nor obsolescent. This is a way of dwelling in time as if in the third stage of Hegel’s dialectic, where thesis and antithesis are simultaneously preserved and annulled in the synthesis (aufheben). This, I argue, is the time of genre and thus the time of the novel when considered through genre theory. Read thus, the novel is never just itself and is always open to futurity. Like the “No, not yet . . . no, not there” with which E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India concludes, as Fielding’s and Aziz’s horses crash against one another and draw apart, the novel itself is animated by a suspension, a cessation, or a pregnant waiting, what we might call the freeze-frame of generic time, as opposed to its 33

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alluvial flows.37 Read through genre theory, the novel is both snapshot and substrate, both the congealed form of a particular history (say, waning British imperialism and rising anticolonial nationalism in Forster’s novel) and the ongoing wave of transformation, the altered state that ensues when something is exported, expanded, taken up, taken apart, adopted, adapted. To understand the novel as both a nodal point of condensation and a networked pattern of connectivity is to place it in the realm of yet another kind of history, this one not dialectical but nonlinear. The Novel and the World: A Nonlinear History Manuel De Landa’s A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, with its titular nod to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, embraces the nonlinear as that which resists the analytics of sequence, stage, and telos; foregrounds interactions between parts rather than sum totals; and thus arrives at a notion of history in which each new phase, be it geologic, biological, human, linguistic, cultural, agricultural, or urban, “simply added itself to the other ones, coexisting and interacting with them without leaving them in the past.”38 De Landa’s map of nonlinear history recalls the rhizomatic map of A Thousand Plateaus, a map with no center and no periphery, no top and no bottom, but structured instead by points of density or saturation and by lines of connection or departure, a map in motion. Taking nonlinearity as a philosophical approach to genre, we can foreground the novel’s formative relationship to history and memory, both of which reveal (like genre itself) the coexistence of multiple times. Genre’s palimpsestic, sedimentary time, rhizomatic space, and recombinant form enable its functioning as memory, both in large-scale histories of literary form and period and in accounts, such as Benjamin’s, Jameson’s, or McKeon’s, that pinpoint how a particular form condenses a particular moment, providing a formal resolution of historical contradiction. If the former acts of genre memory are, to borrow a category from Deleuze and Guattari, sequential-teleological or “arborescent,” the latter are rhizomatic, understanding the very object of the analysis (here novelistic genre) to, in Deleuze and Guattari’s words, “act at a distance, come or return a long time after, but always under conditions of discontinuity, rupture, and multiplicity.”39 Novelistic genre cannot be thought of as a singular thing – not only because of the novel’s own heterogeneity, its cannibal combination of prior influences, but also because of the heterogeneity, and the heterochronicity, of genre itself. At its largest scale, the novel’s generic multiplicity renders it world historical, but in such a way as to offer us a chance to reconceptualize what we mean by both world and history. 34

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The novel is, for Lukács and Bakhtin, as later for Moretti and other world literature theorists, a world genre. This is far more than a genre with the world as the content of its form. As a world genre, the novel is marked by a sensibility of interconnection, what world literature theory often figures as the networked lines of times and spaces: ellipses (to borrow David Damrosch’s figure)40 of old texts coming back around in new uploads, patterns of influence (not always anxious), a substrate of textual connectivity across what Dimock refers to as deep time: “at once projective and recessional, with input going both ways, and binding continents and millennia into many loops of relations.”41 World is both a space and a time and, beyond that, a methodology of reading that finds its Archimedean lever, as does genre theory itself, on the axis of time. The novel emerges from certain regimes of space (nationalism, imperialism, transnationalism, globalization), but its history reminds us that such spaces, no less than the genres that mirror them, are always also forms of time. Mixed, multiple, and multidirectional, genre offers a window onto not merely the history of genre but also history itself. For genre theory, history is an inescapable backdrop of the novel. History is what animates the novelistic individual character moving in time against the backdrop of larger events, as for Bakhtin and, later, György Lukács. History is furthermore the real of the global-colonial world system that finds itself “haunted and tattooed” onto the map of the novel’s form in Fredric Jameson’s world-systems informed reading.42 But history is also what comes back, comes around, demands remembering, finds the possibility of unforgetting in the formal resolutions of the novel. The implicit relationality of novel to world, the representational form to the historical real, is central to the Marxist literary theory of the novel, and its claim for the radical secularism of the novel is a foundational one. For Lukács, the novel unfolds in a world without “immanence of meaning,” a world without God, in which meaning is “found everywhere.” “Inconsolably sad,” the novel is nonetheless capable of issuing a “song of comfort”: the “affirmation of life that seems to emanate from it [the novel] as a mood is nothing other than the resolving of its form-conditioned dissonances, the affirmation of its own, form-created substances.”43 Novelistic form comforts by registering the felt immediacy of historical loss and further absorbing that feeling – Lukács’ “melancholy of form.” Immediate apprehension is thus turned to some broader historical consciousness or sensibility, some looking back, living after, knowing, for which the novel serves as an imaginative archive. So it is that the novel captures “the feeling of an age,” turning history’s events to form’s residues. For Lukács, as for so many other of the genre’s anatomists, the novel is both formal structure and philosophical mode, a strictly dissonant style of 35

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knowing that negotiates the gap between “the conventionality of the objective world and the interiority of the subjective one.” As Timothy Bewes elegantly phrases it, in Lukács, “the novel designates less a form or genre than a condition in which form and content are for the first time radically heterogeneous.”44 Such heterogeneity has been central to readings of the novel’s life, as, for example, in Bakhtin’s celebration of heteroglossia, dialogism, newness, and perpetual becoming. But the heterogeneous substrate of the form has equally been understood to describe what might be called the novel’s life work, its historical function, its form as a condensation of history itself. Seen through the novel, the familiar cycle of history’s repetitive overturn is more than the same damn thing over and over again – first time as tragedy, second time as farce, but perhaps always as novel. The temporal coordinates of the novel here extend beyond the chronotope so famously associated with Bakhtin’s theory of the novel to encompass a sense of historical time itself as novelistic, that is to say, wildly differentiated, nonlinearly coexistent, palimpsestically layered. Read chronotopically (through the process by which Bakhtin says “time thickens out, takes on flesh, and becomes artistically visible, likewise space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history”45), the genre of the novel is marked by spatiotemporal densities both internal to the form (melancholy) and external to the form (dissemination, evolution, accretion). The latter is part of what Dimock means when she casts genre as “a planetary phenomenon, an evolving field spread across temporal as well as geographical coordinates.” A genre’s spread is for Dimock its cumulative reuse, the “recycling that bring[s] it back, break[s] it up, and redistribute[s] it across a variety of locations, a variety of platforms.”46 In another instance of nonanthropomorphic genre theory, Dimock elsewhere glosses genre as virtual, “a runaway reproductive process: offbeat, offcenter, and wildly exogenous.”47 When a genre is virtual, she adds, its “key attributes” become “stackability, switchability, and scalability.” Genre further works through “regenreing: or cumulative reuse, an alluvial process, sedimentary as well as migratory.”48 These scales are important. Despite its long-standing equation with the real (recall Henry James’ snapshot description of the novel as a mirror held up to life or the earlier eighteenth-century genealogy of the novel’s debt to fact), the novel’s generic virtuality highlights its ongoing capacity for change, its steady state of constant change, its perpetual process of becoming other, and, not least of all, its status as a formal process that may take individual subjectivity as one of its representational targets, even perhaps effects, but in the end cannot be explained by such subjectivity alone. 36

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Dimock’s departure point, Jacques Derrida’s “The Law of Genre,” accomplishes this critical task by taking genre out of the rhetoric of mastery, with its stealth subject of knowledge, and into the disseminatory textual economy of errancy. It is not the quixotic critic but genre itself that is knight errant: turning and twisting, tilting and transforming. For Derrida, genre operates less by selection and sequence than by combination, even contamination, and coexistence.49 If the category of genre tends to teleology, codifying the vagaries of literary movement (rises, falls, births, deaths) into historical lineages, genre operates equally through nonlinear processes of interaction, selection, and combination, revealing an essentially recombinant structure and questioning the discourse of origins itself. Thus genre for Derrida is not a point of origin, still less a law of reproduction, but rather something that is always running from, yet routing back through, itself. In this formal feedback loop, each successive iteration or “contamination” of genre becomes part of the system. Impurity, antioriginal heterogeneity, is especially germane to the novel, that historically mixed form, as is also the conceptualization of genre not as a fixed essence but rather as a process. World-systems style and world-literature approaches to the novel have turned precisely from the inner workings of the form to large networked patterns of generic movement over time. As literary critics indebted to Immanuel Wallerstein, including Franco Moretti, Pascale Casanova, and Roberto Schwarz, have intuited, literary genres are elements within a world system.50 Like any other commodity form, both genre’s forms and flows can be mapped, traced, for instance, though the linear succession of capitalist cores and peripheries described in Wallerstein’s account of the world capitalist economy or through the more uneven coexistence of capitalist and noncapitalist structures, European and non-European world-scale economies. The former allows us to tell the story of the novel’s proto-imperial “rise”; the latter the story of its postcolonial “spread.” But such temporalizations of generic modernity are not sufficient, for genre’s time is more than this. If genre can be understood to operate as a world system, it is also equally the ghost within the system – a memory or trace of something long gone. Genre is mappable not only in its rises and spreads, its cores and peripheries, but also in its holdings: the melancholic interior of the form, encrypted around a loss that the form itself preserves and even in some form redresses. Genre theory of the novel, then, can turn both to the zone of what Lukács called the novel’s inner melancholy of form and what I would term the novel’s affective intensities, as well as turn outward to the disseminatory energy of the novel’s global spread. Despite a professional foot in world literature, I have been unable to consider the novel as simply one flow among others, yet another commodity 37

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caught in the circuits of the global capitalist system as it centralizes, expands, and feeds new resources back to some center, in the model described by Casanova (with a distinctly Eurocentric, even Paris-centric, cast) and complicated by other world literature theorists.51 For all that I embrace Dimock’s vision, figured as “a model of recursive kinship,” of a literary history that “loops the gnarled contours of the globe through the gnarled contours of every single node,” the warp and woof of this fabric ends up being American.52 More tempting to me has been the unearthing of a specific logic of racial-colonial capitalism, the system Eric Williams and C. L. R. James have understood to provide the extra-European motor for such iconically European inventions as the French Revolution and the British Empire and the possibility that the novel might follow that process, as Moretti suggests in his claim that the uptake of novelistic form into local materials outside Europe invigorated the genre into a global phenomenon.53 But these flow-based, world-systems-oriented models take us only so far in examining the novel’s broader cultural role, its part in negotiating, resisting, coming to terms with, and moving on from the haunting history of racial capitalism and historical trauma. To answer this question, the novel needs to be considered not only as a world object but as a kind of prototype for the world subject, a genre inimically linked to the categories of subjectivity, interiority, epistemology, power/knowledge, and ideology and further routed, equally irrevocably, through the psychic terrain of affective life. In a foundational Foucauldian analysis of the novel, Nancy Armstrong suggests that we might expect the history of the novel to provide the record of the power that helped to determine how people understood themselves as individuals and what they thought it meant to be happy and free . . . we should be able to read the history of the novel as the formation of the individual who proved fit to inhabit a world based on the twin powers of supervision and information control, a world, in short, like ours.54

In the current moment of dystopian fiction’s resurgence (since the 2016 election of Donald Trump, sales of Brave New World, 1984, and The Handmaid’s Tale have skyrocketed), it is hard not to concede the degree to which novelistic form provides a shorthand not only for the individuals created by a particular social regime but also for the regimes of self and society per se. Chicken and egg, novel and nation, representation and reality – it’s not which comes first but, true to the dialectical form of the genre, that one can’t exist without the other. This, of course, is Benedict Anderson’s influential thesis of the novel as an imaginative technology for the nation form, thanks to its peculiar capture of accumulating time, circulating 38

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connection, and the experience of community in anonymity, each reader of novel or newspaper aware of others like him or her, caught in the same world, experiencing the same thing.55 What Armstrong diagnoses beyond the homology of novel and nation is the role that the former plays in the making of the subject assumed by the latter. Citing Rousseau, social contract theorist, autobiographer, and novelist, Armstrong reminds us of the entwined threads (society, self, human nature, social culture, free desire, practiced restraint) that combine to produce an idea of “an individual capable of transforming his own historical circumstances through the production of laws that are at once the extension and containment of his desires.”56 It is just such an individual that Armstrong shows the novel to produce, indeed to model. At once desiring and disciplined, this Foucauldian individual’s emergence tells the story of the novel’s domesticating work, by which we should understand not only the specifically gendered realm of “domestic fiction” but also domestication as a particular technology of novelistic world-making, the crafting of subjects of desire caught within networks of capitalized power. This is similar to what Jameson detects in Henry James’ creation, through his hallmark point of view technique, of “strategic loci for the fully constituted or centered bourgeois subject or monadic ego” – the very ego that capitalism is invested in creating, and also the very novelistic individual around which, Dorothy J. Hale argues, revolve a series of ethical dilemmas involving telling, lying, acting (out), betraying, knowing the self and the other, staging the impossibility of just such a knowing.57 Such subjects of the novel, emerging through Armstrong’s Foucauldian analytics or Jameson’s Marxist-psychoanalytic “political unconscious” or ethical criticism’s detection of a prototype for the subject of human rights in fictional characters “produced as ‘human,’”58 are not the romanticized Freudian humans of Robert’s account of the novel as primal romance. Rather, these are novelistic subjects emerging through the lens of poststructuralist reading and returning us to where I began this chapter, with James’ identification of the novel as a “loose baggy monster.” Stitched together like Frankenstein’s creature from an assemblage of parts, precariously positioned at the nexus of fables of origin and evolution, life and death, humanity and monstrosity, creation and destruction, the novel repeatedly invites the creature’s own question: “Who am I?” To answer “Nobody” is in the end to attest to the wily work of the novel’s wor(l)ds. N O T ES 1. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline, Columbia University Press, 2003, p. 108, n. 1. 39

vilashini cooppan 2. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Princeton University Press, 1971, p. 304. 3. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, Fielding (1957), University of California Press, 2001; Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. 4. Steven Moore offers an irreverently encyclopedic narrative of the earlier span, emphasizing the pleasures both of the genre and of generic history, in The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600, vol. 1, Continuum International, 2010, and The Novel: An Alternative History: 1600–1800, vol. 2, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. See also Michael Schmidt, The Novel: A Biography, Harvard University Press, 2014; and the foundational cartographies of Franco Moretti’s own Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900, Verso, 1999; and collected volumes, The Novel, vol. 1, History, Geography, Culture and The Novel, vol. 2, Forms and Themes, Princeton University Press, 2007. 5. Thomas O. Beebee, The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative Study of Generic Instability, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994, p. 3. 6. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Cornell University Press, 1981, p. 141. 7. Claudio Guillén, Literature as System: Essays toward the Theory of Literary History, Princeton University Press, 1971, p. 109. 8. Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Edith Grossman, Ecco, 2003, as quoted by Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History, vol. 2, p. 3. 9. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press, 1981, p. 73. 10. Ibid., p. 77. 11. Ibid., p. 82. 12. Marthe Robert, The Origins of the Novel, Harvester Press, 1980, p. 31. 13. Ibid., p. 31. 14. Ibid., p. 32. 15. Michael McKeon, “Generic Transformation and Social Change: Rethinking the Rise of the Novel,” in Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach, ed. Michael McKeon, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000, pp. 382–99, 396. 16. Ibid., p. 396. 17. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 84. 18. Ibid., p. 370. 19. Ibid., p. 415. 20. Cervantes, Don Quixote, vol. 2, p. 14. 21. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 396; Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 1957, Princeton University Press, 1971. 22. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, Schocken, 1968, pp. 83–109, 88. 23. Ibid., p. 87. 24. Ibid., p. 87. 25. Ibid., p. 88. 26. Ibid., p. 97. 27. Ibid., p. 101. 28. Ibid., p. 98. 29. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 145. 40

The Novel as Genre 30. Moore, The Novel, vol. 1, p. 3. 31. Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979, p. 3. 32. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 11. 33. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Modern Library/Random House, 1999, p. 8. 34. Ibid., p. 4. 35. Derek Walcott, “The Sea Is History,” in Selected Poems, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. For a wonderful account of the novel’s love affair with the sea, see Margaret Cohen, The Novel and the Sea, Princeton University Press, 2012. 36. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, Shocken, 1968, pp. 253–64, 262. 37. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India, Harcourt, 1984, p. 362. 38. Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, Zone Books, 1997, p. 16. 39. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 39. 40. David Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, Princeton University Press, 2003. 41. Vilashini Cooppan, Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing, Stanford University Press, 2009; WaiChee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time, Princeton University Press, 2008, p. 3. 42. Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 347–60. 43. György Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (1957), MIT Press, 1983, p. 123. 44. Timothy Bewes, “The Novel Problematic,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 44, no. 1, 2011, pp. 17–19, 17; Lukacs, Theory of the Novel, p. 70, as quoted by Bewes. 45. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 84. 46. Wai-Chee Dimock, “Recycling the Epic: Gilgamesh on Three Continents,” English Language Notes, vol. 51, no. 1, 2013, pp. 19–34, 20. 47. Wai-Chee Dimock, “Introduction: Genres as Fields of Knowledge,” PMLA, vol. 122, no. 5, 2007, pp. 1377–88, 1379. 48. Dimock, “Introduction: Genres as Fields of Knowledge,” p. 1380. 49. Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” trans. Avital Ronell, Critical Inquiry, vol. 7, no. 1, 1980, pp. 55–81. 50. See Moretti, Atlas; Moretti, The Novel; Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, trans. John Gledson, Verso, 1992; and Roberto Schwarz, Master on the Periphery of Capitalism: Machado de Assis, trans. John Gledson, Duke University Press, 2001. 51. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. Malcolm Debevoise, Harvard University Press, 2007. 52. Dimock, Through Other Continents, p. 78. 53. The foundational essay by Moretti is “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review vol. 1, 2000, pp. 55–68; followed by Moretti, “More Conjectures,” New Left Review, vol. 20, 2003, pp. 73–81, and Moretti, “The Slaughterhouse of Literature,” MLQ, vol. 61, no. 1, 2000, pp. 207–27. 41

vilashini cooppan 54. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 35. 55. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (1983), Verso, 1991. 56. Ibid., p. 33. 57. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 154; Dorothy J. Hale, “Aesthetics and the New Ethics: Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty-First Century,” PMLA, vol. 124, no. 3, 2009, pp. 896–905. 58. Hale, “Aesthetics and the New Ethics,” p. 903.

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2 ALEXANDER BEECROFT

Rises of the Novel, Ancient and Modern

When does the novel begin? The question rests, inevitably, on our definition of the novel. Ian Watt defines the novel as a particular variety of realistic narrative prose fiction that is a product of England in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.1 Mikhail Bakhtin sees the novel as beginning slightly earlier, in the Renaissance, developed as a means of representing an emerging understanding of the present as a moment of new beginnings and not simply as the continuation of the past.2 Bakhtin’s model imagines the fictional narratives of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds as proto-novels of sorts while still seeing the novel in modern times as a distinctive and innovative form. But narrative fiction does not begin in the seventeenth century, or in the Renaissance, or even in Hellenistic Greece. As I will show, narrative fiction has a continuous history of over four thousand years, a history that links major regions of the world in a way that few other artistic forms do. Novels, or things that look vaguely like them, rise here and there throughout recorded history, and they pose a dilemma for anyone who wants to think about the history of narrative fiction. Do we divide that history according to local categories of genre, categories that may not always have been theorized at the time or whose theorizations may have been lost, even though this may lead to an atomized series of local histories that conceal known patterns of cross-cultural and transhistorical influence? Or do we assimilate everything into the Eurocentric category of the novel and risk flattening out meaningful distinctions of the kind that both Bakhtin and Watt want to make? I propose another solution: treat narrative fiction as a single entity for the purposes of sketching its history and its patterns of influence and reception and in doing so seek to construct a framework for understanding narrative forms that is able to deal with the wide variety of actually existing narratives on a global level. To do this, I suggest thinking first in terms of length, a universally comparable index, and in particular as divided into two broad categories depending on whether or not a given narrative is designed 43

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to be consumed in one sitting. I propose further of thinking of the latter category in terms of the narrative techniques used to prolong the story, whether through an anthology of thematically related material, through a series of stories placing particular characters in similar situations, through the use of a frame narrative, or through the construction of a continuous, forward-moving narrative that integrates its smaller elements into a coherent whole. It is this latter technique, rather than the realism or focus on the present of Watt or Bakhtin, that I will argue constitutes the most meaningful evolution on a global level. I will return to this discussion later but will first sketch in the broadest possible outlines the beginnings of what could someday be seen as a full global history of narrative fiction. If we look beyond Eurocentric understandings of the novel and think more broadly and globally about fictional prose narratives, it becomes possible to sketch at least the outlines of a global history stretching back roughly four thousand years. The earliest prose fictions yet discovered, such as the famous Story of Sinuhe,3 are found in Egyptian texts of the Twelfth Dynasty of the Middle Kingdom, roughly 2000 b c. We can trace the roots of prose fiction back still further, through the genres that seem ancestral to it: the royal or official autobiography and the Instructions variety of wisdom literature. The former, such as the autobiographical account of the soldier and governor Weni, dating to around 2280 b c, were displayed in temples as a means of honoring the dead. The autobiographical nature of the genre and its consequent emphasis on presenting the subject’s life in chronological sequence offered Egyptian literature the opportunity to hone techniques of linear narration. Instructions were a kind of wisdom literature popular in both the Ancient Near East and Egypt, where a deceased man offers his son or heir a series of maxims to live by. In Egypt, this genre quickly acquired a sort of frame narrative describing the circumstances of the death of the deceased; this device of the frame story and its subordinate yet focalized content will prove indispensable to the later history of prose fiction. The frame story to the Instructions of Amenemhet notably begins with that king’s account of his own assassination in 1962 b c , an assassination that provides the poignant context for the advice he offers his son and heir, Senwosret: It was after supper, when darkness had fallen, And I had decided to take an hour of relaxation; I was lying on my bed, for I was tired, And I started to drift off to sleep. Weapons (intended for) my protection were raised against me, While I acted like a snake of the desert. I woke up to the fighting, pulled myself together, And found that it was a skirmish of the palace guard. If I could have quickly taken weapons in my hand, I would have made the cowards retreat in turmoil. But no one is strong at night, and none can fight by himself; No successful result can come about without an ally.4 44

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The traumatic events of the assassination of Amenemhet and the succession of Senwosret provide, in fact, the backdrop for one of the very earliest and greatest of the Egyptian fictions, the Story of Sinuhe. Sinuhe is an official at the court of Senwosret whose flight into exile and later return are initially motivated by his learning of the assassination of Senwosret’s father. Although there are mythical and sacred elements to the story, many aspects, notably the vivid description of Sinuhe’s flight, are so vividly and realistically depicted that scholars have argued that the story is in fact a historical account rather than a work of fiction.5 The Egyptian taste for narrative fiction (in an era when the only other literary traditions we know of are almost exclusively based in verse and/or in expository prose) will continue unabated for centuries, through the remaining life of the Middle and New Kingdoms, and well into the era of the Macedonian and Roman occupation. During this era, a substantial Greek presence was established in Egypt, especially in Alexandria, and it is likely that many members of local elites became bilingual in Egyptian and Greek. It is in this era, and very possibly in Egypt itself,6 that the tradition we know of as the “Ancient Greek novel” first takes shape. The Greek novel differs in many respects from its Egyptian precursors with its thematic focus that relies much more heavily on the iterative creation and resolution of obstacles to a young heterosexual couple in love (this theme is central to each of the surviving Greek novels: Chariton’s Callirhoe, Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon, Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, Xenophon of Ephesus’ Ephesian Tale, and Heliodorus of Emesa’s Aethiopica).7 Despite these differences, many scholars argue that there are strong connections between Egyptian fiction and the Greek novel even if there is little evidence to go on. In a few rare cases we know of Greek translations of what were originally Egyptian narratives, such as the Myth of the Sun’s Eye and the Dream of Nectanebo (the latter beginning as a fourth-century b c Egyptian narrative and later finding its way into the much-traveled Alexander Romance).8 More speculatively, there may also have been influence in the other direction: it has been argued, for instance, that no single Egyptian-language text was as widely read in Hellenistic-era Egypt as was Homeric epic, and some of the later Egyptian story cycles, such as those around the military hero Inaros, may borrow from the Homeric tradition.9 Much of the Egyptian literary tradition of the Hellenistic era in fact remains understudied and indeed sometimes unpublished; as our knowledge of this literature improves, however, it is quite possible that further connections between Greek and Egyptian fiction will be found. The tradition of Greek fiction (with its two known Roman offshoots, Petronius’ Satyricon and Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, both somewhat outside 45

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the boy-meets-girl norm of the Greek tradition) has a life past the fall of Rome and through the Byzantine era. Between ad 1100 and the fall of Constantinople in 1453, no fewer than sixteen romances (some in a classicizing language, some in a more vernacular register, all but one in verse) are known to have been composed in Greek, an impressive number considering the overall quantity of surviving literature.10 These romances are directly inspired by their ancient precursors and may have influenced the development of the romance in French and German, as well, perhaps, as in Persian.11 Such connections remain somewhat speculative, but the chronology here is striking: the first four Greek romances of the postclassical era (Eumathios Makrembolites’ Hysmine and Hysminias, Theodore Prodromos’ Rhodanthe and Dosikles, Niketas Eugeneianos’ Drosilla and Charikles, and Constantine Manasses’ Aristandros and Kallithea) likely date to the second quarter of the twelfth century, perhaps a couple of decades before the earliest of the French historical romances, the Roman de Thèbes (1150–55).12 It has even been suggested that the entourage of Eleanor of Aquitaine, during its visit to Constantinople during the Second Crusade, provides a possible setting for the transfer of the genre from Byzantium to the West.13 Such scenarios of transmission must remain speculative, but there are other important lineages to be traced. One leads from the numerous animal fables found in the Egypt of the Hellenistic period to a series of texts around the world. The fable “The Swallow and the Sea,” for example, is found also in the Sanskrit tale collection the Pañcatantra. It is difficult in this case to establish whether this is because the Egyptian story traveled to India or an Indian story traveled to Egypt,14 but in either event it speaks to the links between Indian and Near Eastern fictional traditions at a very early stage. The fable of the lion and the mouse, found in the same Egyptian source text (The Myth of the Sun’s Eye), lives on as part of the Aesopic collection; other ancient Egyptian fables have close analogues in the Thousand and One Nights. The Nights itself is a combination of oral narratives from many cultures and pastiches thereof by European hands. It was given its modern shape by its French redactor, Antoine Galland, and was both influenced by and exerted influence on the French novelistic tradition. And later, returning from France to the Arab world, it influenced the new European form of the novel there, demonstrating in itself the complex transactions and circulations that seem common with short narrative fiction.15 To dwell on the Nights, very much a peripheral text in the Arabic tradition, as the key illustration of the currents conveying narrative fiction eastward and westward around the Mediterranean would be to understand those currents in Eurocentric terms, as providing the raw material from the past 46

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and other exotic locations from which Europeans constructed the valueadded product of the modern novel. A more worldly perspective would need to examine just as closely the emergence of fictional traditions within Arabic, which is as much an inheritor of Greek and broader Ancient Mediterranean cultures as Europe. Such a perspective is difficult to hold, especially for the nonspecialist, so understudied has the development of that Arabic narrative tradition been, particularly in the misnamed “Age of Decadence” of Arabic literature from the fall of Baghdad in 1258 to the arrival of Napoleon in Egypt.16 A key form of Arabic fictional narrative is the maqaˉma (literally defined as “an assembly” or “a place for standing”). The maqaˉma is a story in which a narrator travels to a new city and encounters a trickster figure, who uses his considerable rhetorical ability to swindle the narrator and others before his identity is revealed. Narrator and trickster alike depart the city, only to be joined together in a new city in the next tale in the sequence.17 The maqaˉma is a mobile genre, originating in eastern Iran with Badī’ al-Zaman al-Hamadhaˉni (969–1007) and Al-Hariri of Basra (1054–1122) around a century later in southern Iraq. The form circulates everywhere Arabic-language literature is produced, from India to West Africa, throughout the remaining history of traditional Arabic literature, occupying, it has been argued, a position similar to that of the novel in terms of its realistic and/or satirical representation of urban life for an emergent bourgeois audience.18 Rich and complex as the maqaˉma’s Arabic circulation has been, its movement beyond linguistic borders has been significant as well. An extensive Hebrew-language maqaˉma tradition developed rapidly, under the cognate Hebrew name of mahbarot, with works among others by the noted Hebrew and Italian poet Immanuel of Rome (1261–1328). Both Arabic and Hebrew-language maqaˉmat circulated in the Iberian peninsula under Islamic rule: scholars have sought to understand the form in relation to the near-contemporaneous development of episodic frame-tale narratives in medieval Spanish, such as Don Juan Manuel’s (1282–1348) Tales of Count Lucanor, itself an influence on the larger European frame-tale tradition, including Boccaccio and Chaucer, and thus, indirectly, on the European novel. Even this brief sketch reveals the medieval Mediterranean to be not a barrier to storytelling but a space within which fictional narratives circulated widely and genres influenced one another. But the chains of influence reach further still. As we’ve seen, there are clear links (though in which direction we cannot say) between Egyptian animal fables and that great Sanskrit collection of animal fables, the Pañcatantra. Compiled perhaps around the third century b c and gradually translated into virtually every literary language from Icelandic to Javanese, it is impossible to underestimate 47

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the influence of this text on the global history of narrative fiction. Some of the animal fables from the Pañcatantra are also found in the Jataka tales of the Buddha and his various incarnations. As such, these stories also traveled wherever Buddhism traveled, notably across the Himalayas to China. Twentieth-century Chinese scholarship on the history of Chinese fiction (notably that of Wen Yiduo)19 has tended to see the arrival of Buddhist scriptures from India as central to the development of Chinese fiction (and, by extension, to the slightly later but very rapidly productive development of Japanese fiction). Victor Mair has identified the so-called transformation texts, or bianwen 變文 – illustrated narratives designed to explain and illustrate Buddhist ideas in simple terms, dating from the Tang Dynasty (a d 618–907) and discovered among the manuscripts in the famous Dunhuang caves on the Silk Road – as indexes to what he identifies as crucial developments in Chinese storytelling, such as the first explicit use of fictionality and the episodic structure.20 This is not to undermine the significance of indigenous Chinese genres such as historiography, biography, and the anecdote in the development of Chinese fiction (any more than to acknowledge the role of the maqaˉma in the history of the European frame tale is to undermine the significance of indigenous European forms there). Rather, it is to show that fictional narrative in China, like fictional narrative everywhere else, emerges as part of a network of circulation and exchange of stories – a network that can be traced back through written sources at least four thousand years. This has been a remarkably, even disturbingly, rapid sketch of the broadest outlines of that network; a fuller account would require not only much more space than is permitted here but also the benefit of scholarship yet to be undertaken in many areas. The nodes of transition in the global network of fiction that I have discussed (among others) – Hellenistic Egypt, Islamic Spain, the arrival of Buddhism in China – all have been studied extensively, but too often from the perspective of one language at a time or with the focus on one end of the transmission, where one culture is used instrumentally in the scholarship as an aid to understanding the other, rather than viewing the node as both interesting in and of itself and as central to the study of any or all cultures implicated in it. Nonetheless, it should be clear enough at this point that sufficient evidence exists to imagine the possibility of weaving existing local histories of fictional narrative together into a larger whole. But where would we locate the novel, and its rise, in such a network? Must a future history of this form begin in Twelfth Dynasty Egypt and span the globe, overwhelming us with detail and flattening out all local differences? Or is there some way to identify the novel as a distinctive form of narrative fiction? That form would be one whose history extends globally and that might turn out to have multiple local origins depending on our 48

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definition. Still, the history of this more narrowly defined form would take on more manageable proportions than the vast networked history of prose fiction as a whole as I described it earlier. We might begin our search for such an understanding of the novel with Ian Watt’s influential The Rise of the Novel, published in 1957. Watt’s account of the novel as emerging from philosophical and commercial shifts in eighteenth-century England depends, crucially, on a distinction between the “novel” and the “romance.” Watt never offers a formal definition of the romance, but his scattered references to the form clearly mark its status within his work as a foil to the realist novel. The romance for Watt represents an idealized vision of life and its characters as opposed to the novel’s realistic desire to represent people of all types in a “more dispassionate and scientific scrutiny of life.”21 The romance is euphuistic in style, as compared with the sparer language of the novel.22 Romances were published in costly editions, whereas novels were published in formats affordable to the newly emergent middle class.23 Where romances, steeped in the tradition of courtly love, skim over the surface of the emotional attachments between characters, the novel explores both the psychological aspects of love and the economic consequences of real-world attachments.24 Chastity, in romance, is a theme fit only for ladies of noble birth, whereas women of the lower classes are assumed to be sexually insatiable; only in the novel do we encounter the theme of the humbler woman struggling to maintain her chastity in the face of male aggression.25 For Watt, the novel was a form made distinctive by aspects of its content (characterization, emplotment, diction), not by its formal features, and if we followed his model in a global context, our world would be full of lengthy prose fictional narratives that were emphatically not novels. There is an element of circularity to all of this: if we accept the formal distinction between novel and romance as real and substantive, then the moment of the “rise of the novel” in the English-language context is necessarily the moment of the transformation of the romance into the novel rather than the moment at which the romance emerges or some other moment in the evolution of narrative fiction. Texts that do not look like the realist novel will be left out of the discussion, and the prophecy will become self-fulfilling. Further, the distinction between novel and romance is anyway specific to the English-language evolution of even the European form of the novel, let alone to more distant points of reference, and the emergence of comparable realist tendencies in, especially, France, at around the same time did not seem to require the invention of a new formal category.26 Thinking globally, there is no necessary reason why this particular bundle of characteristics Watt associates with the novel (as opposed to romance) would necessarily always 49

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come together in other traditions or contexts. Indeed, narrative fiction in other places and at other times has a complicated relationship with this distinction between romance and realism: the Priapic priestesses, petty swindlers, and legacy hunters of Petronius’ Satyricon are hardly figures of romance in Watt’s sense, but they are equally hard for us to classify as “realist” characters, feeling to us more like the stereotyped figures of satire or comedy. The narrator and swindler of the typical maqaˉma are likewise artificial types rather than rounded and realistic characters, and yet their lives take place well within the everyday world of the less exalted urban classes where we expect the realistic novel to take place. Genji and The Dream of the Red Chamber are stories set in regal or aristocratic surroundings, not among the urban middle classes, yet they display a complex understanding of the psychological aspects of love, just as Watt expects the realist novel to do. Eventually, of course, most of the world’s literary cultures will explicitly embrace the European novel as the paradigm for their own subsequent narrative production, and so such a model will appear to have considerable explanatory power for works created under European influence.27 Yet a too-ready insistence on the Anglo-French realist novel as the paradigmatic form of narrative fiction will necessarily obscure the real histories of such forms – histories I began to sketch earlier and that suggest the need to reevaluate even the local Anglo-French histories of the novel (by, for example, integrating the history of the romance into the history of the novel), let alone the histories of the novel in other lands. Attempts to sketch the “rise of the novel” outside England and France on this basis are forced to limit themselves to an account of the importation of the European form (as with Roberto Schwarz)28 without explaining existing indigenous narrative fictional forms or tracing the connections between those forms and later fiction produced under European paradigms. For a theory of the many “rises of the novel” (or, perhaps better, evolutions of narrative fiction) outside England and France, we will need to look elsewhere. I would like to propose an alternative strategy for thinking comparatively about the historical development of narrative fiction, one that focuses on the formal feature of length. Aside from familiar if tedious debates about the boundaries between the categories of “novel,” “short story,” and “novella,” the question of length is rarely brought up in diachronic or cross-cultural discussions of narrative fiction, yet I would argue that it is in fact crucial to such discussions. There is, I suggest, a meaningful distinction between shorter narrative forms, designed (both in oral and written forms) for consumption in one short sitting, and those designed to be consumed over a period of days. Shorter forms necessarily relate simple stories: boy meets girl, and they are joined in marriage after overcoming a simple and trivial 50

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obstacle, or the failure of a successful man to heed one small detail, whichleads to his downfall, for example. It is scarcely possible to tell more story than this in one sitting. Longer forms both allow for and also require new techniques of storytelling to expand these basic plots to greater lengths. There are, naturally, a variety of techniques for extending narrative, several of which I discuss below, and they range from the simple to the sophisticated, from the simple repetition of homologous incidents to the construction of a large-scale, forward-moving plot into which smaller subplots are carefully and organically integrated. A comparative perspective argues for the importance of this emergence of a continuous, forward-moving plot rather than the emergence of realism as the critical technical innovation on the road to the novel. Long stories do not, of course, require continuous, forward-moving plots. There are numerous examples of very lengthy narrative fiction without such plots. Rather, it is the development of narrative techniques that allows for the development of a continuous, forward-moving plot in an extended narrative, without relying on repetition or digressions to achieve length, which is, I would suggest, the key innovation of the “novel” as we might identify it in a global context.29 We might find a contemporary analogue for this process of developing narrative techniques suited to longer texts in the development of similar techniques for television series.30 Earlier in the history of television, the weekly format (similar to that in which many nineteenth-century novels appeared), as well as the demands imposed by later release in syndication, placed a high value on series whose narratives could be appreciated even by those who had not seen every episode in sequence or who were joining the series late. Many of the earlier series and their forms, whether situation comedies such as I Love Lucy or dramatic genre fictions such as The Twilight Zone, were extremely episodic in nature: the former relying on moving highly predictable and unchanging characters through a variety of different situations or events, the latter presenting unrelated stories (frequently involving physical or metaphysical premises incompatible both with our own world and with each other) linked only by theme and/or affect. As the sitcom became more sophisticated, it began to feature gradual, if stereotyped, developments in its characters’ lives: children go off to college, young newlyweds discover the challenges of parenthood, or initially hostile characters fall in love. For the most part, however, sitcoms and dramas alike relied on the simple repetition of plot devices as their principal mechanism for generating new episodes, whether through recurrent misunderstandings of doubles entendres on Three’s Company or the regularity with which Jessica Fletcher, the heroine of Murder, She Wrote, arrived in a new location just hours before a murder was to take place. Simple reiteration can be 51

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carried on ad infinitum, as television has frequently demonstrated, though there is always the danger that audiences will grow weary of seeing the same story told every week. There had always been forms of television drama (notably the soap opera) with continuous forward-moving narratives, but a famously innovative drama in this regard was The X-Files, which combined stand-alone stories about individual investigations with episodes devoted to a longer “mythological” arc. This latter arc was not featured in every episode, but its presence lurked behind them all in some way, coloring the viewer’s understanding even of stand-alone narrative elements. Finally, more recent series such as Mad Men, The Sopranos, and Six Feet Under (among many others) feature continuous forward-moving plots of the kind familiar from the heyday of the novel. Rather than simply repeating plot devices ad infinitum, such series allow their characters to develop and make that development an organic consequence of their episodic plots. Minor characters have subplots of their own, which intersect with the main narrative and with each other in innumerable ways. The overall narrative arc of the series operates on a much larger timescale but is also (like many great novels) bent not toward a predictable end (marriage, death) but rather toward some other kind of development or transition, whose purpose or meaning would not have been apparent to the viewer at the beginning of the series. A series (or a novel) put together using these more complex techniques creates a whole greater than the sum of its parts, where missing an episode will lead to confusion or frustration. New platforms and methods of viewing have made such development possible in television,31 but the medium draws heavily on the novelistic tradition (itself enmeshed in the European case in forms of commercial serialization) for its repertoire of narrative technologies, which is why it has been possible for me to introduce those novelistic techniques through examples drawn from television. Those narrative technologies, as I have suggested, were developed over time and might provide a more robust rubric for organizing our thinking about narrative fiction in global terms and for identifying and understanding the various rises of the novel. The earliest forms of written narrative fiction, derived as they almost certainly were from oral storytelling, are comparatively short: the types of stories that can be exhaustively told (or read) in one sitting. This temporal criterion is deliberately a little vague; different kinds of historical audiences have presumably been willing to sit through different lengths of stories, but the psychological effect of pausing the story for the day and going about one’s business for some time before resuming it must always have changed the experience of the story. The earliest works of prose fiction in Ancient Egypt (such as Middle Kingdom stories like The Shipwrecked Sailor) are 52

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only a few pages long, though even this brief story features the expansionary technique of the frame tale. Similarly brief are the prose fictions of Tang China, such as the chuanqi 傳奇, or “transmission of the strange” stories, with their often fantastical themes. When composers of prose fiction sought to lengthen the works in their repertoire, the initial focus was often on adding more stories rather than on fleshing out existing stories to ever-greater length. This is in remarkable contrast to the experience with epic poetry, which certainly was capable of great expansion in the earliest times (the Iliad is nearly sixteen thousand lines long; the Mahabharata is over a hundred thousand couplets, making the latter perhaps three times the length in words of War and Peace). To be sure, epic frequently relies on the same device of repetition that we have seen at work in certain kinds of television. In the Iliad, for example, the basic narrative arc concerning Achilles’ withdrawal from, and reintegration into, the society of the Greek camp is designed ultimately to increase that hero’s fame through its demonstration of the Greek army’s inability to defeat the Trojans without Achilles’ aid. To that end, the bulk of the poem, from books three through fifteen out of twenty-four, is devoted to episode after episode in which the Greeks try, and fail, to defeat the Trojans without Achilles. The cumulative effect of these repeated failures is stronger than would have been the case with a single episode, of course, and there is a real sense in which Achilles’ character develops over this time, so the repetitive element of the Iliad contributes meaningfully to the larger narrative. Similarly, a significant element of the Odyssey is Odysseus’ own account of his adventures on the voyage home; this account achieves its own magnitude (four books of the twenty-four in the epic that contains it) largely through the multiplication of adventures (two sets of cannibals, two goddesses who entrap our hero), a multiplication that certainly reinforces the impressiveness of Odysseus’ homecoming, but with little emphasis on the development and transformation of Odysseus the man in the meantime. Leaving epic aside (and Greek epic is hardly fiction to its original audience), early narrative fiction, especially prose fiction, is strikingly simpler in its narrative techniques. We find, as I have mentioned, many texts equivalent to short stories, designed to be enjoyed in one sitting and without organic connections to other narratives. Where early fiction does seek to expand in magnitude, the devices used are simple: the collection of stories on related themes, with no linking material, in an anthology format; the collection of stories involving a repeated major character or characters, who may remain largely static throughout the collection (an early example here would be the stories, popular in Hellenistic Egypt, of the adventures of the priest and son 53

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of Rameses II, Setne Khamwas); and the use of a frame narrative to provide stronger formal links between segments (as in Boccaccio and Chaucer but also, much earlier, in the Sanskrit tale collection the Pañcatantra). Further along the continuum we find highly episodic stories, often combined with unrelated interpolated tales, where the major character nonetheless undergoes genuine transformations over the course of the text (works as diverse as the Satyricon, Don Quixote, and The Tale of Genji might be said to fit this pattern). At the far end of the continuum we find the kinds of tightly integrated paradigmatic novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where all the admittedly diverse and dialogic material presented is nonetheless subsumed under an overarching, if broad, narrative structure. Such works may themselves be focused tightly around a very small number of major characters and plot developments (as in Madame Bovary) or may represent more complex developments among a much larger number of characters (as with Middlemarch, War and Peace, and even The Dream of the Red Chamber), but either way, this form of the novel is structured so that each incident gains meaning from those preceding it and those we imagine may follow, so it would be difficult to understand or enjoy an isolated chapter without being aware of the preceding plot – and difficult to resist continuing on to the next chapter to find out what happens next. This continuum of techniques of narrative extension, ranging from the anthology of unrelated stories to the tightly integrated novel with a forward-moving plot, should not be mistaken for a simple historical master narrative making a claim that differs from that made by Watt only in its content. There is a tendency for forms closer to the integrated narrative end of the continuum to emerge in later historical periods (though, as my mention of The Dream of the Red Chamber should remind us, this does not happen in Europe alone, nor does it happen elsewhere only with European influence), but tightly integrated, forward-moving narratives coexist in every era in which they are found with more loosely assembled narrative forms. This should remind us further that there is no necessary value judgment attached to the emergence of new narrative techniques, as an earlier generation of art historians might have claimed about the emergence of perspective.32 The question is, after all, not even potentially one of the more accurate representation of reality but rather of the creation of smoother transitions between the shorter segments of narrative comprising a larger work. Across the many rises of narrative fiction since Ancient Egypt, it is out of the emergence and use of these new techniques for extending narratives that the most compelling history (of which this chapter necessarily provides the briefest of sketches) could be written. 54

Rises of the Novel N O T ES 1. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, University of California Press, 1957. 2. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, University of Texas Press, 1981, pp. 3–40. 3. William Kelley Simpson, ed., The Literature of Ancient Egypt: An Anthology of Stories, Instructions, Stelae, Autobiographies, and Poetry, 3rd edn, trans. Robert K. Ritner, Vincent A. Tobin, Jr., and Edward Wente, Yale University Press, 2003, pp. 54–66. 4. Ibid., p. 168. 5. See J. W. B. Barns, “Sinuhe’s Message to the King,” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, vol. 53, 1967, pp. 6–14. For a rebuttal, see John Baines, “Interpreting Sinuhe,” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, vol. 68, 1982, pp. 31–44. 6. I. Rutherford, “Greek Fiction and Egyptian Fiction: Are They Related, and, If So, How?,” in The Romance between Greece and the East, ed. T. Whitmarsh and S. Thomson, Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 23–37. 7. For translations, see J. R. Morgan, Collected Ancient Greek Novels, 2nd edn, ed. B. P. Reardon, University of California Press, 2008. 8. See Rutherford, “Greek Fiction and Egyptian Fiction.” 9. Ibid., pp. 28–29. 10. Roderick Beaton, The Medieval Greek Romance, Routledge, 2012, p. 1. 11. Panagiotis Agapitos, “In Rhomaian, Persian and Frankish Lands: Fiction and Fictionality in Byzantium and Beyond,” in Medieval Narratives between History and Fiction: From the Centre to the Periphery of Europe, c. 1100–1400., ed. Panagiotis Agapitos and Lars Boje Mortensen, Museum Tusculanum Press, 2012, pp. 235–367. Also Beaton, The Medieval Greek Romance, pp. 17–21. For a survey of the Persian epic and romance tradition, see Christoph J. Bürgel, “Die Persische Epik,” Heues Handbuch Der Literaturwissenschaft, vol. 5, 1990. 12. Agapitos, “In Rhomaian, Persian and Frankish Lands,” p. 235. 13. Elizabeth Jeffreys, “The Comnenian Background to the Romans D’Antiquité,” Byzantion, vol. 50, 1980, pp. 455–86. 14. Jacco Dieleman and Ian S. Moyer, “Egyptian Literature,” in A Companion to Hellenistic Literature, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, p. 437. 15. Ulrich Marzolph, The Arabian Nights in Transnational Perspective, Wayne State University Press, 2007; Paulo Lemos Horta, Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights, Harvard University Press, 2017; Rebecca Carol Johnson, Richard Maxwell, and Katie Trumpener, “The Arabian Nights, Arab-European Literary Influence, and the Lineages of the Novel,” Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 68, no. 2, June 2007, pp. 243–79. 16. Recent scholarship is beginning the work of reassessing that era. For an introduction to these issues, see Thomas Bauer, “Mamluk Literature: Misunderstandings and New Approaches,” Mamluk Studies Review, vol. 9, no. 2, 2005, pp. 105–32; and Hilary Kilpatrick, “Beyond Decadence: Dos and Don’ts in Studying Mamluk and Ottoman Literature,” Middle Eastern Literatures, vol. 12, no. 1, April 1, 2009, pp. 71–80. 55

alexander beecroft 17. For a fuller description of the genre and an extensive survey of the genre, see Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, Maqama: A History of a Genre, vol. 5, Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 2002. 18. Maurice A. Pomerantz, Rogue Fictions: The Lives of the Maqaˉma, forthcoming. 19. Wen Yiduo 聞一多. “Wenxue de lishi dongxiang” 文學的歷史動向 [Tendencies in Literary History], in Wen Yiduo Quanji 聞一多全集 [Collected Works of Wen Yiduo], vol. 1, 1982. 20. Victor H. Mair, “The Narrative Revolution in Chinese Literature: Ontological Presuppositions,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), vol. 5, nos. 1–2, 1983, pp. 1–27. For a more recent dissent, see also Ming Dong Gu, Chinese Theories of Fiction, SUNY Press, 2006, pp. 32–37. 21. Watt, The Rise of the Novel, p. 11. 22. Ibid., p. 28. 23. Ibid, pp. 41–42. 24. Ibid., pp. 136–37. 25. Ibid., pp. 165–66. 26. Elaine Showalter, The Evolution of the French Novel, 1641–1782, Princeton University Press, 2015. 27. Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review, vol. 1, February 2000, pp. 54–68. 28. Roberto Schwarz, “The Importing of the Novel to Brazil and Its Contradictions in the Work of Roberto Alencar,” in Misplaced Ideas, Verso, 1992, pp. 41–77. 29. I therefore disagree to some extent with Franco Moretti’s interesting argument on the history and theory of the novel, in which he suggests that a Chinese novel such as The Dream of the Red Chamber achieves its length less through forward narrative movement and more through the “horizontal” implications of actions and a general desire to restore equilibrium; Franco Moretti, “The Novel: History and Theory,” New Left Review, vol. 2, no. 52, 2008, pp. 111–24. I would argue instead that rather than identify the complex action of the Dream of the Red Chamber as designed to contain irreversible change, we might see the same processes as unusually sophisticated and extreme techniques for prolonging narrative. For a more general critique of Moretti’s argument here, see Ling Hon Lam and Dahlia Porter, “Hybrid Commodities, Gendered Aesthetics, and the Challenge of Cross-Cultural Comparison: A Response to Moretti’s ‘The Novel: History and Theory,’” Literature Compass, vol. 7, no. 9, 1 September 2010, pp. 900–11. 30. A useful discussion of these developments can be found in Jason Mittell, “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television,” The Velvet Light Trap, vol. 58, no. 1, 2006, pp. 29–40. 31. For a fuller discussion, see ibid. 32. E. H. Gombrich, “Standards of Truth,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 7, no. 2, 1980, pp. 248–49.

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Epic/Novel

It is one of the peculiarities of novel theory that it has a hard time saying what, after all, it thinks a novel is or should be. We know that the novel is not short (except when it is), it is not in verse (although it can be), and it is not real (although the novel has had an iffy relation to fiction at least since Defoe called Robinson Crusoe “a just history of facts”).1 As opposed to a sonnet with its fourteen lines and its volta or to a tragedy with its five acts, its peripetea and catharsis, the novel has seemed to many of its best readers to be best defined by its protean resistance to programmatic definition; and because critics have had trouble saying what once and for all it is, they have sometimes sought instead to say what it is not. This, for instance, is what Georg Luká cs does in his massively influential The Theory of the Novel.2 Written during the First World War, Luká cs’ short work has had an outsized influence on subsequent thinking about the novel and its form. As opposed to making a strong initial claim about the novel qua novel, Luká cs instead begins by defining another related but apparently opposed literary form: the epic. In order to make a case for what the novel is, he spends many pages saying first what it is not; it is not, in other words, a genre that found its best expression in Homer and that seemed simply and powerfully and immediately to represent and to reveal the significance of something like the whole of ancient Greek life. Once establishing the epic as a whole, coherent, and unmediated representation of an ancient and “integrated” civilization, he goes on to cast the novel as a complex, partial, and ironic representation of a modern life that he understands as large, unruly, and essentially “problematic.” In what follows, I want to look at Luká cs as well as at two other figures central to the rise of novel theory – Mikhail Bakhtin and Eric Auerbach – in order to see how aesthetic, social, and political ideas about the epics and the cultures that produced them have – for good and ill – shadowed our thinking about the novel, its rise, and its ends. Luká cs’ argument about the epic is both historical and critical. On the one hand, he offers an idiosyncratically genealogic 57

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account of the relation between the epic, the novel, and their respective moments in time. Epics, he suggests, come from a simpler age, from, in fact, a culture that both saw and produced itself as closed, defined, and socially homogeneous. He writes at the beginning of the volume: Happy are those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths – ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars. Everything in such ages is new and yet familiar, full of adventure and yet their own. The world is wide and yet it is like a home, for the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars; the world and the self, the light and the fire, are sharply distinct, yet they never become permanent strangers to one another, for fire is the soul of all light and all fire clothes itself in light. Thus each action of the soul becomes meaningful and rounded in this duality: complete in meaning – in sense – and complete for the senses; rounded because the soul rests within itself even while it acts; rounded because its action separates itself from it and, having become itself, finds a centre of its own and draws a closed circumference round itself. “Philosophy is really homesickness,” says Novalis: “it is the urge to be at home everywhere.”3

Luká cs’ strange and lyrical description of the “integrated” and epic world of the ancient Greeks casts their life as entirely of a piece and essentially without contradiction or strife: the sky is connected to and in fruitful conversation with the earth, an epic taste for adventure makes the new and strange somehow also familiar and old, and “the world and the self” are not opposed and are, in fact, made of one and the same stuff: “fire is the soul of all light and all fire clothes itself in light.” To live in an epic society was, for Luká cs, to be everywhere at home because, within the confines of that society, everywhere was home. As opposed to the closed and coherent civilization that could produce or that had to reproduce the closed and coherent form of the epic, modern societies – big, unruly, complicated, “problematic” – are necessarily at odds with themselves: The circle within which the Greeks led their metaphysical life was smaller than ours: that is why we cannot, as part of our life, place ourselves inside it. Or rather, the circle whose closed nature was the transcendental essence of their life has, for us, been broken: we cannot breathe in a closed world.4

Thanks, in other words, to technological development, the unchecked expansion of global capitalism, and increased differentiation or specialization within particular societies, it has become harder and harder simply to see the world as it is; this is why, for Luká cs, “the old parallelism of the transcendental structure of the form-giving subject and the world of created forms has been destroyed, and the ultimate basis of artistic creation has 58

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become homeless.”5 When the world becomes too big to represent all at once, it puts us at sea: unlike the Greeks who felt at home in the epic, the age of the novel is essentially homeless. With this, Luká cs echoes other critics of modern, metropolitan capitalism such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Georg Simmel, who wrote in his “The Metropolis and Mental Life” that “[t]he deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage and the external culture and technique of life.”6 For Luká cs, the novel as opposed to the epic was the representative form of that rootless and modern life. As Marx so famously put it in The Communist Manifesto: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”7 The novel as opposed to epic: modern not ancient, open not closed, incomplete not finished, problematic not integrated, heterogeneous not homogeneous, forever lost where the epic was somehow everywhere at home. In drawing this apparently hard line between the ancients and the moderns, the epic and the novel, Luká cs was drawing on a number of sources: on Johann J. Winckelmann, whose Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Art in Painting and Sculpture was broadly influential (on Kant, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Pater, and others); on Hegel, who wrote in his Aesthetics that “[t]he contents of the epic . . . are the entirety of a world in which an individual action happens”; on Simmel, and on Max Weber, who in his “Science as a Vocation” sought to understand modernity as especially “disenchanted”; and on Ferdinand Tonnies, who in his Community and Civil Society (1887) offered the foundational distinction between the opposed social systems he referred to as Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, between organic communities defined by their shared and traditional values and modern societies instead defined by social isolation and alienation. Seen in this light, we might want to take Luká cs’ opposition between epic and novel as absolute, as a historical, ideological, and even ontological threshold separating both a simple and integrated past from a complex, alienated, and fallen present. Where the epic seemed a paradise lost, a simple and organic life where the significance of actions and things was self-evident to those living it, the novel represented the alienating, chaotic, and problematic conditions of “an age of absolute sinfulness”: “the novel form is, like no other, an expression of transcendental homelessness.”8 Leaving things there, however, would be to miss the subtlety of Luká cs’ account, for while he does indeed differentiate between epic and novel, he also makes sure to account for what qualities the two share. While the epic is whole, transparent, and 59

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finished, and while the novel is self-conscious, muddled, and, above all, ironic, both genres are at last defined by their aesthetic relation to what Luká cs calls “aesthetic totality”, to their shared commitment to representing as much of a whole world as they can. The epic and the novel, the two major forms of great epic literature, differ from one another not by their authors’ fundamental intentions but by the given historico-philosophical realities with which the authors were confronted. The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life had become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality.9

Although opposed, epic and novel thus share formal means and ends while needing to work with and on entirely different because historically distinct kinds of content: they share real morphologic proximity in the face of considerable historical distance. As Luká cs imagines it, Homer’s world could be more or less represented within the parameters of a single narrative form – The Iliad, The Odyssey – because that world was both naturally and artificially restricted in scope. Not only was the known world much smaller for the Greeks, but the worldview of the classical Athenian was also artificially and violently restricted (women and slaves were not counted as fully meaningful parts of the social whole). The epic, in that case, can be understood in modest terms as the narrative form best able to represent the greatest amount of what the ancient Greeks took to be significant about their life. As opposed to the closed, immanently epic “integrated” world of the Greeks, modern life is complex, open, unruly, and, above all, big; Luká cs calls it “problematic.” As a result, the novel is modernity’s characteristic narrative form because it tries to manage two things at once. On the one hand and like the epic, it seeks to represent a whole world, to reveal connections between people, things, and events, to reveal the significance of things. On the other hand, it recognizes the fundamental impossibility of doing exactly that; it sees, in other words, that modern life must resist any effort at representation. As a result, the novel is an epic form that seeks paradoxically and, to use Luká cs’ term, ironically to encode within its form – its styles of narration, characterization, plotting, etc. – limits that must at last prevent it from offering a fully or simply epic account of that life. The point here – a point sometimes missed in accounts of The Theory of the Novel – is that the relation between epic and novel is not simply a difference but also a complex form of identity, a morphologic identity that informs an otherwise definitive historical difference between contents and contexts, between ancient and modern worlds. This is important because of the degree to which Luká cs’ apparent distinction has structured so much 60

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subsequent thinking about the novel both as an essentially ironic or selfconscious form and as a historical phenomenon associated with modern life. We need, that is, to see that while there is a powerful heuristic value to setting the novel against the epic (open instead of closed, cosmopolitan instead of national, unofficial instead of official, etc.), Luká cs and those who have adopted and adapted his distinction rely on practical instances that put conceptual pressure on any simple distinction between forms or times. Indeed, an anxiety about the possible, if anachronistic, appearance of epic forms within a nonepic age was one reason Luká cs wrote his book in the first place. As an older Luká cs saw it in his 1962 Preface to The Theory of the Novel, The immediate motive for writing was supplied by the outbreak of the First World War and the effect which its acclamation by the social-democratic parties had upon the European left. My own deeply personal attitude was one of vehement, global and, especially at the beginning, scarcely articulate rejection of the war and especially enthusiasm for the war. I recall a conversation with Frau Marianne Weber in the late autumn of 1914. She wanted to challenge my attitude by telling me of individual, concrete acts of heroism. My only reply was: “The better the worse!”10

At first glance, Luká cs’ outrage in his Preface seems a little out of place; after all, he never mentions the war in a book that has little evidently to do with any politics, never mind the complex political causes and effects of a geopolitical event such as the First World War. What becomes clear, however, is that Luká cs saw enthusiasm for “individual, concrete acts of heroism” as not only a political or ethical issue but also an aesthetic one, as the false imposition of epic values and, more to the point, epic forms onto the content of modern life, an ideological simplification that would, he suggests in his Preface, have disastrous consequences for the world. Arpad Kadarkay writes that “Luká cs attempted to demonstrate the ‘absolute sinfulness’ of the age to the German intellectuals who welcomed the war as an opportunity to overcome their ‘sterile individualism’ by a ‘collective sharing of danger.’”11 War enthusiasm was, in other words, a bad-faith but nonetheless tactically plausible application of epic values onto a world situation that required, as Luká cs saw it, the subtle and self-conscious irony of the novel; Kadarky writes that “any resurrection of the Greek world is a more or less conscious hypostasy of aesthetics into metaphysics – a violence done to the essence of everything that lies outside the sphere of art, and a desire to destroy it.”12 Put more directly, simply bringing epic forms or expectations to bear onto the complexity of modern life isn’t only anachronistic, but it is also and in itself a form of violence. So, when Luká cs’ contemporaries sought enthusiastically to treat the war as an 61

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opportunity for young men to become epic heroes on the fields of Ypres, Verdun, or the Somme, they were, to his mind, not only making an aesthetic error but also doing violence. As much, in other words, as The Theory of the Novel seems to treat epic and novel as opposite sides of an unbridgeable historical divide, the bloody reality of the First World War was proof that even the most modern culture could act as if life could or should be reduced to one and only one epic idea about what life “should be,” and for Luká cs, “the ‘should be’ kills life.’”13 To understand this required not only maintaining a conceptual distinction between epic and novel but also seeing where they could become practically, hopelessly, violently, and maybe inevitably mixed up. In his recent Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form, Paul Saint-Amour has developed this Luká csian argument in order to account for the tactical difference between long, encyclopedic, selfconscious, and – we might say – novelistic works of interwar modernism (James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and others) and an impending culture of total war that sought to reduce the many parts of a whole culture into single and falsely epic means to shared military ends. The rise of total war discourse effectively placed the present inside the political logic of epic, a logic that made war both the crucible and the connective matrix of any given national totality. To write in full-throated epic mode in the age of total war would be to accept the premise of Achilles’ shield: that full militarization is the best, and maybe only, occasion for world portraiture.14

For Saint-Amour as for Luká cs, epic forms facilitated the logic of increasingly totalized twentieth-century wars. The point here is that while Luká cs seems, on the one hand, to accept that there is an absolute difference between epic and novel, he imagines, on the other hand, a present political scene in which old, residual, or reactionary forms could be nevertheless mobilized in the present for dreadful and violent ends. He confronted, in other words, a historical, political, and aesthetic situation in which epic and novel must be thought both together and apart. It is in these terms that Luká cs also anticipates and makes possible Franco Moretti’s attention to the genre of the “modern epic,” which for him includes texts such as Melville’s Moby-Dick, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Goethe’s Faust; for Moretti, a “modern epic” is “‘epic,’ because of the many structural similarities binding it to a distance past . . . But ‘modern’ epic, because there are certainly quite a few discontinuities important enough . . . to dictate the cognitive metaphor of the ‘world text.’”15 Morreti’s “modern epics” are, in other words, texts that strain to capture the whole of an expanding, increasingly complex, and internally differentiated world system in spite of that 62

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system’s maybe intractable scalar resistance to representation. It is also, though, to recognize a more fundamental aspect of Luká cs’ early dialectical method: despite the neat utility of an opposition between ancient and modern, closed and open, epic and novel, the two terms tend in practice to get muddled. Wai Chee Dimock makes a similar point about Luká cs’ comparative literary potential in her Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time: “the kinship between epic and novel might turn out to be one of the most fruitful areas of inquiry . . . I study that kinship as a kinship in lexical bumps, bumps that dot the surfaces of both epic and novel, that spin out into indeterminate lengths.”16 For Dimock, these points of overlap or identity between genres that would otherwise seem simply opposed allow for a method capable of attending to relations across time and space. “Dilating and contracting, they generate a vital non synchrony, with horizons rising and falling, a landscape both ancient and not ancient.”17 This sense of the simultaneous distance and proximity between epic and novel is also and arguably even more apparent in another great theorist of the novel, Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin. In “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel,” Bakhtin both draws on and diverges from Luká cs’ historical account. An early admirer of The Theory of the Novel (Bakhtin made but finally abandoned plans to translate the text into Russian), Bakhtin similarly calls attention both to the closed fixity of the epic and the modern openness of the novel: where the novel undermines and ironizes both itself and the world it would represent, the epic seeks to close things off, to imagine and to present the world, its values, and its history as fixed and immutable: “the epic past is absolute and complete. It is as closed as a circle; inside it everything is finished, already over. There is no place in the epic world for any openendedness, indecision, indeterminacy.”18 In terms of the broad values that epic and novel respectively represent, Bakhtin follows Luká cs’ account quite closely: closed and open, fixed and mutable, solemn and ironic, and so on. Where, however, the two diverge is in their understanding of the historical nature of the two genres and of genre in general. Where Luká cs sees epic and novel as more or less tied to their respective cultures, where, in other words, he sees epic as more or less essential to the organic life of the ancient Greeks and the novel as more or less essential to the increased complexity of bourgeois modernity, Bakhtin instead sees the two genres as reflective of different relations to power and privilege that are always, if differently, present in every society. For Bakhtin, epic and novel represent the official and unofficial impulses and interests that find themselves variously at odds in every society. Where, in other words, the epic is invoked to shore up and support an official story about a community and 63

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thus to reinforce the status quo and the social relations it underwrites, the novel – or, rather, what Bakhtin refers to as the “novelistic” – appears whenever unofficial voices appear to speak against official accounts of life and how it should work. Put differently, for Bakhtin, the epic’s primary official function is to produce a specifically national past as a fixed, sacred, and legitimating origin for a particular political present. Whatever its origins, the epic as it has come down to us is an absolutely completed and finished generic form, whose constitutive feature is the transferral of the world it describes to an absolute past of national beginnings and peak times. The absolute past is a specifically evaluating (hierarchical) category. In the epic world view, “beginning,” “first,” “founder,” “ancestor,” “that which occurred earlier” and so forth are not merely temporal categories but valorized temporal categories, and valorized to an extreme degree.19

As Michael Holquist puts it, the epic “is the genre typical of societies in which diversity and change either go unrecognized or are actively suppressed.”20 The novel, on the contrary, refuses to leave the past alone and instead brings it into what Bakhtin calls a “zone of maximal contact” with the present; one of its key resources is its ability ironically or satirically to provoke laughter. Everything that makes us laugh is close at hand, all comical creativity works in a zone of maximal proximity. Laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it.21

As opposed to leaving the past or anything else alone, the novel puts ironic and unofficial pressure on official, which is to say epic, accounts of how things are or should be. Bakhtin’s strategic sense of the ongoing and, in a sense, ever-present political relation between epic and novel has a number of consequences, some of which he explores in other works which look at the novelistic, critical force of writers such as Dostoevsky and Rabelais, writers who used unofficial literary techniques to undermine, oppose, or travesty the official dogma of their respective times, because Bakhtin himself wrote from a position of political disfavor and exile within Stalin’s Soviet Union, the consequence and immediacy of a novelistic response to the epic management of the political past and present were all the more vital. In addition, though, to seeing the strategic value the 64

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opposition continued to have for Bakhtin, we might also note ways in which his mobile and dialogic take on the terms allows for a different look at individual texts. That is, although the opposition is as heuristic for Bakhtin as it was for Luká cs, in practice, even the most apparently epic of texts will be shot through with heteroglossic (which is to say many-voiced) moments of novelistic proximity and release. Take, for example, The Iliad. Although Homer’s great poem is necessary to all subsequent thinking about the epic, even it is unable fully to suppress the presence of other dissident or ironic or, as Bakhtin might have it, novelistic voices within epic’s otherwise monoglossic midst. Early on, as Odysseus moves through Agamemnon’s ranks, working to rally the Argives to war against the Trojans, one minor character refuses volubly to play along. “But one man, Thersites, still railed on, nonstop. / His head was full of obscenities, teeming with rant, / all for no good reason, insubordinate, baiting the kings – / anything to provoke some laughter from the troops. / Here was the ugliest man who ever came to Troy.”22 Thersites seems designed to provoke laughter, to raise doubts about the official validity of war, and to make a living case for the critical value of the ugly, the ironic, the minor. Alex Woloch writes in his The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel that “Thersites is perhaps the first truly minor character in Western literature. It is not simply that he has a subordinate narrative role, but that his striking fictional identity emerges through, and revolves around, this subordinated position.”23 Thersites’ moment is, of course, short lived, as Odysseus brings it to a violent and spectacular conclusion: “he cracked [Agamemnon’s] scepter across his back and shoulders. / The rascal doubled over, tears streaking his face / and a bloody welt bulged up between his blades / under the stroke of the golden scepter’s studs.”24 Seen in Bakhtin’s terms, while Thersites’ very presence is proof of the tenacity and maybe the inevitability of the minor, the ironic, the unofficial, and the novelistic, Odysseus’ attack is an object lesson in what happens when power’s official and epic alibis are called into question. That said, although the epic violently reasserts itself in the form of Odysseus’ blow, Thersites’ presence in The Iliad remains an undigested and indigestible novelistic remainder in the midst of what must nonetheless stand as the epic’s greatest achievement. I’ll now to turn to one more example, one more twentieth-century critic who drew on Luká cs’ founding distinction between epic and novel both to offer a related but different account of Western literary history and to imply something immediate about the politics of narrative representation in the present. Like The Theory of the Novel, Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature begins with an account of epic forms before turning – in time – to the novel, to examples taken from 65

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Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Woolf, and others. Also like The Theory of the Novel, Auerbach’s large and wildly ambitious endeavor to account for the whole history of aesthetic representation in the West depends on a generic opposition. Where, however, both Luká cs and Bakhtin rely on what I’ve begun to see as a complex and fungible opposition between epic and novel, Auerbach begins his great work exploring an opposition internal to the epic itself; he begins, in other words, in his opening chapter, “Odysseus’s Scar,” with an account of the different stylistic imperatives that seem to govern Western literature’s two great epic traditions: the Homeric Greek epic, on the one hand, and the Biblical epic, on the other. In the first case, Auerbach looks at the scene of Odysseus’ homecoming after years at war and at sea. Although he wants to keep his identity secret for the time, he is recognized by the old housekeeper, Euryclea, who, as she bathes his feet, sees and remembers a telltale scar that Odysseus carries on his thigh. That scar – as the old nurse cradled his leg and he hands passed down she felt it, knew it, suddenly let his foot fall – down it dropped in the basin – the bronze clanged, tipping over, spilling water across the floor. Joy and torment gripped her heart at once, tears rushed to her eyes – voice choked in her throat she reached for Odysseus’ chin and whispered quickly, “Yes, yes! you are Odysseus – oh dear boy – I couldn’t know you before . . . not till I touched the body of my king!”25

The scene is significant for Auerbach because it is characteristic of the bright, clear, and homogeneous style of the Greek epic: “Clearly outlined, brightly and uniformly illuminated, men and things stand out in a realm where everything is visible; and not less clear – wholly expressed, orderly even in the ardor – are the feelings and thoughts of the persons involved.”26 Auerbach goes on to argue that for the Homeric epic there is indeed no background; there are no mysteries or secrets; there can, in fact, be no narrative suspense. Everything – foreground and background, interior and exterior, past, present, and future – is equally present and available to representation in the expansive present of the Homeric epic. With this, the illuminated and homogeneous style of the Greek epic closely resembles Luká cs’ version of the epic as opposed to the novel. In both cases, the epic is characterized by an absence of contradiction, depth, doubt, complication, or self-consciousness. What’s more, both arguments turn on more or less 66

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implicit claims about the socioeconomic character of ancient Greek life, on the fact that both worlds offered clear and homogeneous subjects for representation because of political systems that worked actively, ideologically, and, indeed, violently to reduce the appearance of difference within the state. For Luká cs, if modernity brings confusion, it also brings opportunity: “[o]ur world has become infinitely large and each of its corners is richer in gifts and dangers than the world of the Greeks.”27 For Auerbach, the simplicity of the Greek epic is similarly a result of its sharp political limits: “we become conscious of the fact that in the Homeric poem life is enacted only among the ruling class – others appear only in the role of servants to that class.”28 Although, like Thersites, the voluble and necessary Euryclea stands as an exception, in general, the Homeric epic can represent life simply and directly because the Greek world had reduced life itself into something all too simple. In this sense, both Auerbach and Luká cs treat the Greek epic as a historically specific aesthetic response to historically specific socioeconomic conditions that characterized Greek life. Where, however, Auerbach departs from Luká cs’ model and maybe comes closer to Bakhtin is in his view that when seen in relation not only to Greek but also to the whole of world literature, the epic appears as something divided against itself. In addition to the Homeric epic, there is, he writes, “an equally ancient and equally epic style from a different world of forms,” a style he sees at work in the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac.29 Where everything in Odysseus’ story is clearly laid out on the surface of things, the difficult Biblical account of Abraham’s narrowly avoided sacrifice of his son is shrouded in mystery. In the story of Isaac, it is not only God’s intervention at the beginning and the end, but even the factual and psychological elements which come between, that are mysterious, merely touched upon, fraught with background; and therefore they require subtle investigation and interpretation, they demand them. Since so much in the story is dark and incomplete, and since the reader knows that God is a hidden God, his effort to interpret it constantly finds something new to feed upon.30

As opposed, in other words, to the light and uniformly present clarity of the Homeric epic, the Biblical epic is, as Auerbach has it, “fraught” with complications, depths, mysteries. It comes, in that way, closer to Luká cs’ sense of the novel as an essentially problematic form while also maintaining the sense of contemporary struggle that Bakhtin associates with epic and novel generic expressions of official and unofficial relations to power at a given moment in time. There are several things to say about how Auerbach handles the distinction between these two different but equally “ancient and epic” forms. First, the 67

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distinction allows Auerbach a way to restage an opposition that we saw at work in Luká cs; where the Homeric epic presents us with a closed and apparently fixed unity, “the Old Testament is incomparably less unified than the Homeric poems, it is more obviously pieced together.”31 Because, however, he casts those positions not as a difference between genres but rather as a tension or conflict internal to the epic as such, he is able to foreground a complexity immanent to epic that was – at least at first – somewhat submerged in Luká cs. Second, as with both Luká cs and Bakhtin, seemingly archaic differences between ancient generic modes in fact allow him to deal – albeit obliquely – with more immediate political circumstances. Written in exile in Istanbul, where Auerbach had sought refuge from the Nazis, Mimesis is, among other things, a book about the strategic political potential of literary representations. Where, for instance, the Homeric epic “is enacted only among the ruling class,” the Biblical epic allows for a more democratic view of the world. In the early stories of the Old Testament the patriarchal condition is dominant too, but since the people involved are individual nomadic or half-nomadic tribal leaders, the social picture gives a much less stable impression; class distinctions are not felt. As soon as the people completely emerges – that is, after the exodus from Egypt – its activity is always discernible, it is often in ferment, it frequently intervenes in events not only as a whole but also in seperate groups and through the medium of separate individuals who come forward; the origins of prophecy seem to lie in the irrepressible politicoreligious spontaneity of the people.32

As was the case with both Luká cs’ and Bakhtin’s sense of the novel, the Biblical epic in Auerbach is capable of representing several voices, positions, interests, cases at once; it offers, in other words, an implicit, unstable, and proto-democratic alternative to a totalitarian worldview that had made Auerbach’s own exile necessary. This implicit critique of totalitarianism is all the more apparent in Auerbach’s brief discussion of the difference between legend and history. Where history seeks to reveal the ambiguous, complex, and often contradictory relation between events, “legend,” which Auerbach associates with Greek epic, “arranges its material in a simple and straightforward way; it detaches it from its contemporary historical context, so that the latter will not confuse it; it knows only clearly outlined men who act from few and simple motives and the continuity of whose feelings and actions remains uninterrupted.”33 Put differently, the representational strategies that Auerbach refers to as legend and that Luká cs and Bakhtin refer to as epic represent a totalitarian reduction of the political and historical complexity of 68

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life, and as Luká cs puts it, the effort to reduce life and history to one and only one thing represents “a violence done to the essence of everything that lies outside the sphere of art.”34 For Luká cs, Bakhtin, and Auerbach, the irony, self-consciousness, and depth that characterize the novel, the novelistic, or the non-Greek epic are not only points on a generic or literary historical continuum; they also represent vital, if tacit, conceptual alternatives to any political situation that threatened to reduce life and thought to one and only one thing. For Auerbach, as for both Luká cs and Bakhtin, the difference between these imperatives (open and closed, official and unofficial) is ultimately less important than the ways in which particular cases stage the conflict between them. If, in other words, the history of literary representation can be cast heuristically in terms of two starkly opposed forces, in practice, art tends to emerge as the result of an unfinished and evocative conflict between them. Take, for example, Auerbach’s brief account of Balzac’s opening description of the Maison Vauqueur in Père Goriot. Balzac begins his novel with a brilliantly ekphrastic account of the relation between Madame Vauquer’s body and her broken-down boarding house. The room is at its brilliant best when, about seven in the morning, Madame Vauquer’s cat enters before its mistress, jumps up on the buffet, sniffs at the milk which stands there in a number of bowls covered over with plates, and emits its matutinal purring. Presently the widow appears, got up in her tulle bonnet, from beneath which hangs an ill-attached twist of false hair; as she walks, her wrinkled slippers drag. Her oldish, fattish face, from the middle of which just a parrot-beak nose, her small, plump hands, her figure as well filled out as a churchwarden’s, her loose, floppy bodice, are in harmony with the room, whose walls ooze misfortune, where speculation cowers, and whose warm and fetid air Madame Vauquer breathes without nausea.35

On the one hand, Balzac’s account is, as Auerbach suggests, a kind of achieved and epic totality; the many discrete parts of Balzac’s description seem somehow to add up into a single and continuous thing. It is as if Madame Vauquer, her clothes, furniture, and house are all related parts of some single, large, and pulpy organism. On the other hand, although everything fits together and seems to achieve something like an epic unity, it is a totality without immediately apparent significance. The entire description . . . is directed to the mimetic imagination of the reader, to his memory-pictures of similar persons and similar milieux which he may have seen; the thesis of the “stylistic unity” of the milieu, which includes the people in it, is not established rationally but is presented as a striking and immediately apprehended state of things, purely suggestively, without any proof.36 69

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Although we, in other words, feel that the house adds up to a whole thing, we cannot see why that should be the case, and because we can’t see why, we can’t, at last, see what it all means. It simply is. While the scene seems at first to be rendered with all the clarity, connection, and immediacy of Homer’s famous description of Achilles’ shield – “There [Hephaestus] made the earth and there the sky and the sea / and the inexhaustible blazing sun and the moon rounding full / and there the constellations” – its considerable harmony doesn’t add up to a greater significance; although it is surely coherent, we can’t say what Madame Vauquer’s room or person means.37 This is why Auerbach refers to the description as “demonic”; although its considerable aesthetic design, which formally resembles the clarity of Homeric ekphrasis, must surely mean something, it doesn’t mean anything for us. In these terms, Balzac’s great novel needs to be seen neither as one or the other kind of epic but rather as an incomplete and fraught confrontation between them; it draws on the formal coherence of the Greek epic while maintaining the fundamental inscrutability of the Old Testament epic. Its force is, in other words, the result of the novel’s status as a kind of suspended conflict between the two aesthetic imperatives with which Auerbach begins. We might think here of another complicated example, one that comes from another text that seems ostentatiously to straddle the line between epic and other forms: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Late in the novel, the tattooed islander Queequeg, after nearly dying of a fever, turns his unused coffin into an ornate sea-chest. Many spare hours he spent, in carving the lid with all manner of grotesque figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was striving, in his rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on his body. And this tattooing, had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by these hieroglyphic marks, had written out a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last.38

On the one hand, and like Achilles’ shield, Queequeg’s tattoos, transferred onto the surface of his coffin, offer a full, which is to say an epic account of a whole world: “the heavens and the earth,” the earth, the sky, and the sea: they are all there. On the other hand, despite their full relation to a whole world, the significance of Queequeg’s tattoos and 70

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carvings must finally be withheld and must remain an unreadable and thus deferred promise of meaning instead of meaning itself. As Ahab with apparent and quietly erotic longing remarks when passing by, “Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!”39 The point here is that, like Madame Vauquer’s drawing room, Queequeg’s tattoos represent not a choice between two representational systems – the closed and the open, the finished and the unfinished, official and unofficial, legend and history, epic and novel – but rather the ongoing, desperate, and tantalizing conflict between them. And as others – for instance, Edward Said, Toni Morrison, and Michael Rogin – have pointed out, this tension between the closed and the open, between legend and history, between the epic and the novel, between its vision of America as it was and of American as it could or should be is a source not only of MobyDick’s undeniable power but also of its capacity to speak forcefully, if mysteriously, to its own political situation; in a representative passage, Said writes Melville seems either ambivalent or paradoxical about how exceptional or how typical the whalers are. On the one hand they are meant to be representative of America, the young empire beginning to assert itself among other world empires. On the other, because he is so bent on showing that they are different – and therefore compelled to be more and more different as the story progresses: difference has an internal tendency to intensify and pull away from “sameness” – Melville’s “thoughtengendering” procedures in the novel further distance Ahab, Ishmael, and the Pequod from normalcy, and this effect puts them beyond human community or even understanding.40

Representative and exceptional, normal and deviant, human community and that which seems to transgress human understanding – what, in Said’s view, makes Moby-Dick work is exactly is ability to hold suspended what I have taken as the foundational opposition between epic and novel. In Luká cs, Bakhtin, Auerbach, and those who have followed them we can perhaps see that where the heuristic value of the opposition between epic and novel comes from being able to tell them apart, their practical and, at last, their political value comes from knowing that history is always more complicated than the stories we tell about it. To confront the proximity as well as the distance between epic and novel is thus to confront something fundamental about literature, politics, and history – that if we are to live in the world, we must recognize both the power of and the limits to the stories we tell.

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kent puckett NO TES 1. Daniel Defoe, The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Bell & Daldy, 1862, p. iv. 2. György Luká cs, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock, MIT Press, 1971. 3. Ibid., p. 29. 4. Ibid., p. 33. 5. Ibid., p. 41 6. Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. Kurt H. Wolff, Macmillan, 1950, p. 409. 7. Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan, Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 224. 8. Luká cs, The Theory of the Novel, p. 41. 9. Ibid., p. 56. 10. Ibid., p. 10. 11. Arpad Kadarkay, Georg Lukács: Life, Thought, Politics, Blackwell, 1991, p. 159. 12. Ibid., p. 38. 13. Luká cs, The Theory of the Novel, p. 48. 14. Paul K. Saint-Amour, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form, Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 185. 15. Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Márquez, Verso Books, 1996, p. 2. 16. Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time, Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 91. 17. Ibid., p. 92. 18. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, University of Texas Press, 1981, p. 16. 19. Ibid., p. 15. 20. Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World, Routledge, 2003, p. 77. 21. Ibid., p. 22. 22. Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles, Penguin Books, 1991, p. 106. 23. Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel, Princeton University Press, 2003, p. 4. 24. Homer, The Iliad, p. 108. 25. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles, Penguin Books, 1997, p. 405. 26. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask, Princeton University Press, 2003, p. 3. 27. Luká cs, The Theory of the Novel, p. 34. 28. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 21. 29. Ibid., p. 7. 30. Ibid., p. 15 31. Ibid., p. 17. 32. Ibid., p. 21. 33. Ibid., p. 19. 34. Luká cs, The Theory of the Novel, p. 38. 35. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 469. 72

Epic/Novel 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

Ibid., p. 471. Ibid., p. 483. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, W. W. Norton, 2002, pp. 366–67. Ibid., p. 367. Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 364.

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4 D AV I D JA M E S

The Novel as Encyclopedia

To record the world while conceding the record’s insufficiency, to dream of inclusivity while knowing full well the storage limits of representation, to pretend to master subject matter that exceeds taxonomical control, to assume that so long as things can be catalogued they can also be definitively known, and to assume, in turn, that there’s nothing description cannot adequately classify, even if its job is never done – such are the signs of the encyclopedic syndrome, from which the novel across history has never been immune. Some symptoms are easy to spot, especially when they spur writers to admit the implausibility of comprehensive data gathering. “One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject,” observes Ishmael in Moby-Dick (1851), even “though” the topic itself “may seem but an ordinary one.”1 In a characteristic examination of his own methods of selection and address, Melville’s narrator circles the principal conundrum faced by encyclopedic fiction from all periods: how does one render a massive scale of information? A dilemma we’ll meet again in the pages to come, it serves here as an excuse for the novel’s self-contemplation and, for Ishmael, as a creative incentive. By confronting the task of “writing this Leviathan,” he becomes increasingly self-conscious, often humorously so. With one eye on a reader who could be at once fascinated and fatigued, Ishmael admits that he’s hardly been “at all sparing of historical and whale research, when it has seemed needed.”2 Scaling up his purview, he turns the obligation inherent to all encyclopedias into a duty to his audience, for the novel’s subject makes it seem inevitable that its form will indeed “swell.” And this correlation between matter and structure affects Ishmael’s agency as a spokesman for items he cannot quite encompass: “Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behoves me to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise.”3 As an “enterprise,” it’s exhausting in literal terms as well, precisely because the “Leviathan is the text” – a designation for the novel’s mode as much as for its material – compelling Ishmael to square 74

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compendious reference with “grandiloquent” rhetoric.4 Toiling “under the weightiest words of the dictionary,” he confesses that in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs.5

Though this portrait of the encyclopedic exercise might sound melodramatic, Melville pitches it rather reflexively, drawing our attention to how language itself consciously embodies this formidable venture of “outreaching.” These paratactic lines manifest the snowballing nature of the novel’s task, driven as Ishmael is by the ambition, at once reckless yet compulsive, to transcribe the world’s multifarious and intractable substances into discursive form; to give explanatory shape to objects, species, and ideas while acknowledging that they’re forever in flux across “generations.” Grammar serves to illustrate this endeavor – especially in the accumulative crescendo of successive conjunctions (and) and intensifying quantifiers (all, whole) – and the very construction of Moby-Dick’s narration suggests that the encyclopedic impulse is an obstacle and an impetus, as the proliferation of subjects propels the expressive design of a text that nonetheless admits how illusory allinclusive coverage remains. This admission, this dramatic enactment, of failure is precisely the point of encyclopedias, novelistic or otherwise: a type of self-confession we’ll chart forward in time to modern and contemporary works below. For his part, Ishmael concludes his lightly self-mocking complaints against sheer scale with a positive spin: “Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme.”6 Ultimately upbeat, he celebrates encyclopedism as an authorial crusade, discovering “virtue” in this effort not because the creative labor suddenly seems manageable but because it carries a certain prestige. It turns out that encyclopedic fiction confers on its maker the charisma of heroic extensiveness: “to produce a mighty book,” Ishmael believes, “you must choose a mighty theme.”7 All this exertion in the name of oversized interests may end up as an endurance test for a writer grappling with the “weightiest words” – an undertaking that remains artistically fulfilling owing precisely to its arduousness. In the end, though, any effort such scale demands will be worth it, implies Ishmael, if formal size and thematic scope equate reputational esteem, offering a gateway to literary acclaim. In a sense, this is typical of the way encyclopedic narrative has been critically conceived in relation to the audacity of epic. Yet as we’ll find, 75

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encyclopedism and epic ought to be seen as distinct novelistic genres in their own right. I don’t mean to imply that features of epic are irrelevant to our understanding of how novels operate as encyclopedias. Rather, it seems important to observe that fiction’s absorption of encyclopedism tends to destabilize genres’ clear-cut classifications along with the conventions that typically distinguish them. Moby-Dick is again a case in point. However emblematic it might be of the emergence of nineteenth-century realism, the novel invites us to question some of the fundamental claims of realist representation as such. This much is clear from the self-reflexivity with which Ishmael ponders, as we’ve just heard, his own adequacy before the material he documents, wondering whether he can ever become “omnisciently exhaustive.” That the exhaustion of omniscience is something novelists in more recent times have relished reveals the prescience of Melville’s implicit challenge to what the novel can definitively survey and convey, opening up his work to striking affinities beyond its historical moment. Along these lines, Susan Stanford Friedman has even gone so far as to consider Moby-Dick a “modernist” text, given its engagement with a flashpoint in American modernity characterized by rapid cultural and technological advancement, a move that’s not entirely new insofar as it echoes the revival of interest in Melville among the moderns themselves, with Lewis Mumford declaring in 1928 that “we are nearer to Whitman with his cosmic faith and Melville in his cosmic defiance, than we are to a good part of the work of our own contemporaries.”8 Although Melville has often been grouped among national epics, “entangled in the economies, technology, and geopolitics of whaling,” his novel also “differs categorically from them,” argues Friedman, “because it operates in the realm of the imaginary, symbolic, literary, and linguistic.” Encyclopedism, in short, can make a novel seem well ahead of its time. Recast as a radical innovator, Melville’s anticipation of modernism becomes clear through Moby-Dick’s “heteroglossic ruptures” of convention, its “hybrid blend of genres,” together with its multiple philosophical, scientific, spiritual, and political points of discussion. Not only through subject matter, then, but also in its expansive and expanding modes of telling, the novel evokes “the fissures in the world system of industrial modernity as well as the phenomenological and imaginative dimensions of it.”9 Even if we have misgivings about the critical legitimacy of realigning Melville with modernism, the point is that the structural and thematic exertions of encyclopedism generate startling innovations – reconstituting the very anatomy of the novel and compelling writers to deliberate on the substance of fiction’s mimetic relation to the world. A testament to the novel’s expressive elasticity; a reflection of, also an adventurous response to, the upheavals of modernity’s material and 76

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metaphysical consequences; a facet of literary narrative’s most ambitious calibrations of coverage – thanks to all these factors, encyclopedic fiction appears to be a most – perhaps the most – viably transhistorical genre. Even when critics have placed it within more standardized periods or nation-based genealogies, encyclopedic writing still associates novelists who would otherwise appear disparate in technique or separated in time. In Edward Mendelson’s seminal account, for instance, seven key “members” of this international genre-club are assembled, including Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Goethe, and Melville, as well as the most prominent modernist and postmodern examples of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973).10 For Mendelson, the causes for encyclopedism in fiction are virtually organic (and nationalistic): when a culture “becomes aware of itself as a separate entity,” it “produces an encyclopedic author, one whose work attends to the whole social and linguistic range of his nation” (1268). Despite the rigidity of this “national focus,” Mendelson subsequently makes two concessions: first, that encyclopedic novels actually bear a “peculiar indeterminacy,” becoming compositionally “far more diffuse” than “other varieties of fiction” with a regional provenance; and second, that their epistemological reach, especially in the case of more recent works like Pynchon’s, is matched by geographical expansion.11 Therefore, just as Gravity’s Rainbow is “expert in ballistics, chemistry, and some very advanced mathematics,” it also exemplifies Pynchon’s “international scope, his attention to cartels and communication-networks that ignore national boundaries,” showcasing his virtuosity as a chronicler of a “new internationalism” born out of “information, of data, instead of the old order built on money and commercial goods.”12 However global their ambit becomes, though, what all encyclopedic fictions share in common (according to this model, at least) is a propensity to anticipate their own critical reception. So iconic have some of these texts become, contends Mendelson, that in retrospect it seems their creators have inaugurated a “dialect” that preempts their own cultural profiling and eventual canonization, for the works themselves invariably go on to occupy “the focus of a large and persistent exegetic and textual industry.”13 This much seems true if we glance at the voluminous bodies of secondary commentary on Pynchon and his encyclopedic precursors or when we think of the vast critical industry that “Joyce studies” became throughout the postwar era. But even if epic reputations can stem from encyclopedic ambitions, there are nonetheless important generic differences. Key among them is the issue of temporality. Whereas epics “treat of the immediate culture in which they are written only allusively or analogically,” Mendelson suggests that encyclopedic novels “are set near the immediate present, although not in it,” thereby 77

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“allowing the book to maintain a mimetic or satiric relation to the world of its readers, while at the same time permitting its characters to make accurate prophecies of events that occur between the time of the action and the time of writing.”14 More recently, this account of encyclopedic fiction’s “prophecy-making” has been subject to more nuanced configurations. In his incisive analysis of modernist writing of 1920s and 1930s, Paul Saint-Amour looks to such innovators as Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Ford Madox Ford for their “attempt to see the future as other than the here and now – the more so when the moment oncoming looks just like the consummation of present violence.”15 Saint-Amour resituates encyclopedism as peculiarly attractive for “interwar practitioners of the long-form narrative” because it enabled “them to address the problem of epic while rejecting its solutions.”16 Such is the problem with Mendelson’s conspicuously deterministic, “messianic model of encyclopedic narrative”: it remains, “for all its heterogeneity, intolerant of elements that stray from the genre’s conventions or attempt to pull focus from its portrait of the social totality.”17 Saint-Amour offers solid advice here, urging us “to disentangle the genre of encyclopedic narrative from the social-theoretical trellises on which it has so far hung,” whereby it occupies inflexible molds of “undifferentiated narratives” from which novels emerge either fixated with “modernization as national becoming” or else oriented toward “globalization” as a supranational phenomenon. Long modernist fictions did more to disrupt than fulfill the inclinations of epic to “total representation,” using the encyclopedia’s awareness of its own “ephemerality” as a counterpoint to the way epic “conceives of its knowledge-world as fully mapped and integrated.”18 As we might expect, Ulysses is a standout example of this process, for it’s an epically choreographed novel that nonetheless “engages in an immanent critique of any totalizing project, enacting the tendency of a supposedly total model or portrait to refer more insistently, more accurately, and more meaningfully to itself than to the world.”19 As a result, the “essence” of Joyce’s encyclopedic imperative actually derives from “a yearning,” as Saint-Amour describes it, “in the face of violently deranging forces, for continuity and for social portraiture so total as to comprehend the future.”20 Joyce wasn’t the first to exemplify encyclopedism’s twinned priorities of totality and particularity, though. Over the course of the eighteenth century, as Luc Herman and Petrus van Ewijk have remarked, “it became apparent that the collective body of knowledge stored in the encyclopedic work far exceeded the capacity of individual memory.”21 At the same time, it also became clear that “[a]ny structure pretending to be all-encompassing can only be a rigid and limited system with no room for change.”22 Looking to a British context, we see that some 78

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of the earliest encyclopedic fictions incorporate into their form a tangible awareness of these internal tensions. They do so by admitting their own structural and epistemic limitations, their own necessarily compromised capacity to carry out the role encyclopedism’s fusion of informational scale and accumulation conspires to engineer. Nowhere does this compromise seem more poignant than in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722).23 Defoe’s narrator is as self-conscious as Melville’s Ishmael over the issue of comprehensiveness. H. F., as he’s known, moves as a kind of participant-observer through London’s terrifying epidemic. Alternating modes, he blends visceral episodes of horrified witnessing with sections of verified data. Recreated traumas drawn from his street-level sightings are thus juxtaposed with more dispassionate, concrete information presented in tables, which compare death rates from plague with those of other diseases. By synthesizing emotional and factual responses to the outbreak’s scale, the Journal moves across perspectival “scales” by integrating figures that quantify human costs alongside singularly wrenching instances of loss. Everyday tragedies befalling particular families (witnessed by the narrator or reported to him) become representative of this citywide cataclysm, and Defoe reaches for this universal picture without blunting the affecting specificity of individual cases. In fact, emphasizing the pathos of those cases is also, for H. F., a way of emphasizing the limits of the Journal’s capacity to capture the entirety of the disease’s impact. Acknowledging the partiality of his encyclopedism, he swerves at times toward adynaton – the rhetorical pronouncement of inexpressibility – only then to defend the narrative’s contribution as a story that “may have its uses” in “so many ways as that it will, I hope, never be said, that the relating has been unprofitable.”24 In one respect, then, as a catalogue of social trauma, this encyclopedic journey through the city demotes if not dissolves the primacy of the individual. And yet, at the same time, Defoe requires the subjective presence of an astonished onlooker in order to turn a record of deaths into more than mere data – to novelize, in effect, the grimly repetitive behavior of disease via the simulation of what it was like to observe its local horrors unfold. In performing this doubly duty, aspects of novelistic depiction are placed under the spotlight. More than any other representational component of this “journal,” Defoe subjects description to purposeful examination. For H. F., scenic description is a necessary resource, of course, but it’s an inherently fraught one too, facilitating an emotive picture of dismay even as it falters at the threshold of encyclopedic inclusivity. Though our narrator hopes that recounted episodes “serve a little to describe the dreadful Condition” of infected districts and seemingly futile efforts to resist the spread of contagion, he concedes that “it is impossible to say any Thing that is able to give a true 79

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Idea of it to those who did not see it, other than this; that it was indeed very, very, very dreadful, and such as no Tongue can express.”25 The recourse here to repetition seems to encapsulate the near redundancy of language itself, the exhaustion of its creative reserves. That plaintive trio of reiterated amplifiers dramatizes the lexical shortfall that H. F. has to confront in trying to convey unimaginable “Publick desolation.”26 Still, he persists. And in the course of doing so, Defoe’s narrator sets up something of a contract with the reader. We’re invited to benefit from the encyclopedic breadth of his “journal” while also recognizing – by virtue of his candid metacompositional asides – that the record it offers is authoritative precisely because of its perspectivism, partiality, and emotional involvement, not because H. F. is consistently or objectively comprehensive. Hence he asks the reader not to “tak[e]” it “upon me to either vouch the Particulars, or answer for any Mistakes.”27 What’s more, it’s often by withholding rather than cataloguing information that Defoe’s depiction of the plague’s consequences becomes all the more moving, not least when the narrator returns “to the Case of Families infected, and shut up by the Magistrates.”28 Rather than opt for a typology of effects, he backs away; switching from what’s seen to what’s only heard, the economical level of reference enhances the emotional potency of information left out from this appallingly typical scene of suffering. [T]he Misery of those Families is not to be express’d, and it was generally in such Houses that we heard the most dismal Shrieks and Out-cries of the poor People terrified, and even frighted to Death, by the Sight of the Condition of their dearest Relations, and by the Terror of being imprisoned as they were.29

H. F. proceeds, then, not only in the knowledge of his medium’s limits but also with the sense – potentially, an ethically uneasy sense – that those same limits might affirm the encyclopedia’s advantage. Journal mediates between its obligatory provision of data in measuring the plague’s consequences and its domestic rendition of London in crisis, all the while allowing that the actual experience of plague in its petrifying totality remains indescribable. Hence H. F. operates as though it “were” “possible to represent those Times exactly to those that did not see them,” striving to “give the Reader due Ideas of the Horror that every where presented itself.”30 Embarking on this reconstructive endeavor while ceding the artificiality of transmitting it, Defoe’s Journal suggests that encyclopedism ought to be less about objective fact than descriptive flair if it is to seize an audience and “make just Impressions upon their Minds” that “fill them with Surprise.”31 Defoe’s text seems alert therefore to the ethical dilemmas of giving expressive form to intractable violence. Attuned to the fact that narrative can never extensively enumerate the plight of the vulnerable and dispossessed, Journal 80

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nevertheless attempts to do just that, translating the concession of failure into a premise for invention. As Defoe’s H. F. documents sudden disappearances of families from one day to the next, he draws an unsettling cartography of desertion whose “vanishings are part not only of the book’s poignancy,” in David Roberts’ phrase, but also constitutive of “its disconcerting modernity, its futile struggle to impose a single, all-encompassing narrative scheme on ‘an infinite variety of circumstances.’”32 To the extent that Journal embraces this struggle as a stimulus, and despite what it says about the encyclopedia’s breaking points, it resembles Melville’s conceit of textual self-exposure: to tackle the leviathan is really to tackle what’s most inventive about MobyDick itself, as the novel negotiates levels of sensation, narration, and specialized matter, with all its diegetic immensity and verbal grandiosity. While “social comprehensiveness, or at least a wide range of social representation,” was one of the “distinctive features” of eighteenth-century English fiction, as John Richetti reminds us, at the same time, “a commanding overview with its promise of a hidden totality is not quite what the novels of the period provide.”33 Instead, they debate, as Defoe implicitly does, the “difficulty of imagining” all-inclusive, durable visions of “social coherence.”34 It’s this self-conscious intimation of deficiency that extends into later modernist and contemporary global fictions, whose tactics of “[i]nternal compartmentalization, conflicted discursive zones and organizational schemata, selfcontradictory systems of internal reference” become the structurally generative mechanisms through which the genre of encyclopedism at once “delimits and impedes the project it nonetheless cannot refuse to undertake.”35 In recent decades, some practitioners of world fiction have taken to staging those mechanisms with great satirical verve and with ideologically incendiary results. In its own version of Defoe’s sensational “hoax,”36 Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996, trans. 2008) offers an acerbic catalogue of politically heinous and self-deluding writers whose adventures and vanities are logged in the potted biographies of individual chapter entries. Divided into thirteen principal sections (bearing classificatory names such as “Speculative and Science Fiction,” “Forerunners and Figures of the AntiEnlightenment,” and “The Aryan Brotherhood”), the book concludes with an “Epilogue for Monsters” listing “secondary figures” not documented in the main entries together with a bibliographic list of titles that comprise Bolaño’s imagined corpus of fascist letters. The entries themselves blend mock factual and interpretive registers, moving from biographic description to literary-critical evaluation. In tenor, Bolaño is consciously mischievous. Swaying from the “objective” proviso of encyclopedic authoritativeness, the text’s narrator – though this term doesn’t seem quite right – speculates on intentions and probable destinies, discriminating between the variable 81

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quality of different writers’ works and even at one late stage breaking the frame of pseudoimpartiality altogether when a character named Bolaño makes an appearance. Through such antics, Nazi Literature advertises its own status as an encyclopedic narrative that embodies, and in so doing reflects explicitly on, the assumptions built into encyclopedism as both mission and mode. Bolaño thus goads the reader into entertaining this “novel” as an encyclopedia even though he clearly takes great pleasure in exploiting the faux reliability, evidentiary instability, and ethical dubiousness of the whole exercise of compiling data about the lives and loves of fascist literati. As Héctor Hoyos has observed, the book’s “paratactical unfolding” enacts three key dynamics by (1) spotlighting the “imaginary cultural formation” of “urfascist” literary production and affiliation, (2) embracing a kind of Bakhtinian “cannibalism,” whereby Bolaño “not only ‘devours’ several genres, but also different artistic media,” and (3) confronting and satirically undermining “the assumed authority of literary space” in its fascination with the most ordinary details through which to portray “Nazism as something that takes hold on the everyday, that stays much too alive, and that lies closer than one may think, if under different garbs.”37 Moreover, the reader himself or herself is implicated; as the Epilogue suggests, the book’s audience consists of those “monsters” for whom a copious bibliography of fascistic periodicals, luminaries, and commentaries will provide rich further reading. And the ethical conscription of the reader happens at the level of affective expression, too, as Bolaño’s entries treat their poet figures not as the subject of factually even-handed biography but as compelling and often disturbingly charismatic characters. Their domestic lives, dramatic longings, and tumultuous affections are plotted in ways that invite fascination, humor, and even sympathetic consideration despite the obscene substrate of ideological values they serve to expose. Some entries in Nazi Literature swell into consuming, self-sufficient mininovels in their own right. This miniaturism might itself be extrapolated as part and parcel of Bolaño’s dissent from encyclopedic conventions in general, since his book ultimately doesn’t align with the standard portrait of that novelistic tradition bookended by Melville and Pynchon, in which encyclopedism is synonymous with a kind of intrepid maximalism. One element of Bolaño’s refusal of grand scale is conspicuously political: his first entry on the gregarious “patroness of the arts” Edelmira Thompson de Mendiluce reports that she “longed for the epic and its proportions, a literature unafraid to face the challenge of singing the fatherland.”38 It’s not that maximalism inevitably shares with epic a propensity for messianic renditions of national selfidentity and cultural progress; rather, the hubris of expansionism serves as 82

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a target of Bolaño’s caustic pastiche, with Nazi Literature pulling taut the perimeter wires of its encyclopedic format. Over the course of its thrifty vignettes, explicit evaluations of literary forms and the ideologies they either harbor or proclaim intensify the book’s cutting manner of highlighting political contradictions at the heart of signal movements – even allegedly progressive, avant-garde ones. Thus we hear of Daniela de Montecristo, a “legendary beauty,”39 who authored just one surviving work, The Amazons, an “epic title” that befits its zealous hybridity. The Amazons is a torrential and anarchic blend of all the literary genres: romance, spy novel, memoir, play (there are even some passages of avantgarde dramatic writing), poetry, history, political pamphlet. The plot revolves around the life of the author and her grandmothers and great-grandmothers, sometimes going back as far as the period immediately following the foundation of Asunción and Buenos Aires. The book contains some original passages, especially the descriptions of the Women’s Fourth Reich – with its headquarters in Buenos Aires and its training grounds in Patagonia – and the nostalgic, pseudo-scientific digressions and a gland that produces the feeling of love.40

The enumerative syntax here (in Chris Andrews’ translation) syncs with the literary object it evokes: in this way, Nazi Literature performs its own linguistic mimesis of the encyclopedic phenomena it identifies in the oftenzany, fugitive works whose reputations it catalogues. Yet Bolaño’s narrative also vividly jibes with the notion that encyclopedias, as we’ve seen in the case of Melville and Defoe, are always in some sense reflecting on their own procedures – including the impossibilities of comprehensive data capture those procedures make apparent – drawing attention to the breaking points of representational relevance and the ephemeral currency of collated information. Bolaño lends this inspection of medium, reach, and relevance an added critical function “by recontextualizing national concerns,” as Hoyos puts it, “within the broader history of the tense relation of fascism and the arts throughout the twentieth century.”41 Indeed, the interrogative potential of Bolaño’s “bizarro world” can be found in the way he dramatizes and also comments on “a dynamic image of a totality in constant transformation”: shunning the ideal of coherence and comprehensiveness that modern encyclopedias view as chimerical, he stages an inquiry into the “role of art in regard to such ungraspable totality.”42 This is not to say that encyclopedic fiction is unsuited to more earnest endeavors, that its own self-ironizing preemptions of the genre’s overwhelming desires forestall more urgent and socially immediate interventions. On the contrary, encyclopedism has become for certain contemporary 83

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writers the ideal home for pressing geopolitical, economic, and environmental issues. The encyclopedia’s potential as a sort of “textual ecology” is what Trey Strecker pursues when pointing to Evan Dara’s The Lost Scrapbook (1995), Richard Power’s The Gold Bug Variations (1991), William T. Vollman’s You Bright and Risen Angels (1987), and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996). He argues that the “gigantic scale of these narratives strives to duplicate the natural richness of the planet and to counter the effects of humankind’s impact upon it on a global scale.”43 Size matters, according to this account, because the vast repercussions of the Anthropocene are representable only by narratives that attempt, however imperfectly, to simulate them. Strecker departs from Mendelson’s model of encyclopedic fiction as wedded to self-sufficient totalities – striving to reproduce “the whole social and linguistic range” of the nation from which it derives – preferring instead the prospect of “narrative ecologies,” whereby encyclopedic fictions build “hybrid networks of information systems linked by narrative.” Indeed, narrative in and of itself is what renews encyclopedism’s range of applications, opening up its social and environmental purview, for when “narrative enters a static encyclopedic system, a living, evolving textual ecology unfolds.”44 Pertinent here would be William Gibson’s The Peripheral (2014) and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), whose “globalist aspect,” suggests Matthew Hart, is both enfolded and animated by its interlocking, “nesting-doll structure.” For Mitchell – no less than for earlier encyclopedists, as we’ve seen – structure is tightly bound up with plot. Multinational settings, many of them occupied by multiethnic characters, offer apt backdrops and populations for Mitchell’s leitmotif of “decentred relatedness,” a feature that recurs like “a kind of authorial firmware – something akin to an aesthetic ground plan – for a narrative secondary world that is at once generically diverse and structurally systematic.”45 Equally diverse yet systematically organized in its alternating point of view is Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013). Here another lost book, not a scrapbook this time but a diary, becomes the premise for a transnational plot of displacement, recovery, and environmental consciousness. Ozeki’s novel takes flamboyant pleasure in disrupting the coherence and purpose of its own multiplex system of encounters, histories, and objects of intellection. Centered on the experiences of two women on either side of the Pacific, it also exposes just how outdated Mendelson’s claim now sounds that “encyclopedic narratives find it exceptionally difficult to integrate their women characters at any level more quotidian or human than the levels of archetype and myth.”46 As a physical artifact, A Tale for the Time Being foregrounds its own materiality with 165 footnotes, six appendices, and a bibliography, all of which place Ozeki’s own compositional 84

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apparatuses on display. Through interconnecting stories of ecological vulnerability, we follow the writer, Ruth, somewhat isolated on Vancouver Island, as she comes across on her local beach a washed-up lunchbox in which she finds the diary of Nao Yasutani. A teenager who has been uprooted from Silicon Valley after the tech industries contract, Nao now lives with her parents back in Japan as their marriage falls apart. As she learns that Nao contemplates what it might mean existentially to step outside of time, Ruth wonders whether this diarist might have become a victim of the tsunami caused in 2011 by the Tohoku earthquake, all the while speculating that the journal could turn out to be recent, so recent, in fact, that it might even allow Ruth to come to Nao’s aid. Crossing continents, A Tale for the Time Being “often feels more like the great Pacific gyre it frequently evokes,” as one reviewer remarked. The novel roils like “a vast, churning basin of mental flotsam in which Schrodinger’s cat, quantum mechanics, Japanese funeral rituals, crow species, fetish cafés, the anatomy of barnacles,” among other topics, “jostle for attention” – all of which amounts to “an impressive amount of stuff.”47 Yet the question of whether sheer, random, accumulated stuff can become sustainable material for narration looms at the heart of all encyclopedic fictions, from Moby-Dick’s exhaustive whale physiologies to Gravity’s Rainbow’s rocket anatomies. Equally pervasive for this genre is the question of whether encyclopedias enable prophetic commentary, something that Ozeki contests rather than dutifully confirms as she brings predictive elements down to the level of character, domesticating the grandeur of messianic prognosis (to recall Mendelson’s terms) within the everyday realm of offhand rumination: “A name, Ruth thought, could be either a ghost or a portent depending upon which side of time you were standing. The name Whaletown had become a mere specter of the past, a crepuscular Pacific shimmer, but the name Desolation Sound still hovered in a liminal space and felt to her both oracular and haunted.”48 Such speculations lead Ruth to focalize what resembles an encyclopedia entry on “[h]er own name”49 in a register that stands back from the action and brings her closer to the metadiegetic voice of her creator. For “Ruth” in itself “had often functioned like an omen, casting a complex shadow forward across her life.”50 Mystical though this sounds, we’re then offered a more concrete explanation for the name’s prognostic efficacy. “The word ruth is derived from the Middle English rue, meaning remorse or regret,” but in Japanese, moreover, “Ruth is either pronounced rustu, meaning ‘roots’, or rusu, meaning ‘not at home’ or ‘absent.’”51 As etymologic facts give way to affecting self-reflections, we move from the realm of raw information toward Ruth’s own interiority, shifting from painstaking definition to the pathos of what pronunciation 85

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implies – given how differently a name can signify across cultures. Objective explanation here modulates into intimate self-excavation. Once again, the narrator’s vulnerability becomes emotively prominent, recalling the paradox we first glimpsed in Journal of the Plague Year: potentially unmanageable information exposes the individual, even as the novel’s evocative uses of data seem to summon a participating individual’s reactions. In the case of Ozeki’s Ruth, as for Defoe’s H. F., vulnerability seems all the more pronounced despite the encyclopedia’s pretensions to calm and collected all-inclusivity. Excavations of world historical events also shape Ruth’s immersion in Nao’s voyage, as she tracks the account of her stay with Nao’s 104-year-old anarchist-Buddhist great-grandmother, Jiko. We learn that Jiko’s son served as a kamikaze pilot in the closing phase of the Second World War, while code writing in French secret letters that scrutinize his own role and culpability in the violence he abhors. Echoing these letters’ plaintive appeal to an unknown and ultimately unplaceable reader, Nao’s diary also reaches encyclopedically across temporal and geographic separation, soliciting compassion from an audience who can engage her panorama of unbelonging and its convulsive familial ramifications. Consequently, it dawns on Ruth that she “couldn’t help but feel a strong sense of almost karmic connection with the girl and her father,”52 realizing how in the very act of reading she has cultivated an indelible kinship with Nao at a moment when the costs of Middle East conflicts become indubitable for Ruth’s own generation. Ozeki’s long narrative arc from the Second World War to the legally controversial second Iraq invasion in 2003 – which in hindsight can be seen as having had a catastrophic impact on the stability of that whole region, exacerbating the rise of militant fundamentalist groups while triggering mass migrations to and throughout Europe of a magnitude not seen since the 1940s – exemplifies how encyclopedic narratives “identify nascent phenomena rather than foretell the advent of unborn ones,” as Saint-Amour observes, even as they seem prone to “make and satisfy predictions.”53 Yet, if nothing is certain in what encyclopedic fictions predict, and if they evidently revel in their own descriptive defects – as though textual flaws and total information go hand in glove – then what’s the appeal? Though not always epic in construction, as we’ve discovered, they do tend to demand a certain tolerance from the reader who entertains their claims, a tolerance that can be put under pressure from all angles, tested by Defoe’s notoriously repetitive journal as much as it is teased by Ozeki’s ludic mass of transoceanic “stuff.” This exigency, however, is intrinsic to the allure of any novel parading around as an encyclopedia: by exceeding its own habits, it cuts across our expectations, reappearing as other to itself. Practitioners of encyclopedism have sensed this attraction, no doubt finding in it some solace amid the slog 86

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of construction. As indeed Joyce did. Warning of “the enormous bulk and the more than enormous complexity” of his “blasted novel,” Ulysses, he characterized it as “a sort of encyclopedia” in which “[e]ach adventure” might “not only condition but even create its own technique.”54 We’ve seen across literary history how this global mode reflects intensely on its own formal physique – fusing technique, whenever required, with quicksilver shifts in topic. At any time, of course, perpetual variegation may threaten to compromise the compositional integrity of encyclopedic fiction. Unless, that is, one considers the genre along Joycean lines: for him, the coherence and sufficiency of a specific “adventure” from one event to the next needn’t contradict the effect of encyclopedic span, with “every hour, every organ, every art being interconnected and interrelated in the structural scheme of the whole.”55 This vision of formal self-cohesion is something encyclopedic novels call disruptively to account as they meditate on the transfer of unstable information and confront the wishful prospect of panoramic inclusiveness. Which is not to say that they throw themselves willfully into the very performance of total description all novels seem destined to be defeated by, indulging the incompleteness that underscores the encyclopedia’s aspiration to chronicle, classify, contain. Instead, as Joyce intimates, that performance alone inspires a compelling scheme of its own, a scheme whose “bulk” does nothing to detract from how seductive it can be for readers to discover how myriad things are “interrelated” after all. If late-twentieth-century globalization shrank the world in postmodernism’s view, then social media now continues this process apace. Far from buckling under the pressure, as some doomsayers of the fate of fiction would have us believe,56 the novel today seems primed to take on the job of evoking what Heather Houser has called the infowhelm.57 In an age of digital bombardment, it’s tempting to see fiction reading as a mitigating defense: an excuse for detachment, for seclusion and cerebral respite, for refusing the entertainment swamp into which web browsing can wander. Perhaps the novel will supply this sort of antiglut therapy in decades to come. If so, it would be pious of criticism to view such literary aid as retrograde. Fiction still has important work to do for our deluged attentions: not merely as a type of affective compensation, but also in directly counteracting the mental “shallows” of diversion and the coercions of internet “filter bubbles.”58 After all, there’s nothing reactionary about valuing our absorption in fiction as a palliative asset, one that intervenes in the perennially crowded experience of our time, where communication technologies have facilitated global accessibility without alleviating personal isolation. Recent novelists have already taken to chronicling the fallout, showing how expanding opportunities for connectivity, whether 87

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professional or recreational, often do little to offset material vulnerability. Not strictly speaking encyclopedic (though they’re both long enough to appear so), Zadie Smith’s NW (2012) and Dave Eggers’ The Circle (2013) plot lives either unfulfilled by virtually initiated intimacies or else seduced by the collective obligation to maintain online identities and transparent habits. They also raise questions that are likely to persist for encyclopedists in years ahead, asking whether novels ought to “reproduce the sensations of information saturation,” as Houser puts it, or “instead depict the singular and specific as an antidote to the aggregate.”59 Such a decision – to envelop the planetary scope of data management or instead to particularize discrete experiences of environments where instantaneous access coincides with physical alienation, the pernicious costs of which seem increasingly difficult to measure – will no doubt endure for encyclopedic writing. If turn-of-the-century figures such as David Foster Wallace indicated that some of the most ambitious “cultural experiments express the anxieties of overload,” then his postmillennial successors are finding poignant ways of capturing the irony that web saturation is now a rather efficient incubator for solitariness. This chapter’s historical arc for encyclopedism hopefully suggests that the aesthetic responses such anxieties produce are by no means exclusive to contemporary writing; our present moment, however, is clearly yielding extraordinary provocations for “info-rich” novels.60 Networked societies today may seem a far cry from the plague-struck city of Defoe, the seafaring adversities of Melville, or the fragmenting Europe of Pynchon. Yet that essential problem, that creative goal of encyclopedic inclusion, which pushes the novel to new formal frontiers while also leading it to the brink of collapse, in so many ways lives on – whenever description squares up to the profusion of things yet to be fully described, whenever style grapples with substance on an unprecedented scale. NO TES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

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Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851), Penguin, 2003, pp. 496–97. Ibid., pp. 485, 497. Ibid., p. 497. Ibid., p. 496. Ibid., p. 497. Ibid., p. 497. Ibid. Lewis Mumford, “The Significance of Herman Melville,” New Republic, October 10, 1928, available at https://newrepublic.com/article/114098/signifi cance-herman-melville-lewis-mumford-stacks.

The Novel as Encyclopedia 9. Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time, Columbia University Press, 2015, p. 188. 10. Edward Mendelson, “Encyclopedic Narrative: From Dante to Pynchon,” Modern Language Notes, vol. 91, no. 6, 1976, pp. 1267–75. 11. Ibid., p. 1270. 12. Ibid., pp. 1270, 1272. 13. Ibid., p. 1268. 14. Ibid., p. 1269. 15. Paul Saint-Amour, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form, Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 43. 16. Ibid., p. 188. 17. Ibid., pp. 208, 212. 18. Ibid., p. 189. 19. Ibid., p. 258. 20. Ibid., p. 261. 21. Luc Herman and Petrus van Ewijk, “Gravity’s Encyclopedia Revisited: The Illusion of a Totalizing System in Gravity’s Rainbow,” English Studies, vol. 90, no. 2, 2009, p. 167. 22. Ibid. 23. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Louis Landa (1722), Oxford University Press, 2010. 24. Ibid., p. 32. 25. Ibid., p. 53. 26. Ibid., p. 52. 27. Ibid., p. 51. 28. Ibid., p. 49. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., p. 15. 31. Ibid. 32. David Roberts, “Introduction,” in A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Louis Landa and David Roberts, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. xxi. 33. John Richetti, “The Novel and Society: The Case of Daniel Defoe,” in The Idea of the Novel in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Robert W. Uphaus, Colleagues Press, 1988, p. 47. 34. Ibid., p. 47. 35. Saint-Amour, Tense Future, p. 186. 36. Roberts notes that in his “desire to exploit and contain a crisis,” Defoe produced a fictional cartography of plague “masquerading as history and vice versa,” thereby performing “a dazzling hoax that deploys the mechanics of truthful enquiry” (“Introduction,” p. xiii). 37. Héctor Hoyos, Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel, Columbia University Press, 2015, pp. 38, 39. 38. Roberto Bolaño, Nazi Literature in the Americas, trans. Chris Andrews (2008), New Directions, 1996, pp. 6, 15. 39. Ibid., p. 90. 40. Ibid., p. 91. 41. Hoyos, Beyond Bolaño, p. 50. 42. Ibid., p. 51. 89

david james 43. Trey Strecker, “Ecologies of Knowledge: The Encyclopedic Narratives of Richard Powers and His Contemporaries,” Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 18, no. 3, 1998, p. 67. 44. Ibid., p. 68. 45. Matthew Hart, “Globalism and Historical Romance,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction since 1945, ed. David James, Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 208, 209. 46. Mendelson, “Encyclopedic Narrative,” p. 1272. 47. Liz Jensen, “Review of A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki,” The Guardian, March 15, 2013, available at www.theguardian.com/books/ 2013/mar/15/tale-time-being-ozecki-review. 48. Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being, Canongate, 2013, p. 59. 49. Ibid., p. 59. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., p. 311. 53. Saint-Amour, Tense Future, pp. 208, 212. 54. James Joyce to Carlo Linati, September 21, 1920, in Letters of James Joyce, ed. Stuart Gilbert, Faber & Faber, 1957, pp. 146, 147. 55. Ibid., p. 147. 56. Consider Will Self’s gloomy prognosis, for instance: “The literary novel as an art work and a narrative art form central to our culture is indeed dying before our eyes” due, in part, he avers, to the “current resistance of a lot of the literate public to difficulty in the form,” given the allegedly more appealing distractions afforded by mobile technologies. Will Self, “The Novel Is Dead (This Time It’s for Real),” Richard Hillary Memorial Lecture, University of Oxford, May 6, 2014, available at www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/02/will-self-noveldead-literary-fiction. 57. See Heather Houser, Environmental Culture of the Infowhelm, Columbia University Press, forthcoming. 58. I draw these terms from two recent books that have sought to offer critical eyeopeners on the adverse effects of internet use: Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read, and Remember, Norton, 2010; and Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, Penguin, 2011. 59. Heather Houser, “Managing Information and Materiality in Infinite Jest and Running the Numbers,” American Literary History, vol. 26, no. 4 (2014), p. 742. 60. Ibid., pp. 743, 744.

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5 M I C H A E L S AY E A U

Realism and the Novel

Realism is as much about the distance from reality as it is proximity. And it is because of this distance despite proximity that realism has always been a vexed matter for the novel in ethical, political, and aesthetic terms. Who gets to compose the realistic representation of whom, and who is to reap the benefits (whether aesthetic or political or otherwise) of it? And how is it to be done, especially when the content of the “real” that is to be represented is so varied – running from the shelves of the contemporary supermarket to scenes of remarkable cruelty, depending on the location and situation from which this “real” is drawn. “Realism” exerts a sort of gravitational pull over the novel – writers may work within or around or against its mandates, but in the end, having some sort of relation to realism seems to be an inevitable part of what it means to write a novel. But first, why all this effort and trouble just to show things the way they ostensibly really are? And why does anyone bother in the first place? Why go to the trouble of carefully crafting and then publishing the “real” when all the reader would have to do to get a look at it for free would be to open his or her eyes and look around the room he or she is in, the street outside the window, or the city in which the street is located? In his essay on the so-called reality effect, Roland Barthes attempts to answer a similar sort of question and begins with a seemingly inconsequential detail from Gustave Flaubert’s short story “A Simple Heart” and another from the historian Jules Michelet’s work. Flaubert, describing the room occupied by Mme Aubain, Félicité’s employer, tells us that “an old piano supported, under a barometer, a pyramidal heap of boxes and cartons” (“A Simple Heart,” from Three Tales) . . . produces notations which structural analysis . . . usually and heretofore has left out, either because its inventory omits all details that are “superfluous” (in relation to structure) or because these same details are treated as “filling.”1

Here Barthes is asking, at the opening of his essay, what criticism has to do with textual details that serve no function in the plot and that reveal nothing 91

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profound about the characters, their personalities, or their outcomes. That barometer on Mme Aubain’s wall might provide a tiny bit of sociological shading to our sense of her (she is the sort of person who would own a barometer, at least a minimal marker of social class) but not very much – and besides, her social class has already been well established in the paragraph just before it appears. So the question remains, what exactly is it doing there? Barthes’ answer (if that is the word for it) comes toward the end of the essay when he describes what he calls the “referential illusion.” [W]hen these details are reputed to denote the real directly, all that they do – without saying so – is signify it; Flaubert’s barometer . . . finally say[s] nothing but this: we are the real . . . the reality effect is produced, the basis of that unavowed verisimilitude which forms the aesthetic of all the standard works of modernity.2

According to Barthes, it is the very lack of narrative usefulness of these details – the barometer, the little door, and by connection so much of the stuff that is included in narrative fiction – that helps to explain the reason for their existence in the text. By not having any function other than “being there,” they, paradoxically, fulfill their function, which is to indicate that the world depicted is like the world in which the reader reads the work, full of objects with no immediate purpose or sometimes no purpose at all. While Barthes’ argument is one that sidesteps the ways that small details such as the barometer can mean in novels and stories, it nonetheless is a vivid, if complex, evocation of one of the most important aspects of literary realism – that it not only includes but also revels in the inclusion of material seemingly too banal, ordinary, or useless to merit fictional inclusion. It is an answer that, in turn, raises a series of ever more difficult and sometimes abstract questions about the form of the novel. What is the ideological valence of all this useless accumulation of detail, of the writer’s representation of it, and the reader’s response to it? Is delving intentionally into the realm of the insipid and everyday an estranging, critical act or is it, as Oscar Wilde wonders in his Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, a way to turn novels and stories into mirrors into which the audience can gaze narcissistically, finding itself – or something very like itself – taken up for artistic representation.3 Furthermore, a fascination with the documentary aspects of realism that could in one light appear to be fueled by a desire for selftranscendence and even engagement in another could appear to be nothing more than voyeuristic slumming. Perhaps most important, given the history of the last century and a half, characterized as it is by a widening of the geographic scope (or 92

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at least our awareness of the scope) of literary production, Barthes’ reference to “A Simple Heart” raises, if only between the lines, questions about the relationship between space, identity, and realism. Flaubert’s story, like so much of his work, takes place in what, from a certain perspective, is a peripheral location (Pont-l’Évêque in Normandy, about 120 miles from Paris) – and part of the “simpleness” at play has to do with the noncentrality of the lives and characters depicted. But what happens when a realist literary stance is translated into locales or situations far more distant (whether literally or metaphorically) than Normandy is from Paris? What happens if when a writer attempts to hang Mme Aubain’s barometer on the wall of a home in Bombay, Colombia, or the American South in the years after the Civil War? It is impossible, or at least unprofitable, to consider what realism is without considering the forms, often intentionally distorted, that it has taken globally during the last hundred years? The emergence, for instance, of what has come to be called “magical realism” not only was an adaptive challenge to the suitability of traditional mimetic forms to capture the full reality of peripheral situations, whether geographic, social, imperial, or racial, but was also an intervention that exposed some of the nearly invisible presuppositions of realism itself. (Wilde’s reference to Caliban in his Preface is interesting in this light, as the presumably British reader angered by either the mirror’s distortion or lack of distortion, or perhaps both, is translated into a racialized figure himself or herself. The self that faces the mirror is from the start an other.) Long before the emergence of “other” realisms, the term itself has from its earliest iterations been haunted by self-divisions and internal contradictions. Its first appearance seems to have been in a French journal (Mercure français du XIXe siècle) in 1821, in which it is aligned more generally with verisimilitude than with the imitation of established literary forms. This literary doctrine that is gaining ground every day and which drives toward faithful imitation not of other artistic masterpieces, but rather of the original that nature offers us, might well be called realism: on the basis of a few appearances, it seems to be set to be the dominant literary form of the nineteenth century, the literature of the true.4

By the 1850s, it was an established term for the critical discussion of literature as well as fine art – Louis Edmond Duranty founded a journal called Réalisme in 1856.5 But from the very first we can see that the term meant at least two things at once. On the one hand, it refers to an artistic stance that leans toward the accurate representation of things rather than obedience to previously established models. On the other hand, even if in the passage 93

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above it only comes in the form of a prediction based on “a few appearances,” it is the word for an artistic movement, even a coterie. Realism (with a capital R) is a word we use to describe a school of writers from the nineteenth century who, as the story goes, reacted against the excesses (and especially the excessive subjectivity and general over-the-topness) of those we now label the Romantics. It began (again, according to the conventional telling of the history) with Europeans, generally British and French, such as Charles Dickens and George Eliot, on the one side of the English Channel, and Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert on the other side. Germans (Theodor Fontaine and others), Russians (Anton Chekov and Leo Tolstoy), and Americans (William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Stephen Crane) filled out the ranks as the movement spread. But, then again, “realism,” this time with a lowercase r, is something that has always been an important trait of the novel, at least in the tradition that had its beginnings in seventeenth-century Europe. According to Ian Watt, for instance, realism has long been seen as a “defining characteristic” that “differentiates the work of the early eighteenth-century novelists from previous fiction.”6 And, he continues, [i]f the novel were realistic merely because it saw life from the seamy side, it would only be an inverted romance; but in fact it surely attempts to portray all the varieties of human experience, and not merely those suited to one particular literary perspective: the novel’s realism does not reside in the kind of life it presents, but in the way it presents it.7

Furthermore, novelistic realism is as much a matter of form as content. The very notion of fiction bears within it, even historically, a complex relationship between reality and falsehood, truth and lies. While we (and modern-day bookshops, in their layout) argue that the essential distinction in written works is between fiction and fact, Catherine Gallagher has argued that the novel has from its start been a matter of finding a third way between the two poles. Since the seventeenth century, the novel has negotiated not only with its distinction from factuality but also from fantasy. In other words, the novel emerged out of a dual differentiation – what happens may not have actually happened, but it might well have. As she argues, as the novel emerged out of and in resistance to prior forms such as the personal allegory, the romance, and the libelous screed, [t]wo things were lacking: (1) a conceptual category of fiction, and (2) believable stories that did not solicit belief. Novels supplied both of these simultaneously, which explains their paradoxical relation to fiction. Fictionality only became visible when it became credible, because it only needed conceptualizing 94

Realism and the Novel as the difference between fictions and lies became less obvious, as the operators of fictionality became multiple and incredibility lost its uniqueness.8

She continues: As the novel distinguished itself through fictionality, its fictionality also differentiated itself from previous incredible forms. Hence we have another way of imagining the paradox: the novel slowly opens the conceptual space of fictionality in the process of seeming to narrow its practice.9

So rather than the simple division between factual writing and “made-up” narratives, according to Gallagher’s argument, the category of fiction as it developed over the centuries has mediated between the two poles. It is not a true record of actual occurrences, but neither is it an utterly fantastic account of things that could never be. Fiction, she claims, developed as a mode of representation that was untrue but plausible. And this, as she shows, has long been – from the beginning, in fact – something that literary criticism has been aware of. She cites, for instance, the following passage from the ninth chapter of Aristotle’s Poetics on the role of the poet versus the role of the historian: From what has been said it is clear too that the poet’s job is not to tell what has happened but the kind of things that can happen, i.e., the kind of events that are possible according to probability or necessity. For the difference between the historian and the poet is not in their presenting accounts that are versified or not versified . . . rather, the difference is this: the one tells what has happened, the other the kind of things that can happen.10

While Aristotle, of course, isn’t discussing novels, realist or otherwise, his distinction, which runs not between things that happen and things that haven’t happened but between what has happened and what could happen, speaks to the inherence of the notion of what we now call “realism” in literary understanding from the start. But how is this plausibility achieved? Aristotle links it in his Poetics to “probability or necessity” – in other words, our sense of how things often enough are and what generally happens as a result of a thing like this happening first. Novelistic realism, at its most basic level, is a matter of conformity to certain rules of thumb and unwritten manuals of conventional wisdom about the sorts of things that are likely or unlikely to happen in a given situation. As the novel developed in Europe, and due in part to an increasing interest in human psychology (both before and then after the career of Sigmund Freud), this plausibility increasingly takes the form of what we now call “psychological realism,” which is staked on the depiction of the relationship between the internal personalities, mentalities, and 95

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thought patterns of characters and how they are informed by and in turn play out within the external world. Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, for instance, could be encapsulated as the working out of a thought experiment: what would happen if a young woman, who had received a thorough education in romance fiction, ended up living in a very boring provincial French town with an inept husband. The intricate portrayal of Emma Bovary’s interiority (in particular, its initial constitution) and how it manifests in her behavior in the locale in which she finds herself is at the heart of Flaubert’s innovatively realist project. A late-arriving subbranch of nineteenth-century realism called “naturalism” intensifies this sense of social and psychological causality until the characters and their actions seem almost wholly predetermined by the circumstance out of which they emerge. An easy illustration of what this might mean comes on the first page of American naturalist Theodore Dreiser’s 1900 novel Sister Carrie with the subtitle of the first chapter: “The Magnet Attracting: A Waif amid Forces.”11 True to form, the novel’s protagonist is inserted into a field of forces and acts in what is meant to be taken as a nearly automatically responsive way. But there is another way that novels establish their realistic plausibility – and it is one that perhaps is a symptom of the long modernity in which they emerged and blossomed as a form. It is also a way that has affinities with Barthes’ “reality effect” discussed at the beginning of this chapter. In his essay “Serious Century,” Franco Moretti analyzes the relationship between what he calls “fillers” and “turning points” in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel and offers the following reduction of the plot of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: A cardinal function is a possible turning point; fillers no, they are what happens between a turning point and the next. An example. Pride and Prejudice (1813), Elizabeth and Darcy meet in chapter 3, he acts horribly, she is disgusted: first action with “consequences for the development of the story”: they are set in opposition to each other. Thirty-one chapters later, Darcy proposes to Elizabeth; second turning point: an alternative has been opened. Another twenty-seven chapters, and Elizabeth accepts him: alternative closed, end of the novel. Three turning points: beginning, middle, and ending; very geometric; very Austen-like. But of course, in between these three major scenes, Elizabeth and Darcy meet, and talk, and hear, and think about each other, and it’s not easy to quantify this type of thing, but I have done my best, and have found about 110 episodes of this kind. They are the fillers. And Barthes is right, they really don’t do much: they enrich and nuance the progress of the story, yes, but without ever modifying what the turning points have established.12 96

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In short, Moretti has noticed something that is as interesting anthropologically as it is aesthetically. We could commonly think that readers – especially those who aren’t necessarily writing an undergraduate essay or a Ph.D. thesis – attend to fiction because they enjoy the moments of drama, the sudden turns and revelation. But when one examines a novel, even one as persistently popular as Pride and Prejudice, analysis (or here, really, just counting) discovers the stark imbalance of such moments when compared with the massive volume of what Moretti calls “fillers.” Why do we allow ourselves to spend so much time bathing in the insignificant in order to arrive at that which we, it would seem, really want? Moretti ultimately claims that the fillers, and their predominance in the text, provide works with a stabilizing sort of pleasure much in demand during the period in which they were written. Why fillers, in the nineteenth century? Because they offer the kind of narrative pleasure compatible with the new regularity of bourgeois life. Fillers turn the novel into a “calm passion.” [They] are an attempt at rationalizing the novelistic universe: turning it into a world of few surprises, fewer adventures, and no miracles at all.13

But there is another purpose, or at least effect, of the presence of such seemingly issueless materials in narrative fiction. And it is a purpose that could be called a temporal version of the “reality effect” that Barthes finds in the barometer, in the named material objects, of “A Simple Heart.” We know we are dealing with realism when things don’t happen all the time, at least important things – when a novel conforms more to the pacing and patterns of most people’s everyday lives. The existential dilemma Emma Bovary suffers from, in a sense, is a temporal disorder that comes from a genre misunderstanding. She has read romances in which things do, in fact, happen all the time, only to find herself in a space – provincial France but also, in a sense, the space of the realist novel – in which they don’t. So she tries, with disastrous results, to force the issue. One thing, then, that realist texts do, in general, even if the actual patterns and rhythms vary dramatically from text to text, is disobey a general mandate that literature be eventful, that it have something of interest happening all the time. But this only begs another question: what becomes of realism when it is in fact confronted by an eventful world, when it, as the saying goes, lives in interesting times? And in particular, what becomes of realism when it is applied outside the often more tranquil spaces of the cosmopolitan core of Europe and the United States? A vivid evocation of the stakes involved in such a translation comes from South African novelist J. M. Coetzee in a 1986 essay published in the 97

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New York Times Book Review. The essay deals with the strange and complex situation faced by literary writers during what would turn out to be the final years of the apartheid regime in South Africa. In particular, the question of the ethical stakes of the realistic depiction of the torture conducted by the regime is central to the essay. Since the time of Flaubert, the novel of realism has been vulnerable to criticism of the motives behind its preoccupation with the mean, the low, the ugly. If the novelist finds in squalor the occasion for his most soaring poetic eloquence, might he not be guilty of seeking out his squalid subject matter for perversely literary reasons?14

But the issue at hand here is an even more knotty one than the potential sensationalization of violence for artistically mercenary ends. At the start of the essay, Coetzee focuses on the presence of the headquarters of the South African security police in a building on Vorster Square in Johannesburg. In one sense, it is just another municipal building in a large city, but, on the other hand, it is one that the citizenry passes by every day fully aware of the horrific scenes of interrogation, torture, and murder that were taking place within it. As Coetzee writes, “One can go about one’s daily business in Johannesburg within calling distance (except that the rooms are soundproofed) of people undergoing the utmost suffering.”15 Having described this darkly uncanny situation, Coetzee distills it into something of a literary double bind and shows how it is related to the fundamental dynamics and demands of realism. On the one hand, the novelist responds to an obligation – at once ethical, political, and aesthetic – to represent what takes place behind the closed door of the torture room. [T]he novelist is a person who, camped before a closed door, facing an insufferable ban, creates, in place of the scene he is forbidden to see, a representation of that scene and a story of the actors in it and how they come to be there. Therefore my question should not have been phrased, Why are writers in South Africa drawn to the torture room? The dark, forbidden chamber is the origin of novelistic fantasy per se; in creating an obscenity, in enveloping it in mystery, the state creates the preconditions for the novel to set about its work of representation.16

Novelists’ representational attention is provoked by the closed door – whether the one in question is that of some neighbors on his street or those of the cells of the hulking intelligence agency he passes daily downtown. And, of course, when it comes to the latter situation, there is an ethical obligation involved as well. What would we make of a novel set in Johannesburg during 98

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the period in question that didn’t, one way or another, involve itself in what is happening not quite off stage. But, on the other hand, as Coetzee proceeds, he asks, [y]et there is something tawdry about following the state in this way, making its vile mysteries the occasion of fantasy. For the writer the deeper problem is not to allow himself to be impaled on the dilemma proposed by the state, namely, either to ignore its obscenities or else to produce representations of them. The true challenge is how not to play the game by the rules of the state, how to establish one’s own authority, how to imagine torture and death on one’s own terms.17

The writer, faced with a mandate that is at once literary and ethical, feels obligated to bring the reader inside the forbidden space. But in doing so, according to this paragraph, isn’t the novelist simply playing the game by the state’s rules or, worse, doing valuable propaganda work for the state itself, for beyond the immediate goals of torture, pragmatic or sadistic, there is a communicative intent – torture is an advertisement for the power of the state. To describe what is happening, what the state can only hint at but cannot say, may mean to serve as a sort of PR flack who sounds the dog whistles and warnings that the electoral candidate cannot be heard to have uttered. Coetzee’s evocation of a very specific ethicoaesthetic situation, that of the artist writing in the shadow of Vorster Square, speaks to a wider problem faced by writers, critics, and readers alike when it comes to realism. Especially when dealing with milieus strewn with torture rooms and political prisoners rather than bourgeois pensioners and their barometers, the demand to represent accurately becomes a particularly vexing one and one that is bound up with issues of appropriation, exploitation, and commercialized exoticism. Further, what happens when this literary form, developed primarily in Europe and secondarily in the United States, is resituated into locations far afield from its origin? In his essay “Misplaced Ideas,” Roberto Schwarz discusses the effects on the early development of the Brazilian novel of the mismatch between the liberal socioideological environment that sprouted the European novel as a form and the Brazilian cultural situation (and, in particular, its prolonged economic dependence on slavery). As they write, there was a noticeable “dissonance between representations, and what, upon consideration, we know to be their context” during the period informed by “the impression that Brazil gives of ill-assortedness – unmanageable contrasts, disproportions, nonsense, anachronisms, outrageous compromises and the like.”18 The specific maladaption between acquired literary forms and the realities 99

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they were employed to represent in Brazil has, we can see, been a formative problem in the expansion of the realist novel more generally beyond its northern European points of origin. One answer to this problem has been provided by a loose group of postcolonial and minority writers in the United States and elsewhere whose genre has come to be identified by the paradoxical term “magical realism.” The term itself has a diffuse origin. According to Maggie Ann Bowers, it was first used in Germany to describe a species of Weimar painting and then used (in the form of lo real maravilloso) in the 1940s in Latin America, before attaining, in Spanish, its ultimate formulation in the 1950s as realismo mágico.19 And true to the history of the term, the first practitioners of the form, most famously Gabriel García Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges, were South American writers. Eventually, through direct influence or merely critical association, the term came to be applied to a group of writers in English as well, such as Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, and Angela Carter. Magical realism is a form that inserts fantastical, magical, or mythical elements into what we might call a realist “container.” The elements of realist fiction described earlier are maintained or at least performed – the magical realist text generally proceeds as if it is maintaining the plausibility, the handle on everyday reality and paths of psychological causality that are hallmarks of the form while nevertheless inserting the fantastical. This results in what we might call a “casual hybridity,” in which the banal and the magical share the narrative space without, seemingly, disrupting each other. Take, for instance, the opening lines of a text frequently deployed as an example of magical realism, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981). I was born in the city of Bombay . . . once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date. I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th 1947. And the time? The time matters too. Well then, at night. No, it’s important to be more . . . On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out, at the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps, and outside the window fireworks and crowds. A few seconds later my father broke his big toe, but his accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in that benighted moment, when thanks to the occult tyrannies of the blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country.20

This paragraph evokes at least three genres at once: autobiography (because it is in the protagonist/narrator’s first-person voice), history (note the 100

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deliberate delivery of some textbook facts about the origin of the modern state of India), and myth. The “once upon a time” conjures up the impression that we are about to hear a fairy tale or an exotic myth, only to cancel itself out in the narrator’s hesitation (“No, that won’t do”). Above all, these lines are emblematic of a self-awareness – one might even call it a profitable selfalienation – at the heart of many magical realist texts. “Oh, spell it out, spell it out”; it is as if the narrator (or his author) is attempting to signal to us the stylistic difficulty of fitting a reality such as that of the history of India, or himself as an Indian, into the form of the traditional Western novel. But just as magical realism implicitly (and at times explicitly) asks certain questions about the classical realism that it has incorporated and productively deformed, we are left with difficult questions about magical realism as well. While the idea that colonial, postcolonial, or minority reality is maladapted to conventional realist representation is persuasive, it is also difficult not to sense that the newer forms of realism, at least to a certain degree, conform and cater to Western readers’ taste for the exotic or, to put it more darkly, their resistance to direct exposure to the realities of dire situations. The Western reader may well enjoy a mythologically inflected rendition of the emergence of Indian self-rule more than a documentary portrait of the Calcutta slums, just as a gothicized ghost story about the aftermath of slavery may be easier for the white American reader to take (or the teacher to teach) than a clinical depiction of the realities of black life in America before and just after the disappearance of the institution of slavery. And further, as is wont to happen with chains of literary influence and history, just as writers from the periphery were influenced by but also reimagined realism into a new shape that was seemingly more appropriate to their purposes, so too has magical realism been influential upon writers working in the global centers. As Timothy Brennan has argued, in literary terms the “relations of power have been reversed: U.S. and European novelists now eagerly cop the metafictional extravaganzas and the multilingual and multiracial cross-dressing of work from non-European countries.”21 This translation, further, can lead to controversial results. In a famous (or perhaps infamous) 2000 essay, the critic James Wood identified a set of American and British authors – Rushdie, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith are just some of those named in his piece – that were practicing, according to him, a malign intensification or translation of magical realism that he terms “hysterical realism.” “Storytelling,” he explains, “has become a kind of grammar in these novels; it is how they structure and drive themselves on.” He adds further that “[t]he conventions of realism are not being abolished but, on the contrary, exhausted, and overworked.”22 101

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Whatever the merit of Wood’s claims – and whatever we make of the complicated geopolitical issues undergirding them and the works he is discussing – they make clear the pertinence of the concept of literary realism as an issue that has remained a contentious one from Aristotle’s day to our own. Forms such as magical realism, which translate inherited literary forms from established contexts to new ones, productively distort the original forms themselves. In so doing, again in the words of Roberto Schwarz, they expose “a sore spot of the world-historical process” that is also “a valuable clue to it.”23 But it is also a valuable clue to one of the central dilemmas of the novel as a form, which may – and almost always does – resist the realist imperative to some extent but which, it seems, can only completely abandon it at their own peril. NO TES 1. Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language, University of California Press, 1989, p. 141. 2. Ibid., p. 148. 3. “The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass”; Oscar Wilde and Joseph Bristow, The Picture of Dorian Gray: Authoritative Texts, Backgrounds, Reviews and Reactions, Criticism, Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 3. 4. Darío Villanueva, Theories of Literary Realism. State University of New York (SUNY) Press, 1997, p. 18 (translation mine). 5. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, University of California Press, 2000, p. 10. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., p. 11. 8. Catherine Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality,” in The Novel, vol.1, ed. Franco Moretti, Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 340. 9. Ibid. 10. Aristotle, Poetics, Else, 1967, chap. 9, pp. 342–43. 11. Theodore Dreiser, John C. Berkey, and Alfred Kazin, Sister Carrie, Penguin, 1994, p. xi. 12. Franco Moretti, “Serious Century,” in The Novel, vol. 1, ed. Moretti, pp. 367–68. 13. Ibid., p. 381. 14. J. M. Coetzee and David Attwell, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, Harvard University Press, 1992, p. 365. 15. Ibid., p. 362. 16. Ibid., p. 364. 17. Ibid. 18. Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, Verso, 1992, pp. 27, 25.

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Realism and the Novel 19. Maggie Ann Bowers, Magic(al) Realism: The New Critical Idiom, Routledge, 2004, p. 2. 20. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, Penguin, 1991, p. 3. 21. Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now, Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 38. 22. James Wood, “James Woods’ Classic Takedown of Faux-Dickensian ‘Hysterical Realism,’” New Republic, July 24, 2000, available at https://newrepublic.com /article/61361/human-all-too-inhuman. 23. Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas, p. 29.

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6 C A T H E R INE F L Y NN

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While the genre of the novel takes its name from the “new,” innovation was radicalized in novels written in the first half of the twentieth century. This period featured a violent acceleration of modernizing forces in the consolidation of a commercial, individualist society. The dismantling of a social world structured by notions of faith and tradition placed newly urgent emphasis on the ancient question of what it was to be a person, a question given new dimensions by Darwin’s theories of evolution in the nineteenth century and by Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis in the early twentieth century. If the primacy and rationality of the human being and of culture were questioned by such developments in science and psychology, they were deeply undermined by the expansion of colonialism and by two world wars. This loss of certainty coincided with massive technological developments in the realms of communication and entertainment; if one was no longer sure what to say, there were nonetheless an unprecedented number of ways to speak and to listen. In this context, novelists sought a new readership. While the Victorian novel was a dominant cultural form, appealing to a massive popular audience, modernists wrote for a small group of readers who derived enjoyment or satisfaction from engaging with novels that challenged them with radically new forms and with aspects of social and personal life hitherto overlooked, considered unsuitable for representation, or unimagined. Much of the iconoclastic force of the modernist novel is achieved through its opposition to its immediate predecessor. This repudiation of the nineteenth century is part of the spirit of the times but is also part of the subversive pathos of modernism. Amid a rejection of Victorian culture per se, modernist writers often misrepresented nineteenth-century fiction, casting it as overly obsessed with the material, as incapable of true psychological penetration, as bound by convention and as simplifying reality. Victorian novels indeed question reality, focusing on agents for social and political change, for example, or on protagonists struggling with social conventions. However, while nineteenth-century narrators at times express 104

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doubts that they can faithfully represent reality, the novels we find them in function on the principle that an intelligent individual can perceive reality and that language can usefully describe it. Writing in a transforming society, nation, and empire, Victorian novelists engage in educating readers and structuring their perception of the world by offering information and by providing models for the management of new social energies (even while the details of these novels offer internal critiques of their normalizing tendencies). The modernist novel rejects the organizing concepts of class, gender, morality, and race that were developed over the course of the nineteenth century and to which development the nineteenth-century novel contributed. Instead of promoting shared values, the modernist novel takes an oppositional relation to literary and social convention. This opposition is not or not only for the sake of novelty – novelty certainly has an important role for modernism – but also in the service of philosophical exploration. Instead of representing the world, they present the problem of interpreting it. Questioning collective wisdom and dispensing with the criteria for correctness that would allow one to see individuals and the world as objectively knowable phenomena, modernist novels represent experience rather than knowledge. Epistemological doubt leads the modernist novel to exhibit an overt sophistication about the fictionality of fiction; the modernist novel thus witnesses a flourishing of self-conscious artifice as it engages in the interrogation of convention. In this interrogation, everything is up for reconsideration and reinvention: what it is to be an individual, what it is to be a member of society, what it is to be a man or a woman, what it is to speak and to think. The modernist novel forces readers to grapple with these questions by deemphasizing plot. Here we might understand plot simply as a logically or causally related sequence of events that structure a story about a particular problem, from its appearance to its resolution. While the nineteenth-century novel uses plot to make a statement about the individual in the subtlety and depth of its social and historical contexts, the modernist novel’s questioning of causal linkages and interpretive closure leads it to refuse plot as its primary organizational mode. Rejecting plot as shortcutting questions of judgment and as failing to represent the manner in which individuals experience their lives, the modernist novel reworks and reinvents narrative form in an effort to give expression to individual experience and to the complex environment in which that experience takes place. This diminution of plot leads to the common understanding that the modernist novel is about interiority. David Lodge, for instance, argues that [m]odernist fiction is concerned with consciousness, and also with the subconscious and unconscious workings of the human mind. Hence the structure of 105

catherine flynn external “objective” events is almost completely dissolved, in order to make room for introspection, analysis, reflection and reverie. A modernist novel has no real “beginning,” since it plunges us into a flowing stream of experience with which we gradually familiarize ourselves by a process of inference and association; and its ending is usually “open” or ambiguous, leaving the reader in doubt as to the final destiny of its characters.1

If this “flowing stream of experience” seems plausible, largely because it sounds like James Joyce’s stream of consciousness, the terms associated with it must be put in question. What, in other words, are the “workings” of the “human mind”? Where is the “inside” of introspection? If the modernist novel refuses narrative closure, what does it offer instead? As this chapter explores, modernist fiction has a special interest in the workings of the mind. It devises an array of formal innovations, such as the stream of consciousness, for the representation of interiority. Yet these innovations present the mind not as an isolated, merely subjective mechanism but rather as formed by external, and contingent, events and structures. The modernist novel shows the complexity of experience in its physical, social, and historical immersion and, in doing so, foregrounds language as an inescapable medium by which the individual is formed and connected to others. This emphasis brings with it possibilities for experimentation and innovation; in the modernist novel, language is broken apart and made emphatically present as matter that is capable of being reshaped. This reshaping takes place at the level of narrative form and also at the level of the phrase. Inventions in the sentence and between sentences allow the modernist novel to distinguish itself from the given, the preformed, and the conventional. The deformations and insistent regularities of language in modernist fiction intervene in our understanding of interiority, character, narrative, time, and space to present new kinds of existence and thinking. In order to examine these innovations, this chapter addresses a series of case studies. It looks closely at novels by Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Samuel Beckett. Apart from Proust’s Recherche, it focuses on instances of what might be called the “British modernist novel,” although among these authors only Woolf is English-born, and Beckett turned to writing in French early in his career. This variegated group illustrates the mobile perspectives from which the modern novel is composed. The child of Polish parents, Conrad visited all corners of the world on French commercial and British merchant marine ships before taking up residence in England. Dublin-born Joyce settled in Paris, after more than a decade in Trieste and several years in Zurich. Beckett, another Irishman, joined him there as a young man. Rhys was born in 106

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Dominica, of a Welsh father and a mother of Creole Scots ancestry, and spent her adult life in England and France. Examining novels by these diverse writers, this chapter follows one of many possible chronological paths in a period of massive inventiveness and variety. In so doing, it shows how the modernist novel has moments of lineage and connection despite, and even in, its striking ruptures.2 As Unflinching as a Hero of a Book The personified narrator of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900) contrasts starkly with the omniscient narrator of the Victorian realist novel, who represented with unquestioned accuracy the material, psychological, and sociological conditions of characters at a specific time and place. Lord Jim presents a realism of perception and presentation in British Merchant Navy officer Marlow’s struggle to construct an account of Jim’s character through his own memories and the tales told to him by Jim himself and a host of other characters. Inviting readers’ involvement in a quest for knowledge that ends in bafflement, Marlow’s wandering account is a powerful instance of literary impressionism, the narrative technique influenced by French painting that combines an interest in the processes of subjective apprehension with an unwavering awareness of their limitations. Marlow finishes with a series of unresolved and irresolvable questions about Jim: “He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic . . . Is he satisfied – quite, now, I wonder?”3 To emphasize this pursuit of questions of honor, Conrad blends elements of adventure tales by Rudyard Kipling and H. Rider Haggard with aspects of medieval romance. Yet these questions are rendered problematic and even obsolete by the novel’s subject: Jim’s career, far from his father’s parsonage, in a global market created by imperial conquest. Withholding certainty regarding Jim’s true character, the novel presents a different kind of answer to these questions: formation of the individual by structures that are linguistic, even textual, precisely as they are bound up in these new economic relations. After Jim’s death, an unnamed character receives a bundle of papers including a fragment written by Jim that Marlow describes in an attached letter: “‘An awful thing has happened,’ he wrote before he flung the pen down for the first time; look at the ink blot resembling the head of an arrow under these words. After a while he had tried again, scrawling heavily, as if with a hand of lead, another line. ‘I must now at once.’ The pen had spluttered, and that time he gave it up.”4 Marlow comments on the unknowability of Jim’s intentions, yet the two short sentences respond precisely to an utterance in the first pages of the novel when, a boy in training on a Merchant 107

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Navy vessel on the Thames, lying on his bunk immersed in “the sea-life of light literature,” Jim is suddenly summoned, “Something’s up. Come along.”5 The young Jim, however, remains dazed on the deck while his classmates leap into action. The abrupt, maximally concise sentences he impresses on the page at the end of the novel respond precisely to this first summons: Jim is now the possessor of knowledge regarding an unnamed event (“An awful thing has happened”), and he substitutes for an imperative a personal assertion of obligation (“I must now at once”). His final written words correct an earlier, blundering reprise of the first summons in which he unthinkingly leapt from a boat in response to a command directed at someone else: “‘I had jumped.’ He checked himself, averted his gaze. ‘It seems,’ he said”6 – two short sentences in which past action is reported with uncertainty. Jim’s giving of his life for the death of a prince during his guardianship of a remote kingdom in the Malay Archipelago is a response to his initial interpolation on the other side of the world. In the persistent structure of the three utterances, time and space fall away. Lord Jim thus addresses identity in two contradictory ways: Marlow’s miscellaneous and inconclusive account of Jim’s character and the three telegraphic statements regarding his actions. In contrast to Marlow’s frustrated attempts to know the truths of his innermost being, Jim creates for himself a profoundly different kind of self. Flinging down the pen, he ends his life in a parallel gesture: having allowed himself to be shot by the king of Patusan following the death of his son, Jim’s falling body resembles the mute “ink blot resembling the head of an arrow.” If on the deck of the training ship he imagined himself as “unflinching as a hero of a book,”7 he now achieves a permanent immutability. The novel thus undercuts its own psychological focus and epistemological drive with a mark making that is radically at odds with interiority. Jim is a descendent of Don Quixote and Emma Bovary – “after a course of light holiday literature his vocation for the sea had declared itself”8 – but here he departs from the realm of animate consciousness to become his own character in the sense of a physical figure. The Little Phrase In Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27, In Search of Lost Time, previously translated as Remembrance of Things Past) we see a different opposition of narrative and material form. While Lord Jim engages in a degree of achronology, the Recherche is an extreme instance of the modernist use of nonlinear unfolding to represent the fluidity of consciousness, the subjective experience of time, and the difficulty of interpretation in the absence of shared values and transcendental truth. Plunging its readers into 108

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4,000 pages of memories, reflections, insights, and revised perspectives as it ranges over a period between the 1870s and the 1920s, the novel’s overwhelming mass of material defies plot’s shaping force. In its place, it offers another means of shaping experience, relationships, and even the novel itself. A musical motif recurs throughout, a short sequence of notes from a sonata by the fictional composer Vinteuil referred to by the nameless Narrator and other characters as the “little phrase.” This fragment of music allows an order that is not narrative but relational, and its intimately related positions are open to placeholders of very different kinds. The little phrase is first heard by the Narrator’s friend, Charles Swann, to whom it suggests the possibility of an escape from meaningless experience. It successively operates for him as a summons, a rite, a fetish, an anesthetic, and an aide-memoire. On first hearing, it awakens in him “the desire and almost the strength to consecrate his life,” yet Swann uses the phrase to bind himself romantically to Odette de Crécy, a woman he does not love, in repeated listenings at the Verdurins’ salon where it becomes an official ceremony, the “national anthem of their love.”9 Swann insists that Odette, in private, play the phrase while kissing him, prompting her to ask, “Am I to play the phrase or play with you?”10 The little phrase numbs him to Odette’s “abrupt and disappointing” affection, creating in his soul “blank pages on which he was at liberty to inscribe the name of Odette.”11 Nonetheless, this blankness and numbness conceal a passion revealed only too late; after her love for him fades, Swann inadvertently hears the little phrase and is flooded by memories of her love for him. It is only at this point that the Narrator presents Swann’s observations: “it was to the closeness of the intervals between the five notes which composed it and to the constant repetition of two of them that was due the impression of a frigid and withdrawn sweetness.”12 Unlike the causally connected events of a narrative, the notes of the little phrase form a network of proximity rather than a linear progression. In this network of notes at close intervals to one another, a dyadic relation is emphasized. The reiteration of the two notes creates an impression of paired intimacy and separation, of desire and distance that is characteristic of the novel’s agon. As Swann attempts to “disentangle from his confused impressions” (démêler) the little phrase, he realizes that not only its emotional character but also the notes themselves are based “upon certain equivalents, substituted (for his mind’s convenience) for the mysterious entity of which he had become aware, before he ever knew the Verdurins, at that earlier party when for the first time he had heard the sonata played.”13 The little phrase is thus itself a stand-in for reality, sounding for Swann its disconnection from the actual music while, in sounding, generating his desire for it. Never 109

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encapsulating the sound, it articulates instead the belated and tantalizing structure of experience. An increasing range of elements inhabits the little phrase as it forms a network throughout the novel, binding Swann to Odette and linking them with the Narrator. In the fifth volume, the Narrator declares to his own lover, Albertine Simonet, that the little phrase is the national anthem of their love too. To distract himself from his worries about her fidelity, he uses the little phrase to generate a theory of modern art. Remarking that it resembles Wagner’s motifs, he declares that the incompleteness “characteristic of all the great works of the nineteenth century” leads to a new form of beauty: the artists’ own imposition of a “retroactive unity,” “a unity that was unaware of itself, hence vital and not logical, that did not prohibit variety, dampen invention.”14 The Narrator thus sees the little phrase as having the capacity to align disparate elements in ways that cut across narrative and logical modes of organization, because its lack of definite content allows it to serve at multiple moments and in so doing to unify them. Thus the little phrase offers an experientially satisfying alternative to transcendental truths. It is associated with the novel’s key motifs in a pair of sentences that seem to follow one another but lack a logical relation. It is inconceivable that a piece of sculpture or a piece of music which gives us an emotion that we feel to be more exalted, more pure, more true, does not correspond to some definite spiritual reality or life would be meaningless. Thus nothing resembled more closely than some such phrase of Vinteuil the peculiar pleasure which I had felt at certain moments in my life, when gazing, for instance, at the steeples of Martinsville, or at certain trees along a road near Balbec, or, more simply, at the beginning of this book, when I tasted a certain cup of tea.15

In the first sentence, the Narrator refuses to imagine that the emotions inspired by art are not evidence of its spiritual veracity. This quasi-logic is followed by the logical adverb, thus, ainsi, which, however, introduces a set of experiences that are not those of art and that are not emotional but pleasurable. This shift is part of this mode that is not logical but relational, not referential but positional. It performs, in other words, the form of the little phrase. Following the possibility, voiced by the first sentence, that life is meaningless, the little phrase offers not meaning but a relation in which experience becomes palpable. The Throwaway While the Recherche presents the shifting retrospections of its evolving protagonist/narrator, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) represents interiority in 110

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a different temporality, devising the narrative technique of the stream of consciousness to represent with unprecedented immediacy the haphazard and fleeting passage of its protagonists’ thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Ulysses combines this unprecedented focus on the present-tense processes of consciousness, however, with a commitment to the exploration of multiple discursive styles and logics. Different versions of the stream of consciousness in the first half of the novel are followed in the second by a series of spectacularly innovative narrative modes. Changing form, style, and focus, the eighteen “episodes” of Ulysses reimagine in verbal form the adventures of Homer’s Odysseus. This democratic appropriation of a classical text is combined with a dense allusiveness that draws on the canon of English literature, mixing it with references to popular culture. In this jubilant, if demanding, example of modernist intertextuality, language becomes graphic and acoustic material that is reshaped, repurposed, and set against itself but that is also invested with its own mutating life. Combined with a thoroughgoing verisimilitude, the conjuring of literary forms in Ulysses suggests that history is contingent. Its irreverence toward convention suggests the possibility of freedom and invention within shifting linguistic, historical, and physical processes. Resisting logical progression and suspending conclusion and synthesis, the formal and stylistic variations of Ulysses repeatedly recast individual elements. Early in the novel, Leopold Bloom is handed a “throwaway,” a pamphlet announcing the advent of Elijah and of an evangelist preacher. Instead of the second coming, the throwaway itself reappears as a scrap of rubbish floating down the Liffey. Its text, “all are washed in the blood of the lamb,” is repeatedly reworked according to the concerns of the various episodes, grotesquely literalized, for example, in one of the “exploding visions” of “Circe” when Father Malachi O’Flynn “elevates a blooddripping host” in a Black Mass and appearing as a clichéd explanation of Italian temperament in the web of cliché, periphrasis, and solecism of “Eumaeus”: “All are washed in the blood of the sun.”16 The reiterated throwaway constitutes neither a static form nor a conclusive narrative but instead a transformational process. Bloom’s chief characteristic, and his heroic quality, is his capacity to take pleasure in, and reflect on, his own objectification. When Bloom initially receives the pamphlet, his glance breaks apart the text to see his own name: “Bloo . . . Me? No. Blood of the Lamb. His slow feet walked him riverward, reading. Are you saved? All are washed in the blood of the lamb. God wants blood victim. Birth, hymen, martyr, war, foundation of a building, sacrifice, kidney burntoffering, druids’ altars.”17 The stream of consciousness thus reveals an encounter of consciousness with linguistic, religious, and 111

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historical formation. As Bloom reflects on various kinds of subjection, we see a mind that through engaging with external influences escapes determination. “Throwaway” also features as the name of the horse who wins the Gold Cup as a “rank outsider”;18 Bloom, another rank outsider, is mistakenly attacked for betting on it. Seemingly inconsequential yet surprisingly tenacious, the horse, as well as the scrap of urban text, resembles Bloom himself. The vicissitudes of the phrase accompany those of a character recast in language: Bloom is subjected to repeated and intensified transformations as the book progresses. Successively rendered in the gestating literary language of “Oxen of the Sun,” he is “the traveller Leopold” (Mandeville), “childe Leopold” (Malory), “Mr. Cautious Calmer” (Bunyan), “Leop. Bloom” (Pepys), “Mr. Bloom” (Burke), “the alien” (Junius), “Mr. Canvasser Bloom” (Gibbon), “young Leopold” (Lamb), and “the johnny in black duds” (slang). If the language remains English and Bloom remains Bloom, they do so through their capacity to undergo transformation. The novel’s transformations allow it to relativize different political and social discourses and to present, within these iterations, an individuality that is free from singular identification. This serial being is thematized at the climax of Ulysses’ vestigial plot – which is concerned with the survival of the Blooms’ marriage following Molly’s adultery – when Bloom climbs into the bed that bears the physical traces of his wife’s lover. The pseudoscientific catechism of “Ithaca” features the following question and answer: If he had smiled why would he have smiled? To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity.19

Bloom here is emblematic of any individual inhabiting preexisting structures, an inhabitation that is neither unique nor permanent. That the question takes the subjunctive mode indicates a freedom that nonetheless exists: through the possibility of recognizing and affirming this condition. Bloom’s possible smile at the end of Ulysses thus does not mark a resolution – the possession of a heroine by a hero – but rather the possibility of a conscious refusal of identification with any singular position, a possibility associated with joy. Fear No More The modernist novel’s exploration of the transindividual nature of lived experience finds another articulation in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), which is set, like Ulysses, on a single day. Refusing a realism 112

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centered in material fact, Woolf proposes instead a depiction of reality through the representation of multiple subjective impressions. Woolf’s depiction of interiority is indebted to the associative patterns and unconscious motivations of the Joycean stream of consciousness, yet, unlike Joyce’s use of allusion, idiolect, and fragmentary syntax, Woolf’s representation of experience, sensation, and thought takes the form of a free indirect style that mixes third-person narration with characters’ thoughts. Free indirect style was employed in novels such as Jane Austen’s Emma, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to offer an unprecedented sense of intimacy with a protagonist within a third-person narrative, but Woolf uses it to radically different effect. The narration moves through different perspectives in flowing, expansive syntax uninterrupted by chapter divisions to undo the boundaries between characters. Her contribution, in this novel, to the modernist reconception of the relation of the individual to society is to propose deep interpersonal connections between individuals in a co-being resistant to logical expression. The interweaving of individual consciousnesses presented by the novel’s use of free indirect style is given emphasis by a repeated network of metaphorical patterns and shifting perceptions that cluster around a phrase, “fear no more.” The phrase recurs in the thoughts of Clarissa Dalloway, a mature married woman of high social standing, and of Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran of the Great War, of whom Clarissa hears briefly at the end of the novel. The phrase is a negative imperative from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline that assuages fears not of death but of the travails of life, announcing release from painful physical sensations: “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun / Nor the furious winter’s rages.”20 Taking the cretic form typical of proverbs, with two stressed syllables that end in an /r/ sound that would not be pronounced in Woolf’s nonrhotic variety of English, the phrase presents two different but matched sounds to create a pattern of sameness and difference, an effect of open-ended change. The phrase thus illustrates the shifting continuity Clarissa imagines as her existence, being “part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best,” and describes a death that is simultaneously survival in a different physical form.21 The phrase suggests a universal connectedness in a fundamental condition of life: the constant and unpredictable disruption and alteration of existence by sensation.22 Clarissa associates the phrase with a transpersonal affective realm, a liquid medium into which all emotions pass, “some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows.”23 Later variations of the cascade of aquatic similes that accompanies the phrase assert this coexistence across class and social lines. 113

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Septimus, even in his irrational thought processes, inhabits the same figural water as Clarissa. Outside the trees dragged their leaves like nets through the depths of the air; the sound of water was in the room and through the waves came the voices of birds singing. Every power poured its treasures on his head, and his hand lay there on the back of the sofa, as he had seen his hand lie when he was bathing, floating, on the top of the waves, while far away on shore he heard dogs barking and barking far away. Fear no more, says the heart in the body; fear no more. He was not afraid.24

While in the throes of his distress, Septimus feared that he could not feel, but here he is released into sensation. Septimus’ present sensations merge with past ones in a temporal blending that is combined with a transindividual blending, as his memories echo Clarissa’s perceptions of “the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and barking.”25 As the language erodes any particularizing boundary, here time, place, and the self are undone even as individual consciousness is at its most acute. This shared sensory and affective being subtends the official, institutional divisions of the world. Septimus ends his own life in order to continue inhabitation of this shared realm and to escape the violently repressive efforts to reassert conventional boundaries in the name of “proportion.” In the novel’s logic of shared sensation, sociability and solitude, light and dark, and life and death are not oppositions but rather modulations of each other. Clarissa’s shared immersion with Septimus in the ongoing transformations of experience advances a conception of community in which traditional notions of class identity, social interaction, and political orientation fall away. Yes – Yes – Yes . . . Jean Rhys’ 1937 novel Good Morning, Midnight belongs to a second generation of modernist novels that revisit earlier innovations in a critical mode. Rhys’ novel recasts within a scenario of economic precarity and dislocation the profoundly affirmative ending of Joyce’s novel and the quasi-mystical community suggested by Woolf. Rhys’ novel employs a diminished formal virtuosity: adapting the Joycean stream of consciousness, she rejects its allusive intricacies to produce instead a bald articulation of the psychological and social damage caused by material vulnerability. The powerful final affirmation of Ulysses, uttered by Molly Bloom in middle of the night in the bedroom of 7 Eccles Street as her thoughts shift from lover to husband, “and yes I said yes I will Yes,” are restated by Rhys’ protagonist, Sasha 114

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Jansen, in a hotel bedroom in Paris where she has returned to recover her emotional and psychological stability. The unpunctuated, semantically ambiguous style of the “Penelope” episode provides Rhys with a form for the expression of a psychology destabilized by unmitigated exposure to a commercial environment. Rhys’ novel situates the modernist problematization of individual identity in an environment where all individuals are reduced to bodies of varying economic value. Sasha’s precarity becomes the opportunity to stage a critique of a society structured by unchecked capitalism; the novel illustrates the deformations of individuality, gender, and community in a market from which no one can escape. Sasha’s is not so much a fixed self as it is a series of selves that change according to conditions: locale, hair color, dress, alcohol intake. Rhys restages a scene in Mrs. Dalloway in which Clarissa sees an the old woman going to bed in a neighboring house; looking out of her hotel room, Sasha is confronted with the sight of a young woman putting on makeup and drying her laundry in a neighboring building: “The street is so narrow that we are face to face, so to speak.”26 This encounter leads not to a sense of shared mortality, of connectedness in isolation, but rather to a sense of the possession of rival feminine features and practices, of engagement in competing offstage preparations for performance. It stages the erosion of individuality in an environment in which everyone is a competitor. In Good Morning, Midnight, Rhys depicts a world in which paternal figures and husbands are replaced by employers and male counterparts that face similar economic precarity. The hotel is a key locus for this society, bound by nothing but material concern. Sasha encounters a menacing unemployed salesman, who resembles her as he haunts the hotel corridor wearing a silk dressing gown, and a friendly gigolo, whom she has attracted in her attempts to render herself appealing to wealthy men. In the final scene, having left her door open, she struggles to discern which of the men has entered her room. Recognizing the dressing gown, she declares, in the final lines of the novel: “I look straight into his eyes and despise another poor devil of a human being for the last time. For the last time . . . Then I put my arms around him and pull him down on to the bed, saying: ‘Yes – yes – yes.’”27 Less formally radical than Ulysses, the ending of Good Morning, Midnight is nonetheless powerful due to its ambiguity. While Molly chooses a heroic Everyman, this unknown “cringing, ingratiating” salesman is a marooned and guileless Odysseus, a failed Everyman for her failed Everywoman. Sasha assents to an environment over which she has no control. Her affirmation repeats an example she provides of her “usual conversation, which goes like this: ‘I believe it’s going to be quite fine today – yes, I hope it is – yes – yes – yes.’”28 Sasha characterizes this exchange, which seems more like 115

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a monologue, as “stupid”; it is surrender of critical faculties in a repetitive performance of positivity that attempts to conjure up a desirable outcome. If the affirmation that ends the novel can be read as a capitulation to the worst, Sasha’s refusal to “despise another poor devil of a human being” radicalizes this earlier positivity. Her refusal is a surrender of individual choice, a rejection of the fundamental mechanism of the market. As its heroine foregoes the act of selection, Rhys’ novel abandons the mode of closure achieved by novels such as Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, where judgment, character, and status coincide in a happy union. Staging the renunciation of traditional means of individuation, Rhys’ novel closes in an unspecified mode of interrelation. The ambiguous ending does not merely refuse to conclude the novel’s narrative but also initiates a paradoxical temporality. Sasha’s final words suspend the interrogative alternatives posed by the hotel room itself at the beginning of the novel: “‘Quite like old times,’ the room says. ‘Yes? No?’”29 It is simultaneously empty iteration and transcendence or, in other words, the mere repetition of a familiar collapse and the restoration of a mode of relation that precedes the alienation of assessment. This contradiction is indicated by the novel’s title, Good Morning, Midnight, which invokes the first line of Emily Dickinson’s 1862 poem. The allusion establishes a kinship for the author within the literary canon, invoking a precedent of philosophical exploration through eccentric forms and personae. In the fallen world of Rhys’ novel, its temporal contradiction indicates the paradoxical thinking required for the conception of community in an environment that renders it impossible. A Circle and a Center Samuel Beckett is often seen as conceiving of the terminus of the modernist novel. In his trilogy of novels written in French (1951–53) and published in English translation (1953–57), he presents a final rejoinder to Joyce’s maximalism with the extreme minimalism of a “Literature of the Unword.” During the Second World War, however, at the cusp of what has been called the “postmodern period,” Beckett composed Watt (1953), a novel that does not yet rehearse the failure of language to represent the world. Watt, the eponymous protagonist, models a new kind of character that is caught in the toils of language but who nonetheless retains humor, pathos, and recognizability. With Watt, Beckett moves from an earlier densely allusive technique to a more subtle intertextuality. The novel expands the Ulyssean substitution of sequence for plot because it presents through the 116

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permutations of particular phrases a decentered subjectivity lacking control of its own conditions or meaning. Watt is one of a possibly endless series of servants in the remote house of the mysterious Mr. Knott. Seen only from the back like the God of Exodus, Knott promises to be a complement that would allow Watt to define himself, albeit in negative terms, and escape from the position of sequential placeholder. Yet increased proximity to Knott leads Watt to engage merely in reversed behavior, “As Watt walked, so now he talked, back to front,” an activity that does not constitute a conclusion but only the beginning of a series of odd and inventive inversions.30 Undergoing these permutations, Watt achieves a new liveliness. Watt’s own reflections display this vital seriality, most notably when he ponders a painting that features, on a white background, a circle “broken at its lowest point” and, beside it, a point. Having rehearsed all possibilities for the relatedness of the circle and the center to one another and to themselves, Watt responds to the most irrational of the possibilities: “a circle and a center not its center in search of a center and its circle respectively.”31 A circle searching for “a center” cannot but fail because a circle can have no center but its own; a center “in search of its circle” is equally doomed because a center does not have one, particular circle but an infinite number of them. Watt weeps at a quest whose massive scope “in boundless space, in endless time” merely emphasizes its futility, but the reader’s heightened sympathy is met, in the final clause, by the twist that the tears have a positive effect, “refreshing him greatly.” Watt’s focus on this circle and center is not an ending but a resting point, at which he is found calmly weeping and comically beautiful. Watt suffers but not irrevocably; he is bound but not determined by the permutations of the phrase. Beckett’s later trilogy demonstrates the linguistic entanglement of thought while at the same time rehearsing the disconnection between language and existence. The trilogy rehearses the end of radical experimentation in the novel as Molloy, Malone meurt and L’Innommable progressively defy all the categories that the modernist novel tested and reinvented: narrative, identity, subjectivity, society, temporality, and reality. Its final lines present a deadlock of language and voice. [Y]ou must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.32 117

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The Unnamable thus renounces closure while nonetheless doubting all possibilities of continuation. This doubt therefore can be characterized as postmodern, although it recalls philosophical positions as old as the preSocratics. Beckett subsequently shifted to explorations in the medium of drama and to shorter prose works. In the following decades, the uncertainties of narrative, character, and meaning were rehearsed in ludic mode in what has been called the “postmodern” or “metafictional novel.” More recently, the formal innovations of the modernist novel have often provided a technical repertoire for novelists. In this conventionalization of the once iconoclastic, techniques that originally challenged individuality and plot are employed in novels that rely on those very notions. This chapter has attempted to show the radical deployment of these formal innovations in the modernist novel, a deployment that is accompanied by far-reaching invention at the level of language. In a way that continues to be possible, the sentence and the phrase make the novel strange. NO TES 1. David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy and the Typology of Modern Literature, Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, pp. 56–57. 2. This chapter leaves out authors who most certainly should be addressed in a discussion of the modernist novel, such as Henry James, Gertrude Stein, E. M. Forster, Wyndham Lewis, Ford Madox Ford, and D. H. Lawrence, as well as a second generation that includes Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Mansfield, Djuna Barnes, George Orwell, and William Faulkner. It also might well have included a host of European novelists who influenced novels in the English language and were influenced by them, such as Gustave Flaubert, Alfred Jarry, Louis Aragon, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Alfred Döblin, Robert Musil, and Andrei Bely. 3. Joseph Conrad and Allan Simmons, Lord Jim, Penguin Classics, 2011, p. 318. 4. Ibid., p. 260. 5. Ibid., p. 8. 6. Ibid., p. 86. 7. Ibid., p. 8. 8. Ibid., p. 7. 9. Marcel Proust, C K. Scott-Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and D. J. Enright, In Search of Lost Time, vols. I–VI, Modern Library, 2003, vol. I, pp. 298, 308. 10. Ibid., p. 337. 11. Ibid., pp. 335–36. 12. ibid., p. 85. “Quand après la soirée Verdurin, se faisant rejouer la petite phrase, il avait cherché à démêler comment à la façon d’un parfum, d’une caresse, elle le circonvenait, elle l’enveloppait, il s’était rendu compte que c’était au faible écart

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13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

entre les cinq notes qui la composaient et au rappel constant de deux d’entre elles qu’était due cette impression de douceur rétractée et frileuse.” M. Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, vols. I–VI. J. Y. Tadié, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, 1987–89, vol. I, p. 343. In Search, vol. I, p. 85. “[M]ais en réalité il savait qu’il raisonnait ainsi non sur la phrase elle-même mais sur de simples valeurs, substituées pour la commodité de son intelligence à la mystérieuse entité qu’il avait perçue, avant de connaître les Verdurin, à cette soirée où il avait entendu pour la première fois la sonate.” Recherche. vol. I, p. 343. In Search., vol. V, pp. 207–8. In Search., vol. V, pp. 504–5. “Il n’est pas possible qu’une sculpture, une musique qui donne une émotion qu’on sent plus élevée, plus pure, plus vraie, ne corresponde pas à une certaine réalité spirituelle. Elle en symbolise sûrement une, pour donner cette impression de profondeur et de vérité. Ainsi rien ne ressemblait plus qu’une telle phrase de Vinteuil à ce plaisir particulier que j’avais quelquefois éprouvé dans ma vie, par exemple devant les clochers de Martinville, certains arbres d’une route de Balbec ou, plus simplement, au début de cet ouvrage, en buvant une certaine tasse de thé.” Recherche, vol. III, p. 876–77. James Joyce, Ulysses, Garland, 1986, 8:10–11; 15:4703; 16:889–90. Ibid., 8:8–13. Ibid., 12:1219. Ibid., 17:2126–31. William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, act IV, scene ii, lines 2657–58, The Oxford Shakespeare; The Complete Works, vols. I and II, ed. Jonathan Bate, Oxford University Press, 2005, vol. II, p. 1214. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981, p. 9. Meg Jensen, in an essay on Woolf’s moments of being, also traces this phrase, although she comes to different conclusions: “For Clarissa, the phrase ‘Fear no more’ offers comfort, a connection to the collective. Clarissa, moreover, appears to make a distinction between the heart, which offers its burdens to the sea, and the body, listening to the waves. In Septimus’s hearing the heart and the body are not separated – for him, the heart is ‘in the body,’ which is perhaps why he must throw them out of the window together. And while his vision offers him powers and treasures (like Jacob’s ‘gifts from the past’) it does not allow him to unburden his fears to the collecting sea of sorrows, as Clarissa does.” See “Tradition and Revelation: Moments of Being in Virginia Woolf’s Major Novels,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel, Cambridge University Press, 2007. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, p. 40. Ibid., p. 139. Ibid., p. 40. Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, W.W. Norton, 1999, p. 34. Ibid., p. 190. Ibid., p. 161. Ibid., p. 9. Samuel Beckett, Watt, Grove Press, 1953, p. 134.

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catherine flynn 31. Ibid., p. 105. 32. Samuel Beckett,The Grove Centenary Edition,vols. I-4, Novels, ed. Paul Auster, Grove Press, 2006, vol. II, p. 407. The passage in French in the same footnote should be followed by the citation: S. Beckett, L’innommable, Paris, Les éditions de Minuit, 1953 p. 213.

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part ii

How Does The Novel Work?

7 M A R T A F I GL E R O W I C Z

Novels and Characters “What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?” “About six inches to the mile.” “Only six inches!” exclaimed Mein Herr. “We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!” “Have you used it much?” I enquired. “It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected.” —Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded1

Characters are aesthetic compromises with reality. Like the circle on a map that represents a city or the line on a map that represents a road, a character pulls both toward and away from the human minds and bodies for which it pretends to be a metonymy, replacement, and guide. In English, this duality is marked even by the semantics of the word “character”: it signifies, at once, a person (or a personality) and the stroke of a pen.2 To represent the social world through characters, as novels do, is to insist on the primacy of the particular – of immediate personal experience, specific interpersonal interactions, or everyday life – as the origin and medium of our knowledge about ourselves and others. But characters are also, by definition, never quite as particular as any real-life human. Like any usable map, a map of the social world made out of characters condenses this world into simplifications and symbols. Fictional people convey both the uniqueness and autonomy of individuals and certain types or generalizations through which one can zoom out of these individuals’ lives. Catherine Gallagher thus defines “fictionality” as “the insistence that the human referent of the text was a generalization about and not an extratextual, embodied instance of a ‘species.’”3 The air of reality that many characters and character groups are described as having comes at once from the self-sufficient complexity they seem to possess and from the way their depictions invite the reader to imagine beyond them a vast world of interpersonal and introspective experiences that these fictional figures help one to better understand. One can distinguish 123

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between various kinds of novel characters by examining the means by which these characters, and the novels of which they are a part, enact such generalizations. This chapter outlines several dimensions along which novels and their writers chose what kinds of psychological or social reality, and what ranges of it, are most worth representing. One basic choice determining the construction of a novel’s characters concerns their number. As Alex Woloch observes in The One vs. The Many, the number of characters a novel focuses on – and the relative importance it attaches to them – is a crucial means by which this genre sets up the broader ethical and political dilemmas that it proposes to resolve. Woloch puts this as follows: “each individual portrait has a radically contingent position within the story as a whole; our sense of the human figure (as implied person) is inseparable from the space that he or she occupies within the narrative totality.”4 By examining how many characters are featured in a given novel and what kinds of prominence each of them is accorded, one can begin to describe the dimensions of social life that this novel appears to privilege, as a whole or in its construction of a particular represented human being. At its most crowded, the novel tries to capture the lives of hundreds of characters, many of them just barely and occasionally lifted from their relative anonymity. “A nous deux maintenant!,” cries Rastignac at the end of Honoré de Balzac’s Père Goriot. Rastignac attempts to take stock of the whole city of Paris, whose vast population he now realizes he deeply wants to get to know and to impress. This character serves Balzac as an entry point – one of many – into the multitudes of other people whose lives his Human Comedy will follow over thousands of pages. Rastignac’s bird’s-eye view of Paris announces to the reader the sweeping ambition of Balzac’s masterwork. It also conveys the sheer multiplicity of human beings whose fates are intertwined with each other through social life. This thronged mode of character construction is perhaps best understood by noting its resemblance to (and its arguable roots in) the epic. One of the defining features of the epic is the huge number of people whose fates and lives it tries to depict: all at once, in great battle scenes and assemblies, as well as synecdochally through the kings and leaders who govern them. This innumerable vastness of characters – many of whom exist only as a name mentioned once, in passing – is used to ground generalizations that its narrators or primary figures make about society and history. In The Bhagavad-Gita, for instance, the warrior Arjuna thus meditates on the futility of warfare while looking at a battle in which his brethren are murdering each other. “Teachers, fathers and sons, and grandfathers, too,” he says, “mother’s brothers, fathers-in-law, grandsons, brothers-in-law – 124

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and other family – . . . I don’t want to kill them – even for the kingship of the three worlds, and certainly not for the earth.”5 The Hindu god Krishna, who has disguised himself as Arjuna’s servant, uses this scene to explain to Arjuna the order of the universe. Novels also frequently populate their worlds with a multitude of characters in order to remind their readers how few people they will ever know very closely and how dearly won any kind of broad social awareness necessarily is. Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 thus devotes a long chapter to describing the deaths of a multitude of local women, most of whom are only accorded a very generic description. “The last dead woman to be discovered in June 1993 was Margarita López Santos. She had disappeared more than forty days before . . . But no one saw anything then, in part because it was dark at five or five-thirty in the morning, and there wasn’t enough public lighting.”6 After listing women’s deaths in 1993 for a dozen pages, the narrator moves on to the following year: “[t]he first dead woman of 1994 was found by some truck drivers on a road off the Nogales highway, in the middle of the desert . . . On their way to the bar in question, the other truck driver, Rigoberto Reséndiz, was dazzled for a few seconds by a flash in the desert.”7 The force of this chapter comes both from the sheer number of these murders and from the way their multitude defies the reader’s attempt to relate to any of these women – allowing one to catch a glimpse of the social indifference that seems to have led to these women’s deaths in the first place. Another familiar mode of character construction takes as its basic unit not a mass but a small community or even just a pair of represented people: a family, a group of friends, a couple of lovers. This kind of character construction privileges people’s local ties over the wide social networks of which they are a part. For instance, Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji follows a small group of aristocrats – including its eponymous Prince Genji – as they fall in love with each other, break up, travel together, and exchange poems. “The dust piles on the now abandoned bed. / How many dew-drenched nights have I slept alone!,” writes Genji in a two-line poem. The narrator adds that “with these jottings were several withered carnations, probably from the day he had sent flowers to Princess Omiya.”8 The epic would never have paused to record this kind of intensely private event – an event by which very few people besides this poet/protagonist would be affected. But from the start, many novels aspire to focus on, and validate, such seemingly unimportant interactions.9 The development of the European novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is spurred by a proliferation of justifications for why this kind of more intimate attention might be aesthetically worthwhile. The two bestknown forms taken by these justifications – which could roughly be termed 125

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“Romantic” and “positivist” – gave rise to the sentimental novel, on the one hand, and the realist novel, on the other. The sentimental novel, which has its roots in French and German Romanticism, stems from the philosophical argument that any person’s feelings are expressions of, and gateways into, much broader principles of natural and social life. “I am drunk, or rather raving,” writes Saint-Preux to Julie in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, or, The New Heloïse. “My senses are disordered, all my faculties shaken by that fatal kiss.”10 Rousseau’s novel is revolutionary for spending its hundreds of pages on such emotional fluctuations undergone by a pair of bourgeois lovers. Its rationale in doing so is that – just like the medieval noblewoman Heloïse and her beloved Abelard – Julie and Saint-Preux are people whose inner lives might serve as important examples for others. Representing emotionally sensitive people, Rousseau suggests, gives us insight not only into their individual personalities but also into humankind itself.11 In realist novels, such generalizations from intimate personal experiences into broad human truths take place along socioeconomic lines. Inspired by late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century studies of probability and statistics – as well as more immediate forms of social discipline such as instruction manuals – realist novels turn their characters into condensed forms of knowledge about various kinds of social backgrounds, pressures, or aspirations. For instance, in novels such as Pamela and Pride and Prejudice, the romantic troubles of a pair of lovers become a means for commenting on the various virtues or inconveniences of bourgeois social relations. Armstrong phrases this point as follows, here describing Jane Austen: “her novels deal with a closed community of polite country people who tend to be undistinguished by either great fortune or title. In such a community, social relations appear to be virtually the same thing as domestic relations. The community can therefore be represented in terms of the household and of a relationship among households.”12 Many nineteenth-century novels try to combine epic and intimate forms of character construction; they seek to produce both an effect of more intimate, condensed insight and of a certain epistemic vertigo or wonder at the sheer scope of potential social relations. One way in which this act of synthesis takes place is through what René Girard describes as patterns of triangular desire: the cast of a novel’s characters continues to expand as the attractions of its initial group of main characters pull them toward, or place them in the orbit of, an increasingly broad social network.13 One extreme example of this expansion is Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Tolstoy’s novel at once consistently centers on and extrapolates ever more boldly from the adulterous romance between Karenina and Count Vronsky. Bookended by the start 126

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and tragic ending of this love, it is by no means reducible to it in focus and interest. Instead, the many loves and jealousies on which this novel touches – between Karenina and the Count as well as between her and her husband Karenin and between Vronsky, his former lover Kitty, and Kitty’s admirer Levin – ultimately add up to a cast of characters that is both astonishingly vast and deeply intertwined. Other nineteenth-century novels push their character construction in the opposite direction. Especially around the turn of the century, an increasing number of novels begin to focus on nothing more than the consciousness of a single character. They treat this character’s inner life and first-person experience as significant in its own right and as sufficient motivation for an entire narrative. Through reported monologue or free indirect discourse or – more extremely – through experimental techniques such as stream of consciousness, these novels turn this particular represented person’s perspective into an apparently inexhaustible object of attention, treating it as a sufficient point of entry into broader social or metaphysical concerns. By some accounts, this focus on the individual psychology of a character derives from (and is perhaps an inevitable consequence of) the realist novel’s long-standing commitment to a distinction between what E. M. Forster has called “round” and “flat” fictional people. As Deidre Lynch describes it, in the eighteenth century, novelists start to represent their protagonists as not just morally but psychologically superior to the people around them.14 These distinctions between characters who seem to merit – or not merit – more sustained attention slowly give rise to the idea that a character’s thoughts and feelings might be fascinating enough to deserve a whole narrative of their own. One might also tell an alternative story of the novel’s intense turn to introspection by noting novels’ ties to nonfictional accounts of first-person experience. “Splendid Things: Chinese brocade. A sword with a decorated scabbard. The grain of the wood in a Buddhist statue. Long flowering branches of beautifully colored wisteria entwined about a pine tree,” writes Sei Shonagon in The Pillow Book, claiming for her personal beliefs the status of broader truths about taste and virtue.15 Writings such as hers – or like St. Augustine’s Confessions – provide an even earlier inspiration for broader cultural and philosophical turns toward examining first-person experience as an end in itself.16 In response to both kinds of generic and cultural pressures, the novel’s growing interest in “round” characters culminates in the great explosion of interest in the first-person experience of early modernism. During this period, the novel’s attention to a wider array of social structures diminishes in favor of examining singular, nearly solipsistic embers of consciousness. This form of attentiveness animates the work of writers such as Henry 127

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James, James Joyce, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Fernando Pessoa, and Machado de Assis. Pessoa’s narrator in The Book of Disquiet says I avert my eyes from the back of the man in front of me and I focus them on all the other people walking along this street, I see them all clearly with the same absurd and cold tenderness that I see the shoulders of the unconscious man I’m following. All this is just like him . . . all this is the same unconsciousness diversified on faces and bodies that are different, like puppets moved by strings that end in the same fingers of the hand of one who is invisible.17

Pessoa focuses on the way his narrator’s body moves one moment to the next. He describes the likenesses and dissimilarities this narrator senses in the world around him in a way that does not differentiate between more and less insightful perceptions; the point is no longer even to show why this narrator is a worthwhile character to examine but merely to find out what it is like to be him. Another set of choices that govern the construction of character involves a novel’s political, social, or psychological agenda. A novel can zero in on exemplary characters who model extreme forms of vice or virtue: the world as it should be always or as it should never be. At the other extreme, a novel can attempt to focus on nothing more than the immediate phenomenology of “probable” social or individual experiences. The one extreme conjoins the novel with didactic literature; the second brings it close to an aspiring empirical science. The middle path between these two extremes involves constructing characters through a learning process, or Bildung. The more didactic varieties of character types have their origins in religious narratives and political utopias. By drawing strong moral or ethical distinctions between some characters and others, novels invite their readers to take their narratives as exemplars of the kind of life that might be worth leading or of the kind of political action that might turn out to be productive. At their simplest, these idealized or vilified characters often seem to be little more than allegories: personified instantiations of particularly valuable (or particularly damnable) human traits. In more sophisticated cases, such characters embody particularly sensitive or astute responses to complicated, controversial social events. Samuel Richardson’s supremely virtuous Pamela is one example of didactic character construction; the Marquis de Sade’s supremely depraved Juliette is another. Sometimes, as in Thomas More’s Utopia or Wang Shuo’s Don’t Call Me Human, these supremely moral or immoral characters constitute a community. At other times, as in Naguib Mahfouz’s Children of Gebalawi, they are a series of exceptional members of their respective societies. In many novels, the didactic potential of an idealized 128

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character can also become a self-reflexive object of attention. “Here I am, probably the only man Otto Quangel converted with his postcard campaign,” cries out a character in Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, dramatically applauding Quangel as at once a failed and an exceptionally brave member of the anti-Nazi resistance. “But I’m no good to you, Otto Quangel, I can’t carry on your labor. I’m too much of a coward.”18 A more empirical kind of character construction emerges from political satire, as well as from the eighteenth century’s obsession with categorizing and typologizing personal traits.19 Charles Dickens’ secondary characters – such as Gradgrind, Honeythunder, and Bumble – exemplify this trend in its simplest form. These characters, whose traits are captured through their very names, represent the variety of forms human personality can take and instantly classify them into understandable, stylized, and sharpened types. More subtly but no less powerfully, novels also frequently telegraph such generalized social information by letting us know what a character looks like or what he or she is wearing. Saint-Loup’s impeccable clothes in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time signal his wealth; Charlus’ delicate gait suggests, with increasing insistence, that he is what Proust’s narrator calls “a homosexual.” Characters such as Bumble or Gradgrind continue to be prevalent in children’s literature and young-adult novels. Novelists also still return to versions of this mode of character construction for political ends. For example, Han Shaogong’s A Dictionary of Maqiao is organized as a series of character names and other terms such as “streetsickness,” “eating (as used in springtime),” and “three seconds,” all listed alphabetically and explained as mock dictionary entries.20 Through these efforts at classifying, or mock classifying, the life and community of a village, Shaogong’s narrator conveys his dissatisfaction with the bureaucratic political regime in which his represented community lives. In the course of the nineteenth century, empirically minded character construction also frequently comes to be associated with the notion of probability and the rising cognitive and psychological sciences. Many scholars have studied the deep influence of these mathematical and biological sciences on authors ranging from George Eliot – whose narrators’ vocabulary is rife with declarations of how “probable” or “typical” her protagonists’ fates are – to the French decadents such as J. K. Huysmans, for whom Darwinian evolutionary biology becomes a model for the gradual corruption of human beings. Toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, novelists also turn to Marxism as an aspiring science of social life. This Marxist framework helps to give rise to naturalist characters such as the ones that populate the novels of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Richard Wright’s Native Son, Andrei Platonov’s 129

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The Foundation Pit, and Emile Zola’s The Human Beast. These characters’ construction gradually strips bare the initial illusion that they are moved by much more than their bodily instincts and urges – or that they can rely on much more than these urges to free themselves from the oppressive social reality in which they find themselves. With their idealized communist workers, the novels of social realism – such as Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered – provide a limit case of this extreme Marxist empiricism, frequently tipping over into the moralistic rhetoric characteristic of the novels described earlier. “His heart beat fast. His cherished dream was realized!,” says Ostrovsky’s narrator as his protagonist finally finds the approval of the Communist Party. “The steel bonds have been burst, and now, armed with a new weapon, he had returned to the fighting ranks and to life.”21 Katerina Clark compares the process of writing these seemingly hyperempirical social-realist characters to “the procedure followed by medieval icon painters. Just as the icon painter looked to his original to find the correct angle for a particular saint’s hands, the correct colors for a given theme, and so on, the Soviet novelist could copy the gestures, facial expressions, actions, symbols, etc. used in the various canonical texts” already approved by the Soviet government.22 Even though, like the naturalist novel, social realism is frequently based on what Clark calls “journalistic,” “ephemeral” material – the particulars of average people’s daily lives – in its obsession with drawing the correct “scientific” conclusions from these everyday events, it veers back into a didactic kind of idealism.23 In between these two forms, and arguably combining them, is the protagonist of the Bildungsroman. For many critics, this type of character is one of the most emblematic features of the novel as a genre. The character of the Bildungsroman, who continues to develop throughout the course of the novel, turns the process of accruing knowledge about society – both through empirical facts and through their generalizations – into its own object of representation and into a definition of personal development. As Mikhail Bakhtin describes it, the Bildungsroman “provides an image of man in the process of becoming. As opposed to a static unity, here one finds a dynamic unity in the hero’s image.” As a consequence, [t]he hero himself, his character, becomes a variable in the formula of this type of novel. Changes in the hero himself acquire plot significance, and thus the entire plot of the novel is reinterpreted and reconstructed. Time is introduced into man, enters into his very image, changing in a fundamental way the significance of all aspects of his destiny and life. This type of novel can be designated in the most general sense as the novel of human emergence.24 130

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This type of character construction originates from variations of the quest narrative and the picaresque narrative; the Akkadian tale of Gilgamesh is one precursor of this trend. This “road trip-style”, physically as well as intellectually transitive structure of character development, persists in some contemporary Bildungsromane – such as, for example, in D’Arcy Niland’s The Shiralee. But in most novels of this type the protagonist’s “journey” is most importantly spiritual or psychological. The first novel to which the term Bildungsroman has been explicitly applied – Goethe’s The Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister – is both a travel narrative and the narrative of a spiritual journey, as its protagonist wanders around with an itinerant theater troupe while slowly realizing that he will never become anything more exciting than a banker. It dramatizes the tension between the individual’s particularity and his or her surrounding social norms and the gradual means by which this individual responds to this tension. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this form of representing personal growth has also often been used to depict cross-cultural exchanges and tensions. In novels as diverse as Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Chang Rae-Lee’s Native Speaker, a protagonist’s development from adolescence to adulthood, or from early adulthood to middle age, mediates much broader meditations on the experience of migration, cultural oppression, and multiculturalism. These novels also use their maturing characters to contest more conventional or hegemonic notions of what counts as growth and maturity in the first place. For instance, the protagonist of Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions – a young black woman living in colonial Rhodesia – is only able to acquire a Western-style education at the cost of losing many ties to her community, as well as certain forms of cultural awareness these ties supported. Diaz’s Oscar Wao continues to use a mixture of English and Spanish throughout his life – a mixture that Diaz’s narrator refuses to translate – in an implicit rejection of Anglo-centric narratives of assimilation. In many novels, idealized, stereotyped, and developing characters coexist with each other. This could be said, for instance, of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Its protagonist – himself partly modeled on characters of the late-nineteenth-century “coming of age” Bildungsroman – is surrounded, on the one hand, by strongly typologized socialites who embody particular features of French high society and, on the other, by idealized aesthetes such as Swann, Bergotte, and Elstir, from whom this protagonist attempts to learn about art, love, and life. 131

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Returning to the map metaphor with which I began, the last major dimension of a novel’s character construction is based in this genre’s endemic tension between the map and the territory. Could a character be, or at least seem to be, more real than life itself? Do novel characters oversimplify our reality, or is reality as novels depict it more accurate than our own perception of it? For many novels, these are tantalizing questions, ones that open up onto the largest ambitions of the genre.25 The dramatic rise of the novel in the eighteenth century was sparked by its ability to make its characters usurp an air of total plausibility – to seem at least as real as living people and perhaps even more so. James Grantham Turner thus describes the waves of panic and euphoria that “swept” through England in response to every new installment of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: Reception seems too mild a word for the Pamela craze that swept through eighteenth-century Western Europe and inspired emulation in virtually every medium . . . If we say Europe was “touched,” the pun would be appropriate, conveying an enthusiasm that supporters viewed as sentimental identification and skeptics diagnosed as a contagious madness.26

In later centuries, this trust in fictional narratives as forms of real-life insight was deepened by Sigmund Freud’s reliance on novelistic tropes in his famous case studies, among other factors. Many critics argue that novels should be cherished for their capacity to make us trust them so completely: this is how they are able to subvert our more conventional understanding of our environments and ourselves. In Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep?, Seo-Young Chu argues that, at its best, fictional narrative is a means of forcefully embodying and validating experiences that might otherwise be easy to dismiss as merely subjective.27 Chu’s argument applies most directly to Afro-Futurists such as Octavia Butler and many kinds of science fiction, such as Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, as well as magical realism and its many offshoots and cousins beyond South America: Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and Salīm Barakaˉt’s Fuqahaˉʾ al- Ẓalaˉm (The Sages of Darkness). In these fantastical narratives, impossible or unconfirmable versions of the past and future become means of seeing anew our political and social present. “The house, the books, everything vanished,” recounts Butler’s protagonist, Dana, at the beginning of Kindred. Dana finds herself swept, as if by magic or witchcraft, from the late-twentieth-century East Coast into a pre-Civil War American South. “Suddenly I was outdoors kneeling on the ground beneath trees,” she continues. “Before me was a wide tranquil river, and near the middle of that 132

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river was a child splashing, screaming . . . Drowning!”28 It is precisely by refusing to explain in realist terms how or why Dana is pulled back into the past to save this (white) child – a child whose life she will be compelled to save many more times in the course of the novel – that Butler conveys the deep, many-generational sense of trauma and compromised autonomy instilled in many African Americans by the experience of slavery. From the start, though, the notion of the reality of novel characters – and their reliability as models of real-life self-understanding – is also one that the novel is famous for mocking. The first and arguably most famous of these expressions of mockery is, of course, Cervantes’ Don Quixote; its other bestknown instance is Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. These metatextual cautionary tales suggest that the novel represents the world, and a person’s position within it, in a way that is too comfortably self-enclosed and apparently comprehensible. Novels have this effect because they enclose their characters within what Thomas Pavel calls small “fictional worlds” within which larger reality is represented only as “fuzzy spaces” beyond our field of vision.29 As Flaubert and Cervantes – and many others besides them – suggest, novel characters might seem real to us merely because we wish to be like them and to live in a world like theirs and not because they reveal something about us. They are carriers of fantasies about a form of reality that would somehow be more appealing, meaningful, and understandable, and in which our lives seem much more universally admirable and important, than we should ever plausibly expect them to be. Most nineteenth-century novels – as well as most twentieth-century novels that respond to the tradition of nineteenth-century realism – take Flaubert’s and Cervantes’ warnings seriously. The gradual development of character construction from the precursors of the novel to its current-day forms is marked by increasingly overt acknowledgments that character construction involves a complicated balance of concessions and compromises among the many aspects of social and embodied life that seem to call for accurate representation. One might distinguish later novels from the narrative forms that inspire them by noting the increasing self-consciousness with which these novels signal that their narrative choices in character construction are, in fact, only choices. Like the useless barometer Gustave Flaubert adds to Madame Aubain’s bedroom (as Roland Barthes famously describes it), their character construction urgently gestures toward outward reality as an excess whose fullness these fictional beings can never really capture.30 This double dream of novel characters as vivid experiences of who we “really” are – and as radical critiques of what we take our reality to be – persists well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At one extreme, in the metatextual novels of Samuel Beckett, Nathalie Sarraute, and Italo 133

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Calvino, the postrealist novel attempts to disenchant our belief in our own psychological depth and uniqueness, exposing it as a fantasy created by conventional discourse. Beckett’s, Sarraute’s, and Calvino’s novels achieve this end by arguably dismantling their characters altogether: reducing them to empty, replaceable pronouns or disembodied voices. At another extreme, the hyperrealist novels of Karl Ove Knausgaard, Orhan Pamuk, and Elena Ferrante question our ability to describe or relate to stories that are not already our own. “In the moments of greatest darknesss,” says Ferrante’s narrator in The Story of the Lost Child, the last volume of her Neapolitan tetralogy, “I was sure that Lila had written the detailed story of her daughter, sure that she had mixed it into the history of Naples with the arrogant naïveté of the uneducated person who, perhaps for that very reason, obtains tremendous results.”31 Ferrante’s narrator is certain that her friend would be much better at telling this story that she would be, as someone who experienced it much more immediately. Coming at the end of this narrator’s long narrative about her native Naples, this expression of fear is also an indirect reminder of how strongly the novel has defended, and prized, the process of writing stories directly and only from one’s life. Whether by suggesting that our subjectivities are merely fabricated – or that they are a sort of limit point beyond which our imaginations and our capacity for sustained interest both falter – these recent novels still continue to offer characters (or to pointedly resist them) as means to reflect on which parts of our first-person and interpersonal experience we take for granted or put most trust in. Wondering whether we are ever really able to perceive ourselves with more refinement than a novel inscribes into its fictional people, they encourage us to see these figures both as forms of condensed knowledge about “ourselves” and as test cases for what such self-knowledge might be in the first place. NO TES 1. Lewis Carroll, “The Man in the Moon,” in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, Lit2Go Edition, 1893, chap. 5. 2. Deidre Lynch makes this point in The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning, University of Chicago Press, 1998, pp. 38–42. 3. Catherine Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality,” in Franco Moretti, The Novel, vol. 1, Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 342. 4. Alex Woloch, The One vs. The Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel, Princeton University Press, 2003, p. 13. 5. The Bhagavad-Gita, ed. and trans. Laurie Patton, Penguin, 2008, p. 12. 6. Roberto Bolaño, 2666, trans. Natasha Wimmer, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, pp. 374–75. 7. Ibid., p. 399. 134

Novels and Characters 8. Murasaki Shikubu, The Tale of Genji, trans. Edward G. Seidensticker, Knopf, 1976, vol. I, p. 179. 9. In historical terms, this intimate mode of character construction relates back to aristocratic courtship narratives that Western readers term “romances” and that, as a narrative structure, extends considerably beyond the West. Romances and their non-Western cousins follow the relationship between two people who develop a sexual attachment in the face of initial difficulties and obstacles. Western precursors of this trend include ancient Greek novels such as Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe and the tradition of troubadour poetry. In other traditions, novels that focus on romantic love bear clear affinities with texts such as Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber. 10. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Essential Writings of Rousseau, trans. Peter Constantine, ed. Leo Damrosch, Modern Library, 2013, p. 293. 11. Although this mode of character construction has generally tended to be less popular, in later centuries, versions of Rousseau’s sentimentalism continue to be taken up in world literature. For instance, Yukio Michima’s Sea of Fertility is a long modernist novel that complicates Rousseau’s model of attachment by suggesting that its protagonist’s lover might have been reincarnated in a new body. Following a version of the conventional sentimental plot, Michima uses it to formulate questions not only about the universality of human feelings but also about the specificity and precision of any person’s loves. 12. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 135. Versions of this plot structure are adopted, permuted, and subverted by many other authors – Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, and many others – because the influence of the British and French novels spreads beyond these countries. The worldwide spread of the realist novel from the late eighteenth century onward is aptly described by Franco Moretti in Graphs, Maps, Trees (Verso, 2007). 13. René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. 14. “Austen,” Lynch writes, “identifies to her readers the proper means of and motives for literary experience when she demonstrates that the truth of a letter is situated beneath or beyond the face of the page and when she demonstrates that character cannot be known at first sight. The scenes of ‘reperusal’ establish Elizabeth’s development and the character depth while they present her close reading as an impetus to revision.” Lynch, The Economy of Character, p. 131. 15. Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book, trans. Ivan Morris, Penguin, 1967, p. 109. 16. Michael Warner and others also point out that the notion of divine or social election, in which many of these nonfictional self-examinations were grounded, also helped to give early voice to marginalized members of society such as African-American slaves or women. See Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, Zone, 2005. 17. Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. Alfred Mac Adam, Pantheon, 1991, p. 35. 18. Hans Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone, trans. Michael Hoffman, Melville House, 2009, p. 381.

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marta figlerowicz 19. Lynch thus describes these “collectible” early-eighteenth-century characters: “In their transactions with the preternaturally legible persons of their books, I contend, early 18th century readers found a coping mechanism. On the one hand, these readers had to negotiate the experience of a marketplace that was chock full of strange new consumables and that beggared description. On the other hand, they believed themselves, as literate Britons, to be the beneficiaries of a symbolic environment that was founded on principles of perspicuity and accessibility and in which truths could be self evident” (Lynch, The Economy of Character, p. 5). 20. Han Shaogong, A Dictionary of Maqiao, trans. Julia Lovell, Columbia University Press, 2003, pp. 136, 215, 242. 21. Nikolai Ostrovsky, How the Steel Was Tempered, trans. R. Prokofieva, Progress Publishers, 1974, p. 425. 22. Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, University of Chicago Press, 1981, p. 4. 23. Ibid., p. 5. 24. Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel),” Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern McGee, University of Texas Austin Press, 1986, p. 22. As Susan Fraiman describes it in Unbecoming Women, “The term Bildungsroman is said to have been suggested by Friedrich von Blanckenburg’s discussion of Bildung in his 1774 ‘Essay on the Novel,’ and Karl von Morgenstern actually coined it around 1820 in two lectures on the ‘essence’ and ‘history’ of this contemporary form. But the person most often associated with its origin is philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, whose 1870 biography of Friedrich Schleiermacher certainly popularized, if it did not actually introduce, the German genre.” Susan Fraiman, Unbecoming Women, Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 3. 25. The dream that texts could not only describe but also uphold a person’s reality is, of course, a very old one. Long before our current prototypical holy texts such as the Bible and the Qu’ran were written, ancient scriptures sought ways in which the human body could be somehow captured within, or definitively united with, text as a means of its perfection and preservation. The hieroglyphs of the Egyptian Book of the Dead list all the body parts of the buried person in order to ensure that they will still be functional in the netherworld. “Let not thy limbs be without movement; let them not suffer corruption; let them not pass away; let them not decay”: The Egyptian Book of the Dead, trans. and compiled by E. A. Wallis Budge, Penguin, 2008, p. 187. Ancient Buddhist prayers were also meant to be repeated thousands of times until they have become constitutive of the person pronouncing them. 26. James Grantham Turner, “Novel Panic: Picture and Performance in the Reception of Richardson’s Pamela,” Representations, vol. 48, 1994, p. 70. 27. Seo-Young Chu, Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep, Harvard University Press, 2010. 28. Octavia Butler, Kindred, Beacon Press, 1979, p. 13. 29. Thomas G. Pavel, Fictional Worlds, Harvard University Press, 1986, p. 95. 30. It is, Barthes says, “as if the referent’s exactitude, superior or indifferent to any other function, governed and alone justified its description”: Roland Barthes, 136

Novels and Characters “The Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986, p. 145. “All this shows,” he continues, “that the ‘real’ is supposed to be self-sufficient, that it is strong enough to belie any notion of ‘function,’ that its ‘speech-act’ has no need to be integrated into a structure and that the having-been-there of things is a sufficient principle of speech” (ibid., p. 147). 31. Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child, trans. Ann Goldstein, Europa Editions, 2015, p. 462.

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8 SU Z A N N E K E E N

Novels and Readers

Novels – long prose narrative fictions – are extraordinarily difficult to generalize about, but that hasn’t stopped many critics from blithely doing so, often by adding qualifying, delimiting traits to their definitions. For some critics, a novel must be realistic, referring to a recognizable social world in a verisimilar fashion; some critics insist on human characters and an emphasis on delineating their psychology and motives; others work within the bounds of national traditions; some admit only those works written in English after a certain date (usually in the early eighteenth century). I for one agree with critic Steven Moore, whose Christian Gauss Prize–winning tome The Novel, An Alternative History 1600–1800 opens with the line, “By the year 1600, the novel was an old, old genre.”1 It was old when Cervantes wrote Don Quixote (1605), and as Moore describes in energetic detail in the first volume of his literary history, The Novel, An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600, it was eclectic. In its earliest Greek examples, the novel “was an elastic form that made room for interpolated poems, stories within stories, pornography, and parody, where the realistic and fantastic blend together.”2 Novels rose not just in the newly literate, Protestant, English context described by Ian Watt but in Iceland in the twelfth century, in Japan in the eleventh century, and in the Pahlavi writings of Zoroastrians in Persia even earlier – in stories that became part of The Thousand and One Nights when they were melded into their famous frame story, of Shahrazad’s life-saving narration (which probably came from India). Novels were global from the start and not only in the postcolonial context that I treat in this chapter. They came from all over the world, in many different languages and diverse eclectic forms, and they could take as their subjects just about anything: from the adventures of a starving boy – the picaro – to the adventures of a silver penny; from the psychology of an eleventh-century Japanese lady in waiting, kidnapped and educated by a government minister, to the psychology of a Jewish Irishman who must stay out of his house all day so that his wife can commit adultery; from plots 138

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that show how their protagonists come of age and reconcile themselves with society to plots that allow their characters to escape out of this world into multiverses. The development of realistic English fiction is a bright strand, but only one strand, of the tangled, complex skein that makes up the novel. Bringing their active imaginations to the cocreative work of reading is a great diversity of readers, without whom no fictional world could ever take shape. As Louise Rosenblatt writes, initiating the theorization of the reader’s role in the creative transaction, “a text, once it leaves its author’s hands, is simply paper and ink until a reader evokes from it a literary work.”3 Literature comes to life in human minds, and although the words making up novels constrain the potential world-making a reader performs, novels also leave a great deal to the imagination. This means that the personal qualities, identities, experiences, dispositions, and tastes of individual readers contribute substantially to the novels they read. Recognizing the centrality of the reader’s cocreation of the novel leads us to two questions: (1) what do we know about a novel by learning who has read it?, and (2) what do we discover about a reader by learning not only what he or she has read but also by how he or she has responded to it? Though the first question may seem more pertinent to a discussion of the global novel, much of literary theory and criticism, including old-fashioned sources and influences studies, relies on the second question. It is much easier to answer the second question and tempting to extrapolate from personal reading experiences to a theoretical universal reading experience than it is to investigate the first. Although this chapter suggests several methods for finding out more about the global readership of the novel, I begin, as it were, at home. The novels on my own bookshelves include The Lord of the Rings (1954–55), Watership Down (1972), Midnight’s Children (1981), Oryx and Crake (2003), and Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda (2000) – fantasies, novels with animal characters, political allegories, dystopias, and graphic narratives. I wouldn’t want to give up The Golden Ass (trans. 1566), even though it was composed in Latin somewhere between 158–180 c e, or the Icelandic sagas, even though recent archaeological discoveries have begun to shift the old critical consensus that they are purely fictional. My own definition of the novel – long prose narrative fiction – rules out verse narratives, yet it is still capacious enough to admit a lot of outliers: romances written before the novel emerged as a “new” form; serial fictions that may not come to an end even with the death of their original author; fantasies, allegories, and graphic narratives; early detective fiction from China; and experimental documents in print and in digital form that lay bare the devices of the genre in playful and unexpected ways. This breadth suggests a certain kind of reader but also a circumstance; I am 139

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lucky to be able to access a great diversity of texts and fortunate that the English language has been hospitable to the development of the novel not only in the British Isles but all around the world, for the novel has not only authors but also readers across the globe, and (aided by excellent translators who render texts from alternative linguistic traditions into more accessible forms) those readers make up audiences near and far from the site of original composition. I believe that novelists employ narrative empathy strategically in order to reach readerships at home, in targeted locations abroad, and all around the world. Since each reader plays a crucial role in completing the narrative transaction, making the novel in hand a living art work rather than an object on the real or virtual shelf, the tastes, practices, and motivations of real readers matter. This chapter suggests what we can learn about novels and their readers from case studies of texts’ journeys from local to global audiences.4 A single novel may have multiple different audiences, even in its original moment of first publication and dissemination, as Brian Richardson has theorized.5 Some novels catch on with dispersed and diverse audiences; some have remarkable staying power and sustain readerships through the centuries. Some are read and valued so consistently over the generations that they become part of the canon, read by students because cultural authorities agree that they ought to be forever known. By far the majority of novels that have ever been published have made an immediate bid for sales to individuals and circulating libraries; if they do not receive either the reviews or word-of-mouth recommendations to catch on with a sufficient audience in that first period, they are unlikely to reach later readerships, though there are famous exceptions to that generalization (Melville’s Moby-Dick [1851] is among them). Commercial or critical success matters for the dissemination of novels. Though there a few prominent examples of fan fiction elevated to prominence by an enthusiastic internet readership, for most novel readers living today, the mediation of agents, publishers, bookstores and libraries, critics, teachers, book clubs, and fellow readers is a basic condition of the reading experience. Recommendations, human and automated, shape the reading list that comes to our attention; the novels that we read have been enjoyed by others before us. Strategic narrative empathy plays a role in the process. To put it in the negative, novels that fail to evoke readers’ empathy or choose not to invite it are less likely to engage distant readerships. This is perhaps especially the case for writers who begin their careers far from the major international publishing centers of London, New York City, Toronto, or Western Europe.6 As Casanova observes, a Darwinian competition for survival disfavors novels originating from remote locales: “the books produced by the least literarily endowed countries are also the most improbable; 140

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that they yet manage to emerge and make themselves known at all verges on the miraculous.”7 Postcolonial novels can reach readerships far and wide, in part, through a critical mechanism of the world marketplace, the book prize. In the second half of the twentieth century, the period of decolonization and the rise of postcolonial fiction, prizes have played a role in winnowing the harvest of novels in English and then publicizing their authors to a worldwide audience. A case in point is Salman Rushdie. Long before The Satanic Verses (1988) controversy wrote Rushdie permanently into literary history, his original fame came from Midnight’s Children (1981). Midnight’s Children won not only the Booker Prize (1981) but also the English Speaking Union Literary Award and Britain’s oldest award for fiction, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (1981). It has twice been recognized as the “Best” of Booker (now the Man Booker Prize) on the occasions of its twenty-fifth and fortieth anniversaries. Not all prize winners have staying power, but Midnight’s Children has become canonical. Its current American paperback edition proclaims it to be one of the Modern Library’s “100 Best Novels.” Several other literary prizes have disseminated the news about worthy novels and emerging novelists. Vikram Seth and Tsitsi Dangarembga were first brought to the world’s attention through regional Commonwealth Book Prizes (in 1994 for India and in 1989 for Africa, respectively). Sometimes the process of reaching a global readership involves spectacular leaps from obscurity to world renown. An experimental novel published by the small feminist collective Spiral in New Zealand in 1984, the bone people by Keri Hulme was republished in 1985 in the United States as a result of winning a prize, the Pegasus Award, a vehicle of the Mobil Corporation intended to honor works from countries whose literature is rarely translated into English. The bone people was recognized as Maori literature in winning this award, which involves translation and publication by Louisiana State University (LSU) Press. In the bone people’s case, translation was not required, for it is written mostly in English. Hulme’s the bone people does integrate significant passages in Maori, and the author self-identifies as a part-Maori person. A minor controversy stirred around the Pegasus Award and the legitimacy of the bone people’s claim to be Maori literature (because it was written primarily in English); when it comes to global recognition, controversy doesn’t hurt. The novel was republished in the United Kingdom by Hodder & Stoughton in 1985 and won the Booker Prize that year.8 In 2010, a new edition of Hulme’s novel was issued with a cover done by a tattoo artist, one of six novels rereleased with tattooed covers as Penguin Inks, part of the seventyfifth anniversary celebration of the publishing house. More recently, in 2007, Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip (2006) began its climb to worldwide book club and 141

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syllabus adoption by winning the Best Book Prize of the Commonwealth Prize’s Southeast Asia and South Pacific region. Globally successful novelists’ careers can be traced through the prizes. For example, long before Americanah (2013) collected the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was recognized by the Commonwealth Best First Book Prize in 2005 for her debut novel Purple Hibiscus (2003). That recognition followed Purple Hibiscus’s win of the Best First Book in the Africa region of the Commonwealth Book Prize and the Huston-Wright Legacy Award for black American writers in 2004. That same year it was shortlisted for the Orange Prize (2004) and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (2004–5). It even made the long list for the Booker Prize (2004). Adichie’s historical novel Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) collected the Bailey Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize) in 2007, and a year later at the age of thirty-one, Adichie was named a MacArthur Fellow. In the language of the MacArthur Foundation’s citation, Adichie’s novel of the Biafran war employs “multiple narrative voices, a precise movement back and forth in time, and prose that is at once witty and empathetic,” immersing her readers in the perspectives of her characters (“MacArthur Fellows”). What makes a prize-winner prize-worthy, and do these qualities translate into success with a global readership? Many elements of a novel’s topics, generic register, and narrative techniques contribute to the likelihood that it will travel well, to be read by diverse readers. For example, writing in a familiar generic template, such as the Bildungsroman, with its core narrative of a character’s development from childhood to adulthood, renders a novel accessible to readers but may risk a limiting conventionality in a formulaic appeal to diverse audiences.9 V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) is an important example of a postcolonial novel that adapts Bildungsroman to a new location and set of life circumstances, a process of transplantation that sometimes results in what Roberto Schwarz describes as “ideological incongruities” that can strike “a note of discord.”10 Yet, as Schwarz demonstrates, great novelists such as Machado de Assis make a virtue of these generic dislocations by emphasizing them. The liberating counterpoint of a different perspective on a mainstream form and its typical attitudes also wins over readers. Many mid- to late-twentiethcentury postcolonial Anglophone novels hitch onto canonical British fictions with explorations of alternative points of view, as Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) does with its sympathetic portrait of Bertha Mason from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997) does with Dickens’ Great Expectations (1861). Still other novels employ “bridge” characters such as children or students who more readily prompt 142

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diverse readers’ character identification than utterly alien adults in unrecognizable circumstances. However, the novel as a world-making device possesses inherent advantages in inviting readers to enter imaginatively into strange realms and to meet their characters unlike any persons of their lived experience. Novelists bank on their ability to craft occasions for cocreation that will stimulate the investment of emotion and cognition of readers near and far. An important element for the kind of market success enjoyed by prizewinning fiction lies in a postcolonial novel’s capacity to evoke readers’ empathy from members of those diverse audiences worldwide. Like most novelists, postcolonial authors seeking to reach world readerships call on narrative empathy, an affective element of the operations investigated by cognitive narratology. Like all elements of the fictional communication transaction, narrative empathy inheres in both the form and content of novels, coming to life when real readers cocreate fictional worlds and animate them with their own imaginations and feelings. This experience involves readers’ empathy. As I have earlier written, “A subset of narrative empathy, readers’ empathy leads to differentiation of readers in terms of their belonging to in-groups addressed directly by authors hoping to evoke empathy.”11 A component ingredient of narrative empathy, readers’ empathy12 can occur for a number of reasons: a reader located in rural Virginia can find himself or herself resonating emotionally with a Haitian teenager or with an old lady in an Indian hill station or with an assassin posted to the far corner of a star system light years away from his or her own. Matching with characters in identity or experience accounts for some of the emotional resonance that readers experience in narrative empathy, but connection by way of tropes of a genre or evocation of a landscape or interior can also trigger the fast, fleeting sharing of emotion, sensation, and orientation to a fictional world that also contributes to empathy. Furthermore, novel readers report intensities of character identification and immersion in fictional worlds that are utterly unfamiliar. They rise to the occasion presented by a novel, becoming the readers that a text demands, even when they are very different in every measurable way from the implied reader, as Peter Rabinowitz has theorized.13 This experience does not flatten out all empathetic readers of a single text into a singular “reader”; indeed, it leads to readerly sensitivity about degrees of belonging or alienation on a scale that allows differentiation of audiences closer to or further from the text’s home base and ideal reader.14 As I have earlier proposed, authors’ efforts to evoke emotional responses from their readers can be discerned in texts as traces of the transaction aimed at readers located near or far, including the most distant posterity audiences 143

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who can only be reached in the future. I describe the varieties of authorial strategic empathizing by differentiating the audiences with which they hope to communicate: “bounded strategic empathy” addresses members of ingroups; “ambassadorial strategic empathy” addresses members of more temporally, spatially, or culturally remote audiences; “broadcast strategic empathy” calls on all readers to experience emotional fusion through empathetic representations of universal human experiences and generalizable responses to particular situations.15 A single novel may include representations and techniques that invite empathic responses from all three audiences as well, either simultaneously (as in broadcast strategic empathy), or in alternation (with consciousness of both the local and distant readerships), or indeed in temporal sequence during the life of a novel that gets read by different generations of readers centuries apart. As a practical matter, the study of the responses of readers belonging to different audiences challenges students of the novel to recall that their own reactions are probably not universal. A paradox of readers’ empathy lies in the felt intensity of connection with a representation (through character identification or immersion, for example) and the simple fact that readers’ own temperamental, experiential, and contextual differences generate varied responses to those representations over time and across space. No two readers (even quite similar people) read the same novel exactly the same way, yet their individual experiences of readers’ empathy invite them to believe in a novel’s universal invitation to empathize. Personal and cultural factors inform their responses, simultaneously generating differences in their reading and the sense that they are joining crowds of others who resonate as they do. How many readers’ share in that experience can be traced through bestseller lists, film options, television adaptations (that further extend a novel’s reach), and book reviews and blogs from around the world? Between the interpretation of market data tracking the behavior of large numbers of readers and the critical practice of close reading (which can illuminate techniques in passages that evoke narrative empathy) lies a theoretical challenge: what do we mean by readers, and how are we to understand their role? Novels must have both real and imagined readers in order to work, and authors persist in using narrative techniques and strategies of representation to reach those readers and manipulate their minds and emotions. For those who acknowledge the centrality of readers to a narrative genre that must be, at the very least, read aloud to be experienced, “the reader” has been theorized in a variety of ways by different schools of thought. “Reception theory,” “reader-response criticism,” and “Aristotelian rhetorical narratology” all include at least an idealized “reader.” Among those three approaches, only reader-response criticism 144

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routinely includes empirical study of the reactions of many different readers, or differentiated groups of readers, as a core methodology. Sociological study of reading sometimes studies the traces of readerships’ behavior, as recorded in library acquisition lists or in publishing trends. To grapple with novels as a global form and their readers all around the world virtually requires “distant reading,” a critical practice advanced by theorist Franco Moretti. By aggregating and analyzing vast amounts of data, for example, from compiled library circulation records over the centuries, we can learn more about the rises and falls of subgenres of the novels, the gender of readerships, the introduction of tropes (Moretti uses the example of “the clue” in detective fiction), and their spread than we can by any amount of close reading carried out by the lone literary critic. This strategy can redress the balance of readings based in individual responses or in the abstract “reader” so often found in reception theory. It can support empirical studies of the responses of groups of real readers. Distant reading as an approach has much to recommend it, for it helps scholars chart the growth and spread of emergent forms. For example, distant reading might help us recognize the emergence from the wordless books of the nineteenth century and serial narratives in comics or manga form the tankoˉbon or graphic novels that readers find so appealing today. Distant reading might reveal the radical increase in the average length of novels written for young readers after the huge market success of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series demonstrated that children love – and will get parents to buy – long books. Distant reading would certainly be able to suggest correlations of novel formats with literacy rates, confirming a relationship between wider access to education and the growth in popularity of three-volume novels that could be checked out from libraries and, later on, cheap one-volume reprints that could be purchased at railway bookstalls. Distant reading allows a scholar to tell compelling stories about how markets and changes in technology intertwine with formal and generic developments. It can affirm or confute literary historical narratives driven by arguments about valued qualities of novels, such as F. R. Leavis’ The Great Tradition, which singled out Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad as the best English novelists because they advanced an “awareness of the possibilities of life.”16 Distant reading challenges any critic who would prefer to limit “the novel” to a manageable, relatively brief, canonical list of works, whether chosen for their diversity or for their development of a style such as realism. It enables discernment of large-scale shifts in publishing and reading behavior over time, and in that sense it is a sociological method, focused on the behavior and preferences of large numbers of readers, observed over time. Combined with literary historical questions and case studies of individual texts, it can be a powerful 145

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interpretive tool and has resulted in compelling visualizations using the techniques of digital humanities. Some would argue that a critic employing distant reading is no longer a true reader of novels, for these projects often show more concern with metadata about novels than with novels themselves. It should come as no surprise that most scholars studying “the reader” of fiction have typically not availed themselves of distant reading methodologies. Indeed, the role of the reader has not invariably been included in formalist theories of the novel or narrative. Barthes’ (post-)structuralist classic S/Z (1970) includes no code for the reader’s work, because his or her deciphering, recognizing, or responding role is implicit in his other codes: the reader exists to process the cues built into the text. Classical narratology describes narrative features and techniques that appear in novels (and other narrative genres), but it does not always include a theory of readers’ participation in responding to the strategies of representation that it analyzes. Meir Sternberg, a prominent theorist of narrative poetics, warns against the assumption that any one narrative technique has a reliable, singular effect, cautioning us to expect many-to-many correspondence between a narrative technique and responses to it or meanings attributed to it or, in Sternberg’s words, “between linguistic form and representational function.”17 Sternberg calls this the “Proteus principle,” and it serves as a warning against assuming that one’s own reaction to a novel’s invitations to cocreate a fictional world will be matched exactly by any other reader. We bring our differences to the experience of reading novels. This commonsense principle may seem to discourage critical scrutiny of the novel’s impact on different readers, but it need not. It can be interpreted as both a caution against overstatement and an invitation to undertake empirical studies of real readers, whose reactions we should expect to show a range of responses and levels of engagement. An ever-important tactic involves avoiding confusion among real and imagined readers, as well as readerly roles characterized within novels. The terminology and analytical techniques of narrative theory can assist in differentiating real readers from implied readers and narratees. Drawing on Wayne C. Booth and Wolfgang Iser’s work, narrative theorist Seymour Chatman created a paradigm that illustrates the flow of communication from actual author to actual reader, with some points of interest along the way. real author - - > || implied author – > (narrator) – > (narratee) – > implied reader || - - > real reader

The positions in parentheses, narrator who tells and narratee who receives the telling, are textual artifacts, parts of the novel’s discourse.18 All novels have narrators, but narratees aren’t always specified, though they are implied 146

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by the existence of narration. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children employs an explicit narratee, the impatient caretaker and critic Padma. real author - -> || implied author – > (narrator) – > (narratee) – > implied reader || - - > real reader

On the far outsides of the diagram we find the real or actual author and the real or actual reader (both roles can be occupied by plurals, such as coauthors or collaborators and readerships, but the paradigm simplifies these positions to singular persons). The actual author can be the subject of biography because he or she exists in the real world (but will necessarily change over time). The actual reader represents an individual role occupied by any of us when we read a novel. We exist, and in the actual world one of our activities is to read a novel written by the actual author. The real reader and author do not have to coexist at the same time, though we often do. real author - - > || implied author – > (narrator) – > (narratee) – > implied reader || - - > real reader

Both the implied author and the implied reader are projections of the text. The implied author is the specific ever-lasting version of the actual, historical author that the text projects. The implied author lives on after the actual author has been eulogized and buried. We write of the actions and intentions of the implied author in the present tense, whereas the actual author receives past-tense reference, as in historical or biographical narration. The real-world experiences undergone by the actual author, including the 1989 fatwa responding to his novel The Satanic Verses, belong to literary history. An intuitive way of distinguishing the real author and the implied author would be to recognize that the “Salman Rushdie” of The Satanic Verses (1988) is rather different from the Rushdie projected by Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990). The difference has partly to do with the fatwa, but it is also a result of genre, for Haroun is a children’s book. Although it offers a powerful argument against censorship of narrative art (an argument immediately appreciated by adults aware of the author’s experiences), it also projects a sweet, melancholy, and fantastical “Rushdie” who resembles L. Frank Baum more than Jonathan Swift. The implied reader, like the implied author, is also a projection of the text. Basic information about the implied reader can be readily characterized by the capabilities required by the text; for example, to read the original edition of The God of Small Things (1997) by Arundhati Roy, the reader should be (at least) an adult, literate in English, and capable of gap-filling imagining in response to a text full of temporal anachronies. Since this description of the implied reader would also apply to most of the major modernists’ works and 147

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many contemporary novels, it does not capture the particularity of Roy’s implied reader. Her text invokes a reader interested in caste and politics, in intensities of feeling, and in the special relationships of twins. Roy’s implied reader is a sensitive and open-minded person. By the time the gap-filling work of cocreation has been finished, the implied reader takes shape as one who is open to a nuanced understanding of illicit sexual liaisons, and there the question of the location of her implied reader opens up. Adult Indian readers are not unfamiliar with explicit sexuality, as in some of their own culture’s ancient texts, such as the Kama Sutra (second century c e). However, representations of sex between members of different castes (or between a Dalit and a high-caste Christian, as in the novel) could be more difficult for some Indian readers to accept. In the West, elite readers such as John Updike reviewed the novel with enthusiasm for its Faulknerian stylistic accomplishment as much as for its fresh subject, and although critics writing for the European and American dailies, weeklies, and biweeklies noted the challenging depiction of contact with an “untouchable” character, they did not reject it or respond to it as particularly shocking. This dual potential raises the possibility that Roy’s novel projects more than one implied reader, one who is invited to be shocked into a new view of Dalit subjectivity and one who is invited to admire the author’s mastery of the narrative techniques of high literary modernism. These two distinct implied readers are not necessarily mutually exclusive (the same reader may feel called upon to join a complex narrative audience capable of balancing or integrating those expectations), but they do not inevitably coexist. A common experience of adults who reread novels they first encountered as young people is to discover that the work invites an additional, layered response from a more mature reader, although it still functions for a naive or less experienced audience at the same time. Only rarely does an actual reader find a novel’s implied reader a perfect match – when it happens, it is an experience to be cherished.19 Implied readers are different from real individual readers such as Updike. Literary history informs us that not all actual readers responded to the text’s invitation to live up to the liberal or even radical combination of qualities that inhere in its implied reader. One the one hand, The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize in 1997 and reached a global audience as a consequence of recognition by the most influential and prestigious prize given in the English-speaking world. On the other hand, some readers at home in India took offense at the novel’s representation of illicit liaisons. Sabu Thomas filed a suit against Roy in a petition alleging that The God of Small Things “was obscene and likely to corrupt or deprave the minds of readers” (“a lawsuit”). Chatman’s paradigm allows us to recognize that actual readers have responses to novels that show how dramatically they 148

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differ from the text’s implied reader(s). For whatever one thinks of A God of Small Things, its implied reader is certainly not an innocent person corrupted or seduced into depravity. Indeed, its implied reader (whether local or international) is a person of some experience and sophistication who may be shocked by Roy’s representations but would be in little danger of suffering moral degradation from reading the novel. I have employed this dramatic example to suggest that there are frequently striking differences between implied readers and real readers and even more extreme differences among all the real readers of a text. To paraphrase Fredric Jameson, nothing is to be gained by passing over in silence the radical differences among readers of the global novel: “[w]e sense, between ourselves and [an] alien text, the presence of another reader, of the Other reader.”20 Jameson, citing Edward Said, rightly criticizes the “othering” that differentiates readers and texts in a fashion that implies an inferiority that goes along with the differences. Yet he prefers attention to radical differences over “falling back into some general liberal and humanistic universalism” (“Third-World”21). To understand that novelists sometimes deliberately attempt to appeal to commonalities and even universals of human experience in order to accomplish connections through ambassadorial or broadcast strategic empathy does not diminish readers’ uniqueness. In fact, it might even have the power to enhance the cocreative work and pleasure of every novel-reading experience. N O T ES 1. Steven Moore, The Novel, An Alternative History: 1600 to 1800, Bloomsbury, 2013, p. 1. 2. Steven Moore, The Novel, An Aternative History: Beginnings to 1600, Continuum, 2010, p. 4. 3. Louise Rosenblatt, The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work, Southern Illinois University Press, 1978, p. ix. 4. My emphasis on Anglophone contemporary fiction admittedly limits the scope of my allusions to the global novel. It should go without saying that there are rich and lively traditions of the novel in many languages, including languages with relatively few speakers, such as Icelandic or Gikuyu. Famously, Kenyan novelist Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o established himself as James Ngugi, writing his earliest fiction in English. Weep Not, Child was published by Heinemann in 1964, making Ngu˜gı˜ the first East African novelist to reach a global audience. Later in his career, in a highly influential 1986 work of nonfiction, Decolonising the Mind, Ngu˜gı˜ influentially argued that African writers should eschew writing in English and should instead compose and publish their works in indigenous African languages. To do so, according to Ngu˜gı˜, is to engage in the anti-imperial struggle against European hegemony (Decolonising, p. 108). Though relatively few African novelists have followed his lead (Ngu˜gı˜ writes first in Gikuyu but also publishes his own 149

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5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 150

English translations of his novels, as in The Wizard of the Crow [2006]), his argument underscores the mixed blessing of writing in a global lingua franca such as English: one can reach a large world readership in English, but one may also thus pass up opportunities to communicate with readers in one’s native tongue. Ngu˜gı˜ argues that for African novelists, writing in English is to opt out of the revolutionary anti-imperial struggle (Decolonising, p. 108). For a lucid description of the many audiences to which a work can embed outreach, see Brian Richardson, “Singular Text, Multiple Implied Readers,” Style, vol. 41, no. 3, 2007, pp. 257–72. By far the majority of all books that reach global audiences pass through the portals of editorial offices located in Western European capitals or North American major cities. Two Chinese publishers hit the top ten in 2015, and further down the list several Japanese publishers rounded out the top fifty. Though major publishers are often owned by multinational corporations, their main editorial offices tend to be located in the traditional publishing centers. See “The World’s 57 Largest Book Publishers, 2015,” Publishers Weekly, June 26, 2015; for commentary on the production and distribution of fiction, see Pascale Casanova, World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. Devoise, Harvard University Press, 2004, p. 17. Casanova, World Republic of Letters, p. 12. For a thoughtful discussion of the bone people and the marketing of prestige in the global market, see James English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value, Harvard University Press, 2005, pp. 317–20. Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now, Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 203. Roberto Schwarz, “The Importing of the Novel to Brazil,” in Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, ed. John Gledsoe, Verso, 1992, pp. 44, 52. “Narrative Empathy,” in the living handbook of narratology, ed. Peter Hühn et al., Hamburg University Press, paragraph 13. For an extended discussion of readers’ empathy, see Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel, Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 65–99. For a discussion of the distinctions among a variety of actual and hypothetical audiences of texts and the different efforts that readers may make to live up to a narrative’s ideal audience as projected by the narrator, see Peter J. Rabinowitz, Before Reading, Cornell University Press, 1987. Experiencing a gap between oneself and a novel’s implied reader is a normal experience of wide readers, and it may be especially the case when we read novels that originate in different times or cultures from our own. For an elaboration of these ideas, see Suzanne Keen, “Readers’ Temperaments and Fictional Character,” New Literary History, vol. 42, no. 2, Spring 2011, pp. 295–314. First described in Empathy and the Novel, Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 142–43. See also my elaboration of the audiences reached by strategic narrative empathy in “Strategic Empathizing: Techniques of Bounded, Ambassadorial, and Broadcast Narrative Empathy,” Deutsche Vierteljahrs Schrift, vol. 82, no. 3, September 2008, pp. 477–93. F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (1948), Doubleday, 1954, p. 10.

Novels and Readers 17. Meir Sternberg, “Proteus in Quotation-Land: Mimesis and the Forms of Reported Discourse,” Poetics Today, vol. 3, no. 2, 1982, p. 112. 18. Wayne C. Booth and Wolfgang Iser, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Cornell University Press, 1978, p. 151 (emphasis added). 19. There is a special phase in the life of a reader when the novelists of his or her own generation come into their powers. These writers, who may have grown up reading some of the same books as the reader, have a special capacity to create an implied reader uncannily similar to the reader himself or herself. 20. Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text, vol. 15, Autumn 1986, pp. 65, 66. 21. Ibid., p. 77.

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9 ROBERT T. TALLY JR.

The Space of the Novel

With its typically lengthy narrative unfolding across hundreds of pages, the novel is considered a profoundly temporal literary form. Duration, if only in the time it takes to read such a large work, is a key aspect of the novel. Indeed, as some historians and theorists have suggested, time or temporality is really the subject of the novel – the modern European novel, at least – which then becomes the principal genre by which time, its experience, and its effects are explored. The formal correspondences between the novel and historiography, for instance, would seem to confirm the sense that the novel is, as it were, about time, and many of the world’s most famous novels are presented as fictional (and sometimes even nonfictional) histories, chronicles, biographies, or autobiographies, from The Tale of Genji to Don Quixote, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, In Search of Lost Time, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. In The Theory of the Novel, György Lukács pointed out that of all literary genres, “[o]nly in the novel . . . is time posited together with the form.”1 Unlike the brief poem, whose very appearance on the page, including its spacing, line breaks, and iconography (the verbal icon, the well-wrought urn, etc.), marks it as a distinctively spatial form, the novel’s expansive narrative registers its fundamental relationship to time because it requires an extensive period during which the story will unfold. Even if the narrative takes place in a single day, as Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich make abundantly clear, the experience of time and its passing often occupy a central place in the theory, and reading, of the novel. After what has been called the “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences, increasing numbers of scholars are paying attention as well to the relations among space, place, and the novel.2 Of course, this is not to say that space or spatiality was ignored previously. Critics obviously paid attention to matters of geography or topography in examining a novel’s setting, for example, and regionalism, local color, and national identity have long been standard features of critical inquiry. 152

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Even at the level of form, as in Joseph Frank’s influential 1945 essay, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” which demonstrated the suppression of temporality in a number of modernist works, critics have examined the ways in which texts were imbued with spatial relations of their own.3 Indeed, one could say that matters of space as well as those of time have always been addressed in literary criticism, although time and temporality have, until recently, tended to dominate in studies of the novel or of narrative more generally. In many cases, critical attention to space or spatial relations was often reserved for the areas in which things took place, the mere setting, a backdrop or container in which the events unfolded but which itself had little direct consequence. Space or place in this rendering remained rather static and inconsequential, whereas time and temporality appeared to gain significance, whether they are considered in terms of grand historical developments over centuries or an individual’s experiences of the passage of the hours in a day. In recent years, critics have asserted the significance of spatiality in the theory of the novel. This spatial turn has been linked to various developments, including postmodernism, with its distinctive “new spatiality,”4 and postcolonial criticism, which has emphasized the significance of place and territory in cultural studies.5 In critical theory, structuralist and poststructuralist thought called into question the dominance of time and temporality, and Michel Foucault (among others) identified the present era as “the epoch of space.”6 Although much of the work currently being done under the auspices of geocriticism, literary geography, or the spatial humanities is directly associated with such timely developments within twentieth- and twenty-first-century social or cultural theories, many critics operating in these areas have returned to earlier texts and thinkers whose writings inform the current conversations.7 As a result of these varied interventions into the theory and history of the novel, the distinctively spatial aspects of that apparently temporal form have been increasingly brought to light and studied. In this chapter, I discuss the space of the novel in terms of both its formal characteristics and its variegated content, and I argue in particular that the novel is a form of literary cartography. The novel projects, describes, and figuratively maps the social spaces depicted and, in some sense, created in its pages. In a way, the novel is a sort of map, one that enables readers to orientate themselves and the characters, events, settings, and ideas of the novel in the world. Looking at various critics and theorists, I suggest that the novel is a form ideally suited for the project of figuratively mapping the world and our situation and prospects in it. 153

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Space and Place in the Novel When one thinks of space in relation to the novel, the first consideration is usually the depiction of spaces or places in the text. This is sometimes thought of as the “storyworld,” the area in which the events of the novel take place.8 The storyworld could be entirely imaginary, such as Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, whose population, history, and geography are explored over dozens of humorous fantasy novels. Alternatively, the storyworld could closely resemble the geographic spaces of the real world, as with the gritty realism of Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles in The Big Sleep and other detective novels. Or it might combine some aspect of the two, as in William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, which undoubtedly resembles the real Lafayette County, Mississippi, but which has developed its own mythic history over the course of Faulkner’s writings. The basic geography and distinctive places in a novel are powerfully effective in orienting the reader and establishing the setting of the fictional world.9 But, then, no matter how much a given storyworld makes reference to the spaces of the “real” world, the spaces of a novel are necessarily imaginary, by virtue of being part of that fictional universe. As Virginia Woolf once observed in an essay on the “real” places to be found in Dickens’ novels, “[a] writer’s country is a territory within his own brain; and we run the risk of disillusionment if we try to turn such phantom cities into tangible brick and mortar . . . No city indeed is so real as this that we make for ourselves and people to our liking; and to insist that it has any counterpart in the cities of the earth is to rob it of half its charm.”10 Woolf here insists that the storyworld maintains its own autonomy from the real world and that the reader encounters this geography as a space of the imagination. In some ways, this is certainly true. The places and persons in the novel are, by definition, fictional, even if they are closely tied to referents in the real world. Within the pages of a novel, the places are certainly “real” enough, even if the place in question is the flying island of Laputa in Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. Nevertheless, one can distinguish fantastic realms like the Land of Oz from more clearly referential locations like Dostoevsky’s Saint Petersburg, and indeed, such distinctions are often crucial to drawing lines, even those that might occasionally be blurred, between various genres or modes of writing. The setting of a novel is already a spatiotemporal concept. For example, when we say that at the beginning of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the story is set in Missouri in the 1840s, we identify both a location in space and a moment in time. Setting is often a crucial aspect of the novel, since the history and geography directly affect the way that characters, events, and plots are understood. In the case of Huckleberry 154

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Finn, much of the humor and the pathos of the novel derives from both the regional color of what would still have been thought of as “the old Southwest,” the distinctive landscapes along the Mississippi River, and the historical moment, most notably, the reality of slavery before the Civil War; this all takes place at a distance from the place and time of the composition and of readership’s reception (e.g., Twain wrote the novel in Connecticut for a largely Eastern audience in the 1880s). Twain not only sets his novel in a distinctive region, but his prose partakes of a regionalism that makes Huckleberry Finn all the more memorable, a picaresque novel set among the riffraff of a wild, sometimes beautiful, but largely unsophisticated or uncivilized part of the country. The odd vernacular used by Huck (the narrator) and others helps to accentuate the difference between the region of the storyworld and those more familiar to the reader. The relevance of space and place to the novel is not limited to geography. Other spatial arrangements, such as architecture, interior design, and types of spaces, invariably have their own effects on a narrative. One need think only of the affective resonances of a word like “home,” which means something rather different from mere abode, apartment, or house. Houses or other buildings can frequently be the main setting for novels, and the layout of the rooms or the relations between the interior and exterior often determine the plot. The “haunted house,” for instance, has provided a memorable site for mystery or horror from Horace Walpole’s Gothic Castle of Otranto to Stephen King’s The Shining or Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Sometimes, in these cases, the physical location in the “real world” is unknown or irrelevant – Edgar Allan Poe never says in what country or region his “House of Usher” takes place – but the building itself generates the sense of spatial anxiety. The space aboard a vessel, as in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick or Brian Aldiss’ Starship, can have similar effects. Often the setting has less to do with the geographic location than with the type of place or the arrangement of spaces in the novel. Rooms or other enclosed spaces offer excellent examples of this. The same basic space means different things, even though the dimensions may be identical, depending on the meanings attached to it. For instance, a bedroom and an office tend to serve rather different purposes and carry quite different senses.11 Meanings of given spaces vary dramatically across literature as well, because a room could signify comfort to some, confinement to others. Woolf’s liberatory “room of one’s own” is a far cry from the isolated room occupied by the protagonist of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” for example. There is an almost limitless number of associations that could be made about a given “room,” and novelists over time have attempted to represent these in manifold ways. 155

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Indeed, spaces and places in the novel may refer not only to the physical setting of the story or to the layout of the spaces in which the characters move but also to the ideas and thoughts about various spaces and places that emerge in the novel. For example, in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Emma constantly dreams of Paris, which makes that city a key site in the text; she never actually makes it to Paris (the closest she gets is Rouen), but the dream of Paris colors every aspect of her character and of the plot. Hence, what a character thinks about a place is another important way in which place can affect a novel, even if the place in question never appears or is depicted. Such a place, whether real or imaginary, immediately becomes part of the literary geography of the novel, which, in turn, becomes a space to be mapped. Spatial Representation In discussing his approach to composing The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien explained that he “wisely started with a map, and made the story fit (generally with meticulous care for distances). The other way about lands one in confusions and impossibilities, and in any case it is weary work to compose a map from a story.”12 Here Tolkien is referring to an actual, physical map, one that he drew up himself and that allowed him to make visible the world of Middle-earth. But the plot of Tolkien’s novel is itself cartographic, even if one were to set aside the helpful maps included at the beginning of each volume.13 The Lord of the Rings represents a vast space, the imaginary realms of Middle-earth, which features not only a diverse topography and geography (complete with rivers, lakes, seas, mountains, valleys, forests, caves, cities, towns, and so forth) but also a rich, dense historical background that gives these various places a kind of overdetermined significance or surfeit meaning. Each place is not only marked, as if on the map, but is also described, contextualized, interpreted, and woven into a larger geopolitical discourse. Many of the places encountered bear three or four different names, for example, because their geographic or spatial situation is couched in a long history that includes encounters with different races, ethnicities, and linguistic groups. The more or less linear itinerary of the novel’s protagonists – notably Frodo and Sam’s long journey into Mordor and Merry and Pippen’s peregrinations around Fangorn Forest, Isengard, Rohan, and Gondor – is set in relation to a much larger geography and history that make their own personal encounters and discoveries all the more meaningful. The “map” of Middle-earth is not merely the sketch/drawing included at the front of the book, designed to aid the reader (like the writer) in following the errant travelers along their 156

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way, but is primarily formed through the narrative itself. For the imaginary world created by and through The Lord of the Rings, the novel serves as the map. It makes sense that a wholly imaginary “otherworld” such as Tolkien’s Middle-earth would call for a cartographic narrative so that its distinctive spaces and places could be rendered visible in the mind of the reader. Yet, as noted earlier, the same processes and effects can be found in highly realistic works as well; Dickens’ London and Balzac’s Paris would require the same sort of narrative mapping, regardless of how familiar the reader might be with the underlying “geospace” purportedly represented in the text. In truth, all novels – or, more generally, all narratives – take part in this sort of literary cartographic project. Lennard Davis, in Resisting Novels, distinguishes between three types of place: the actual (such as the London of Dickens), the fictitious (say, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which is similar to parts of Great Britain but not localizable on a map), and the renamed (F. Scott Fitzgerald’s East and West Egg, for instance, which mirror locales on New York’s Long Island).14 But each of these is “ideological,” according to Davis, and each therefore partakes in the crisis of representation that lies at the heart of the novel’s project: to give form to, or make sense of, the world. One of the main ways in which novels give form to the world is by orienting readers, whether by reference to places in the readers’ “real” world or by reference to distinctive places in the storyworld or, most often, by some combination of the two.15 Eric Bulson has shown how the modern novel employs geographic or spatial information to orient, and sometimes to disorient, the reader, whose imagination must navigate the figural landscapes of the novel’s represented space. Bulson demonstrates the degree to which actual maps and guidebooks played a role in novelistic representation.16 But, as with novels depicting imaginary worlds, the actual figured geography plotted on a chart is not required, and could even interfere with, the literary cartography of a novel. The literary cartography of the novel certainly does relate to the spaces of the real world, but there need not be any one-to-one correspondence between the referential space outside the text and the representations within it. How does this work? As a form of literary cartography, the novel presents its readers with descriptions of places, situates them in an imaginary geography, even if it is quite similar to familiar places in the extradiegetic sphere beyond the text, and provides points or frames of reference by which they can orient themselves and understand the world in which they live. In this way, the novel may also help readers to get a sense of the worlds in which others have lived, currently live, or will live in times to come. From a novelist’s point of view, the work provides a way of mapping the spaces encountered or 157

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imagined in the author’s, the reader’s, or a character’s experience. Ricardo Padrón has observed that literary works not only “allow us to picture places and spaces, but by telling stories that take place in them, or by sculpting characters associated with them, they give those places life and meaning.”17 The text does not replace the image, nor could the image entirely replace the text, but the novel’s literary cartography, operating as it must at the level of the imagination and bringing to the fore problems of representation, interpretation, and meaning, makes possible different ways of seeing and thinking the world as it appears both inside and apart from the text itself. In a manner that is not merely metaphorical, the novel both represents space and helps to produce it. The novelist or narrator creates the world depicted in its pages; the narrative makes connections, establishes relations, and emphasizes a given feature, all the while surveying the territory in which characters, actions, settings, and events exist, operate, or merely take place. Whether expressly acknowledged or not, the space and place of the novel condition, if not determine, the characters and events, so the “imagined geography,” as Edward Said called it, is not simply a backdrop or container. It is also an active force in its own right, a means by which to shape a world, because the plot so often entails descriptions – literal or figurative – of landscapes or domains connecting discrete elements in order to produce the narrative. Famously multiformal and heteroglossic, the novel brings together remnants of other narratives, depictions of peoples or occurrences, observations, meditations, information gleaned from eyewitness testimony or from secondary reports, scraps of legends, myths, and inventions of the fancy. In stitching together this patchwork representation of a world, the novel, or literary map, makes possible an image that gives shape to the world and that can become the basis for future surveys, narratives, or maps. Literary Cartography The novel is not the only literary genre in which a project of literary cartography could be carried out, and one could certainly see how the practice operates in other literary forms, such as the epic, romance, or lyric, not to mention such genres as travelogue, ethnographic writing, and so on. In fact, one could argue that iconographic poetry or nonnarrative description could appear to be all the more maplike, inasmuch as it already appears to be a straightforward representation of space, whether in the form of various spatial arrangements of lines on a page or of depictions of the geographic space exterior to literature. When Frank referred to the way in which certain modern or modernist works take advantage of a “spatial form,” he was, in part, comparing them to the short poem or vignette, in which all parts are 158

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present at once, not extended temporally across the longue durée of a typical novel.18 More specifically, Frank was looking at the way modern (or modernist) writers used formal techniques to give a sense of simultaneity, thus disrupting the fluvial progression of time in the narrative and emphasizing events taking place side by side. But the beginning, middle, and end required of all plots in Aristotle’s estimation are not only temporal but spatial, and to find oneself thrust in medias res refers as much to the geographic milieu or situation as it does to the position within a chronologic sequence. A plot itself is spatial, for a plot is also a plan, which is to say, a map. The plot establishes a setting, sets a course, and marks features of an imaginative landscape. In Maps of the Imagination, Peter Turchi argues that every creative writer is a mapmaker. Turchi concedes that his usage is metaphorical, but he notes that the “actual” map is itself a kind of metaphor, since its representation of the places or spaces of the world can only be figural or figurative. There are no “true maps,” in the sense of perfectly mimetic images of the depicted territories. The famous parable from Jorge Luis Borges, “Of Exactitude in Science,” which describes a map so detailed that it was made coextensive with the territory it was intended to map, warns us against being too fastidious in the cartographic enterprise. But, then, no one ever truly mistook the map for the territory, the territory for the map. As in the literary cartography produced by a narrative, the matter is necessarily creative, provisional, incomplete, and also extraordinarily useful. Turchi identifies several categories or processes with which every writer and every mapmaker must deal, of which the question of selection or omission might be the most important.19 To begin with, the writer, not unlike the cartographer, must determine what elements to include in the story or map. This question already implies others, such as the following: What is the function of this story or map? What do I want the reader to get out of it? What counts as a place (or event, character, or theme) worth marking? What can safely be left out? For example, a road map intended for motorists would be expected to depict all available roads, streets, avenues, highways, and so on, but it might be forgiven for omitting pedestrian walkways or trails. Similarly, the novel might include high levels of detail with respect to certain characters, places, or events while skimming over other features. No map is definitive, but then that merely opens up the possibility of more and better maps, depending on the perspectives of the maps’ makers and users. In a well-known formulation, James Joyce once stated that in Ulysses, he wanted “to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth, it could be reconstructed out of my book.”20 Ulysses is imagined as a narrative map, even a blueprint, of the city of Dublin itself. But, then, one hardly believes that urban planners or 159

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developers would agree that the sprawling modernist novel actually provided a feasible blueprint for the cityscape of Dublin. Joyce’s stated desire reflects the degree to which a writer’s cartographic project is ultimately impossible, doomed to failure in advance, but also capable of failing in interesting ways. The spaces represented in the novel cannot be the same as the “real” space of a city or country. However, the spaces projected and depicted in the novel’s literary cartography are not, in this sense, unreal either. The imaginary space of the novel and the real geospace of Dublin are clearly connected, but they do not coincide exactly, and Joyce’s comment must be taken to reflect an ironic ambition, no less meaningful for being ironic. The same would hold for the other types of representations mentioned by Davis, since the novelistic description of a renamed place (e.g., Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County) or of an entirely imaginary place (such as China Miéville’s New Crobuzon) would still operate differently than would a visual image or drawn map of the place. Nevertheless, the literary cartography developed through the novel, whether it be As I Lay Dying or Perdido Street Station, makes possible new ways of seeing, experiencing, and interpreting the spaces depicted. The mapping project of a novel is necessarily open ended, which means that it can only be incomplete, provisional, and tentative, although this characteristic is actually one of its great strengths. For example, as I have discussed elsewhere,21 in his Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1974), Georges Perec spent three days monitoring a single location in Paris and recording everything he saw. Of course, his literary representation could not “exhaust” the place, owing to the necessary processes of selection and omission that characterize the project of narrative mapmaking. As Bertrand Westphal observed of Perec’s experiment, it would have remained incomplete even if he had “camped out in the heart of the Sahara,” but “Perec instead chose to engage with the bustling Place SaintSulpice,” a busy urban locale where far more was going on than could possibly be noticed, much less narrated or described. “Although he was confined to one location at a specific time, the project was actually boundless.”22 Indeed, merely enumerating the buses that pulled up at the bus stop would quickly become tedious, not to mention describing other vehicles, pedestrian passers-by, their clothing and overall appearance, the dogs or birds, and so on. Moreover, beyond the visual archive, Perec needed to bring the other senses into play by describing, for example, the feel of the midday sun, the smell of diesel fumes, and the sounds of children crying. Ironically, all this attention to detail and almost indiscriminate recording of information ultimately leads to a failure not only to “exhaust the place” entirely (which, in any case, would be impossible) but also to register the uniqueness of the place chosen. After all, when one starts focusing on such 160

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apparently insignificant details as a bus passing by, what difference does it make that the author is at Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris as opposed to some other town in France or elsewhere in Europe or even the world? For all its attention to detail and focus on a single, actual place, the literary cartography of Place Saint-Sulpice is not well served by this exhausting method. The novelist must select the particulars of a given place or story that will allow for the narrative map to be meaningful. A story lacking essential elements or, in contrast, containing too many inessential ones will fail to deliver the proper “place” to its readers. The author produces the world through the narrative, thereby rendering it meaningful. A failure in this enterprise can be more serious than a mere inaccurate picture, since all maps are technically inaccurate or incomplete. But the failure might lead to the reader or narrative itself becoming “lost,” which, in turn, makes the story and its depicted spaces and places less effective. Spatiotemporality and the Novel In “Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel,” Mikhail Bakhtin coined the term “chronotope,” literally translated as “time-space,” in order to make clearer sense of the relations between historical time and geographic space in literature. Bakhtin focuses especially on early forms of the novel, written well before such “first” novels as Don Quixote or Robinson Crusoe, which demonstrates the long history of the novelistic chronotopes (on novels in the Greek and Hellenistic traditions, see Chapter 2). As Franco Moretti has pointed out, Bakhtin’s essay is “the greatest study ever written on space and narrative,” and yet it does not include a single map or diagram, which perhaps demonstrates the degree to which Bakhtin understands this spacetime to operate within the language and form of the novel itself rather than in connection with some other way of visualizing space or place.23 The chronotope is a way of understanding the “generic techniques that have been devised for reflecting and artistically processing” aspects of time and space. Space and time are inextricably bound together, and the chronotope is “a formally constitutive category of literature.”24 Marcus observes that the chronotope is the key concept of the entire Bakhtinian theory of the novel, since the ways time and space are represented constitute the force and effectiveness of the form itself. As she puts it, Bakhtin argues that the history of the novel is the history of the chronotope, that is, the history of the novel’s representation of time and space. While all novels develop chronotopes, different subgenres have different chronotopes, which function as generic markers. The chronotope gives substance to the 161

robert t. tally jr. historically variable ways of experiencing and perceiving space and time, and changes in chronotope also indicate changing relationships between the literary work and historical reality, particularly with respect to such factors as subjectivity, social relations, and knowledge production.25

Essential to Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope is its historicity. Chronotopes are not fixed, stable, or static; they develop over time, and they are specific to their times and places. Bakhtin does not provide a definitive or detailed treatment of the theory of the novelistic chronotope. Rather, he allows its terminological flexibility to cover a number of related notions. Hence, at times the chronotope primarily appears to be defined by its respective genre, whereas in other moments it seems to refer to a particular spatiotemporal figure within a work or genre, such as “the road” as distinctive chronotope. As Bakhtin states: In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope.26

Bakhtin’s discussion of the chronotope in the development of narrative forms or genres leads from the ancient romance with its “adventure chronotope” and abstract space; through the ancient Roman novels of Apuleius and Petronius, where “space becomes more concrete and saturated with a time that is more substantial”; to ancient biography and autobiography, whose focus on the time and space of the individual would “exercise enormous influence . . . on the development of the novel.”27 In moving from “the ancient forms of the novel,” as he calls them, to the “folkloric chronotope, the chivalric romance, and the carnivalesque fiction of François Rabelais, Bakhtin identifies a movement in narrative forms similar to the one identified by Lukács in The Theory of the Novel, but he does not view the shifting chronotopes or narrative forms as a degradation of some earlier unity or integrated totality visible in the prenovelistic epic form. Instead, he finds that the proliferation of various voices and the historical “inversions” of myth and history offer moments of democratic or revolutionary potential. Bakhtin argues that chronotopes are “the organizing centres for the fundamental narrative events of the novel. The chronotope is the place where the knots of the narrative are tied and untied. It can be said without qualification that to them belongs the meaning that shapes narrative.”28 The chronotope is thus a critical element of any literary cartography, for it is through the use of and reference to particular chronotopes that the meaning of the narrative, the shape of the world, is established. However, here it is also certain that the 162

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individual writer or mapmaker is not simply making choices, selections, or omissions but is participating, perhaps without his or her knowledge of it, in larger historical and cultural processes by which these moments and places gain greater significance. As Bakhtin concedes, “[t]he represented world, however realistic and truthful, can never be chronotopically identical with the real world it represents, where the author and creator of the literary work is found.”29 These broader and more complex relations among the world, the text, and the literary cartographer point to the supraindividual or historical forms discussed in Lukács’ theory of the novel. The chronotope itself develops over time such that “the road” as it appears in Don Quixote is quite different from the one animating Jack Kerouac’s narrative in On the Road. The changing aspects of this spatiotemporal feature highlight the ways in which spaces and places are themselves both produced and productive of different ways of seeing the world. In his essay on spatial form in modern literature, Frank argued that while the traditional novel was a fundamentally temporal form, modern literature tended to break up, freeze, or cease the flow of time in the narrative, presenting instead isolated images that appear simultaneously or in a static field.30 In some respects, this spatialization of time in the modern novel might be viewed as an “epic” maneuver inasmuch as the writer attempts to reproduce the conditions under which the epic form had thrived, for example, a stable social hierarchy or a strictly delimited, relatively unchanging storyworld. The idea, which draws on a somewhat Romantic tradition, is that the ancient societies that produced such works as the Homeric epic were whole, integrated, and even static social spheres, whereas a breakdown in the social totality, along with an increasing sense of anxiety or alienation, characterized the modern world. The novel, as the literary form par excellence of openendedness, indecision, and indeterminacy, will have as its vocation the figurative mapping of a world no longer whole. The novel, like the map, becomes the means by which the fragmented sphere can be imagined, if only provisionally, as a totality.31 Space and the Modern Novel The advent of the age of the novel coincides with the fragmentation of this imagined coherence or totality in the ancient world of the epic.32 Implicit in this view of space and representation in the epic or novel is the idea that a given social formation will have social and spatial relations proper to it. Put differently, one might say that each society produces its own kinds of space, which then must be addressed in various ways by novel forms of cartographic or other spatial practices. This is partly the argument in Henri Lefebvre’s 163

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The Production of Space, in which he asserts that “every society – and hence every mode of production with its subvariants (i.e., all those societies that exemplify the general concept) – produces a space, its own space.”33 The novel, as a form of literary cartography, develops different techniques, styles, or genres in attempting to map this space. Put another way, the novel provides an opportunity to imagine the world and to see how it is constructed. Drawing on Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space, as well as the insights of economic historians, Jameson understands that the social and political transformations effected by the capitalist mode of production have also radically transformed spatial relations. In Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson argues that “the three historical stages of capital have each generated a type of space unique to it” and that these “are the result of discontinuous expansions or quantum leaps in the enlargement of capital, in the latter’s penetration and colonization of hitherto uncommodified areas.”34 The first stage, market capitalism, witnessed the homogenization of space, the development of a Cartesian gridlike spatial organization, a geometric space that demystified the earlier, feudal or medieval senses of space and place. Here the realist novel or realism more generally emerges as the dominant mode of novelistic discourse, as the narrative mapping project attempts to apprehend the experience of this kind of spatial formation. Later, with the emergence of monopoly capital and imperialism, particularly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a new sort of national space, already becoming international, emerges. The “realistic” novel no longer captures the experience of such a space, and as the problem of figuration becomes more urgent, so the techniques associated with modernism (such as free indirect style, stream of consciousness, montage, collage, and spatial form) may be viewed as attempts to overcome the representational crisis. For Jameson, the revolutionary experiments with language and style, including such novel representational techniques as free indirect discourse, stream of consciousness, polyphony, and collage, in modernist texts reflect “an attempt to square this circle and to invent new and elaborate strategies for overcoming this dilemma.”35 Edward Said makes a similar point in a “note on modernism” in his Culture and Imperialism. Said suggests that the new aesthetic forms reflect a growing apprehension of the irony of imperialism. “To deal with this,” writes Said, “a new encyclopedic form became necessary.” The features of the modernist novel include “a circularity of structure, inclusive and open at the same time,” such as, for example, in the stream of consciousness of Joyce’s Ulysses or Faulkner’s The Sound and the 164

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Fury. Such techniques would also include epic and mythic elements, not to mention generic and pop-cultural elements, and an “irony of a form that draws attention to itself as substituting art and its creations for the once-possible synthesis of the world empires.” For Said, this aesthetic of modernism represents a reaction to the impending breakdown of the imperial system, as the literary artist attempted to hold an imaginary reality together that was no longer feasible in the “real world.” As Said concludes, “[s]patiality becomes, ironically, the characteristic of an aesthetic rather than of political domination, as more and more regions – from India to Africa to the Caribbean – challenge the classical empires and their cultures.”36 In the age of globalization or of postmodernity, in which the traditional borders or frames of reference have been redrawn, elided, or exploded, the representational crisis becomes all the more urgent, while the forms of representation (now including media and technologies hitherto unimaginable) struggle to map the seemingly unmappable totality. If, in Lukács’ view, the seventeenth- or eighteenth-century novel attempted to map societies in “a world abandoned by God,” then the scope of the novel today extends to scale of the global system itself, as might be witnessed in such recent works as Amitav Ghosh’s magnificent Ibis trilogy (Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire), whose multicultural cast of characters ranges globally from China and India to Mauritius and beyond during the nineteenthcentury Opium Wars. The result is a “world picture” tied to specific historical events but crucially informing our own image of the twenty-first-century world system. Although the social and spatial conditions for its emergence as a cultural form were quite different from those in place today, the novel seems particularly well suited to represent the human experience, social relations, and the world more generally in an age of globalization. In its multiformal style, heteroglossia, and attention to ever-changing chronotopes (to speak in a Bakhtinian idiom), the novel is expansive enough to attempt to comprehend this vast space and the myriad forces operating within it. No novel or set of novels could lay claim to completeness or perfection, but in their impurity and audacity, novels attempt to map the system. Even in the case of the ones that seem to operate on a much smaller spatial scale – focusing, for example, on a single person, a small area, or a limited series of events – the “world” mapped in this literary cartography takes shape and takes on meanings that then serve as the basis for other, perhaps more powerful literary maps. The space of the novel thus involves the constant mapping and remapping of the real and imaginary spaces of the world. 165

robert t. tally jr. NO TES 1. György Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock, MIT Press, 1971, p. 122. 2. See, e.g., Barney Warf and Santa Arias, The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Routledge, 2008; Peta Mitchell, Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity: The Figure of the Map in Contemporary Theory and Fiction, Routledge, 2007; Michael Dear, Jim Ketchum, Sarah Luria, and Doug Richardson, eds., GeoHumanities: Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place, Routledge, 2011; and Robert T. Tally Jr., Spatiality, Routledge, 2013. 3. See, e.g., Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, Oxford University Press, 1973; Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” in The Idea of Spatial Form, Rutgers University Press, 1991, pp. 1–68. 4. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press, 1991, p. 418; see also Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, Verso, 1989. 5. See, e.g., Edward W. Said, Orientalism, Vintage, 1978, and Culture and Imperialism, Knopf, 1993; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds, Routledge, 1987; and Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge, 1994. 6. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, vol. 16, Spring 1986, p. 22. 7. See, e.g., Sharon Marcus, “Space,” in The Encyclopedia of the Novel, ed. Paul Shellinger, Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998, pp. 1259–62. 8. See Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, trans. Christine van Boheemen, University of Toronto Press, 1985, pp. 93–99; see also Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, and Maoz Azaryahu, Narrating Space/ Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet, Ohio State University Press, 2016, pp. 16–43. 9. See Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadelupi, The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, rev. edn, Harcourt, 1999. 10. Virginia Woolf, “Literary Geography” (1905), in Books and Portraits: Some Further Selections from the Literary and Biographical Writings of Virginia Woolf, ed. Mary Lyon, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, 1977, p. 161. 11. See Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas, Beacon Press, 1969. 12. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter, Houghton Mifflin, 2000, p. 177. 13. Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology, Houghton Mifflin, 2003, p. 94. 14. Lennard J. Davis, Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction, Routledge, 2014, p. 55. 15. See Ryan, Foote, and Azaryahu, Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative, pp. 19–20. 16. See Eric Bulson, Novels, Maps, Modernity: The Spatial Imagination, 1850–2000, Routledge, 2006. 17. Ricardo Padrón, “Mapping Imaginary Worlds,” in Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, eds. James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow Jr., University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp. 258–59. 166

The Space of the Novel 18. Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” p. 18. 19. Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, Trinity University Press, 2004, p. 25. 20. Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, and Other Writings, ed. Clive Hart, Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 69. 21. See Tally, Spatiality, pp. 53–54. 22. Bertrand Westphal, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces, trans. R. Tally, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p. 150; see Georges Perec, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, trans. Marc Lowenthal, Wakefield Press, 2010. 23. Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, Verso, 2005, p. 35. 24. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imaginations: Four Essays, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press, 1981, p. 84. 25. Ibid., p. 1260. 26. Ibid., p. 84. 27. Ibid., pp. 120, 146. 28. Ibid., p. 250. 29. Ibid., p. 256. 30. See Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” 31. See Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, p. 60; Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” p. 16. 32. On “the age of the novel,” see Jonathan Arac, Impure Worlds: The Institution of Literature in the Age of the Novel, Fordham University Press, 2011. 33. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Blackwell, 1991, p. 31. 34. Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 410. 35. Ibid., p. 411. 36. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, Vintage, 1993, pp. 189–90.

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10 ROBERT SPOO

The Novel and the Law

The law’s regulation of the novel has often served the interests of identifiable groups: authors and publishers as owners of literary property; typesetters, bookbinders, and other artisans involved in book manufacturing; private persons invasively named or potentially defamed in fictions; and the general public, whose morals have been the concern of lawmakers, prosecutors, and vice crusaders. The laws governing the novel and its social effects have notably included copyright acts, defamation and privacy doctrines, and obscenity statutes. Though each of these legal regimes has a long and complex history, I concern myself in this chapter chiefly with the roles they played with respect to British, Irish, and American fiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, I focus on the surprising and even perverse ways in which the regulatory effects of copyright statutes, obscenity laws, and privacy doctrines worked together and against each other, sometimes to suppress transgressive fictions, sometimes to cause them to proliferate in mass or underground markets. It would be an exaggeration, perhaps, to say that the novel has been a special target of the law’s coercive force; indeed, the legal mechanisms sampled in this chapter also operated on drama, nonfiction, and even poetry. Yet, as a genre inherently committed to the illusion of fact and veracity, the novel has opened itself to the litigious assaults of those who felt their reputations were injured or their privacy invaded by an author’s too reckless trafficking with reality. Historically a magnet for libel actions, the roman à clef was, in a sense, the fullest realization of the novel’s appetite for the real, notwithstanding that subgenre’s modern banishment to the margins of aesthetic respectability. The novel’s narrative energies – devoted early on to portraying the sentiment and subjectivity of such characters as Pamela Andrews – were easily adapted to the licentious adventures of a Fanny Hill and quickly drew the regulatory gaze of prosecutors of obscenity. Copyright laws, initially enacted for the encouragement of historical, scientific, and other “useful” learning,1 later 168

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found their truest home in fanciful works of fiction and poetry, which courts today treat as falling within “the core of the copyright’s protective purposes.”2 Far from attempting to trace the jurylike epistemology of fiction or to recount fully the rise of the law of the novel,3 I offer here a selective survey of law’s impact on the production, dissemination, and consumption of modern fiction, often in transatlantic contexts and with certain backward glances for historical perspective. My account of transatlantic literary production and twentieth-century British and American legal regimes tells only part of a much larger story of the novel and the law. Yet, like the particular “cases” and “paradigms” that Pascale Casanova uses to theorize larger transactions and ruptures in the world republic of letters,4 the legal mechanisms that I identify may be found operating, in historically inflected forms, in other times and places. During much of the nineteenth century, for example, copyright and tariff laws played an enormous role in shaping literacy and readership in Britain and its colonies and dominions. British and colonial laws permitted inexpensive editions of English-language novels to be printed and consumed in British colonies, but they prohibited those same cheap editions from being imported into the United Kingdom, where domestic copyright law kept the price of books artificially high and fostered the growth of circulating libraries as the only means by which many Britons could encounter new fiction. At the same time, the absence of US copyright protection for British novels allowed cheap American reprints to make their way into Britain, Canada, and other territories.5 Indeed, the lack of US copyright protection for foreign works from 1790 to 1891 – discussed later – inevitably brings to mind the piracy of Western intellectual property in Asian countries today. Throughout the nineteenth century, protests against “Yankee pirates” issued from Britain,6 just as today Western politicians and intellectual property (IP) industries decry the failure of Asian nations to enforce copyright laws that exist to protect cultural products.7 American piracy during the nineteenth century, expressly permitted by federal statute, cannot be understood without examining many factors of the period, including America’s protectionist laws and policies, literacy rates and individual purchasing power, the book manufacturing industry, and the status of the United States as a net importer of culture.8 Similar factors, adjusted for economic and technological differences, might fruitfully be applied to the study of current IP enforcement in emerging Asian economies, where both Western and Asian entertainment products, including fiction, are sold or downloaded in unauthorized forms at a fraction of authorized prices.9 169

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Obscenity The sanctioning force of obscenity laws has historically reached to almost everyone and everything in the novel’s communications circuit: authors, publishers, printers, booksellers, sales clerks, readers, and even the book itself.10 One of the earliest novels to be condemned as morally obscene (as distinct from religiously or politically illicit under the heads of blasphemous or seditious libel) was John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (popularly known as Fanny Hill), first published in London in 1748–49 and promptly targeted by the British secretary of state, who issued arrest warrants for Cleland, his publisher, and his printer.11 The law thus acted in personam, directly on the persons and purses of the author and the disseminators of the work, as it did again in Massachusetts in 1821 when the American publisher and printer Peter Holmes was tried for the commonlaw misdemeanor of obscene libel after he “knowingly, unlawfully, wickedly, maliciously, and scandalously, did utter [and] publish” an unedited version of Fanny Hill, which the indictment accused of being “lewd, wicked, scandalous, infamous and obscene.”12 This string of condemnatory adjectives anticipated the clotted, repetitious language of American legislators, state and federal, who would later seek to define the obscene through lexical overchoice – lewd, lascivious, filthy, indecent, disgusting – in their statutory enactments. Ensnared in these “mysteries of tautology,”13 Peter Holmes was convicted and sentenced to a jail term and a substantial fine.14 Fanny Hill proved a perennial provocation to censors. Many courts condemned its account of “lesbianism, female masturbation, the deflowering of a virgin, the seduction of a male virgin, the flagellation of male by female and female by male, and other aberrant acts.”15 As late as 1963, a London retailer was successfully prosecuted for advertising and selling the unexpurgated Mayflower edition of Fanny Hill,16 even though D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover had been exonerated three years earlier under the same British law, the Obscene Publications Act of 1959. In the United States during the 1960s, when social tolerance for sexual subjects was changing rapidly, Fanny Hill was condemned as obscene in some states and pronounced lawful in others.17 Courts struggled in those years to absorb and apply the still unfamiliar constitutional standard for obscenity that the US Supreme Court had articulated in 1957 in Roth v. United States: that a work was obscene, and therefore unprotected as free speech, if, to the average person applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the work, taken as a whole, appealed to a prurient interest, and the work was utterly without redeeming social value.18 How could a piece of fiction, seemingly saturated with prurient 170

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appeal, receive the law’s pardon on the basis of some inherent social value? It seemed a puzzle. Roth confirmed a paradigm shift in the judicial treatment of obscenity in the United States by bringing the First Amendment directly to bear on indecent speech. American obscenity law had traveled far by the 1960s. Hard-fought litigations involving Lady Chatterley’s Lover, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, and many other works of fiction had gradually pointed the way to the new approach for judging obscenity. In previous decades, courts had confined themselves to assessing obscenity as a factual matter, weighing a work’s offensiveness against its isolable virtues, its salaciousness against its morality. After Roth and similar cases, judges could put aside the blunt quantifying of smut and decide the question as a matter of First Amendment law, inquiring whether a work had any serious social or literary purpose despite its full-throated indecency. This approach allowed courts to do what even socially progressive jurists of earlier decades could not: openly concede a book’s offensiveness yet rule that inherent free-speech values forbade suppression. In 1966, the US Supreme Court declared that the high court of Massachusetts had erred in deeming Fanny Hill obscene and that “the social value of the book can neither be weighed against nor canceled by its prurient appeal or patent offensiveness.”19 Fanny Hill, for all its voyeuristic indecency, was protected as free speech precisely because its literary and novelistic qualities embodied social value. The novel as a genre enjoyed a signal advantage under the Roth standard. Even rudimentary narrative and indistinctly marked characters – the simpering epistolary lyricism, narrative transvestism, and paratactic sex plot of Fanny Hill – might qualify as not “utterly without redeeming social value” and thus lift the work into the constitutional safe zone. Roth and its progeny provided a rule of law that transcended the numerous uncoordinated regulatory sources – state statutes, federal postal and customs prohibitions, criminal and civil provisions, and the quasi-official activities of purity groups – and trumped them with a single constitutional test for social value. The literary thus became the legal. In contrast, pre-Roth challenges had rendered controversial works vulnerable to the patchwork of laws and parochial mores of many jurisdictions and often made victory in one court merely a prelude to litigation in another. The legal had fragmented the literary by subjecting texts to the reader response of geographically and culturally diverse judges and juries. The case of Ulysses in America illustrates this patchwork regulation of the obscene. We typically think of Joyce’s novel as having suffered under a unitary legal ban until Judge John M. Woolsey liberated it in 1933, but in 171

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fact Ulysses was neither comprehensively banned nor fully exonerated in the United States at any point up to or even after Woolsey’s famous ruling. Instead, Ulysses was subjected to a series of legal skirmishes, sporadic suppressions, and piecemeal adjudications – to the uncoordinated, capillary assaults of the law – throughout the first part of the twentieth century. Between January 1919 and January 1920, US Post Office authorities suppressed three different issues of The Little Review, each containing a portion of Joyce’s novel, by revoking the New York magazine’s second-class postage privileges.20 These subjective, discretionary bans, virtually immune from judicial review, derived their authority from Section 211 of the US Criminal Code, a law that Congress had originally enacted in 1873 at the urging of Anthony Comstock and his New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Section 211 subjected to seizure “[e]very obscene, lewd, or lascivious, and every filthy, book, pamphlet, picture, paper, letter, writing, print, or other publication of an indecent character, and every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for preventing conception or producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use.”21 The expatriate poet Ezra Pound never tired of assailing “the statute which lumps literature and instruments for abortion into one clause.”22 More than a year before the Ulysses suppressions, another issue of The Little Review had been declared nonmailable when the Postmaster of the City of New York decided that one of its items, Wyndham Lewis’ story “Cantelman’s Spring-Mate,” was “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” within the meaning of Section 211.23 A federal court reluctantly upheld the suppression, ruling that Lewis’ story, which recounted an English army officer’s cynical seduction, impregnation, and abandonment of a young woman, exhibited “a tendency to excite lust” that justified seizure by the Postmaster.24 As late as 1959, postal authorities sought, unsuccessfully as it turned out, to ban Lady Chatterley’s Lover from the US mail.25 After the Post Office, it was the New York courts’ turn to condemn Ulysses. In the autumn of 1920, John S. Sumner, secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, swore out a complaint against the editors of The Little Review for publishing the section of Ulysses in which Leopold Bloom masturbates while observing a young woman on the seashore. In early 1921, despite a vigorous defense by attorney John Quinn, the New York Court of Special Sessions found the editors guilty of publishing obscenity under the state’s penal code and fined them $50 each.26 Whereas the postal seizures under the Comstock law had acted in rem, directly against Joyce’s offending text, the New York law acted in personam, against the disseminators of the text. The effect was the same: the serialization of Ulysses was soon discontinued. (In Britain during the same period, publishers of 172

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The Well of Loneliness, Lawrence’s The Rainbow, and other works that courts had deemed obscene allowed those titles to be suppressed in a forfeiture proceeding, thus accepting in rem destruction of their stock to avoid an in personam judgment that might have carried severe monetary or carceral penalties.27) Ulysses first appeared as an unexpurgated book in 1922 in Paris, where the moral climate and publishing norms were more accommodating than they had been in the 1850s when the government of the Second Empire prosecuted Gustave Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire, and other writers for outrages against religion and public morality. French authorities were not greatly interested, moreover, in expending resources on English-language works that were destined for transport out of France anyway.28 In Britain, however, Ulysses was officially suppressed until 1936, not by any court ruling but rather as a result of the British Home Office’s policy to seize any copy imported into the country.29 France’s unchallenged exports thus became England’s contraband. US customs also intercepted Ulysses under federal laws that permitted discretionary seizures of obscene or contraband imports. In 1928, the US Customs Court upheld the seizure of seven copies of Ulysses, along with Pierre Louÿs’ novel Aphrodite and other titles, at the port of Minneapolis under the Tariff Act of 1922.30 In 1930, the US Tariff Act was amended to establish a fairer, more coherent mechanism for testing the validity of seizures: promptly after a seizure, customs was required to inform the US attorney of the district in which the book had been taken; the US attorney was, in turn, required to make a reasoned case in the federal district court for the book’s forfeiture. The discretionary power of customs officials was thus subjected to meaningful judicial oversight. Moreover, the government was required to bring the civil forfeiture action directly against the allegedly obscene book, the legal res, instead of prosecuting individuals involved in the book’s importation. It was under this procedure that Random House and its attorney, Morris L. Ernst, orchestrated the seizure of a copy of Ulysses imported from Paris in 1932. That copy was the sole defendant in the federal in rem action, United States v. One Book Entitled Ulysses by James Joyce, in which Judge Woolsey implicitly rejected the restrictive obscenity standard that American courts had borrowed from the 1868 English case Regina v. Hicklin31 and ruled that the net effect of Ulysses did not lead to lustful thoughts in a person with average sex instincts.32 In all, between 1919 and 1934, Ulysses was the occasion of numerous official seizures and suppressions, multiple state and federal court adjudications, a criminal fine, and at least one criminal incarceration in the United States.33 None of these rulings definitively settled the legal status of the book 173

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in America. Even after the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed Judge Woolsey’s decision in 1934, Ulysses was still vulnerable to attack by postal authorities, state prosecutors, and vigilant vice societies. Just a few months after Woolsey issued his decree, an Episcopal clergyman learned that the US Post Office had seized a copy of the Random House Ulysses that he had mailed to himself along with Lives of the Saints and Richard Maurice Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness. When the clergyman protested, the Post Office stated that it planned to hold the book until the appeal of Woolsey’s decree was decided; in the meantime, the good pastor could consider himself charged under the Comstock law with sending obscenity through the mail.34 Although Woolsey’s opinion contained crucial legal ingredients – the reasonable libido, serious literary value, holistic context – that would later be fused and constitutionalized in Roth and other obscenity rulings of the US Supreme Court, that tribunal never assessed the legality of Ulysses. Instead, the passage of time has acted as the court of last resort, conferring an informal immunity on Joyce’s masterpiece. Today the prosecution of fiction for obscenity has become mostly a memory in Anglo-American law, and child pornography laws chiefly target images, not texts. Copyright The rise of the novel is coeval with the rise of modern copyright law. The Statute of Anne, enacted by the British Parliament in 1710, was the first law to vest authors with the exclusive right to print and reprint their books, in contrast to earlier grants and privileges that had protected the printing monopoly of the Stationers’ Company, a guild that also acted as a censor of writings offensive to church and state authorities.35 Copyright law, in its simplest form, serves to discourage rivals who might free ride on authors’ creative efforts and usurp their hard-won markets by producing unauthorized copies of their works. Nine years before the publication of Robinson Crusoe (1719), Daniel Defoe urged legal protection for “the Author’s Property . . . the Child of his Inventions, the Brat of his Brain.”36 Yet the protection conferred by the Statute of Anne was not without limit. Statutory copyrights were to last no more than a total of twenty-eight years. Later copyright statutes, including the first US Copyright Act of 1790,37 also granted rights for limited times. In making copyrights perishable, these laws effectively decreed a public domain. The end of copyright was the beginning of the commons. Authors and publishers enjoyed exclusive rights in their intellectual creations for a time; then those creations passed into a legislatively demarcated public domain for anyone else to use without permission. 174

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There has always existed a tension between copyright laws and obscenity laws. The same government that grants a property right in creative products may ban those products if they violate laws against immorality. The nice legal question is whether a work that is deemed obscene automatically loses its copyright protection or whether literary rights exist independently of any judicial finding of obscenity. Does property require propriety? Or does any advancement of learning, however objectionable under present community standards, deserve protection from piracy? In English judicial practice of the early 1800s, an equity court would decline to issue an immediate injunction against piracy if the court felt the plaintiff’s work to be of questionable morality. The court would instead direct the plaintiff to establish his or her literary property in a successful damages action in a law court and then return to the equity court to seek an injunction. Because an action at law was costly and, if unsuccessful, could trigger criminal prosecution, many authors simply dropped the matter. Robert Southey, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley each suffered ongoing piracies because equity courts required copyrights in potentially scandalous narratives to be tested first in a law court. Equity’s procedural fastidiousness came to be viewed, inaccurately, as a flat substantive rule barring immoral works from enjoying copyright protection.38 The unintended result was that judicially unchecked piracies proliferated, and morally suspect works enjoyed a wider and cheaper circulation than they probably would have had under monopoly prices. As Lord Eldon remarked in 1817, “[i]t is very true that, in some cases, [equity procedure] may operate so as to multiply copies of mischievous publications by the refusal of the Court to interfere by restraining them.”39 This functional antagonism between obscenity and copyright law continued through the development of the modern novel. In banning controversial modern writings, obscenity law tried to function as a sort of supercopyright, vesting the government with exclusive power to control publication and making it impossible for anyone else, even authors, to print and disseminate such works. Copyright law, in perverse contrast, sometimes failed to protect modern works at all. Writings thought to be indecent were poor candidates for copyright protection in Britain and the United States not because they were typically deemed incapable of enjoying a property right but because authors and publishers faced legal and practical obstacles to enforcing copyrights in questionable writings (as was true of the equity suitors of the nineteenth century). Notably, the US Copyright Acts of 1891 and 1909 granted copyrights to foreign authors only if they managed to have their works printed from type set within the United States – and, later, printed and bound there – simultaneously with or shortly after publication in their home country.40 This requirement came to be known as the “manufacturing 175

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clause,” a transparently protectionist measure that favored American book manufacturers at the expense of authors. Failure to comply with the manufacturing clause – and thus to give book artisans their due – would result in the loss of US copyright for a foreign work. Ezra Pound, who bitterly resented the manufacturing clause, complained that in America, “any, absolutely any, material gain to no matter whom is of more importance than clarity of thought, enlightenment, or any possible property of the mind.”41 For him, US copyright law, like book tariffs, perverted the order of things, ranking articles of manufacture above authors’ creations, treating paper, lead, ink, and buckram as if these mere physical media were of greater importance than the ideas they embodied. The US copyrights of many novels first published abroad were lost for noncompliance with the manufacturing clause: W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions (1904), Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919), Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg’s Candy (1958), and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), to name just a few. Various obstacles – reputed literary indecency, limited authorial fame, and privacy concerns – delayed the reprinting of these works in America until it was too late to salvage their US copyrights. In the eyes of many foreign observers, the manufacturing clause was simply a continuation of pre-1891 US policies that had refused to extend any copyright protection whatsoever to foreign authors, with the result that the novels of Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot, and many other popular British writers flooded the American market in cheap editions for an increasingly literate populace. A parallel form of lawful piracy had earlier threatened the novels of Samuel Richardson and other English authors whose works were unable to enjoy copyright protection in pre-Union Ireland.42 When notorious novels such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover lacked enforceable rights in the United States or Britain in the twentieth century, pirated editions proliferated, often expurgated and clandestinely sold. The New York pirate-pornographer Samuel Roth built a dubious career on repackaging experimental modern writing, much of it uncopyrighted, as titillating entertainment for men, filling his magazines with fragments of modernism fixed in an amber of transatlantic decadence, mild eroticism, and international realism. Fiction and prose experiments by Joyce, Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, and Djuna Barnes appeared alongside work by Frank Harris and Catulle Mendès, the ghost stories of Richard Middleton, and the Welsh realism of Caradoc Evans. A serialized translation of Octave Mirbeau’s A Chambermaid’s Diary – a picaresque account of fetishism, sexual manipulation, and ruined innocence – appeared in the same Roth 176

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magazine as a bowdlerized Ulysses. Roth advertised them together as “great suppressed novels.”43 His business model was simple: purported or adjudicated obscenity led to the impairment of copyright, and impaired copyright paved the way for lawful piracy, one body of law in effect subverting the purpose of the other. Lawmakers were sometimes the bookleggers’ best friend.44 Gifted a commons brimming with popular foreign fiction, American publishers had realized by the 1850s that they had to impose some form of order on unrestrained reprinting if they hoped to control the price of books and sustain their lists of foreign titles. Confronted with free, lawful resources, publishers adopted a form of self-regulation called the “courtesy of the trade,” an informal, norms-based practice that imitated the main features of copyright law and permitted both publishers and authors to benefit, though inconsistently, from the wholly fictitious exclusive rights that trade courtesy recognized. Publishers respected each other’s claims to particular foreign authors or titles and paid the authors sometimes handsome honoraria or royalties.45 Dickens received £1,000 each for A Tale of Two Cities and Our Mutual Friend.46 Consistently observed in the nineteenth century by established American publishers, and more fitfully by British publishers, courtesy principles survived among twentieth-century American publishers such as B. W. Huebsch, Alfred Knopf, and Bennett Cerf. Cerf’s Random House, in particular, proudly observed courtesy with other publishers. For example, Cerf agreed to pay a royalty on sales of Green Mansions to his competitor Alfred Knopf, who claimed an earlier courtesy association with W. H. Hudson.47 While helping to prepare the litigation that lifted the federal customs ban on Ulysses, Cerf deftly mobilized the residual tradition of trade courtesy to protect his claim to exclusive publishing rights in Joyce’s uncopyrighted work.48 As late as the 1970s, editors at Harper & Row requested courtesy treatment for Plath’s The Bell Jar when they learned that Random House was planning to issue the unprotected novel in America. Random House courteously ceded the volume.49 Trade courtesy was an improvised, second-best form of IP, a sometimes porous but tangible consolation for a hypertechnical, discriminatory copyright law. Today the copyright laws of most Western nations have swept away rights-defeating technicalities. Novelists need no longer fear that their labors will be exploited by lawful piracies, at least in the transatlantic setting. Instead, technology – digital reproduction and the Internet – poses the greatest threat to the ability of writers and publishers to capture the full value of copyrighted works. Responding to technological erosions of IP, legislators have so dramatically increased the scope and length of copyrights that far 177

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from prematurely entering the public domain as they did under earlier laws, works are rendered unavailable for unfettered use for sometimes more than a century. One of the pathologies created by overlong copyrights is the aggressive control, viewed by some as arbitrary and capricious, of the literary estates of Arthur Conan Doyle, James Joyce, J. D. Salinger, and other authors. The posthumous use of authors’ rights to intimidate or to profit unreasonably is well documented, as noted below. Privacy, Publicity, Defamation By the late nineteenth century, the conditions of modernity had given rise to a legal hygiene of personality and privacy, a sacred space of selfhood that, as its moral and monetary value grew, attracted the intimidations of blackmailers and the invasions of tabloid journalism and instant photography.50 Blackmail spared reputation by means of illegal, menacing promises – a forced partnership in secrecy – while defamation law sought to salvage reputation and compensate its injuries through legal process. Blackmail illegally promised to conceal injurious truths; libel and slander doctrines legally redressed injurious falsehoods. Privacy laws slowly coalesced as potential remedies for unlawfully invaded personal space, while incipient publicity rights, breaking from the husk of privacy rights, came to permit the monetizing of public personality.51 These legal forces converged in the modern self that sought to enjoy the benefits of selective public display while fiercely asserting the right to be let alone. Within and outside of fiction, blackmail straddled private and public life, coercing the victim’s cooperation by promising not to disclose an embarrassing truth. In Oscar Wilde’s novel, Dorian Gray compels a former friend, the chemist Alan Campbell, to help him dispose of the body of the murdered Basil Hallward by threatening to reveal some disgraceful fact about Campbell.52 A serious crime punishable by lengthy incarceration,53 blackmail was so insidious and merciless a practice that Sherlock Holmes regards the professional blackmailer Charles Augustus Milverton as “the worst man in London” and winks at Milverton’s murder at the hands of one of his victims – a righteous killing that Holmes will neither report to the authorities nor use to extort advantages from the killer, thus ending the harassing cycle of blackmail by making a gift of his silence.54 The condoned murder is a measure of the perceived uselessness of blackmail prosecutions (which required the very disclosure the blackmailer had bargained to conceal) and the growing value of reputation and privacy. Wilde himself fell prey to blackmailers who had obtained his private homoerotic letters. These letters, in turn, helped the Marquess of Queensberry to defeat Wilde’s attempt to 178

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prosecute him for libel and later served the Crown’s purpose in prosecuting Wilde for the crime of gross indecency. Like his indiscreet letters, Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was offered in court as evidence against him, as if this strange tale of magically preserved youth and invisible corruption simply transcribed Wilde’s own secret sins or carried the key to his alleged posing as a sodomite.55 Wilde’s trials and writings were a compendium of legal and social preoccupations of the fin de siècle: privacy, celebrity, reputation, blackmail, defamation, obscenity, and sexual crime. Today, a number of privacy tort laws are recognized and routinely enforced,56 but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, legal protections for privacy were diffuse and undeveloped. In 1890, two Boston lawyers, Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis, published in the Harvard Law Review a groundbreaking article entitled “The Right to Privacy.”57 In it, they argued that “the right to enjoy life” in the modern era must include “the right to be let alone.” “The press,” they wrote, “is overstepping in every direction the obvious bounds of propriety and of decency. Gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and the vicious, but has become a trade which is pursued with industry as well as effrontery.”58 Warren and Brandeis argued that the common law should acknowledge the sacredness of human privacy by making violators liable for damages in tort. Seeking precedent for their theory, they reasoned that a right to privacy could be inferred from the IP rights that had long been recognized in private papers.59 The law’s protection of unpublished documents was only superficially a concern for property, they contended; in truth, it was a chivalrous acknowledgment of the sacred space of individuality under threat from “the too enterprising press, the photographer, or the possessor of any other modern device for recording or reproducing scenes or sounds.”60 Without a clear cause of action for invasions of privacy – apart from the often inapplicable law of defamation – authors resorted to two homemade remedies: self-help and literary representation. They took pains to destroy or conceal external sources of private information, or they internalized the problem of privacy in their fictions, or both. Anxious to shield his privacy from the scrutiny of biographers, Henry James notoriously employed self-help late in life by making a bonfire of his accumulated manuscripts, notebooks, and letters.61 Availing himself of the second remedy, James made privacy and celebrity the central themes of The Bostonians, The Reverberator, The Aspern Papers, and other works.62 He wrote during a time when gossip journalism and celebrity culture were rapidly eroding the ability of authors and other figures to conceal their private lives and control their public images and when copyright laws and barely emergent privacy rights gave scant hope of keeping inquiring minds at bay. 179

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James’ fictions record the rising tide of commercialized gossip and offer images of individual resistance to the modern destruction of privacy. The Bostonians (1886), for example, dramatizes a fierce struggle between domestic privacy and “the great arts of publicity” that render personal experience “food for newsboys” and the subject of “infinite reporting.”63 The novel traces the spectacular rise of Verena Tarrant, whose magnetic oratory makes her a popular figure in the women’s movement. Her mentor, Olive Chancellor, seeks both to promote her public image and to build a private domestic life with her, even as Basil Ransom, a southerner with conservative views of women, fiercely battles Olive for control of Verena’s mind and body. In the end, Basil forcibly abducts Verena just before her most highly publicized lecture, convinced that she is meant not for “the public mind” but “for something divinely different – for privacy, for him, for love.”64 Basil’s victory over “the great public” requires the sacrifice of Verena’s career to his private desire and traditional ideology. The novel ends ironically, with Verena captive in Basil’s arms, telling him how “glad” she is but unable to suppress her tears – perhaps “not the last she was destined to shed.”65 The novel’s concluding image of vindicated companionate privacy comes at a great price: the triumph of heterosexual domestic norms is brought about by the loss of Verena’s identity and the destruction of her life with Olive. James reserved his most withering attacks on publicity for his fictions about authorship. His short story, “The Real Right Thing” (1899), tells of a woman who authorizes a multivolume biography of her recently deceased husband, the celebrated writer Ashton Doyne. George Withermore, a young writer chosen for the job, sets to work researching Doyne’s life but soon comes to feel that the dead man has withdrawn his approval of the project and tells the startled widow that “[t]here are natures, there are lives, that shrink” from public scrutiny.66 The “horror” of it all, Withermore explains, is the ghost’s alarm “[a]t what we’re doing.” Doyne has given signs that he opposes a triple-decker monument. “He’s there to be let alone.”67 At the end of the story, Withermore and Mrs. Doyne “give up,” persuaded that the perturbed spirit has barred the way to biographical revelations. Though she had thought she was doing the right thing by commemorating her husband, Mrs. Doyne realizes that she must do “the real right thing” by respecting his right to be let alone.68 The best life is the unrecorded life. The widow Doyne bases her power over her husband’s private life on her legal ownership of the rights in his unpublished papers.69 The great irony is that her unassailable property right does not, in the end, allow her to divulge her husband’s secrets – he continues to hold a veto power from the grave. Doyne, though defunct, remains stronger than the bundle of rights that the 180

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law recognizes in the unpublished witnesses to his earthly existence. Warren and Brandeis had contended for a privacy right of living persons, and today in the United States the right of privacy is largely confined to the living (though some states recognize publicity rights for deceased personalities).70 James took the matter much further by writing an amicus brief for the right of the dead to be let alone. And yet Doyne’s postmortem resistance, his determination to haunt his widow’s commemorative enterprise, is consistent with Warren and Brandeis’ claim that literary rights in unpublished documents are only an outward and visible sign of the larger sacrality of personality. Personality, like its crude signifier, the ghost, can be thought of as surviving death and transcending a mere right to damages. In “The Real Right Thing,” James made just that argument by closing the story with the ghost triumphant in his preserved privacy. Though subjected to irony in James’ fictions, the proprietary connection between literary rights and authorial privacy – between copyrights and confidentiality – has remained a persistent belief of authors and their estates up to the present. Copyrights have been used as a stick for beating back the curious public. In the 1980s, the reclusive author J. D. Salinger sued Random House to enjoin the distribution of an unauthorized account of his life, alleging that the biographer had infringed Salinger’s copyrights in his unpublished personal letters, even though the letters were available to the public in university libraries. Sensing the real purpose of Salinger’s lawsuit, the trial court found that the biographer’s quotations were a fair use: “[The biography] cannot be dismissed as an act of commercial voyeurism or snooping into a private being’s private life for commercial gain.”71 The appellate court reversed this ruling, however, contributing to a chilly climate for scholarly fair use that continues in some respects to exist today. The judge who had ruled in favor of Salinger’s biographer in the trial court wrote afterwards: “Serious distortions will occur if we permit our copyright law to be twisted into the service of privacy interests.”72 A related form of legally enforced privacy and image crafting has involved the use of copyrights by authors or their estates to withhold or withdraw certain works from publication, such as juvenilia or disavowed texts. William Wordsworth long ago justified lengthy copyright terms as a means of preventing publishers from issuing reprints of works that “[the author] himself has rejected.”73 The use of copyrights to shape approved canons and to sanitize biographies has continued in recent times. In the 1960s and 1970s, the literary estate of Sylvia Plath sought to prevent the posthumous release of her semiautobiographical novel The Bell Jar in the United States and relented only when it became clear that the novel’s failed US copyright would permit anyone to issue it in America.74 More recently, Salinger’s estate, as 181

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committed to authorial privacy and selective canonicity as Salinger himself was, engaged in litigation to prevent European publication of early Salinger stories that unquestionably reside in the public domain in the United States.75 The James Joyce estate, which once warned that the private lives of Joyce and his family were “no one’s fucking business,” has brandished its copyrights, existent and nonexistent, to discourage scholars and others from publishing disapproved projects.76 So egregious had the Joyce estate’s behavior become by 2006 that a group of American lawyers agreed to represent a scholar pro bono in her lawsuit charging that the estate had been misusing its copyrights to silence discussion of Joyce’s life, family, and writings.77 One of the scholar’s allegations was that the estate had persisted in claiming a US copyright for the first Paris edition of Ulysses long after the claim was shown to be baseless.78 As these examples show, legal strategies for preserving authors’ privacy have the reciprocal effect of shaping their public image: to control privacy is to superintend publicity. While copyrights have often been invoked to enforce authorial privacy, James Joyce conversely used privacy laws as an indirect means to enforce a doubtful US copyright in Ulysses. In 1926, Samuel Roth began reprinting installments of Ulysses in his magazine Two Worlds Monthly without permission from or payment to Joyce. Joyce hired a New York law firm to put a stop to Roth’s serialization and to obtain monetary damages from him. Realizing that courts might not enforce rights in Ulysses (a book that suffered from a questionable copyright and an immoral reputation), Joyce’s lawyers chose to sue Roth under Section 51 of the New York Civil Rights Law, which forbade the commercial misappropriation of an individual’s name, portrait, or picture. Essentially a statutory right of privacy, Section 51 allowed the attorneys to attack Roth for using Joyce’s name without authorization, even though Roth had simply named Joyce as the author of Ulysses in his magazine and in advertisements. Shaky though Joyce’s name-theft claim was, his attorneys managed to extract a consensual injunction from the beleaguered Roth. Here privacy law was essentially doing the work of what today we would call the right of publicity: the right to monetize celebrity names and likenesses. We see in Joyce v. Roth a right of publicity emerging from a lawsuit ostensibly about privacy rights, a de facto claim of economic harm couched in lawyerly rhetoric about Joyce’s injured feelings. Joyce, like Groucho Marx, Cher, Elvis Presley, and Clint Eastwood much later, was seeking judicial approval for propertizing his public image.79 Thus, while name misappropriation is numbered among the privacy torts, its modern tendency has been to protect a lucrative right of publicity. The other privacy torts seek redress for outrageous disclosures of private 182

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truth or for placing truth in a false light. The law of defamation also participates in the modern hygiene of protected personality, but it does so by combating not injurious truths but injurious falsehoods.80 Libel claims, and the fear of them, have shaped the novel, from the political use of libel to patrol the border between fact and fiction in the eighteenth century81 to the private policing of reputational and commercial harm in later periods. Many of James Joyce’s early stories remained unpublished for years while British publishers and printers, who were legally vulnerable along with the author, anguished over an accusatory realism that insisted on naming actual public houses, shops, and English monarchs. In 1954, a man mentioned in Ulysses sued the BBC for broadcasting a reading of the allegedly defamatory book. Wyndham Lewis saw several of his works, including his novel The Roaring Queen (1936), withdrawn from publication or abandoned at the proof stage to appease complainants who had recognized themselves in Lewis’ satirical portraits.82 Threatened with a libel action, the English publisher of Women in Love settled the claims of two depicted individuals and insisted that Lawrence revise the text to pixelate the offending likenesses.83 Authors, publishers, and printers live in fear of hawkeyed, hypersensitive, or opportunistic readers who peer through the keyholes of fiction and claim to glimpse their maligned selves. Libel law is one factor that has led novelists to claim aesthetic autonomy for their fictions, while the novel’s bad double, the roman à clef, has more openly risked scandalous referentiality.84 Menaced with legal liability, the novel’s anxious dependence on external fact has generated a familiar paratext, encountered at the start of many books: “All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.” This disabusing paratext appeals to the reasonableness of readers in the text’s vestibule, asking them to respect the difference between imagination and life and to avoid crude roman à clef conversions. It urges the deluded, the literal minded, and the thin skinned to put aside their instinct to sue for libel or for privacy invasion and to play the author’s game of fictiveness in a sporting spirit. As early as 1851 in his Preface to The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne wittily combined a form of the all-characters-are-fictitious paratext with an important rumination on the genre of narrative romance, announcing that the “personages of the tale . . . are really of the author’s own making, or, at all events, of his own mixing” and that it is “an inflexible and exceedingly dangerous species of criticism [that brings the author’s] fancy-pictures almost into positive contact with the realities of the moment.”85 Hawthorne’s dual purpose was to discourage claims of libel and to assert the primacy of the nonrealistic and the imaginary in his aesthetic craft, to make literary autonomy double as a shield against legal harassment. 183

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The modern novel’s ritual inclusion of these threshold paratexts has served both to prepare the aesthetic experience of readers and to steer them away from the courthouse doors. Conclusion The social factors that gave rise to the novel included, along with the growth of the middle class and literacy,86 the law’s desire to regulate the invasive referentiality and narrative prurience to which the novel, with its illusion of factual revelation about private lives, transgressively tends. The law has influenced the craft of fiction, turning the scene of writing into a space selfconsciously inhabited by the gaze of obscenity, defamation, and privacy laws. Works as different as Madame Bovary and Finnegans Wake arguably internalized the strictures of obscenity laws and made avant-garde style serve as a barrier to prosecution.87 The same legal forces, along with copyright laws, have shaped the dissemination and consumption of the novel. In an economy that seeks to reward individual creativity with property rights, copyright law has sometimes underregulated and sometimes overregulated, and not infrequently has bizarrely partnered with legal censorship to permit the impairment of authors’ rights and the unauthorized dissemination of banned texts. The novel’s rise required a society conditioned to receive the pleasures and provocations of fiction’s flirtation with the real. The law has both participated in that conditioning and served as a mechanism for controlling what it has wrought. NO TES 1. British Statute of Anne (1710), 8 Ann. c. 19, § 1. 2. Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 US 569, 586 (1994). 3. I refer to Ian Watt’s likening of the “novel’s mode of imitating reality” to the truthseeking role of the trial jury, which, he wrote, expects factual particulars and specific identities as part of “a full and authentic report of human experience.” Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, University of California Press, 1957, pp. 31–32. 4. Pascale Casanova, La république mondiale des Lettres, Éditions du Seuil, 1999. 5. For early discussions of these legal forces and effects, see Royal Commission on Copyright, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1878, pp. xxx–xxxix, 1–9, 202–10; William Briggs, The Law of International Copyright, Stevens & Haynes, 1906, pp. 476–565, 587–618. 6. See, e.g., “Culture and Progress Abroad,” Scribner’s Monthly, vol. 3, January 1872, pp. 375–76; S. S. Conant, “International Copyright: An American View,” Macmillan’s Magazine, vol. 40, June 1879, pp. 151–61. 7. See generally Andrew Mertha, The Politics of Piracy: Intellectual Property in Contemporary China, Cornell University Press, 2005; Peter Baldwin, 184

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8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries of Trans-Atlantic Battle, Princeton University Press, 2014, pp. 19, 275, 277. For a discussion of nineteenth-century American piracy, see Robert Spoo, Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain, Oxford University Press, 2013, chap. 1. Howard W. French, “Chinese Market Awash in Fake Potter Books,” New York Times, August 1, 2007, available at www.nytimes.com/2007/08/01/world/asia/ 01china.html?r=0; Dennis Abrams, “In China: Online Literature Booms, Reportedly Along with Piracy,” Publishing Perspectives, April 11, 2016, available at http://publishingperspectives.com/2016/04/china-online-literaturebooms-piracy/#.V2IqhPb2bIU. For the classic definition of the communications circuit, see Robert Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?,” Daedalus, vol. 111, 1982, pp. 65–83. See Simon Stern, “Fanny Hill and the ‘Laws of Decency’: Investigating Obscenity in the Mid-Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-Century Life, vol. 43 (forthcoming). I wish to thank Professor Stern for his helpful suggestions regarding this chapter. Commonwealth v. Holmes, 17 Mass. 336 (Mass. 1821). Morris L. Ernst and William Seagle, To the Pure . . .: A Study of Obscenity and the Censor, Viking Press, 1928, p. 190. Wayne C. Bartee and Alice Fleetwood Bartee, Litigating Morality: American Legal Thought and Its English Roots, Praeger, 1992, p. 57. Larkin v. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 243 NYS.2d 145, 147 (NY Sup. Ct. 1963). Censorship: A World Encyclopedia, ed. Derek Jones, Routledge, 2001, pp. 533–34. See, e.g., Larkin v. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 252 NYS.2d 71 (NY 1964); Att’y Gen. v. A Book Named “John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure,” 206 N.E. 2d 403 (Mass. 1965). 354 US 476, 488–89 (1957). A Book Named “John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure” v. Att’y Gen., 383 US 413, 419 (1966). Paul Vanderham, James Joyce and Censorship: The Trials of “Ulysses,” New York University Press, 1998, pp. 1–2, 28–36. Act of March 4, 1909, chap. 321, § 211, 35 Stat. 1129. Letter from Pound to John Quinn, December 29 and 30, 1917, in Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and John Quinn 1915–1924, ed. Timothy Materer, Duke University Press, 1991, p. 132. Vanderham, James Joyce and Censorship, pp. 17–18. Vanderham suggests that the authorities may also have viewed the magazine issue as politically subversive in time of war. Anderson v. Patten, 247 F. 382 (SDNY 1917). Grove Press, Inc. v. Christenberry, 276 F.2d 433 (2nd Cir. 1960). See Vanderham, James Joyce and Censorship, pp. 41–53; Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. edn, Oxford University Press, 1982, pp. 502–4. Rachel Potter, Obscene Modernism: Literary Censorship and Experiment, 1900–1940, Oxford University Press, 2013, p. 18. Ibid., p. 65.

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robert spoo 29. See Carmelo Medina Casado, “Sifting Through Censorship: The British Home Office Ulysses Files (1922–1936),” James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 37, 2000, pp. 479–508. 30. Heymoolen v. United States, Treas. Dec. 42907 (Cust. Ct. 1928). 31. [1868] L.R. 3 Q.B. 360, 369. 32. United States v. One Book Called “Ulysses,” 5 F. Supp. 182 (SDNY 1933), aff’d sub nom. United States v. One Book Entitled Ulysses by James Joyce, 72 F.2d 705 (2nd Cir. 1934). 33. Samuel Roth was imprisoned in 1929 for violating parole after vice crusaders raided his warehouse and seized copies of Ulysses, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Fanny Hill, and other titles. Jay A. Gertzman, Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica, 1920–1940, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, pp. 15–48. 34. Unpublished letter from Morgan Brainard to Judge Woolsey (March 29, 1934), in John Munro Woolsey Papers, Yale Law School. 35. 8 Ann. c. 19. 36. “Review” (February 2, 1710), quoted in Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright, Harvard University Press, 1993, p. 39. 37. Act of May 31, 1790, chap. 15, § 1, 1 Stat. 124. 38. For a discussion of this equity procedure and its impact on authors such as Southey, Byron, and Shelley, see James R. Alexander, “Evil Angel Eulogy: Reflections on the Passing of the Obscenity Defense in Copyright,” Journal of Intellectual Property Law, vol. 20, 2013, pp. 209–314. 39. Southey v. Sherwood (1817), 35 Eng. Rep. 1006, 1008 (Ch.). 40. Act of March 3, 1891, chap. 565, 26 Stat. 1106; Act of March 4, 1909, chap. 320, 35 Stat. 1075. 41. “American Book Pirates,” New Statesman, April 16, 1927, pp. 10–11, reprinted in Ezra Pound, Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals, vol. 4, ed. Lea Baechler et al., Garland Press, 1991, p. 383. 42. Samuel Richardson, The case of Samuel Richardson, of London, printer: with regard to the invasion of his property in The history of Sir Charles Grandison, before publication, by certain booksellers in Dublin (London, 1753), University of Oxford Text Archive, available at http://ota.ox.ac.uk/desc/3817; Stephanie Fysh, The Work(s) of Samuel Richardson, University of Delaware Press, 1997, pp. 100–23. 43. Two Worlds Monthly, vol. 2, no. 3, February 1927, inside front cover. 44. For a detailed account of these copyright issues and Roth’s activities, see Spoo, Without Copyrights, pp. 4–5. 45. Ibid., chap. 1. 46. Charles A. Madison, Book Publishing in America, McGraw-Hill, 1966, p. 26. 47. Bennett Cerf, At Random: The Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf, Random House, 2002, p. 57. 48. See Spoo, Without Copyrights, chap. 6. 49. Frances McCullough, Foreword to Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1971), Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006, pp. xii–xiv. 50. Scholars have traced the growth of privacy concerns in legal, literary, and ideological contexts to the mid-nineteenth century and before. See, e.g., Milette Shamir, Inexpressible Privacy: The Interior Life of Antebellum 186

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51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70.

American Literature, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Other scholars have explored the connection between legal conceptions of privacy and domestic intimacy and female experience. See Jeannie Suk, At Home in the Law: How the Domestic Violence Revolution Is Transforming Privacy, Yale University Press, 2011. See Mark Bartholomew, “A Right Is Born: Celebrity, Property, and Postmodern Lawmaking,” Connecticut Law Review, vol. 44, 2011, pp. 301–68. See The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Perennial Library, 1989, pp. 128–33. Angus McLaren, Sexual Blackmail: A Modern History, Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 19. Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton,” The Strand Magazine, vol. 27, April 1904, pp. 373–83. See Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, Knopf, 1988, pp. 435–56. Paul M. Schwartz and Karl-Nikolaus Peifer, “Prosser’s Privacy and the German Right of Personality: Are Four Privacy Torts Better than One Unitary Concept?,” California Law Review, vol. 98, 2010, p. 1940. Samuel D. Warren and Louis. D. Brandeis, “The Right to Privacy,” Harvard Law Review, vol. 4, 1890, pp. 193–220. Ibid., p. 196. Ibid., p. 205. Ibid., p. 206. See Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life, Harper & Row, 1985, p. 664. My observations about James’ fictions and privacy here are adapted with substantial revisions from my essay, “‘Ah, You Publishing Scoundrel!’ A Hauntological Reading of Privacy, Moral Rights, and the Fair Use of Unpublished Works,” Law and Literature, vol. 25, Spring 2013, pp. 85–102. For an excellent use of Warren and Brandeis’ article to shed light on James’ fictions of private life, see Richard Salmon, Henry James and the Culture of Publicity, Cambridge University Press, 1997, chap. 3. A rich discussion of Warren and Brandeis in connection with James’ complex attitudes toward privacy in his fictions is found in Brook Thomas, American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract, University of California Press, 1997, chap. 3. Henry James, The Bostonians, Macmillan, 1886, pp. 122–23. Ibid., pp. 268–68. Ibid., p. 449. Henry James, “The Real Right Thing,” in The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. XVII, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909, pp. 427–28. Ibid., p. 428. Ibid., p. 426. For a discussion of “The Real Right Thing” that touches on international copyright and literary property, see Amy Tucker, The Illustration of the Master: Henry James and the Magazine Revolution, Stanford University Press, 2010, pp. 55–56. Pierre N. Leval, “Toward a Fair Use Standard,” Harvard Law Review, vol.103, 1990, pp. 1116–22, 1130; see also Jessica Bozarth, “Copyrights and Creditors: What Will Be Left of the King of Pop’s Legacy?” (Note), Cardozo Arts and

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71. 72. 73.

74. 75.

76.

77.

78.

79. 80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87.

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Entertainment Law Journal, vol. 29, 2011, pp. 100–1 (noting that nineteen states recognize some form of descendible publicity rights). Salinger v. Random House, Inc., 650 F. Supp. 413, 426 (SDNY 1986), rev’d, 811 F.2d 90 (2nd Cir. 1987). Leval, “Toward a Fair Use Standard,” p. 1130. Letter from Wordsworth to Sergeant Talfourd (June 17, 1838), reproduced in Russell Noyes, “Wordsworth and the Copyright Act of 1842: Addendum,” PMLA, vol. 76, 1961, pp. 380–83. See McCullough, Foreword to Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, pp. xii–xiv. Memorandum of Law in Support of Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss, DevaultGraves Agency LLC v. Salinger, 2:2015cv02178 (W.D. Tenn. filed March 16, 2015). For the Joyce estate’s efforts to protect “‘the much abused privacy of the Joyce family,’” see D. T. Max, “The Injustice Collector: Is James Joyce’s Grandson Suppressing Scholarship?,” New Yorker, June 19, 2006, pp. 35–36 (quoting Stephen James Joyce). See Amended Complaint for Declaratory Judgment and Injunctive Relief, Shloss v. Sweeney, Case No. CV 06–3718, at 10 (N.D. Cal. filed October 25, 2006). I was one of the attorneys who represented Professor Carol Shloss, then of Stanford University, in her lawsuit against the Joyce estate and Stephen James Joyce. See Robert Spoo, “Copyright Protectionism and Its Discontents: The Case of James Joyce’s Ulysses in America,” Yale Law Journal, vol. 108, 1998, pp. 633–67. A full account of Joyce’s name-appropriation lawsuit is found in Spoo, Without Copyrights, chap. 5. Criminal libel law in previous centuries punished provocative publications of truth no less than of falsity, on the theory that such publications tended to disturb the public peace. In contrast, civil defamation claims, which have been common in modern times, require that publications be false to be wrongful, on the theory that these publications inflict private reputational harm. See Sean Latham, The Art of Scandal: Modernism, Libel Law, and the Roman à Clef, Oxford University Press, 2009, chap. 4. See Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. For a discussion of Joyce’s and Lewis’ encounters with libel law, see Latham, The Art of Scandal, chap. 5. David Farmer et al., “Introduction,” D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. xlix–l. See Latham, The Art of Scandal, pp. 9–10. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables: A Romance, Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1851, p. v. In his Preface to The Blithedale Romance, Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1852, pp. iii–vi, Hawthorne asserted that his characters were “entirely fictitious” despite any resemblance of the story’s utopian community to the actual Brook Farm. See generally Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel. See William Olmsted, The Censorship Effect: Baudelaire, Flaubert, and the Formation of French Modernism, Oxford University Press, 2016; Vanderham, James Joyce and Censorship, chap. 3.

11 M A R K A L G E E - H E W I T T, ER I K F R E D N E R , AND HANNAH WALSER

The Novel as Data

A radically expanded notion of “reading” – which can now be close, distant, or take place at the surface – has emerged in recent scholarship, one that demands a reconsideration of the ways in which a reader gains information through an encounter with a novel.1 In response to these evolving practices of textual interpretation, our conceptions of the novel itself have begun to change, shifting dialectically from the novel as a medium of narratives and ideas to a plurality of textual and contextual data that can be accessed, transformed, and even “read” through computational methods. Though we have always known that novels are more than the sum of such parts, even a single novel considered in this way can yield a wealth of information about word frequency, syntax, and structure – the building blocks of literary fiction. Interpretation usually happens at the critic’s scale of reading: maybe a few thousand novels in a lifetime, from which a handful of texts are considered at any given moment to develop an idea or advance an argument. But when we ask questions about genre – “What was the novel?” instead of “What were these novels?” – a turn toward data can offer historical, cultural, and generic insights without direct antecedents in past models of literary study precisely because the information offered by these insights does not operate on a human scale, though they are drawn from and informed by it. Thinking of the novel as data is by no means an attempt to circumvent reading. Rather, like other critical frameworks, it is better understood as a new way of seeing what has long been before us. In this chapter, we consider these multifaceted transformations as we move from novel to data and, in the process, back to the novel. Although relatively new to the work of literary criticism, research in this vein has already yielded key insights in, for example, the interleaving of the conversional narrative with its formal structures or the loci of geographic attention in American fiction of the nineteenth century.2 In these and other studies that understand the novel as data, what kinds of new knowledge become possible, 189

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and what kinds of knowledge are lost? Can the phenomenological and interpretative aspects of a reader’s encounter with a novel become data? And what, if anything, does this teach us about the novel itself? As we shall show, the intellectual and technological transformation of the novel into data is neither as radical as it might seem at first, nor is it a move unanticipated by the novel itself. Data and Information What does it mean to study the novel as data? Data, first of all, are closely connected to information. Whether read for pleasure or studied as objects of cultural interest, novels are a communicative medium and, as such, are carriers of information themselves. The information typically gained by a reader includes concepts familiar to literary criticism: plot, theme, characterization, and conflict. A close reading looks beneath these surface features to detect hidden elements, whether they are structural and aesthetic aspects that speak to the function of the text or information relating to the sociocultural conditions under which the novel was written or published. Both of these readings, however, fundamentally locate the information in the novel within higher-order concepts and ideas. In either critical epistemology, the novel ceases to be an ordered collection of lexemes or words and instead becomes an assemblage of themes, histories, and meanings, detached from the language through which they are communicated to the reader. It may have more or less in common with other novels of the same genre, time period, nationality, or author, but as a textual object, it remains irreducible in and of itself. As a part of a literary critical argument, then, a novel is anecdotally important. It can function as a piece of evidence if one of its higher-order concepts or facets confirms a pattern also found in related novels, but it needs to be explored as a unique object and, crucially, as a whole. This strategy of reading is predicated on a set of mental operations that dictate how we extract information from a text in the first place: in seeking to understand a particular concept, plot, narrative, or theme, for instance, we often elide the specific words (and the specific order of the words) through which that concept is communicated. Words are, to put it another way, the means by which reader comprehension happens but not that which is comprehended. A reader studying David Copperfield can speak of the theme of class, or education, but he or she cannot precisely state (or be expected to know) how many times “the” is used to communicate these concepts. But in these words lie the patterns that construct the novel, that form the characters and communicate the ideas (and the ideology) that the author codes into the 190

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text. For example, in David Copperfield, the frequency of a word such as “the” reveals that it, unlike most nineteenth-century novels, deemphasizes descriptive noun phrases at the beginning of the text in favor of the personal narrative (marked by “I”).3 Even such a “content-free” word as “the” reveals aesthetic facets of the novel, and its relationship to the other texts of its period, that are inaccessible to the traditional forms of literary interpretation. Reading the novel as data transforms both the text itself and our relationship to it.4 It is reduced to a collection of words, in a particular order, each of which can be treated independently from the novel as a whole. Concepts, topics, and themes become assemblages of these words that emerge through the abstraction of our reading experience. These higherorder features no longer function themselves as concrete pieces of information and objects of interpretation; instead, they are revealed to be the end result of interpretative processes themselves. Reading novels as data, then, involves not just a change in the novel as an object but also, and more importantly, a change in our strategies of reading. In 1961, in The Future of Data Analysis, statistician John W. Tukey described the differentiation between statistics, a pure mathematical science, and data analysis, an applied science that seeks to determine meaning from a given data set. The transition from reading to data analysis is less severe but still involves many of the same processes that Tukey describes: “procedures for analyzing data, techniques for interpreting the results of such procedures, ways of planning the gathering of data to make its analysis easier, more precise or more accurate, and all the machinery and results of (mathematical) statistics which apply to analyzing data.”5 As it is applied to novels, then, data analysis becomes a new form of reading, a new way to interpret textual information. Implied in this transformation from novel to data is quantification. Word counts of “tokens” (the individual words in the text) can be aggregated into counts of “types” (the unique words), turning raw words into a numerical representation of the novel. In quantification, what we lose in the immediate interpretability of the results of the analysis we gain in the ability to make use of statistical and computational operations to parse text at scales, both large and small, that are unavailable to readers. This is the metamorphosis that lies at the heart of Claude Shannon’s information theory: the transformation of words into bits, into quanta of communication whose order, repetition, and frequencies not only can represent the text down to the smallest detail but also can be added, multiplied, or statistically modeled.6 As early as the mid–twentieth century, the representation of text as quantity merged with literary criticism, inspiring Roman Jakobson’s theory of communication functions. Jakobson’s work sought to systematize text (including the novel) 191

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in terms of its ability to transmit messages, adding the “poetic function” to explain the role of literature in textual data analysis.7 If, in quantifying novels, we lose the ability to interpret the quantified text as readers, we gain the ability, as analysts of the resulting data, to study micro- and macroscopic linguistic structures at scales ranging from an individual sentence to a corpus of thousands, or millions, of texts.8 The resulting evidence, though less easily subsumable into a narrative argument, has the potential to turn theoretical concepts into replicable, data-driven operations. Why Think about the Novel through Data? Reading the novel as data involves not just a transformation of substance (words into numbers) but one of scale as well. As the words of the text become numbers (raw and normalized frequencies, probabilities, and sequences), a comparison between novels becomes akin to a mathematical operation: a comparison of quantities, frequencies, percentages, and likelihoods. Whereas a close reading of an individual novel resolves the information of the text into a series of discrete features (themes, concepts, and narratives) that may be more or less qualitatively similar to other novels that the scholar has read, the quantitative comparisons enabled by the transformations of the novel into data are subject to a different set of operations. Similarities and differences between texts become a function of shared or differing word probabilities: whether these probabilities represent the presence/absence of words or the statistical likelihood of them appearing in given sequences, their transformative power remains the same.9 Whereas meaning, in a close reading, lies in the reader’s ability to apply larger cultural or aesthetic phenomena familiar to him or her to a text from the outside in a quantitative analysis, meaning becomes a set of relationships within and between texts, an assemblage of presences and absences that together offer a different way to reconstruct the sociocultural, aesthetic, or critical phenomena that shape the novel. It is this large, macroscopic scale that is most often cited as a primary advantage of such a quantitative analysis.10 Rather than arguments based on, at most, tens of books, we can now craft arguments based on comparisons that are orders of magnitude larger. And yet, a quantitative analysis of the novel depends primarily on both of the scales at which data operate: the very small and the very large, the microscopic and the macroscopic. As these analyses count individual function words within thousands of texts, they are able to reveal new kinds of resemblances and differences that are only apparent within these magnitudes of scalar reading. Yet reading at these scales depends on a process of abstraction. A quantitative analysis, by its nature, requires a loss of information to attain 192

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interpretability. Many analyses that compare individual word frequencies across thousands of texts lose the ability to keep track of where these words occur and in what order in any individual text. They retain minute knowledge of frequencies while sacrificing any knowledge of sequence. Studies that elect to focus on relationships of sequence find that this information is incompatible with frequencies. And in both cases, to collapse comparisons involving millions of words into an interpretable measure, analyses must collapse the many dimensions of similarity and difference into single measurements of comparison.11 To operationalize a novel, then, is to measure it, and to measure it is to reduce it to discrete points of meaning.12 In any process of abstraction, information is lost. But even close reading studies sacrifice information for clarity. In a close reading, a reader reduces the manifold complexity of the text down to a single point of conceptual understanding, often abstracted to single-word concepts: “time” in To the Lighthouse and “identity” in David Copperfield. Such an analysis excludes the information in the novel that could be used to compare David Copperfield along other axes (social critiques of industrialization or Victorian gendered social codes). The difference is that this information loss occurs at the beginning of the analysis, at the point of reading, rather than at the end of the analysis, at the point of interpretation. A reader focusing on identity will abstract the language of the book to this one concept and then compare the concept across texts (or within a single novel). A quantitative analysis retains much more of the complexity of the text in the comparison but abstracts the dimensions of comparison in order to create an interpretable measurement. Both deal in abstraction; the divergence between the two analyses lies in when it occurs. In the process of abstraction, the quantitative textual analysis gains the ability to operate at extremely large scales, across corpora of texts rather than individual texts. The advantages of this are manifold, particularly in the possibilities it offers for changing our understanding of the literary history of the novel. Scholarship on the novel has always been constrained by the pace of reading. Take, for example, Ian Watt’s and Michael McKeon’s divergent accounts of the development of the novel through the eighteenth century in The Rise of the Novel and The Origins of the English Novel, respectively. While the conclusions both draw are vastly different, the texts that they chose to analyze, out of the hundreds of novels published during the timeframe of their arguments, are remarkably similar: Don Quixote (1605 and 1615), Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), Robinson Crusoe (1719), Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Pamela (1740), Clarissa (1748), Tom Jones (1749), and Tristram Shandy (1767), among others.13 The scholarly canon of novels, whether that of the eighteenth, nineteenth, or twentieth century, is, in part, a response to 193

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the inability of the critic (let alone the reader) to account for the vast number of novels published. Faced with the entirety of literary history, the institutional response has been to cull the numbers of novels into what Matthew Arnold in 1869 called the “best which has been thought and said in the world,” the literary canon.14 In this reduction, though, what historical transformations and local effects are lost in the vast field of what Margaret Cohen has called “the great unread”?15 In a provocative response, Franco Moretti begins “The Slaughterhouse of Literature” with a list of titles from Columbell’s circulating library catalog: “Arabian Tales, Aylmers, Annaline, Alicia de Lacey, Albigenses, Augustus and Adelina.”16 The form of the list itself causes us to wonder what these books were. Many sound like they might well have been novels, but few have been studied. Framing the logic of the list in Darwinian terms, if we imagine the novels that have “survived” (i.e., that we still read) as the fittest iterations of a particular subgenre of the novel, then, through the parallel processes of education and canonization, we come to take these works’ distinctive features as salient expressions of the ideas, affects, and other cultural-historical forces that a subgenre of the novel responded to or expressed. But when we look to the vast number of texts that are no longer read or taught or written on, we begin to see contingencies: other histories, other ideas of the novel than the ones we have inherited. Do these texts Moretti lists, known as novels in their time but unmentioned in accounts of the novel such as Watt’s or McKeon’s, have less purchase on the category because they did not survive the “slaughterhouse”? Expertise, literary expertise, consists, then, of knowing a fraction of a fraction of the field. The aperture through which critics hope to shed light is quite small. Scholars of literature interested in quantitative textual analysis need not (and, for that matter, do not) claim that the recent empirical turn somehow invalidates previous literary scholarship on the basis of mere sample size.17 The study of literature has always focused on outliers, those privileged positions in Pierre Bourdieu’s field, at the expense of almost everything else in it precisely because the works that people read and rediscover contribute more to literary culture than unread and forgotten works do.18 But one of the great opportunities offered by a quantitative analysis of text lies in putting the small fraction described by Bourdieu in the context of the vast unread discussed by Cohen and Moretti. As early as 1500, when the total number of books and manuscripts in Western Europe hovered around 11 million,19 the prospect of “reading it all” had already become quixotic. Today, with nearly 3 million new books published annually, merely finding

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all the novels published in a given year would be hard enough, never mind the matter of actually reading them.20 When we consider how little of the field we can actually read – and how deliberately unrepresentative what we actually read is – we can get a sense for the scale at which claims made about “the novel” necessarily operate and how transformative a quantitative analysis that could take a much larger account of the field as whole could be. If these vast corpora offer a new set of possibilities for novelistic information, then they are only made feasible by the minute features at the other end of the scale through which quantitative analysis operates. From a detailed attention to the individual frequencies of individual words, we can compare thousands of texts across hundreds of years. Seen in this way, the differences between quantitative analysis and close reading become transformations not only of scale but also of structure. If we imagine the text to be a fabric, then close reading cuts a swatch and examines its colors, patterns, and texture; a quantitative analysis, by contrast, pulls apart the weave to examine individual threads whose use can be compared across vast amounts of cloth. Close reading focuses on the synthetic effect, whereas reading novels as data allows us to explore the texts’ constitutive elements. The former ties the range of potential readings to the theories and concepts that the closer reader brings to the text; the latter offers the potential of new readings based on the unanticipated patterns that emerge from the data. Yet, in the analysis of these patterns, we can assemble new synthetic models of the text whose conclusions work hand-in-hand with the literary practices of close reading. Indeed, one research outcome for a project that reads the novel as data is a new way of characterizing the exceptional and conventional aspects of a literary novel when put in dialogue with a larger field. Our ideas about what makes a novel such as David Copperfield exceptional might be developed on aesthetic, historical, and cultural grounds and then bolstered by readings of Dickens’ novel, along with comparative texts, informed by previous theoretical and critical work in the field. An extension of this traditional modality of criticism then asks whether such qualitative claims can be verified, refined, modulated, or upended by means of a quantitative scaling up. Rendering the novel as data does not merely provide a new approach to old questions, although it can. Rather, transforming the novel into data radically expands the set of texts against which literary critics and historians must test their assumptions and theories about both literary and nonliterary works. Andrew Piper has argued that the case for a quantitative intervention rests, in part, on the inability of the humanities to generalize in a systematic

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and intellectually rigorous way an area where quantitative research has excelled.21 The generalizations produced by data-analytic approaches are unusual for literary studies because they are capable of being wrong: not in the sense that their claims can be contested, since this applies to any mode of literary criticism, but rather in the sense that the findings can be reproduced or, if not, falsified.22 Here lies a critical difference between the analysis of the novel as data and the practices of close reading. In the quantitative analysis, there are aspects to the researcher’s hypothesis that are unknown at the outset of the study and that may prove the initial hypothesis false. In the close reading, the categories of true and false, in the scientific sense, are meaningless because all information present in the analysis is already known to the researcher at the outset. Interpretation from such an analysis can be “reproduced” by persuasion, but what persuades one reader may not be enough for another. Theories of the novel pieced together from close readings are abandoned as they fall out of fashion or are superseded by new cultural norms, but rarely are they proven “false.“ And yet both skeptics and practitioners of data-oriented literary criticism constantly ask the same questions of these methods. Can quantitative aspects of a text really have purchase on the qualitative experience of reading or broader notions of literary history? If they can, which do? And if we are looking to the right metrics, how do we determine their significance? Working with the Novel as Data “Data” does not only connote computation. The spreadsheet program and the database, for instance, have become the object metaphors that we turn to when we think about data today, but these have analogue origins in such things as bookkeeper ledgers and shipping manifests. Indeed, in thinking about the novel as data, we could, in fact, look back at least as far as 1907, when Mary Williams published her Dickens Concordance, whose title page describes the book as “a compendium of names and characters and principal places mentioned in all the works of Charles Dickens.”23 Williams restructured Dickens’ corpus around three simple questions. Which character was introduced or place visited? In which book? And when? The Dickens Concordance is thus partly indexical, partly cartographic, and partly temporal, privileging each of these categories over the many other aspects encoded into Dickens’ works (see Table 11.1). Because of this structure, Williams’ Dickens Concordance is not only an early example of the novel reimagined as data but also a way of reencoding prose as a means of data storage and retrieval. 196

The Novel as Data TABLE 11.1: Partial Reproduction of Table from Dickens Concordance Character or place Cook’s Court, Cursitor Street

Book

Chapter

Bleak House

10

Coper Augustus – “Boz”

Dancing Academy

–

Copperfield, Mr. and Mrs.

David Copperfield

1

Copperfield, David Coppernoze, Mr. Corney, Mrs.

David Copperfield

1

Mudfog Papers, 2nd Meeting

23

Oliver Twist

23

Source: Mary Williams, The Dickens Concordance, Being a Compendium of Names and Characters and Principal Places Mentioned in All the Works of Charles Dickens. Francis Griffiths, 1907, p. 87, available at https://archive.org/details/dickensconcordan00willrich.

So can Williams’ way of restructuring Dickens’ work teach us anything about the novels themselves? We are surely unsurprised to find that we meet David Copperfield in the first chapter of David Copperfield. But for Dickens’ many bit players and functionaries, we might readily assemble a character network out of such introductions, a timeline of entrances tied to the work or even Dickens’ larger oeuvre, and start to more fully describe what Alex Woloch has termed the “character space and character systems” of the individual novels in Dickens’ fictional universes.24 For instance, we might learn from patterns readily visible in Williams, but more obfuscated in Dickens’ narrative, whether the timing of a character’s introduction betrays their (in-)significance to the novel’s plot. We can address questions such as these more readily with Williams’ data than we could with Dickens’ novels despite the fact that both contain sufficient information. It is Williams’ transformation of this information, the way that she makes it available as data, that makes it available for such a reading. As we see through Williams, the novel considered as data can help to organize observations that elevate the primacy of a set of questions. Yet one could not read Williams and feel that one had read Dickens. This is true in spite of the fact that from the perspective of Williams’ questions, both contain the same information. The incommensurability of Williams’ work with Dickens’ – and, by extension, the transformation from novel into data – also encodes loss. There is no single data representation adequate to address a broad range of literary critical inquiry; instead, the way that we represent data is contingent on the questions that we wish to ask of them. The very act of representing data (through a graph, a spreadsheet, or a database) already encodes a research hypothesis into the representation.

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Computation and Criticism The Dickens Concordance is certainly an early example of a critical work that imagines the novel as data, but it is limited in its ability to speak about the genre of the novel more broadly. At approximately 3.8 million words, Dickens’ body of work is massive by any standard, and Williams had the drive to ask, and answer, quantitative questions about character and place across Dickens’ entire corpus. But as corpora begin to exceed 100 million words, such a strategy becomes impractical or even impossible.25 We need computational processes that can transform elements of those texts into observations of literary phenomena. A first-order problem for studying novels as data is the form of the novel itself. Paper, glue, and ink do not readily compute. If we want to work faster than Williams did, then, we need digital copies of the texts. This is the first transformation the novel undergoes to become data, and like other means of producing data we have looked to so far, the process necessarily entails a loss of some aspects of the work. For the novel, the loss is primarily paratextual: printing and formatting choices, material histories, and other means of mediation change as books are converted into digital files.26 After this process, then, what remains? The novel’s words, punctuation, paragraph breaks, and their sequencing. Once we have these files, though, how can the computer begin to “read” them? Any reference here or elsewhere to computational reading is a metaphor of convenience. To the extent that computers can “read,” they frequently do so by moving through the text one word at a time, often tracking one or more elements, patterns, and so on, but it remains different TABLE 11.2: Document-Term Copperfield.

A Portion of the Matrix for David

Word

Frequency

aback

1

abandon

6

abandoned

13

Abase

1

... daughterlike

198

1

daughters

9

David

65

Davy

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in that the computer does not parse for semantic meaning. And yet the digital representation of the quantities of words in the text offers opportunities for analysis that are otherwise unavailable to a reading that focuses on meaning. One such representation is the “documentterm matrix,” a table that contains each of the types extant in a given document or documents along with the number of tokens (see Table 11.2). Here we find ourselves with quantities rather than qualities and a “text” reorganized in such a way that it is scarcely recognizable. But this defamiliarization provides new opportunities for analysis: from the distribution of words and characters in a single text to a new analysis of the relationship between lexical patterns in novels across the wider nineteenth century. Word Distributions The frequency of words in a novel such as David Copperfield belies our expectations as readers. In order to be noticed by a reader, a word must be frequent enough that it is repeated within the text but unique enough to be recognized as such. Words such as “the,” “and,” or “of,” for instance, are used too often to accrue any special meaning within the novel, but infrequent words such as “nestle,” “plotted,” and “outstanding” – all used only once in the novel – are so rare that they are lost among the 330,000 other words in the text. Unless it is used in a particularly striking way, however, a low-frequency word vanishes into the linguistic background. But if reading comprehension takes place at a middle scale, between the ultrahigh- and ultralow-frequency words that occupy the ends of the spectrum, what does the distribution of frequencies in a text, or in a corpus, actually look like? Figure 11.1 shows the full distribution of the frequencies of every word in David Copperfield, from most to least frequent. Each one is given a bar that rises to the height of its raw frequency, from 13,436 at the left of the graph (“the”) to 1 at the far right of the graph (“zigzag”). The vast majority of the plot appears to be empty, simply because the frequency falls off so quickly that only the words on the very left side of the graph appear to have bars that are visible on the axes. This is because the distribution of frequencies within any text document (or collection of text documents) follows “Zipf’s law,” an exponentially decreasing distribution in which each rank, moving from highest to lowest, decreases in frequency by half.27 The first few frequencies demonstrate the pattern: “the,” 13,436; “I,” 11,961; “and,” 11,642; 199

Freqency

mark algee-hewitt, erik fredner, and hannah walser Word

14K 13K 12K 11K 10K 9K 8K 7K 6K 5K 4K 3K 2K 1K 0K 1

2

3

4

Figure 11.1: Distribution of word frequencies in David Copperfield ordered from high to low. The four zones below the x-axis represent specific frequency ranges.

“to,” 10,242; “of,” 8,579. The four numbered zones below the x-axis divide the chart into meaningful segments based on the frequencies of words they demarcate. Zone 1 captures the 1,000 most frequent words in the corpus, which have frequencies from 13,436 to 28. These are primarily composed of function words that are predominantly invisible to the reader even though they structure the language and grammar of the text. Zone 2 shows the next group of words: with frequencies from 27 to 6; they are repeated enough to be noticed but much less so than the function words that populate zone 1. Zone 3 contains words with frequencies from 5 to 2; these are typically words that have some value in repetition but do not play a significant part in the text. It is worth noting that many minor character names appear here. Finally, zone 4 contains words that are only used once in the text. It is the largest single group of frequencies, as it typically is for any text or corpus. In their article “Mind-Modelling with Corpus Stylistics in David Copperfield,” Peter Stockwell and Michaela Mahlberg draw on cognitive poetic models, coupled with a close reading of the text, to explore the mental structures of the characters in the novel. In the course of their investigation, they isolate lexical choices made by Dickens to articulate the cognitive space of particular characters, focusing, for example, on words “from the domains of perception, thought and belief: think, 200

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looked, doubtfully . . . hope, anxiously, concocted.”28 The authors argue that these terms define a particular set of mental processes in their repetition by and around characters. If we place them on the graph of word frequencies in Figure 11.1, they would fall squarely into zones 2 and 3: high frequencies relative to the words on the right, which only occur once, but still orders of magnitude less frequent than the terms of the left. Yet it is here that the authors, like many before them, place their attention. This is the space of close reading on the word distribution: words that may contain a weak signal in and of themselves but that strike the perfect balance between remarkableness and infrequent repetition that signals attention to the reader. An argument such as Stockwell and Mahlberg’s explores the use of these words as data in and of themselves but is only able to provide these terms through a close reading of the cognitive models of the text.29 But what of the work of the remaining four-fifths of the graph? By isolating these words in service of their argument, they not only ignore the thousands of other words from the same frequency rank but also the tens of thousands of other words at different frequency ranks. By quantifying the words and making them available to computation, we can bring these ranks into visibility. The words in Figure 11.2, which shows only words with frequencies over 500 (the top ninety-five words in the corpus), contain a number of

Word 14K 13K 12K 11K 10K

8K 7K 6K 5K 4K 3K 2K 1K 0K the i and to of a in was my that it her he me with as had said his you at she for mr have on but be not him so when is all we if by this which were what been out little from there no or very would one an up could am upon do more into any they aunt micawber know miss some are mrs never should about who much made time

Frequency

9K

Figure 11.2: The top 95 most frequent words in David Copperfield, ordered by frequency.

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powerful signals. Strongest of all is authorship: the frequencies of these terms, aggregated over the text (and, ideally, many texts by Dickens), reveal a pattern that is unique to Dickens’ writing style.30 They also serve to differentiate the language of a text written in Victorian England from texts written in different times and places (a late-twentieth-century American novel, for example). Between authorship and period signals, most of the raw information in a text is contained within this first frequency rank. Yet it receives little to no attention in close reading studies: the patterns of high-frequency words that identify authorship, or period, are simply too subtle, or take place over too much text, to be recognized by a reader (at least consciously). By quantifying the novel’s lexicon, by turning the text into data, we can move from close readings into larger pattern analyses that reveal relationships between this text and others. It is through the silent but extremely active register of high-frequency words that texts reveal their nonuniqueness – their participation in systems of genre, authorship, period, and nationality that surpass both authorial intention and readerly awareness.31 One way that quantitative literary critics have adjusted to the fact that high-frequency words tend to mark style more closely than semantics involves removing what are known as “stopwords.” The stopword category includes many of those function words that are more indicative of authorial style than bearers of meaning (“the,” “and,” “of”) as well as prepositions (“at,” “into”) and contractions (“I’m,” “you’d,” “won’t”). To readers, these words, the connective tissues of prose, are almost invisible.32 More important, many words from zones 1 and 2 are of critical interest, but their relationships are harder to see with the intervening stopwords. By counting only nonstopword frequencies, however, we can get a much better sense of a text’s recurring themes, interests, and investments. In David Copperfield, the most frequent nonstopwords are “said,” “mr.,” “little,” “one,” “upon,” “know,” “micawber,” “aunt,” “now,” “miss,” and “peggotty.” Like the prevalence of “I” in Figure 11.2, we can understand the dominance of “said” as it relates to Dickens’ novel writing. Character names (“Micawber” and “Peggotty”) and forms of address (“Mr.,” “Aunt,” and “Miss”) unsurprisingly also appear quite frequently. But even this short list points to some words bearing more conceptual and stylistic weight: Dickens’ interest in representing the young and the downtrodden (both rendered sympathetically with the occasional diminutive “little,” surprisingly high in third place), David Copperfield’s development of social and philosophical epistemologies (“know” and its pair “not 202

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know”), and the roles of both coincidence and memory in Dickens (what happened in the deictic “now,” and what from then has come to be known “now”). This movement between scales, from close to distant, happens constantly in the preceding microreadings of that word list. We necessarily refer to both Dickens’ broader intellectual project and practice as an author and the specific contexts in which the words that appear most frequently in David Copperfield are used. To make an implicit point explicit, we enter into a familiar interpretative mode of literary criticism but with a different object than the paragraph, chapter, or work in looking at these frequencies.33 Interpretation can be guided – and occasionally overruled – by information derived from the quantitative analysis of a text. And, more important, not every computational result is accessible to literary interpretation. That is, even though the results of algorithmic inquiry sometimes look like text, they are not always readable as texts. Just as literary critics can mistakenly amplify or dampen the significance of a passage or motif, so too can incautious quantitative analysis attempt to read signal into noise. And, by explicitly resisting the urge to read the results, to link sequentially the results of a topic model or narrate the historical axis of a graph, the analysis of the novel as data can offer even more radical reconfigurations of our understanding of the text. Character Networks Word order is also open to computation. Most models of textual frequency operate as a so-called bags-of-words. That is, they are quantified according to frequency, sacrificing any information on their order or position in the text. Yet this positional data are as informative as the frequencies, and through them, even the most interpretable lexemes in the text can carry meaningful quantitative information. Character names, for example, can reveal relationships in the novel simply by proximity. Two characters mentioned in the same paragraph (a function of proximity and word order) suggest a link between those two characters, whether they are acquaintances, enemies, or simply linked by the narrator of the paragraph. By quantifying this proximity, we can map the social space of the novel through character interactions. Figure 11.3 shows the social space of David Copperfield as a network of interactions. Here each node (circle) is a character in the text, and an “interaction” occurs whenever two characters are named within the 203

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Figure 11.3: Social network of David Copperfield. Nodes are characters, edges are determined by the appearance of characters in the same paragraph, and the nodes are sized by eigenvector centrality. Eigenvector centrality measures the influence of a given node in a network. Its basic assumption is that a given node’s influence should increase in proportion to (1) the number of other nodes to which it is connected and (2) the number of connections each of its connected nodes has. In a social network, if one person has a large number of connections and his or her connections also have large numbers of connections, that person would have a high eigenvector centrality. Cf. Ernesto Estrada, A First Course in Network Theory, Oxford University Press, 2015.

same paragraph. The more interactions that occur between two characters, the thicker is the edge between them. Although a reading of the text can offer an equally comprehensive (and more precise) understanding of the relationships between the various characters (including how they change over time), through the network, not only can we calculate the specific metrics that define these interactions, but we can also study the social universe as a total synchronic set of relations rather than a simulated dynamic system that emerges through the narrative of the text. As such, patterns of relationships that were not apparent from a reading of the text begin to emerge. For instance, through this visualization of the novel’s sociality, the most famous characters (besides David himself), Uriah Heep and Wilkins Micawber, appear as less important than Tommy Traddles, James Steerforth, and Richard Babley, all of whom co-occur with David more often than either Heep or Micawber. This, in turn, points to the novel’s 204

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asymmetrical representation of the social: by working from David’s perspective, we learn more about his friends (Traddles and Steerforth) and their connections than we do about characters who arguably have a greater impact on David’s life (Heep’s machinations, Micawber’s help to reveal Heep’s fraud), even though he spends less time and mental effort on them. Virtual Spaces Moving beyond the text itself, quantifying the language of David Copperfield allows researchers to draw comparisons between it and other texts in Dickens’ corpus. Using the frequencies of words, we can assess how similar David Copperfield is to other novels by Dickens.34 And because these similarities (or dissimilarities) are functions of patterns of words, we can also see the ways in which two texts are like (or unlike) each other. In this model, two texts are similar if they share the same words in the same frequencies. Texts that contain substantially different words, or different frequencies of the same words, are less like David Copperfield than texts that share its vocabulary and proportions. Each word in this model of similarity acts as a dimension of comparison. So, across the full table of words, we can compare Dickens’ novels in 13,441-dimensional space.35 Yet here we run into two problems. First, by including all the possible dimensions, we weight our model heavily toward the far end of the frequency distribution, toward words that appear once or twice in David Copperfield and not at all in any other text (e.g., the names of minor characters such as “Julia,” who is only mentioned twenty-nine times by that name in the text). At the same time, the very highfrequency words receive an outsized weight, strengthening the authorial style signal rather than the semantic content of a given text. If the goal is simply to compare Dickens’ corpus intratextually, then this is less crucial; however, if we want to assess the similarity between Dickens’ texts and those of his contemporaries, then the author signal would reduce any other patterns to noise. In this analysis, we reduced the dimensionality of our comparison in two ways: first, by limiting the total number of words to 500 relatively high-frequency words and, second, by reducing the text of the novel to nouns only. A comparison between two texts based on this set of metrics, therefore, reveals the similarity of their most frequent nouns (rather than infrequent words or function words). Novels, through

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this method, are similar when they share similar objects, people, or things in the same proportions. This necessarily limits our analysis to only one of many possible dimensions of comparison between texts, but one whose logic allows for meaningful conclusions to be drawn from the process of quantification. The use of frequent nouns solves the problem of the high- and lowfrequency words biasing the results toward authorial or uniquely textual signals. Yet the question of how to visualize even a 500-dimensional comparison remains. Even if we can assess the similarities between novels based on these features, the purely mathematical or statistical results resist meaningful interpretation within the context of literary studies. Figure 11.4 therefore reduces the dimensions of analysis from 500 to 2 through a “principal component analysis” (PCA). A PCA combines the various points of comparison (the individual words) into discrete principal components, combinations of words that most strongly separate the texts in the corpus. In Figure 11.4, the first two principal components are plotted against each other. In this graph, each dot is a text by Dickens, and distance in the virtual space of the graph is a marker of lexical similarity. Two texts that use the same nouns, in the same proportions, are closer to each other on the graph. Two texts that use different words, or different frequencies of the same words, are farther apart. The direction of their separation (horizontal or vertical)

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reveals some information on exactly which words are either pushing the texts apart or pulling them together. The virtual space of the PCA then translates complex lexical similarities into measurable distances at the cost of some precision. From the graph we can observe the unique position of David Copperfield among the virtual space of Dickens’ works. By itself, in the upper right corner, the text seems an outlier among the corpus, although not as much as A Christmas Carol on the opposite side of the chart, whose complete isolation speaks to its differences of method, genre, and intended audience within Dickens’ oeuvre. By the measurement of its most frequent nouns, David Copperfield is most like Bleak House. This is a logical result: both texts deal with themes of class and deception, are set in cities, and are among Dickens’ longest works (even after scaling to adjust for length as part of the comparison process, length still carries some weight in the analysis). Interestingly, Little Dorrit and Hard Times are the next closest novels, suggesting that these four retain some similarity in their most mentioned nouns, a function of their similar settings and conceptual concerns. Again, among the advantages of a data-driven approach in literary studies is the ability to move between scales. Figure 11.5 shows the same arrangement of Dickens’ texts, only now in relation to a larger corpus of British and American Victorian texts from the Chadwyck-Healey collection of novels. 207

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This corpus, while not truly representative of literary production in the nineteenth century, nevertheless contains an expanded canonical sample of roughly 700 texts from the period.36 From this graph, then, we can gain a better understanding of where Dickens, as an author, fits within the literary field of his period, as well as the location of David Copperfield in relation to the new texts. Again, the distances on the graphs are virtual representations of lexical similarity between the texts, specifically comparing their 500 most frequent nouns. The positions of the other texts in the corpus reveal many of the forces dictating the specific arrangement of Dickens’ texts. The two novels that are among the farthest from David Copperfield – Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol – occupy the same quadrant that, at its extremity, contains Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty. This suggests that the objects in these texts, among the more popular in Dickens’ corpus, are more in keeping with a certain kind of nineteenth-century children’s literature than his more complex or satirical books. A Tale of Two Cities, however, and Barnaby Rudge and the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood all lie in the same direction as William Beckford’s Gothic novel Vathek. Because Barnaby Rudge begins with a story of murder, which echoes the mysterious disappearance of Edwin Drood, it is logical that both should share, at least in part, a lexicon with historically set Gothic novels. Finally, although none of Dickens’ corpus overtly resembles Walter Scott’s historical novel Rob Roy (situated in the lower-right quadrant among Scott’s other novels), the descriptive work of Nicholas Nickleby most closely echoes Scott’s depiction of the sociocultural and economic conditions faced by both the highland and lowland Scots in Scott’s Waverley novels. By treating Dickens’ novel as data, by quantifying the data and comparing them statistically with both the rest of Dickens’ own corpus as well as those of his contemporary canonical authors, new patterns of resemblance begin to emerge. Although they serve only as a prompt for further interpretive work as we question the results and seek to explain the axes of differentiation, the novels of the nineteenth century, when transformed into data, quantified, and analyzed as numerical objects, reveal more and deeper patterns than human readers could possibly perceive. Again, the strength of the quantitative analysis lies in relative measures, not absolute statements of identity. Things are more or less like each other, allowing us to speak of the nineteenth century as a spectrum: in this case, a spectrum aligned along “object-ness” in Dickens. 208

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Reading across Scales But the patterns that we have seen in David Copperfield, and in Dickens’ texts more generally, offer little meaning when viewed in the vacuum of a purely quantitative analysis. Instead, these objects give us new entry points into an interpretation of the text. But the return from a distant reading to the text itself is disorienting: informed by the computational study, what we notice about its ideas and emphases has shifted. The graph allows us to view a novel, or a corpus, at a glance. Seeing a novel not as pages turned over hours but as a simultaneous array of words in multiple relations with others and themselves is a position more attuned to the novel as an assemblage: words in an order, a node in a network, a point in vector space. These transformations, however, point us toward unexpected local manifestations of larger phenomena. For example, the noun most distinctive of Dickens across his writing when compared with the larger nineteenth-century corpus is “head.” In other words, compared with the other texts in the Chadwyck-Healey novel corpus, the word “head” appears significantly more often in Dickens’ novels than we would expect if it were randomly distributed across the entire corpus.37 It is therefore a lexeme that marks both a distinctive authorial habit and an important site of attention for a critic. Unlike the stopwords that we discussed earlier, “head” is both used significantly more frequently and is a particularly significant word, the double valence of significance signifying both statistical and interpretive importance. “Head,” then, not only provides a lexical axis with which to differentiate Dickens’ writing from that of his contemporaries, but it also bears a significant thematic and conceptual burden, perhaps best expressed in David Copperfield. Its very prevalence, which suggests its unimportance to the reader of David Copperfield, turns out to be a measure of its significance within the larger Victorian context. “Head” is a peculiar word to read closely considering that it is far more common and, as a result, more polysemic than abstractions such as “bildung” or “selfhood”: “head” is unlikely to be a word on which a critic would build a close reading. On rereading Dickens’ works with the knowledge of its surprising statistical significance, however, we can recognize an emphasis on the head as characteristically Dickensian in style and theme. In Great Expectations, Dickens is careful to describe Mr. Jaggers’ “exceedingly large head and a correspondingly large hand,” amplified by equally large fingers that Jaggers constantly bites in a gesture meant to menace but that

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comes off as almost childish.38 Like a caricaturist, Dickens inflates Jaggers’ head to make it easy for the reader to see what one needs to know about him. For Dickens, the head is as much the physical repository of brain and mind as it is a bodily vehicle of expressing the unsaid and the unsayable. In conversation, his characters constantly “shake,” “nod,” “motion with,” “twist,” “throw back,” and “sit with their hand upon their head,” among other gestures of affirmation or disavowal, as the situation demands. But heads also “confuse,” “[get] heavy,” “ache,” and “grow light,” precipitating narrative developments rather than merely reflecting on them. Most of all, thoughts, ideas, and impressions “come into” his characters’ heads, which is to say that they rise to the foreground, not of perception, but rather of attention, thereby becoming part of the narrator’s, and, by extension, the reader’s interpretative framework. David Copperfield’s focus on the protagonist’s developing mentality, as he forms a sense of self in a deceitful world while cultivating writerly sensibility, suggests the particular importance of the head as a thematic locus for the novel. But the connection between the word “head” and these concepts, which are crucial for a close reading, could only have come from a recognition of the significance of “head” in a quantitative analysis of Dickens’ works. For example, consider these passages, separated by a chapter break, near the end of the novel: And Agnes laid her head upon my breast, and wept; and I wept with her, though we were so happy. [It] was like the beginning of a favorite story Agnes used to tell them, introductory to the arrival of a wicked old Fairy in a cloak who hated every body, it produced some commotion. One of our boys laid his head in his mother’s lap to be out of harm’s way, and little Agnes (our eldest child) left her doll in a chair to represent her, and thrust out her little heap of golden curls from between the window-curtains, to see what happened next.39

Across these two passages, we see that the head makes contact with the body (“upon my breast” and “in his mother’s lap”) in a gesture of physical and narrative intimacy that both concludes the marriage plot between David and Agnes and points toward the lives of their children. The mirroring of the head movement not only establishes a physical continuity between marriage and childhood but also suggests an epistemological continuity whereby one’s mental life is physically

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connected to and even “leans on” the family. Moreover, the children listening to the story, who want to be “out of harm’s way” and yet “see what happened next,” almost come to personify novel reading itself, heads tilted down and simultaneously looking out “between the window-curtains.” Conclusion We have suggested that the difference between a close reading and a datadriven, quantitative analysis of the novel lies in a transformation from a synthetic approach to the novel as a singular object and a constitutive approach to the novel as an aggregation of features that is itself only one data point among a corpus of thousands. At stake in the transformation, then, is our understanding of the novel itself: what it is, what information it contains, and what it can do as both a literary and critical object. Quantitative analysis offers new scales through which to read the novel. At the macroscopic level, it can include a wealth of new texts, forgotten or dismissed from literary history, against which to measure intuitions and conclusions that have been gleaned from the canon so far. We can compare texts mathematically or statistically across centuries, nationalities, and genres and create new constellations of resemblance and difference. At the microscopic level, we can trace the patterns of individual words through an author’s corpus, or text, revealing the textual threads that hold together the synthetic conceptual features that lie at the level of reading. The information that we gain from either analysis is different in kind from that revealed by reading, even close reading, a single novel. If the former provides document-term matrices, eigenvector centralities, and principal components, then the latter offers ideas, concepts, and affect. The former offers ways of measuring the novel, of operationalizing the text along the axis of literary criticism or history. The latter offers an interpretative understanding of the text that reconciles the experience of reading and the reader’s knowledge and intuition with the formal features of the novel. They are not, however, incompatible. Both rest on abstractions of the novel and, more importantly, both require interpretative acts on the part of the researcher to create meaning from the analysis. And it is in interpretation that the power of recasting the novel as data reveals its true transformative potential. If quantitative analysis requires strategies of close reading in order to make meaning out of its 211

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mathematical operations, so too do the practices of close reading require the new scales of analysis available only through quantitative study. The new methods that we have outlined work hand-in-hand with the methods of literary criticism and history as they have been traditionally practiced by scholars. Reading the novel as data while forgetting the disciplinary lessons of literary study foreshortens our ability to interpret the results of our analysis. But, by the same token, as quantitative textual analysis reveals the omissions, biases, and limitations of close reading, so too has it become equally necessary to attend to these new critical practices. Already they are on the brink of transforming our understanding of individual novels or authors, and yet the potential of this new method of literary criticism is greater still. As we mobilize these methods to access new ways of understanding novelistic prose, as we compare the canon and archive of the novel not only among themselves but against all of the writing, fictional and nonfictional, of a given historical period, we gain the potential to not just analyze a novel, or even many novels, but to finally assess the true role of the novel in shaping the ideas, values, and even the very culture of every period that the novel has touched. NO TES 1. Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” in Distant Reading, Verso, 2013, pp. 43–62; Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations, vol. 108, no. 1, 2009, pp. 1–21. 2. Andrew Piper, “Novel Devotions: Conversional Reading, Computational Modeling, and the Modern Novel,” New Literary History, vol. 46, no. 1, 2015, pp. 63–98; Matthew Wilkens, “The Geographic Imagination of Civil War-Era American Fiction,” American Literary History, Vol. 25, no. 4, 2013, pp. 803–40. 3. Recent work at the Literary Lab has shown that the “average” nineteenth-century novel has a high frequency of “the” at both the beginning and the end of the text. In David Copperfield, the frequency of “the” is depressed at the beginning relative to the end, and the word “I” is actually more frequent than “the” at key moments of the narrative. 4. Stephen Ramsay, Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism, University of Illinois Press, 2011. 5. John W. Tukey, “The Future of Data Analysis,” Annals of Mathematical Statistics, vol. 33, no. 1, 1962, p. 2. 6. Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, University of Illinois Press, pp. 8–9. 7. Roman Jakobson, “Closing Remarks: Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas Sebeok, Wiley, 1960, pp. 350–77.

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The Novel as Data 8. A “corpus” is any set of texts considered together. For instance, imagine a corpus of all novels published in 1899 or all the poems by the Lake Poets. 9. See examples of this in Andrew Piper and Mark Algee-Hewitt, “The Werther Effect: I. Goethe, Objecthood and the Handling of Knowledge,” in Distant Readings: Topologies of German Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Matt Erlin and Lynne Tatlock, Camden House, 2014, pp. 155–84. 10. See, for example, Matthew Jockers, Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History, University of Illinois Press, 2013, p. 28. 11. Which remain highly contingent on the methods of collapse. See, e.g., D. Sculley and B. Pasanek. “Meaning and Mining: The Impact of Implicit Assumptions in Data Mining for the Humanities,” Literary and Linguistic Computing, vol. 23, no. 4, 2008, pp. 409–24. 12. Franco Moretti. “‘Operationalizing’: or, the function of measurement in modern literary theory,” pamphlets of the Stanford Literary Lab, June 2013. 13. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002; Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, University of California Press, 2001. 14. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Jane Garnett, Oxford University Press, 2009. 15. Margaret Cohen, The Sentimental Education of the Novel, Princeton University Press, 1999, p. 23. 16. Franco Moretti, “The Slaughterhouse of Literature,” in Distant Reading, 65. 17. Lee Konstantinou, “Am I Turning Empirical?,” Arcade, Stanford University, available at http://arcade.stanford.edu/blogs/am-i-turning-empirical. 18. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, Stanford University Press, 1996. 19. Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten van Zanden. “Charting the ‘Rise of the West’: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, A Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries,” Journal of Economic History, Vol. 69, No. 2, 2009, pp. 409–45. Based on the accumulated data in Tables 11.1 and 11.2, across all the languages of Western Europe, the total number of manuscripts and printed books available in 1500 would have been roughly 10,906,675. 20. “Books in Print, Global Edition,” Bowkers, November 16, 2016, available at www.booksinprint.com/Search/Results?q=%7b%7b(publisher-date%3d% 5b2015-01-01~To~2015-12-31%5d)%7d%7d&ast=se. 21. Cf. Andrew Piper, “There Will Be Numbers,” Journal of Cultural Analytics, May 23, 2016, available at http://culturalanalytics.org/2016/05/there-will-benumbers/. 22. Here we use “falsifiable” in the sense of Karl Popper, who gives it a privileged position in his proposed revisions to the scientific method. To be falsifiable (and therefore empirical), a theory must be able to be wrong if one or more occurrences that it has ruled out occur. Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Routledge, 2002, p. 68. 23. Mary Williams, The Dickens Concordance, being a compendium of names and characters and principal places mentioned in all the works of Charles Dickens,

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24. 25.

26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

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Francis Griffiths, 1907, available at https://archive.org/details/ dickensconcordan00willrich. Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel, Princeton University Press, 2009. This would hardly constitute a research project on an unprecedented scale. For reference, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is 1,267,069 tokens, often printed in six volumes. A corpus with 474 such volumes would exceed 100 million words. By contrast, the complete HathiTrust corpus has over 814 billion tokens (cf. David McClure, “Counting Words in HathiTrust with Python and MPI,” Techne, Stanford Literary Lab Blog, August 26, 2016, available at https://litlab .stanford.edu/counting-words-in-hathitrust-with-python-and-mpi/). Sample files of this type can be easily found on sites such as Project Gutenberg or Archive.org, both of which maintain a mixture of manually entered and humancorrected texts that were typed by hand or scanned from the original and converted to plain text through a process known as “optical-character recognition” (OCR). These files are “plain” in the sense that they only allow minimal characters (letters, numbers, spaces, symbols, carriage returns, etc.) and eliminate other types of formatting or media (bold, italics, images, etc.). George Zipf, The Psychobiology of Language: An Introduction to Dynamic Philology, MIT Press, 1935. Peter Stockwell and Michaela Mahlberg, “Mind-Modelling with Corpus Stylistics in David Copperfield,” Language and Literature, vol. 24, no. 2, 2015, pp. 129–47. Ibid., p. 136. David Hoover, “Statistical Stylistics and Authorship Attribution: An Empirical Investigation,” Literary and Linguistic Computing, vol. 16, no. 4, 2001. J. Rybicki, M. Eder, and D. Hoover, “Computational Stylistics and Text Analysis,” In Doing Digital Humanities: Practice, Training, Research, ed. C. Crompton, R. J. Lane, and R. Siemens, Routledge, 2016, pp. 123–44. Indeed, at times these words almost literally become invisible. Psychological studies have shown that readers frequently fail to notice unnecessarily duplicated and misspelled words. Cf. K. Rayner, S. J. White, R. L. Johnson, and S. P. Liversedge, “Raeding Wrods with Jubmled Lettres: There Is a Cost,” Psychological Science, vol. 17, no. 3, 2006, pp. 192–93. Dawn Archer, What’s in a Word-List? Investigating Word Frequency and Keyword Extraction, Routledge, 2012. In making cross-novel comparisons, we scale word frequencies to account for differences in text length, so instead of simply transliterating the fact that “David” appears sixty-five times in David Copperfield, we convert it to a frequency, recording that it represents 0.0002 percent of words in the text. This is possible because the novels use 13,441 types (unique words), with many millions of individual tokens. “Nineteenth-Century Fiction.” Chadwyck-Healey (ProQuest), November 15, 2016, available at http://collections.chadwyck.com. The statistical significance of the use of “head” here was determined by a Fisher’s exact test, which gives each word a p-value indicating whether it passes the threshold for significance within the text of a single novel or author. With

The Novel as Data a p-value of 1.44 × 10−25, it is clearly highly significantly less than the 0.05 threshold for significance. 38. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. Margaret Cardwell, Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 75. 39. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, ed. Nina Burgis, Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 844 [our emphases].

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12 P R I Y A JO S H I*

The Novel as Commodity

This chapter analyzes the novel as a particular kind of commodity as it circulates in global markets. Forms of prose fiction had existed well before the word “commodity” entered parlance around 1400 c e when, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term initially indicated “a quality or condition of things in relation to the desires and needs of men.” Later, when “desires and needs” became aligned with opportunities for economic exchange, commodity began to indicate property, then profit, and finally, its current usage: “a kind of thing produced for use or sale.”1 The early reference to desires and needs reveals how much a commodity relies both on consumers (desires) and on commerce (needs). A commodity has a market because it addresses the desires and needs of its purchasers. In such a context, the novel is several kinds of commodities. It is a material product, like others, that is fabricated both in small batches and mass produced, in workshops and sometimes in factories, processed, assembled, and eventually purveyed in a dizzying array of outlets and platforms. Beyond its circulation in the market as a “thing produced for use or sale,” however, the novel also enjoys a symbolic value that is frequently disaggregated from the market economy and might even be antagonistic to commerce, as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu notes. A novel’s symbolic value is created by its content, its readers, and its social presence in different cultures where it is ratified by the surrounding world of ideas. In these contexts, a novel’s symbolic value often outlives its market value. To study the novel as a commodity, therefore, includes studying its circulation in both material and symbolic realms as an object that trades both in commercial and in cultural capital. * Temple University supported the research and writing for this chapter with a Presidential Humanities and Arts Research Award. Eric Bulson, Peter Logan, Daniel Ryan Morse, Leslie Allison, and Ulka Anjaria provided helpful feedback on earlier drafts. Many of these ideas were first tested in the best research laboratory in the world: the university classroom. Heartfelt thanks to my students for helping stress-test my claims.

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This chapter supplements literary critics’ attention to the novel’s symbolic value with attention to the material conditions behind its production and circulation. Doing so provides a fuller understanding of the novel’s long halflife as a commodity in the global marketplace. Such an approach foregrounds methods typically pursued by book historians that demonstrate that the technologies of production have always played a significant role in the circulation and consumption of the novel. In eighteenth-century England, for instance, the novel was a commodity like others whose circulation was enabled by new technologies of print and emerging attitudes toward the individual, sealing the form’s engagement in markets where content allied with means of production. In nineteenth-century Britain, meanwhile, the novel was initially regarded with suspicion for its questionable moral content. By midcentury, however, most regarded the novel a modern “classic” and developed it for colonial markets and domestic universities, ensuring enduring readership and sales. Today, the novel is a global commodity that is widely produced and purveyed across numerous platforms where it enjoys readers and influence, its popularity and prestige often in a competitive pas de deux. This chapter analyzes the novel’s multiple lives as a commodity. It describes the historical contexts behind the production of the modern novel and details some of the contemporary elements of its circulation and production. Further, it queries the novel’s destinies in different moments and markets beyond the Anglo-French belt. Thus, though the focus in this chapter is on the English novel, in some cases “English” refers to the novel produced in England and in others, to the novel produced in the English language in places such as Nigeria, India, Ireland, and the United States. The focus on different contexts and cultures provides a more global dimension for understanding the novel’s commodification that an exclusively European emphasis obscures. This chapter proceeds in three sections. The first reviews book history’s contributions to understanding the novel as a commodity and the circuits through which it circulates. The second section details the commercial success of the modern novel in previous centuries, and the final section analyzes the material and symbolic conditions that produce the novel as a global commodity in the current moment. The conclusion regards the shrinking space between metropolis and margins in the circulation of the contemporary global novel. The Novel and Book History In 1982, the historian Robert Darnton observed what he later recalled the “fissiparousness” surrounding the history of books. “Experts were 220

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Author

Publisher

Printers: Compositors Pressmen Warehousemen

Binder

Readers: Purchasers Borrowers Clubs Libraries

Intellectual Influences and Publicity

Economic and Social Conjuncture

Booksellers: Wholesaler Retailer Peddler Binder etc.

Suppliers: paper ink type labor

Political and Legal Sanctions

Shippers: Agent Smuggler Entrepot Keeper Wagoner etc.

Figure 12.1: The communication circuit. Source: Robert Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?,” Daedalus, vol. 111, no. 3, 1982, p. 68.

pursuing such specialized studies,” he wrote, “that they were losing contact with one another.”2 In order to circumvent the scholarly pointillism of specialized study and to understand how modern books circulated, Darnton sketched a communication circuit (see Figure 12.1). In it he attempted to show connections between the many components that constituted the production, circulation, and consumption of a book. An author wrote books, a publisher published them, booksellers sold them, and readers read them. Intellectual, economic, and political matters – such as the French Revolution in Darnton’s research – influenced the circuit in numerous ways by affecting the cost of paper or ink (thus affecting publishing and print) or transport (thus affecting bookselling and readerly access). Readers have a less clear influence on authorship in Darnton’s circuit, as the dotted line in Figure 12.1 indicates: readers receive print rather than initiate its production. In this, Darnton implicitly adumbrates Karl Marx’s notion of consumption as the terminus in a cycle that begins with production. In contrast to this view, figures such as Michel de Certeau and Roland Barthes proposed that consumption is “another production”3 and that readers, not authors, produce the books they read (“the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author,” in Barthes’ phrase4). The claim is largely theoretical, especially in Barthes’ and de Certeau’s versions, because stepping outside an empirical archive and reflecting on the particular alchemy that occurs when the human eye encounters ink on a sheaf is a fairly abstract project. Here even book 221

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historians have little to say. Thus, while book historians such as Darnton have urged research on contact in the communication circuit, they have been less insistent on researching specific forms that constitute the circuit, remaining reticent on matters of textual taxonomy. Darnton’s circuit reveals how the trade in books occurs, not why. It reveals much about the alchemy of production and circulation, less about the alchemy of consumption. The fissiparousness that Darnton observed in 1982 has receded in recent decades. Yet somewhere between revealing the fortunes of a single text (the Bible, for example) and those of large aggregates – forbidden bestsellers in pre-Revolutionary France, as Darnton did – the extensive midrange calls to be studied more fully. Above all, the alchemy of consumption remains a frontier in book history: who reads, what they read, why, and how urge further study. “What fundamentally we study,” challenged bibliographer D. F. McKenzie, “is not so much the history of the book as the sociology of texts.”5 Doing so, he insisted, provides the opportunity to “consider the human motives and interactions which texts involve at every stage of their production, transmission, and consumption.”6 Thus alongside the social context in which books circulate is what McKenzie calls the “human presence” in consumption. Together the two help to explain the specific forms in which a wide variety of “books” (the term, for McKenzie, could include the codex, pamphlets, broadsides, printed lectures, discography, and digital forms) circulate around the world.7 Literary scholars have long viewed book history as the domain of historians and librarians, eschewing its methods and emphases when studying the production of literary forms. Histories of the novel, in particular, have tended to focus on the novel’s symbolic capital (what’s in a novel, who it is by, and so on) rather than its circulation as a commodity in markets where the novel’s prosperity or decline is, in fact, a function of both economic and human forces. Observing the opportunities provided by book history, literary scholar Franco Moretti described its practices as “a new field, full of surprises: that however hasn’t yet really bitten into literary history . . . There is a great diplomacy between book historians and literary historians, but true intellectual engagement is still to come,” he concluded in 1998.8 Those literary scholars who have “bitten into” book history have begun to savor insights that significantly renew the study of the novel from one focused on its symbolic value (broadly, its content) to a scrutiny of its production and consumption (i.e., the economic and social contexts behind its circulation). Together they provide new ways of understanding the novel as a commodity in a global marketplace. 222

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A brief example from a prize-winning Nigerian novelist illuminates book history’s promise for the study of the contemporary global novel. Early in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013), two high schoolers engage in a mating ritual. The exchange that seals their bond occurs during a conversation about the books they read. “I saw you holding James Hadley Chase, near the lab. And I said, Ah, correct, there is hope. She reads,” remarks Obinze. He continues, “What about other books? Which of the classics do you like?” “Classics, kwa? I just like crime and thrillers,” replies Ifemelu, the young woman who, reading preferences notwithstanding, grows up to become a public intellectual writing a blog on race that inspires dissertations at Yale and Princeton.9 The exchange efficiently captures the destiny of the novel in the twentyfirst century. Ifemelu’s reading secures her status in the hierarchies of a Lagos high school where few insist on the distinction between “classics” and genre fiction as Obinze does when he inquires about “other books . . . you also have to read proper books.”10 The novel’s symbolic value is such that simply reading one is what matters, not which forms one reads. Yet the exchange invites one to ask why novels by James Hadley Chase (1906–85), the son of a colonial Indian Army officer who wrote lurid thrillers set in 1930’s America, ended up in a Lagos high school in the 1990s. Why was Ifemelu reading Chase? And how did his novels get to Nigeria in the first place? Ifemelu’s affection for the best-selling James Hadley Chase (whose first novel George Orwell described as a “cesspool”) indexes a world where the novel circulates around the globe in popular forms such as crime and thrillers, romances and melodramas.11 Book historians who have researched publishers’ sales reports testify that the fortunes of the modern novel are secured through enduring sales of popular forms that flourish long after their sell-by date has passed. Most critical accounts of the novel, however, have fetishized its “literary” forms and marked them as “classics,” worthy of extended curatorial attention. Ifemelu read Chase in part because his works were widely available in Nigeria half a century after they were first published in London. The high costs involved in developing a domestic Nigerian print industry meant that British books circulated most amply there in well-produced copies, and Chase enjoyed “unequalled sales in Nigeria,” according to Ibadan publisher Olaiya Fagbamigbe.12 In wartime England, meanwhile, Orwell ruefully concluded that Chase’s novels were “one of the things that helped to console a people for the boredom of being bombed.”13 The two reports reveal the kind of nuance book history provides literary history. Chase’s novels rose to the top in certain markets due to the exigencies 223

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of production and circulation.14 He remained a phenomenon there and elsewhere because of what D. F. McKenzie called the “human presence,” namely, his ability to appeal to the desires and needs of readers across time and space (as Orwell adumbrates). Attending to the material conditions of production and circulation helps to demystify the story of the novel, even as it enables scholars to identify the specific forms of the novel that enjoy widest circulation. The novel is a particularly stable staple commodity, with different forms thriving in a global publishing ecosystem alongside other media such as film and the attractions of the Internet including on-demand content. A brief history of the modern novel provides context before developing some of these observations further. The Novel and the Marketplace In many accounts, the story of the modern novel begins with Englishman Samuel Richardson, a man of modest means who made a living in the trades as a printer. In between printing serials and parliamentary papers, Richardson published an epistolary novel, Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded, in 1740. With Pamela’s commercial success, the rise of the novel was assured: Richardson had captured readers and markets that were keen for more of the new form. The past became prologue. The triumphalist story of Richardson and Pamela obscures a matter hidden in plain sight, namely, the close relationship between the technology of print and the commodification of the modern novel. As a printer, Richardson owned a letter press, which meant that he controlled novelistic production in the most literal sense. Moreover, as a job printer with long-term contracts from the House of Commons, Richardson was assured a steady income that allowed him to take risks on other print jobs, as he did with Pamela. The story of the modern novel thus is closely aligned with the story of its production. Richardson’s ownership of a press played no small role in supporting his experiment in producing the modern novel, a largesse he extended to other contemporaries, including Daniel Defoe, whose later works Richardson printed. The artisanal, small-batch printing of the novel in the eighteenth century – Pamela and Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) had first printings of no more than 1,500 copies each – is a story in numerous chapters.15 By the nineteenth century, however, the arrival of more efficient print technologies ushered in changes for both printing and the novel. The eighteenth-century British job printer that Richardson embodied gave way to Victorian publishers who now selected content that they, in turn, “jobbed” to a printer. British 224

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publishers – not printers – became arbiters of content, increasingly careful in the products they pursued. Access to overseas markets enabled by an expanding Empire in the nineteenth century endowed global ambitions to the onetime small-scale artisans of London’s Paternoster Row. The story of the British novel thus went from having a few chapters in its eighteenthcentury telling to three volumes in the nineteenth century, and a symbolic and physical transformation in which both publisher and reader played key roles. In 1886, Macmillan and Company launched a Colonial Library series made up almost entirely of new fiction titles intended for sale in India and other colonial markets. Pragmatic and thrifty, the family firm had conducted extensive market research, first building their brand in India as publishers of education titles, then establishing sales outlets there, and eventually launching the Colonial Library with novels exclusively for sale overseas, a venture that eventually underwrote much of Macmillan’s profits and prestige in fiction in Britain. The nineteenth-century British novel, heralded in critical accounts for its close contact with domestic readers, was in fact always already a global form. The profits enjoyed by London publishers were as reliant on global readers as they were on British ones, a point that Macmillan’s account books from the period reveal.16 The story of the nineteenth-century novel thus adumbrates its circulation as a global commodity. Indeed, the novel’s status as a commodity helped to enhance its global presence. The form circulated widely, was reproduced beyond the putative text belt of Britain and France, and had a thriving local presence across numerous reading cultures. The “rise” of the novel that Ian Watt had described for the eighteenth century is actually many rises, a serrated set of ascents rather than a single Olympus or Everest. In this context, of course, James Hadley Chase had to travel from London to Lagos, though why his novels might continue to be read there through the century remains to be answered. The Novel as Symbolic Commodity This chapter has referred to desire and need as twin strands that ensure the circulation of commodities. The final section reviews specific forms of the novel that fabricate need and desire. The sociology of the novel incorporates a circulation history, shaped by content – where desires are inked – and context – where the ink is consumed. As a commodity, the novel is an outlaw of a special kind, vaulting over established borders, sneaking around barriers 225

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of taste and tastemakers, thwarting exchange-rate mechanisms as it travels globally, equally a refugee and a native, holding a key to unclaimed histories and unwritten futures. It has become the common property of those who come into contact with it, as James Hadley Chase’s novels became for Ifemelu in Nigeria. This section reviews the nexus between desire and market in the circulation of the contemporary novel. It attends closely to specific forms of the novel and the stories that these forms reveal and conceal. Midcentury theorists of the novel such as Ian Watt have claimed formal realism as the dominant procedure by which the novel establishes intimacy with its readers. Realism’s focus on individuals and their subjective experiences ensured its enduring way in the world. It was not the subject matter as such but the novel’s delivery that enabled its reach. “The novel’s realism,” Watt explained, “does not reside in the kind of life it presents, but in the way it presents it.”17 Realism’s focus on the subject found wide expression throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where novels were frequently titled after individuals (a practice that even twentieth-century modernism never fully eschewed in novels such as Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, Du côté de chez Swann, Buddenbrooks, etc.). In line with claims such as Watt’s, to speak of the novel was implicitly, for many, to speak of the realist novel, referring to its most “successful,” even “classic” form. Yet readers across the globe had tastes for a far greater variety of forms than the term “realism” conveys. “Classics, kwa? I just like crime and thrillers,” replies Ifemelu when Obinze exhorts, “Which of the classics do you like? . . . You also have to read proper books.”18 As the novel’s production in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has gone global, it has established markets and factories worldwide that consume and produce forms that outpace European theories of the novel. Three examples help to illuminate the vivid gap between the novel’s practical life and prevailing theoretical explanations about it. One of the extraordinary discoveries that British colonial archives yield is the sustained rejection of realism among nineteenth-century Indian readers. The very details of the everyday that sustained Victorian readers in London alienated them in India. Indian critic Ram Chandra Bose reported in 1890: I hurry over graphic descriptions of scenes which to me are outlandish; inventories of articles of furniture which it will never all to my lot even to dream of buying; vivid pictures of costumes which I scarcely expect to see; and portraitures equally realistic of drawing rooms in which I should probably feel myself and be felt to be a fish out of water.19

Meanwhile, explaining the failure of the realist novel in Ireland, scholar Terry Eagleton explains: 226

The Novel as Commodity [C]lassical realism depends on the assumption that the world is story-shaped – that there is a well-formed narrative implicit in reality itself, which it is the task of such realism to represent. The disrupted course of Irish history is not easily read as a tale of evolutionary progress, a middle march from a lower to a higher state, and the Irish novel from Sterne to O’Brien is typically recursive and diffuse, launching one arbitrary narrative only to abort it for some other equally gratuitous tale, running several storylines simultaneously, ringing pedantically ingenious variations on the same few plot elements.20

Should the Indian and Irish cases suggest that readers’ reticence toward classical realism was a colonial phenomenon, scholar Franco Moretti’s research on the novel’s circulation and translation in nineteenth-century Europe reveals that the form’s European readers too “were unified by a desire, not for ‘realism’ (the mediocre fortunes of Stendhal and Balzac leave no doubts on this point) – not for realism, but for what Peter Brooks has called the melodramatic imagination: a rhetoric of stark contrasts that is present a bit everywhere and is perfected by Dumas and Sue.”21 Ifemelu’s preference for “crime and thrillers” in twentieth-century Lagos echoes desires that, archival findings reveal, were over a century old, widely shared among readers in London and Londonderry, Lucknow and Lyon. It is this reading preference that speaks for the future of the novel, as well as urges a revision of its current theories. The cleavage in Americanah between “classics” and everything else is conveyed by terms such as “literary fiction” versus “genre fiction,” both categories somewhat revealing if not altogether coherent. Genre fiction today would include crime and thrillers – Ifemelu’s favorites – along with science fiction, children’s literature, young adult, chick lit, lad lit, romances, westerns, fantasy, historical fiction, and adventures. Literary fiction, however, is not so easy to pin down. Some claim that literary fiction is complex, requiring sustained contemplation rather than yielding immediate entertainment. They point to its hybridity: a literary novel is often genre bending and stylistically innovative, demanding serious attention from readers. Thus Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), characterized by elements of fantasy, historical romance, and political commentary, is considered a pinnacle of literary achievement, worthy of earning its author a knighthood that its mongrel morphology might not fully anticipate. The gulf between the literary novel and its popular counterpart emerged and widened in the early decades of the twentieth century when the novel and its reading publics expanded dramatically. “When a Mrs. [Eliza] Haywood [1693?–1756] sat down to write a novel she could produce admirable fiction, because she was in touch with the best work of her age,” explained scholar 227

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Q. D. Leavis in 1932.22 In contrast to the eighteenth century, Leavis observed, “[t]he bestsellers of the twentieth century do not change their courses because D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, or James Joyce has written; indeed, they have probably never heard of these novelists, and as we have seen, their readers certainly have not.”23 For Leavis, the “insatiable demand for fiction – now the publisher’s mainstay – had to be satisfied by the second rate.”24 “Worthless fiction” emerged, and the once homogeneous marketplace saw a cleavage: the common reader now read common novels; the more sophisticated read other kinds that got variously labeled literary or classics, largely ignoring that once upon a time in the West, popular and classic were the same as they were in the eighteenth century with Richardson, or in the nineteenth century with Scott and Dickens.25 Anchored by research on reading and public library borrowing patterns, Leavis’ account conveys the historical demand for the novel, though she does not pursue why “second rate” novels became – and remain – such a mainstay for publishers and readers across the globe. Leavis’ blindness to this phenomenon captures an insight that has come sharply into focus in the present century in worlds where both the novel and readers have seen substantial growth in numbers. Starting in 2014, after a decade spent lamenting the deaths of publishing, of print, of reading, and even of the book, Nielsen BookScan, the sales data provider, reported a rise in print book sales that has continued. Accompanying the rise in overall sales, fiction is seeing “more book sales than ever,” reported Nielsen’s president, Jonathan Nowell, with marked rises in “niche genres” such as juvenile fiction.26 Markets such as India are anticipated to be the future for Englishlanguage book sales, with some observing that the country is poised to become “the biggest English-language book-buying market in the world” by 2020.27 What readers of fiction desire in the world’s emerging markets for the novel does not appear to be high-literary fiction. Genre fiction proliferates in this landscape, its sales underwriting the risks that publishers undertake to pursue lower returns of higher-profile literary novelists. As publishing has shrunk from independent and family firms such as Macmillan to global corporations (once called the “Big Six,” there are now just five), vanguard publishers of the modern novel such as Macmillan are now owned by the German company Holtzbrinck. Publishers such as Penguin, which created the mass-market paperback revolution in 1935 by democratizing print so that literary fiction stood alongside genre titles, Hemingway nestled beside Dorothy Sayers, saw a million Penguins in print in less than a year, the sheer diversity of titles matched by the firm’s wide distribution in drug stores and railway stations. Today the majority stake in Penguin is owned by another German behemoth, Bertelsmann, and it is hard to expect the corporation to 228

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initiate the entrepreneurial daring Penguin did during the 1930s under Allen Lane that succeeded despite the Depression and the Second World War. Meanwhile, many of the popular titles that Penguin published in the 1930s and 1940s are today marketed as Penguin Classics, revealing the porous border between literary and genre fiction. It would be tempting, if not entirely accurate, to suggest that “classics” refers, at least in part, to especially successful literary novels rather than their canny commodification. Yet, as Pierre Bourdieu notes, classics are simply “lasting bestsellers which owe to the education system their consecration, hence their extended and durable market.”28 Assigning certain titles in classrooms ensures that they remain in print – and thus become “classics” – even if they are not always read by reluctant students assigned to do so. If individual publishers such as the Macmillan brothers and Allen Lane appear as heroes in the story of the novel during past centuries, today’s publishing paradoxically enjoys less symbolic capital even as the economic returns from commodifying the novel have greatly increased. Publishing today savvily manages the shape and size of the novel to ensure greatest profit at lowest cost outlay. Genre fiction enjoys its own bound size (the mass-market paperback, akin to a Renaissance duodecimo), literary fiction, a larger trade size (akin to the octavo), each priced accordingly with a differential of up to 50 percent that creates a rewarding economy of scale. Thus a novel translated from the Swedish might first appear in cloth priced at $30, then a trade paperback priced at $15, both targeted for readers who are not intimidated by reading a translation. Should the title secure wider appeal, it is reissued in the mass-market size and priced to move at $10, as Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2005) was by its US publisher (2008, 2010). The nimbleness with which publishers produce, print, and price a novel underscores its commodification and reveals at least part of the story behind the novel’s global circulation. Meanwhile, the proliferation of digital platforms has introduced new challenges for publishers. Glossy covers with prize-winning art, canny sizing, expensive layout, and book design are all rendered irrelevant in an e-book. Publishers of the contemporary novel have therefore settled on length as a new opportunity. According to a report in The Guardian, a study of over 2,500 titles appearing on the New York Times bestseller lists and Google’s annual survey of most-discussed books found that the average length of a commercial novel has increased by 25 percent in the twenty-first century, from 320 pages in 1999 to over 400 pages in 2015.29 Reportedly, “people who love to read appear to prefer a long and immersive narrative, the very opposite of a sound bite or snippets of information that we all spend our lives downloading from Google,” observes literary agent Clare Alexander, citing 229

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long novels by Donna Tartt, Jonathan Franzen, and Hanya Yanagihara and concluding: “clearly the literary establishment loves long books too.” But the “literary” establishment is only a small corner of the global publishing market for the novel, which includes far more names than Clare Alexander cites in The Guardian. On the more commercially sustainable end is the publication of genre fiction, exemplified in the United States by James Patterson, whose prolific writing factory includes dozens of coauthors (including former president Bill Clinton) who have collectively published over 150 titles that have sold more than 325 million copies worldwide.30 In 2016, Patterson inaugurated a new line of novels called BookShots each under 150 pages and priced at $5 (“life moves fast; books should too,” his website announces).31 Patterson has a clear vision of what commercial fiction means: seventy BookShots titles have been published in little over a year, described as “pulse-pounding thrillers . . . [i]mpossible to put down,” in forms such as crime, science fiction, mysteries, and romances in which Patterson is already well ensconced at the top of national bestseller lists. 32 Patterson’s BookShots bear a remarkable resemblance to Allen Lane’s venture at Penguin from almost a century ago. In 1930s England when libraries and lending clubs still thrived, Lane defied prevailing market logic and chose to sell Penguins at an extraordinarily low price (6 pence) through Woolworths and transport hubs, places where people naturally congregated, though not necessarily to purchase novels. Similarly, Patterson uses the widely frequented retail opportunities offered by drugstores and grocery checkout lines to vend his novels for the price of a cup of coffee. Also like Lane, whose short Penguins were necessitated by historical context – in Lane’s case, the paper to print long novels was heavily rationed in wartime Britain – Patterson’s BookShots are produced in a moment when many readers already gravitate toward short-format prose widely available on e-reader ventures such as Kindle Singles. In both examples, novels are the low-hanging fruit placed in reach of readers who need make no special effort to acquire them. Patterson’s product placement further recalls the pulp-fiction trade in the United States in the 1930s. Titles priced for a dime were sold in gas stations where an out-of-work oil executive named Raymond Chandler discovered them during a Southern California pit stop, and a new kind of hard-boiled detective fiction took off shortly thereafter. Penguin and Patterson – publisher and author – illuminate the extent to which publishing is a business, one in which the novel is a commodity that can be traded much as futures and options, staples and discretionaries. It appears to be a particularly resilient durable good that is both managed by and itself manages the market: it is both shaped by and shapes the contexts 230

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of its circulation. The novel plays these dual roles largely because of what D. F. McKenzie called the “human presence.” It attracts a range of readers, transporting them and itself across real and imagined borders, often oblivious to regimes of prestige and fashion. Its fortunes rest on both its literary and its popular forms and on the readers who pursue them. In this century, five global corporations manufacture and market the novel, but it is in the end the reader who produces it. When publishing has been indifferent to emerging trends in the novel, readers turn writers literally, quite beyond Roland Barthes’ evocation, and use prevailing technologies to produce new forms of the novel in a phenomenon media scholar Henry Jenkins calls “participatory culture.”33 Rather than serving as ellipses to shade in a communication circuit as Robert Darnton’s model conveys (see Figure 12.1), readers today fundamentally define the circuit in a variety of ways. Stephenie Meyer’s 500-plus-page vampire romance Twilight (2005) defied publishing logic about genre fiction (that it must be short) and made Hachette millions in sales, inviting enthusiastic readers to its thriving fan sites that incubated their own successful forms of the novel. One novel initially “published” in a Twilight fan fiction site was the erotic romance Fifty Shades of Grey (2011), which migrated as a print-on-demand title by an Australian outfit before being picked up by the mainstream imprint Vintage, where it had sold over 125 million copies by 2015. Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey are examples of popular novel forms that appeal to devoted readers but that publishing’s “Big Five” initially ignored. Readers’ viral passions rewired long-established circuits of publishing and print in order to make these novels available to others. In this context, readers became “authors” in literal and Barthesian senses, and they exploit digital technologies to also become agents, compositors, publishers, and retailers of the novel. A revised communication circuit for the novel today would need to embed readers at its center as agents who propel authors and, in cases such as Meyer and James, bypass printers, publishers, shippers, and booksellers, all totems in Darnton’s book circuit (see Figure 12.1). Book historians Padmini Ray Murray and Claire Squires have proposed a revision to Darnton’s communication circuit for the digital age (2013), though their remixed model preserves the publisher’s power and prestige rather than recentering it on the reader, where it belongs.34 Reframing the communication circuit around the reader enables the possibility of uncovering relationships that do not simply confirm the prevailing model but rethink it. Above all, a reader-centered circuit urges the study of the novel as a special kind of commodity that commands market share because it addresses the shifting desires of consumers. Trade and profit are 231

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to be made from the novel, to be sure, though it is the human presence, in the form of readers, who are the arbiters of this communication circuit. Conclusion The novel’s ascent in the economy of prestige (James English’s phrase) has been enabled in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by what book historians have long identified as a book culture composed – beyond publishing – of thriving outlets for sales, reviews, book festivals, literary societies, and prizes.35 An established book culture supports publishing and the forms that emerge from it. It acknowledges production and inspires it as well. In the twenty-first century, the culture of reviews and prizes has been a largely metropolitan phenomenon, with a clear preference for highbrow forms of the novel. The economy of prestige has ignored the novels of James Patterson, E. L. James, and Stephenie Meyer, even though their titles command a market share far in excess of that enjoyed by their literary counterparts such as Salman Rushdie and Chimamanda Adichie. In a widely circulated polemic, the editors of the magazine n+1 excoriate what they identify as the metropolitan conditions that favor certain forms of today’s global novel, forms, they insist, that “can’t help but reflect global capitalism, in its triumphs, inequalities, and deformations.” They continue: “In the English language, World Literature has its signature writers: Rushdie and Coetzee at the lead, and Kiran Desai, Mohsin Hamid, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie among the younger charges. It has its own economy, consisting of international publishing networks, scouts, and book fairs. It has its prizes.”36 Despite the symbolic capital that the global novel summons in its particularly metropolitan economy, the n+1 polemic is skeptical about its influence: “World literature . . . canonized by the academy, has become an empty vessel for the occasional self-ratification of the global elite, who otherwise mostly ignore it.”37 In short, n+1 underscores the view that a chronicle of the novel that focuses just on its “classics” misses the real plot. Theories of the modern novel that flourish to date have, perhaps unwittingly, tended to echo the cultural priorities toward their object that n+1 observes. These theories absorb attitudes toward production and vigorously exercise what scholar Pascale Casanova calls a critical “right to legislate literary matters.”38 Spaces and countries “highly endowed with literary resources,” Casanova writes, tend to determine what gets published, translated, circulated, reviewed, prized, and discussed.39 The concept of literary prestige that modern theories of the novel inadvertently purvey originates in cultural hierarchies that are invisible to most. The “classics” that Obinze 232

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covets are part of a “republic of letters” (Casanova’s title) that praises Graham Greene as “proper” and relegates James Hadley Chase otherwise. The republic that Casanova is intent on revealing is a bit like the one in ancient Rome with a small minority ruthlessly restricting access to and determining participation in a treasured public culture. Paradoxically, however, metropolitan book culture embodies a strange and inadvertent inversion: it advocates forms of the novel that are largely ignored outside a narrow self-ratifying economy of prestige, while large swathes of the novel that its metrics ignore enjoy a truly global base of readers whose support underwrites the economy of print in the first place. Ifemelu’s preferred crimes and thrillers are an unacknowledged economic base for the “classics” that Obinze covets in Lagos. Casanova’s and n+1’s gloomy descriptions of the novel and how they got this way thus has refreshing sparks from spaces outside the cultural core. The insurgent, sometimes subversive popular forms characterized as genre fiction have been sidelined by the economy of prestige as well as by the prevailing metrics of scholarly analysis. Obinze’s classics – “proper books” – were objects of study by Ian Watt and György Lukács, Roland Barthes, and others. Yet, despite being largely excluded from book culture and the mainstream economy of prestige, Ifemelu’s popular novels shape and command a global circuit that draws readers who repurpose it as cultural bricoleurs. A brief example from outside the literal and figurative metropolis illuminates this phenomenon. In 2013, the multinational consulting firm KPMG reported that “India is an outlier country, where print is still a growth area.”40 Annual revenues from print are a close second behind television and far ahead of film: print dominates in a country that some remark is poised to be “the biggest Englishlanguage book-buying market in the world” by 2020.41 A closer look at sales of the novel in India reveals that writers unheard of outside India, and largely sneered at within, have created an appetite for fiction that creates a significant part of these revenues. While sales of titles by literary novelists such as the Man Booker Prize–winning Kiran Desai languish at roughly 300 copies per year, those by Chetan Bhagat (b. 1974) catapult to the million within a few months of publication. Scoffed at for a colloquial style mixing Hindi and English, a reliance on far-fetched plot devices such as a cell phone call from God, and the prevalence of SMS texts and dialogue over narration, Bhagat’s seven novels to date have earned him wide approval and sales among India’s youth readers. He was repeatedly sidelined from the Jaipur Literature Festival, “the greatest literary show on earth,” according to the former New Yorker editor Tina Brown, yet his novels outsell those of most 233

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highbrow Indian writers featured there. When India’s mainstream publishers rejected Bhagat’s novels for not being “serious” or “literary,” others speedily took their place to great profit, so much so that Indian publishing is now characterized in two phases: “BC” for before Chetan and “AC” for after.42 Like Penguin and Patterson, Bhagat (a former Goldman Sachs banker) developed a canny business model, pricing his novels at a fifth the cost of literary titles by Rushdie and Desai. Adaptations of his novels into the ruthlessly competitive Bollywood film industry have rendered those films top box office grossers for the new millennium. “The obvious dilemma,” writes journalist Mini Kapoor, “is that [Bhagat’s] writing does not have the complexity to be diced by the established instruments of literary analysis.”43 And yet this popular and even dissident figure has singularly become a mainstay in Indian publishing, even as the republic of letters looks on, nonplussed and contemptuous. The culture industry in India is still obstreperous and unruly, and the “bourse of literary value” includes publics not fully socialized into metropolitan priorities that dominate elsewhere.44 It is these publics that Chetan Bhagat’s bestselling novels capture and preserve across the past decade. Ignoring a phenomenon such as this, in a market as big and deep as India’s, is perilously myopic. Bhagat’s command over commodity and content in the novel urges a wider lens in a study of the novel’s future. In particular, the popular novel’s mobility captures markets and readers across economic and geographic regimes, bringing new spaces into its purview as well as relocating itself to new ones. In the current publishing world with its multiple platforms, the novel appears to combine a market once hopelessly divided between “classics” and everything else. It remains Hydra-headed, though with no single head leading its fortunes as a commodity. As media scholar Melanie Ramdarshan Bold notes, the digital public sphere has largely rewired how the novel circulates as a commodity today: “traditional publishers are no longer the sole gatekeepers of [literary] culture.”45 New forms of the novel emerge on social writing platforms such as Wattpad, where they are vetted by passionate readers and prove massively lucrative before a timorous publisher wakes to their potential, as St. Martin’s eventually did with Amanda Hocking, the bestselling author of zombie romances. Wattpad’s authors also include prestige novelists such as Margaret Atwood and the Nobel laureate Paulo Coelho, as well as Hocking and others less likely destined for lasting cultural memory. The platform, however, gestures to a culture where readers sustain certain forms of the novel and render them thriving economic commodities. 234

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Ifemelu’s passion for James Hadley Chase remains widely shared even today. Internet fan sites on Chase abound in Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Russia, Sierra Leone, and the United Kingdom, many providing extensive bibliographies of Chase’s eighty-nine thrillers and commentaries on variants that convey an enviable amateur mastery typically reserved for “classic” authors.46 Chase’s novels traveled to Nigeria the way his titles did elsewhere: he remained in readers’ affections and even helped develop them. In her first months as a university student in Philadelphia, Ifemelu replaced her reading of Chase’s novels for those by James Baldwin and then William Faulkner: “as she read, America’s mythologies began to take on meaning . . . And she was consoled by her new knowledge.”47 In the end, it is the attraction of new knowledge and consolation that keeps readers attached to the novel. Different forms of the novel purvey the combination differently in different proportions. As long as the novel addresses desires and needs, it will thrive as a commodity, both real and symbolic, and one day its theories will more fully detail the process. N O T ES 1. “Commodity,” Oxford English Dictionary. 2. Robert Darnton, “‘What Is the History of Books?’ Revisited,” Modern Intellectual History, vol. 4, no. 3, 2007, p. 495. 3. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 1, trans. Stephen F. Rendall, University of California Press, 1984, p. xxi. 4. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath, Hill & Wang, 1977, p. 148. 5. D. F. McKenzie, “The Sociology of a Text: Orality, Literacy, and Print in Early New Zealand,” The Library, Sixth Series, vol. 6, no. 4, December 1984, p. 205. Reprinted in The Book History Reader, 2nd edn, ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, Routledge, 2002, pp. 205–31. 6. D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (1986), Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 15 (emphasis added). 7. Ibid., p. 29. 8. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, Verso, 1998, p. 143. 9. Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, Americanah, Knopf, 2013, p. 72. 10. Ibid. (emphasis added). 11. George Orwell, “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” Horizon, October 1944, p. 3. 12. Dillibe Onyeama, “In Search of Nigeria’s James Hadley Chase,” West Africa, January 14, 1980, p. 65. 13. Orwell, “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” p. 4. 14. Onyeama, “In Search of Nigeria’s James Hadley Chase,” p. 65. 15. Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 20. 235

priya joshi 16. Priya Joshi, In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India, Columbia University Press, 2002, pp. 119–21. 17. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, University of California Press, 1957, p. 11 (emphasis added). 18. Adichie, Americanah, p. 72 (emphasis added) 19. Ram Chandra Bose, “Robert Elsmere,” Madras Christian College Magazine, vol. 7, 1889–90, p. 287. 20. Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture, Verso, 1995, p. 147. 21. Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, pp. 176–77. 22. Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), Bellew, 1978, p. 131. 23. Ibid., p. 132. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., p. 133. 26. Ellen Harvey, “Five Takeaways from Nielsen BookScan,” Book Business, February 10, 2015. 27. Jason Burke, “Mills and Boon Answer Call of India’s New Middle Class for English Novels,” The Guardian, March 4, 2010. 28. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel, Stanford University Press, 1995, p. 147. 29. “The Big Question: Are Books Getting Longer?,” The Guardian, December 10, 2015. 30. Alexandra Alter, “James Patterson Has a Big Plan for Small Books,” New York Times, March 22, 2016, p. B2. 31. “BookShots,” jamespatterson.com. 32. “BookShots,” jamespatterson.com. 33. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Routledge, 1992. 34. Claire Squires and Padmini Ray Murray, “The Digital Publishing Communication Circuit,” Book 2.0, vol. 3, no. 1, June 2013, pp. 3–23. 35. James English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value, Harvard University Press, 2008. 36. “World Lite: What Is Global Literature?” n+1, vol. 17, 2013, p. 5. 37. Ibid., p. 7. 38. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise, Harvard University Press, 2004, p. 23. 39. Ibid., p. 15. 40. KPMG-FICCI, ‘The Power of a Billion: Realizing the Indian Dream,” in Indian Media and Entertainment Industry Report, 2013, available at kpmg.com.in. 41. Burke, “Mills and Boon Answer Call of India’s New Middle Class.” 42. Priya Joshi, “Chetan Bhagat: Remaking the Novel in India,” in A History of the Indian Novel in English, ed. Ulka Anjaria, Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 311. 43. Mini Kapoor, “What Makes Chetan Bhagat the One-Man Industry and Change Agent That He Is,” India Today, August 28, 2014, available at indiatoday .intoday.in. 44. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, p. 12.

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The Novel as Commodity 45. Melanie Ramdarshan Bold, “The Return of the Social Author: Negotiating Authority and Influence on Wattpad,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, June 16, 2016, p. ff1. doi:10.1177/ 1354856516654459. 46. “James Hadley Chase,” http://jameshadleychase.free.fr. 47. Adichie, Americanah, p. 167.

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13 J A N BA E T E N S A N D H U G O F R E Y

The Graphic Novel

A Subfield, Yes, but an Expanding One If it is true that comics are no longer just for kids, what does this mean for the graphic novel? The graphic novel today is less a form of comics targeting a particular audience, allegedly via the use of “adult” content, than a different kind of medium that reshapes all aspects and dimensions of comics: its content, of course, but also its style and format as well as the publishing policy and the cultural values related to it.1 Unlike comics, graphic novels tell serious stories that no longer focus on superheroes, humor, or adventure tales and introduce new strands of fiction and nonfiction such as biography and autobiography, history and journalism. Unlike comics, graphic novels even dare to put narrative between brackets, featuring nearly storyless works about boredom, angst, and immobility, sometimes even abandoning all traces of figuration and agency, as can be seen nowadays in the very popular subgenre of abstract comics.2 Unlike comics, graphic novels display as much as possible the idiosyncratic style of an individual author who aspires to become an auteur, in full control of every aspect of his or her work (graphic novelists, by the way, are more and more female, whereas the comics industry has always been an all-male business). Unlike comics, graphic novels are (sometimes very) long narratives published in book form, preferably by general or literary publishers, often very prestigious ones such as Pantheon and Jonathan Cape, and in formats whose size may change with each new work (even when they are serialized, and some of them still are, graphic novels like to resemble one-shot book publications). Unlike comics, graphic novels are no longer sold in newsstands but in “real” bookshops, next to “real” books. Last but not least, graphic novels are eager to claim a place under the high-cultural sun, something traditional comics could not even dream of – or were reluctant to do so, for reasons that have to do not only with a sense of unfair competition between high and low art3 but also with the fear that the cultural upgrade from comic book to graphic novel 238

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might have negative consequences on what has always constituted the power of comics: (1) their direct contact with the energy of popular culture and (2) the capacity to interact almost in real time, thanks to the paced rhythm of serialization, with the “news of the day.”4 In comparison with the creative chaos of the comics world, graphic novels may seem slow (it takes at least as much time to write a graphic novel as a novel) and a little stiff (ignoring and even misrepresenting the popular realm no real comics can do without). As one can imagine, the difference between comics and graphic novels is not absolute. Not all graphic novels follow the ideal model that was just sketched, and more and more comics have started including elements from the graphic novel model. Nor is the difference simply chronological. Even if it is generally accepted that comics came first and graphic novels later (the histoires en estampes of Töpffer excepted), it is not possible to date with precision the appearance of the latter. Just as we know that there were comics before The Yellow Kid (R. F. Outcault, 1895), there have been graphic novels before A Contract With God (Will Eisner, 1978 – a collection of short stories, by the way, and thus not a novel). One should avoid any fast and easy dichotomy when approaching the world of comics and graphic novels and see their difference as that between two types that can overlap in various ways. Possible intersections in concrete works do not imply, however, that the very division between comics and graphic novels is meaningless. Many scholars who reject the notion of the graphic novel, accusing those who use it of elitism, are therefore obliged to use another, no less clear-cut terminology to distinguish between traditional comics and, for instance, “adult comics” (Sabin) or “alternative comics” (Hatfield). The success of the graphic novel cannot be denied in today’s culture. Not only has it been widely regarded as a separate medium from the late 1980s onward, but the new type of comics it represents can now be found literally everywhere. The worldwide success of Spiegelman’s Maus, for instance, has been decisive in this regard. According to some critics, the graphic novel would even be promised a bright future if the novel as a genre would start dwindling – which, of course, is not (yet) the case,5 and it is spreading all over the world, both through the export of mainly graphic novels from the United States and the emergence of local imitations and reappropriations of the imported works.6 The story of what is happening with the graphic novel sounds very familiar. Media historians would define its achievement as resulting from a combination of remediation and globalization. On the one hand, the graphic novel appears as a form that not only appropriates but also “remediates” and hybridizes a previous verbal medium, in this case the novel. It manages to do so because of its combination of words and images, which makes it fitter than its competitor in the attempt to create more 239

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appealing forms of storytelling.7 On the other hand, the graphic novel is a medium that has succeeded in changing its initially local form into a global one, with all the complex globalizing negotiations that are entailed in these changes of scale. As a global form, emerging today in more and more countries and cultural traditions, the graphic novel is a complex phenomenon. Unlike comics, which are often directly marketed to a global audience and whose global dissemination is part of a larger strategy deployed by cultural industries such as the Disney Corporation, for whom comics are just one tiny part of a multimedia and cross-platform product development, graphic novels have often close ties with the personal vision of independent makers, targeting a more or less local audience. The global success of a work such as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2007) was totally unforeseen – which does not mean, at least a posteriori, that it was totally unforeseeable. The increasing role of postcolonial authors in the contemporary book market, as well as the very special relationship between the Western world and Iran, certainly after 9/11, offers two plausible explanations for the enthusiastic national and international reception of the work of an unknown artist in exile published by a small independent company specializing in nonmainstream material. In practice, however, more and more graphic novelists do address a global (i.e., Anglophone) audience, and this is, of course, a severe restriction to our understanding of global. The reasons for this new strategy are various: there is the desire to professionalize, which is only possible if one can cater to a broader audience, but there is also the cosmopolitan character of many young artists who can travel, study, and work abroad; finally, there is also the international emulation that results from the growing number of translations.8 The twofold story of remediation and globalization cannot be reduced to the appearance and circulation of the graphic novel as an institutionalized label or category, however. Just as with comics in general, the graphic novel has been the object of a striking endeavor to stretch its limits in time as well as space. First, it is now no longer seen as a characteristically American form of adult comics, invented by Eisner and then popularized by Art Spiegelman. The existence of graphic novels before Eisner-Spiegelman and outside the United States is now universally acknowledged, and the works of both Eisner and Spiegelman are now being read in a longer and less monocultural and monolinguistic tradition. From this point of view, the graphic novel repeats some features that have been very important in the story of comics. Indeed, definitions of comics have systematically tried to broaden its field and scope, in both temporal and spatial terms, first, thanks to its supposed links with previous art forms (the idea that the birth of comics should be dated in the 240

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prehistorical times of the cave paintings is a long-standing stereotype in comics studies) and, second, thanks to the possibility of recognizing other forms of comics outside the US breeding ground of newspaper comics.9 With the arrival of the graphic novel, this take on the spatial and temporal scope of the medium has been repeated. To define the graphic novel always means tracing a new history and showing cultural, geographic, and social diversity. The more the existence of the graphic novel is socially and culturally acknowledged, the more efforts are undertaken to push back in time the moment of its first appearance as well as to nuance the US hegemony in the field, which is no longer incompatible with a more open approach of making room for non-American forerunners and models. As clearly shown by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s RAW magazine (1980–91), much of the inspiration of Maus came from the European avant-garde. And in recent scholarship, the historical role of A Contract With God tends to be taken over by Harvey Kurtzman’s Jungle Book, a 1959 short story collection by the founder of Mad Magazine,10 or even by the wordless woodcut novelists of the 1920s, which were very popular on both sides of the Atlantic and themselves deeply influenced by European models of engraved illustrations (Gustave Doré).11 As a corollary, it is no longer denied that next to and even before the rise of the US graphic novel there existed already in other countries (Otto Knückel was German; Frans Masereel, the actual inventor of the wordless woodcut novel, was Belgian) a thriving graphic novel market and readership, even if the “graphic novel” label was not used to define these works. In France, for instance, definitely a model for many US authors,12 many publishers, critics, booksellers, and readers continue to prefer the term bande dessinée (literally “drawn strip”), blending the two domains of comics and graphic novels (the French use of the term “graphic novel” originally refers to a publication format, not to issues of style and content that are dramatically diverse and sometimes rather experimental in bande dessinée). Hence also, and more generally speaking, there has been a tendency to rethink this history in terms of networks and mash-up works of mutual influences, appropriations, and creative misunderstandings between a wide range of genres, formats, media, and national traditions. Satrapi’s Persepolis is, once again, a good example: a definitely postcolonial voice, deeply marked by Persian graphic traditions (as demonstrated, for instance, in the technique of the “collective character,” the idea of a multitude being visualized by the repetition of similar characters within a single frame), but also clearly motivated by local influences (Satrapi’s black and white drawings are indebted to the European woodcut models as well as to the teaching of her mentor, David B., the author of L’Ascension du haut 241

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mal (translated as Epileptic [2006], a landmark publication in French autofiction). All these elements clearly show the deeply globalized structure of the making, the marketing, the critical reception, and the commercial success of the modern graphic novel. At the same time, the graphic novel has increasingly been defined in novelistic terms, something that had never been the case of comics despite the extremely close links between certain forms of comics such as the adventure strip or the sci-fi comics of the 1920s (one may think here of Wash Tubbs, starting in 1924, or Buck Rogers, starting in 1929) and their literary counterparts. So what makes a graphic novel a novel and not just a new form of comics? Length? Not really, since many graphic novels are actually short story collections. Serious content or innovative narrative techniques? Not really either, since this would imply that seriousness and narrative inventiveness had not existed before in the comics world – an implausible allegation. Few works of art are as sophisticated and profound as Herriman’s Krazy Kat, for instance. Are graphic novels then novels because they are literary adaptations? Not at all, since most graphic novels are not derived from literary source material, whereas quite a few comics are, for instance, those produced within the infamous Classics Illustrated series, which no one has even taken seriously as literary works. The crucial change between comics and graphic novels seems to be that of authorship and style, on the one hand, and format and distribution, on the other. Graphic novels are no longer the more or less anonymous and streamlined products of a Taylorized studio system but the conscious output of an individual author claiming an individual drawing style, an individual use of the possibilities of a medium using both words and images and using all possible layout and rhythmic opportunities of panel and book, and, last but not least, an individual worldview. Besides, the graphic novel is also published in book format, which allows it to find its place next to “real” literary works on the shelves of serious bookshops. It is the combination of all these elements that has moved the graphic novel from the newsstand to the bookshop, the library, the canon, and the classroom. It is even not absurd to think of this progression as a stage in the evolution of the novel that thus explores new narrative techniques and modes of characterization. It can be dangerous, however, to make the concept of the graphic novel too capacious, taking it as a new generic term for all kinds of comics (and, in this case, traditional comics would become something like “graphic novels for kids”) or including forms of word and image interaction that belong to very different cultural contexts (we already gave the example of the rupestrian art, but other examples might entail Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Bayeux tapestry, or even the stories told in the stained glass of Gothic cathedrals, all usual 242

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suspects when it comes to broaden the corpus). In order to study what the graphic novel is and what it actually does, it makes sense to stick to a more modest definition of the kinds of works that can be labeled graphic novels – and here one should definitely limit oneself to print and book culture; if not, the graphic novel may become anything and thus nothing at all. In this regard, three names are frequently associated with the concept of the graphic novel: Rodolphe Töpffer (1799–1846), the nineteenth-century forerunner; Will Eisner (1917–2005), who was one of the first to claim successfully the strategic use of this term as a genre label; and Art Spiegelman (1948–), whose graphic novel Maus (1991) represents a watershed moment for the institutional recognition of the medium. These three names are not the only ones that have helped to design the graphic novel, but what makes Töpffer, Eisner, and Spiegelman so interesting – besides the fact that all three are at the same time practitioners and theoreticians, trying to find out about their art in the making – is their common insistence on the very nature of the graphic novel, which they all present as a form of writing, of literature, and thus of the novel (though Spiegelman commonly disliked the term because it did not capture the attempt to use a popular and commercial medium to tell a story of personal and collective trauma that nobody was expecting in this format). This is a major difference with comics in general, whose narrative and literary status is not always foregrounded (instead, the visual relationship with caricature is commonly underlined). Töpffer himself called the new medium that he was inventing by trial and error a form of “engraved stories” (histoires en estampes).13 In his influential instruction book, Comics and Sequential Art, Eisner starts by stating: The format of comics presents a montage of both word and image, and the reader is thus required to exercise both visual and verbal interpretive skills. The regimens of art (e.g. perspective, symmetry, line) and the regimens of literature (e.g. grammar, plot, syntax) become superimposed upon each other. The reading of a graphic novel is an act of both aesthetic perception and intellectual pursuit . . . [T]he psychological processes involved in viewing a word and an image are analogous. The structures of illustration and of prose are similar. In its most economical state, comics employ a series of repetitive images and recognizable symbols. When they are used again and again to convey similar ideas, they become a distinct language – a literary form, if you will.14

In the case of Spiegelman, as noted earlier, a lukewarm fan of the concept of graphic novel,15 the critical emphasis on the fact that his work exceeded the traditional boundaries of comics was present from the very beginning. The awarding of the Pulitzer Prize to Maus in 1992, which signified the 243

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great breakthrough for the graphic novel in mainstream culture, hinted in that same direction. The prize was a “special citation,” that is, a prize that escaped the generic boundaries of the Pulitzer (which has special categories for cartooning and photography, for instance). This difficulty of locating Maus in a given generic category – a problem repeated by many reviewers’ hesitations between the categories of fiction and nonfiction – is another sign that the graphic novel is migrating from the well-established domain of comics to something else, which comes closer to literature and writing – or should we say closer once again, for the pioneering work of Töpffer was clearly characterized, by its maker as well as by its first readers, as a special type of literature. This is, of course, not the place to scrutinize whether images can or cannot be the equivalent of writing – a statement that most theoreticians of the “pictorial turn” have been invited to challenge critically.16 What matters is the fact that most critical reflections on the graphic novel do take the literary dimension of the medium as one of their starting points. One can therefore easily understand why the graphic novel has entered the literary field. First of all, there is the power of the label itself, which is far from neutral: to call something a “novel” has inevitably dramatic consequences for its position in the larger literary field, for today the novel is in the center of this field and has therefore a canonical and hegemonic status. Second, the shift from newspapers and magazines to publication formats that belong to the shelves of a traditional bookshop or library also affects the perception of the work, whose cultural status is now upgraded. And third, there is also the assumption that the primary objective of the graphic novel is storytelling. It is the combination of these three features that creates a family resemblance with the novel, with which the graphic novel shares a wide range of techniques and tactics. To summarize, then, the graphic novel is definitely a subset within the larger field of comics, but it is also a rapidly expanding field that has exceeded the formal and thematic restrictions of comics. It is thanks to this expansion that the graphic novel has now entered the larger field of literature, both fiction and nonfiction17 but also both prose and poetry.18 Yet what does it mean exactly to state that the graphic novel has been morphing into a kind of novel? Visual Literature or Literature Tout Court? Graphic novels are no longer restricted to the areas, styles, and thematic clusters employed at the time of their appearance as do-it-yourself (DIY) black and white photocopied drawings with strong autobiographical 244

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characteristics and fiercely rooted in the countercultural Zeitgeist. Today, graphic novels cover as wide an array of themes, modes, and registers as any serious novel. Contrary to traditional comics, narrowly confined to clichéd constraints of genre fiction and house style, graphic novelists can freely choose what to tell and how best to do it. Nearly all topics and subjects are open to further exploration or blending, and contemporary graphic novels can even change styles within the limits of a single work, a recent phenomenon that has become almost overnight a distinctive feature of many graphic novels. A couple of years ago, Paul Gravett, a pioneering editor and curator of comics in the United Kingdom, published the must-read collection 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die: The Ultimate Guide to Comic Books, Graphic Novels and Manga (2011), but it is not difficult to foresee that the new edition of this anthology will be split into three parts: comics, graphic novels, and manga. Much more essential than these kinds of lists and charts, the ever-increasing number of publications or the fast-paced further diversification of form and content is the question of why graphic novels are now considered novels rather than something else. After all, their basic material is visual. Other forms of graphic storytelling such as sequential photography, the visual essay, picture stories in magazines or newspapers, and serialized forms of painting (as in the stations of the cross subgenre or the Marie de’ Medici cycle by Rubens) did not shift from visual art to literature, and the reason for this difference is not the wordlessness of these forms or the word and image interaction in the graphic novel (as we have seen, there has always existed an important strand of wordless graphic novels). Rather, the answer to the question of why graphic novels have been accepted as literature is twofold. It has to do with the major differences between comics and graphic novels, on the one hand, and internal changes in the literary field, on the other. In an important essay on the legitimization of the comics medium, Thierry Groensteen (2006) has studied its gradual acceptance by mainstream critics and scholars along with the symbolic handicaps that have prevented comics from fully integrating into the domain of culture (as opposed to just the domain of entertainment). The five thresholds he discusses include hybridity (word and image combinations are less valued than “pure” media); the link with children’s literature; the lasting heritage of a despised visual genre, namely, caricature; the gap between the evolution of comics and that of visual arts in general (comics seem rearguard in comparison with modern art); and eventually, a number of technical features that undermine the cultural significance of images that are only available as small-scale reproductions in works that do not give a special status to individual drawings. Graphic novels clearly escape some of these problems, but in some cases their 245

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possible handicaps are the same as those of comics in general. Graphic novels are most of the time hybrid works, the impact of caricature and cartoonesque style remains a given, only the abstract comics subgenre seems to match similar evolutions in high art, and graphic novel images are never “original” but are printed and reproduced drawings. From a technical point of view, the shift from comics to graphic novel is thus not strong enough to explain why graphic novels have proved capable of shaking off the negative connotations of comics in order to integrate into the prestigious world of literature. The reason for these changes therefore must be found elsewhere, more specifically in the evolution of the novel itself. If the success of the graphic novel is undoubtedly connected to the emancipation from the traditional comics model, the surprising reframing of the medium as a literary form19 is mainly due to dramatic changes within the novelistic field itself. Since the 1920s, the novel has suffered from competition with film, the medium that, according to most remediation theories, has replaced the novel as the most adequate tool for storytelling. The growing impact of film is demonstrated not only by the appearance of a cinematographic style of novel writing but also by a shift in the status of the work as a work of art, which is more and more expected to function as a tool easily adaptable into a film scenario. Of course, novels continue to be written, for even if the movies have now achieved a cultural hegemony that printed novels are no longer capable of seriously challenging, the film industry still needs the prestige of literature as a marketing tool for the selling of its products.20 The writing of the novel is now the first step toward filmic adaptation. This fundamental tendency involves a crucial shift first from style to storytelling and second from storytelling to story. The value of a novel no longer depends on its stylistic features, as had been the case in the modern novel since Flaubert, the very first author to have nourished the ambition to write a novel (Madame Bovary, 1857) about nothing, one where style is all.21 In contrast, the novel of the film age is one that is action oriented and whose plot can be lifted from its verbal materialization and translated into a visual form as simply as possible. Such a conception of the novel is strongly indebted to a poetics of “dematerialization,” that is, of a separation of form and content and thus of the possibility to move content from one material medium to another one.22 Even when the story is written down in words, it is no longer the words that count. Rather, it is the story that is behind them, and that story can only be converted into images if the words do not resist, if they are transparent vessels for a “dematerialized” narrative. Seen from this perspective, the graphic novel is a more than welcome candidate for entering the novelistic arena. First, it has the reputation for being action driven. To a large extent, though, this is a misinterpretation of the 246

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medium, since it has tried from the very beginning to get rid of the narrative overdrive of its antimodel, the superhero comics. However, the belief in the concentration of the graphic novel in storytelling certainly plays a role in the literary embrace of this hybrid medium. Besides being narrative driven, the graphic novel is equally supposed to be an adaptable one – although not necessarily easily adaptable. There are adaptations of Harvey Pekar, Phoebe Gloeckner, Marjane Satrapi, and Daniel Clowes, for instance, but not of Maus or Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan (at least not on screen). Here as well, concrete adaptation practices may deliver more ambivalent lessons, but once again these issues do not affect the general conviction that graphic novels can be read as a kind of movie storyboard or even more drastically that storyboards ought to adopt the codes of comics and graphic novels.23 Moreover, historically speaking, the emergence of the graphic novel coincided with the end of a long period of sweeping experiments in the novel, which had started with the high modernist forms of writing initiated by authors such as Joyce, Faulkner, and Barnes and continued with the work of several experimental generations with authors such as Barth, Gaddis, and Coover, after whom experimental fiction more or less ran out of steam. As a result, the 1970s witnessed new forms of post- and post-postmodern novel writing that had, first, challenged the primordial role of narrative and, second, foregrounded the importance of style and textual materiality.24 In this context of the growing awareness that the novel, as a narrative medium, was a dead end – a very inspiring one, though, from a literary point of view – the graphic novel could be welcomed as a logical ally in the recuperation of what the experimental novel had succeeded in putting between brackets: direct, clear storytelling with recognizable characters to identify with, a well-made plot, and a fictional world to believe in. From this perspective, it is no longer a problem that one of the major historical roots of the graphic novel is taken to be the wordless woodcut novels of the 1920s and 1930s, in which storytelling, world making, and characters one can identify with had been key. Moreover, the tradition of the woodcut technique and the convention of wordlessness have remained vital strands within contemporary graphic novel production. The number of wordless graphic novels is quite high not only in experimental categories such as abstract comics but also in many types of graphic novels. Besides, many important graphic novelists alternate word and image interaction and wordlessness, such as, for instance, Chris Ware, probably the most innovative graphic novelist, alongside Daniel Clowes and Charles Burns, of the post-Maus era. This lack of words, which theoretically speaking should have locked the graphic novel into the domain of narrative and serialized painting or engraving,25 is on the contrary a strong argument that links the medium 247

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with the literary novel. This may seem a paradox, but there is the fact that storytelling practices are nowadays no longer exclusively associated with verbal storytelling and can entail many forms of visual or hybridized narratives as well. Moreover, storytelling forms, be they verbal, visual, or a complex hybrid, are increasingly read in light of their adaptability to film or television scripts, and this perspective as well bridges the gap between graphic novels and novels in general. In such a context, the graphic novel can become a real contemporary novel, much closer to the final destination of the novel than the literary novel itself. Once again, this suggestion may seem paradoxical, and it would be absurd to deny that many graphic novels do distinguish themselves from traditional novels by their emphasis on the visual aspects and word and image interaction. The simultaneous perception of various images on the page and hence the possibility to combine several different temporalities, spaces, fictional levels, and even styles in static yet visually often highly dynamic images are features that resist adaptation. The sometimes labyrinthine page compositions of Jimmy Corrigan, with their amazing mix of eventlessness (lack of action, boredom, existential void, endless repetition of small gestures, and uneventful spaces) and dizzying complexity (minimalist variations, permanently changing layout grids, and layering of temporal events involving several generations) exemplify very well this search for a specific use of the graphic novel that is not just a story told in images but also a story created by the dialogue between a huge set of visual and verbal elements and units on the page and in the book. Nevertheless, contemporary graphic novels do continue to present themselves as novels, that is, as stories that can be read in a more or less straightforward way, with a strong plotline, a well-defined narrator, and a diegetic universe the reader can easily recognize. Finally, the graphic novel also negotiates with much ease and suppleness the hybridization that has entered the literary novel itself since at least the last quarter of the twentieth century. The combination of words and images, the most blatant example of multimodal storytelling, is, of course, anything but new – it may suffice to think of the long yet not always wellaccepted institution of the illustrated novel – but the global success of the work of W. G. Sebald26 represents a watershed moment in the general perception of the role of images in fictional narratives. Sebald’s very idiosyncratic use of images, included without captions and no longer necessarily matching their descriptions in the text, have opened radically new perspectives on the nonillustrative and nondecorative use of images, certainly of photographic images, that recover in his work the radical openness that is often denied by their use of “evidence” in factional prose. After Sebald, it is common nowadays to add images or photos to novels, after 248

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long centuries of suspicion of images as either vulgar or commercial (one may remember here the extremely negative attitude of Flaubert toward all forms of illustrations and their very ambivalent acceptance by Henry James). The usual way of inserting images avoids as much as possible their use as mere illustrations (something that continues to be stigmatized as definitely nonartistic) and aims at constructing a creative tension between what is told and what is shown. Only such an antinomy, it is argued, is capable of producing artistically worthwhile combinations. As a naturally hybrid or multimodal form, the graphic novel is not hindered by these types of elite-art considerations and presents a more straightforward intertwining of the verbal and the visual that the literary novel is both pursuing and struggling with. The progressive intrusion of the “visual turn” (Mitchell) in all things novelistic is thus identifying the graphic novel as a possible model for new attempts to do something with words and images. Storytelling or Transmedial Storytelling? As stated earlier, the emphasis on storytelling “dematerializes” the novel, separating narrative “content” and narrative “form,” blurring the boundaries between novel and graphic novel. This process, however, is not an aim per se; it is an approach for achieving a different objective, namely, the migration of story material from one medium to another. Today the novel has become transmedial, and the graphic novel buzz is part of that movement. Roughly speaking, transmediality can be implicit or explicit, and it can take two different forms, partial or complete. It is implicit when a novel is made in such a way that it circumvents all that may block or complicate its remediation (a long interior monologue, for example), while enhancing those elements that are easy to remediate (a brief physical description of a character, for instance). It is explicit, logically, as soon as it reappears in another medium.27 However, these remediations do not always obey the same logic. In its most elementary or partial form, transmediality is part of the adaptation process. In its more complex and complete form, best known thanks to the pioneering work of Henry Jenkins (2006), it refers to “the technique of telling a single story or story experience across multiple platforms and formats including, but not limited to, games, books, events, cinema and television. The purpose is not only to reach a wider audience by expanding the target market pool, but to expand the narrative itself.”28 The difference between both types, partial and complete, goes beyond the techniques of dispatching and disclosing the building blocks of the story. 249

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It also entails a radical shift from storytelling to world making. In the elementary or partial form of transmediality as adaptation, a plot or story is moved from one medium to another. In the complete form, it is no longer the story but the world in which the story is situated that is key to the process. This shift is consistent. If the reader – who is also spectator, gamer, prosumer of the story – cannot access all the story elements of a given work but has to complete the information in one medium by expanding his or her reading to other works in other media, the experience of the work may always present the risk of disappointment. Even if one is offered a full story in this or that medium, there is always the awareness that many parts of the story are withheld, and this may result in frustration – sometimes a positive one: the desire to know more about it; sometimes also a negative one: an abandonment, due to the unpleasant sensation that it will never be possible to know it all. For this reason, the center of gravity shifts from story to diegesis, that is, the spatiotemporal background of the story as it unfolds.29 Traditional narratology acknowledges the presence and importance of such diegesis but not to the point that it ceases to be circumstantial. In complete transmedial storytelling, however, it is the background that comes to the fore. What the audience likes in Lord of the Rings is probably as much the world of Middle-earth as it is the story itself – the latter overly simple and highly formulaic, as asked for by the necessity to ensure the smooth global distribution of the work.30 At first sight, the graphic novel is a part of a transmedial turn of the novel, be it implicit or explicit, partial or complete. At the same time, however, the graphic novel also continues to display strong antitransmedial tendencies. We would like to conclude, then, by stressing two aspects of this element of resistance, the consequences of which cannot be reduced to the mere defense of graphic storytelling as a medium-specific business. First of all, the graphic novel features a direct, material link between story and storyteller, a dimension of storytelling that has been lost during the transition from oral storytelling to storytelling in print. As argued by Jared Gardner, who transferred some ideas from Walter Benjamin in the well-known essay on Leskov from the field of the novel to that of the graphic novel: In fact, alone of all of the narrative arts born at the end of the nineteenth century, the sequential comic has not effaced the line of the artist, the handprint of the storyteller. This fact is central to what makes the comics’ form unique, and also to what makes the line, the mark of the individual upon the page, such a unique challenge for narrative theory. We simply have no language – because we have no parallel in any other narrative form for describing its narrative 250

The Graphic Novel work. In comics alone the promise of Benjamin’s looked-for “moving script” continued to develop throughout the twentieth century. Here the act of inscription remains always visible, and the story of its making remains central to the narrative work.31

This observation offers a new argument for the encounter between novel and graphic novel, the latter offering, almost nostalgically, something that is missing in the former. In addition, it makes a strong plea for the graphic novel’s resistance to transmedial migration and appropriation. Adapting the graphic novel to the screen or to a videogame environment would inescapably signify the loss of what makes the medium so attractive to the modern audience: its graphiation,32 that is, the presence, within the very act of storytelling, of its maker. And certainly American Splendor (2003) is one of the few very rewarding adaptations of a graphic novel into a film that directly addresses this issue by doing all it can to feel like a graphic novel through the use of various narrative devices, included among them the direct appearance of Pekar himself speaking directly about his on-screen representation. A second aspect is the graphic novel’s insistence on all things related to the technicalities of drawing as well as print. Although modern graphic novelists often do use the computer, a majority of them remain extremely attached to the materiality of drawing: the choice of paper, ink, pencils, eraser gums, brushes, and so on is always an existential choice that has nothing to do with fetishism or nostalgia.33 The artist’s studio contains a PC, a scanner, and other digital equipment, but these instruments remain marginal: they support the creative act of drawing; they do not replace or supersede it. Likewise, all graphic novelists prove highly sensitive to the quality of print, both the printing process itself, which they tend to follow as closely as possible, and the printing result, the book with its size, weight, smell, touch, and feel.34 It is therefore understandable that graphic novelists are only cool lovers of digital storytelling. The arrival of e-comics and e-graphic novels has been heralded with great regularity since the 1990s, but until now a real artistic breakthrough has not yet occurred. The number of digital graphic novels is considerable, but their place in the field remains rather modest, and the reception of the new technique by ambitious authors is overall negative, if not frankly hostile. Is it a reaction against the overwhelming power of videogames, a medium with which it may be difficult to compete? We would rather suggest that the major reason for the lasting absence of e-graphic novels results fundamentally from what helps the graphic novel continue to dominate: the visible presence of the storyteller, on the one hand, and the preservation of the essential link between novel and print culture, on the other. 251

jan baetens and hugo frey NO TES 1. See Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey, The Graphic Novel: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, 2015. 2. See Andrei Molotiu, ed., Abstract Comics, Fantagraphics, 2010. 3. See Bart Beaty, Comics versus Art, Toronto University Press, 2012; and Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey, “Why So Much Hatred? Fine Art and Comics, Before and After the Graphic Novel,” Art History (forthcoming). 4. See Charles Hatfield, Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, University Press of Mississippi, 2005. 5. See Charles McGrath, “Not Funnies,” New York Times, July 11, 2004. 6. For an overview of what is understood today by “world comics,” see Frederick Luis Aldama, http://professorlatinx.com/planetary-republic-of-comics/. 7. See Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, MIT Press, 1999. 8. The art house works published by the leading Anglophone companies such as Pantheon, Cape, Fantagraphics, and Drawn & Quartely, for instance, are now being systematically translated into almost all major Western languages. 9. For important historical research, see David Kunzle’s The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825 (The History of the Comic Strip, Vol. 1), University of California Press, 1973, and The History of the Comic Strip, Vol. 2: The Nineteenth Century, University of California Press, 1990. For a theoretical discussion, see Thierry Groensteen, Mr Töpffer invente la bande dessinée, Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2013. 10. See Baetens and Frey, The Graphic Novel; and Santiago Garcia, On the Graphic Novel, trans. Bruce Campbell, University Press of Mississippi, 2015 [2010], p. 90. 11. See David Beronå, Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels, Abrams, 2008. Also more recently Spiegelman with his Wordless! performance, a stage show created with composer Philip Johnston that highlights the history of these wordless novels. 12. See Joseph Witek, ed., Art Spiegelman: Conversations, University Press of Mississippi, 2007. 13. See Philippe Kaenel, Le Métier d’illustrateur: Rodolphe Töpffer, J. J. Grandville, Gustave Doré, Droz, 2005, p. 273. 14. Will Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art, 1985, W.W. Norton, 2008, p. 2. 15. For the evolution on this thinking on the concept, see Witek, ed., Art Spiegelman: Conversations. 16. See W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory, University of Chicago Press, 1994. 17. See Steve Tabachnick, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Graphic Novel, Cambridge University Press, 2016. 18. See Brian McHale, “Beginning to Think about Narrative in Poetry,” Narrative, vol. 17, no. 1, 2009, pp. 11–27. 19. For many reasons it is preferable to avoid the labeling of the graphic novel as a “genre,” which is definitely too narrow a concept to cover the graphic novel’s range and scope. The broader concept of “medium,” which includes the notion of “genre” as one of its many parameters, seems much more appropriate. 252

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20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

The graphic novel explores a wide variety of old and new genres, and it can even avoid genre labels, characteristically present in lowbrow genre fiction as they are absent in highbrow novel production. In a seminal book, The Adaptation Industry, Routledge, 2011, Simone Murray explains in great detail the mechanisms between the commercial “marriage” of literature and cinema: the former needs the latter to be professionalized (for only adaptations can guarantee the author a viable income), whereas the latter needs the former to give a cultural upgrade to its productions. Films that can be marketed as literary adaptations, certainly if the adapted books have won important literary prizes that target a global audience, have an economic advantage in the struggle for box office. A connection with a literary work gives a label of quality to the film, even if most spectators are not interested at all in ever reading the adapted book in question. For an ideological and political critique of this position, see Jacques Rancière, “Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Killed,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 34, no. 2, 2008, pp. 233–48. The concept has been introduced by Garrett Stewart to analyze the use of “illegible” books as in fine art installations; see Garrett Stewart, “Bookwork as Demediation,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 36, no. 3, 2010, pp. 410–57. For a critical debate, see Thierry Groensteen and Benoît Peeters, eds., Storyboard: Le Cinéma dessiné, Yellow Now, 1992. See Raymond Federman, Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow, Swallow Press, 1975. The classic example being William Hogarth’s A Harlot Progress (1732). Himself strongly influenced by a Surrealist landmark publication, André Breton’s Nadja (1928). There exist, of course, many forms of intramedial adaptation, which are not taken into account in the debates on remediation: junior versions of classic works, rewritings of Shakespeare in modern English, reader’s digests, pastiches, and parodies – not to speak of translations into other languages. For more details, see Andrea Philips, A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling: How to Captivate and Engage Audiences across Multiple Platforms, McGraw-Hill, 2012. See Alain Boillat, Cinéma: Machine à mondes, Georg, 2014. One may ask en passant is it coincidence that works like Lord of the Rings and indeed many graphic novels privilege a sense of place and inside these works a putative transmediality occurs through a common presentation of maps? We would suggest not at all. Jared Gardner, “Storylines,” Substance, vol. 40, no. 1, 2011, pp. 56–57. See Philippe Marion, Traces en cases, Académia, 1993. See Hillary Chute and Patrick Jagoda, eds., “Comics and Media,” Critical Inquiry, Special Issue, vol. 40, no. 3, 2014. See also Ian Hague, Comics and the Senses, Routledge, 2014.

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14 J E S S I C A P R E SS M A N

The Novel in the Digital Age

The novel in the digital age does what the novel has always done: it challenges expectations of what a novel is and what it can do. The novel is a genre concerned with newness and novelty, and digital technologies enable new ways of exploring novelty across literary content, form, and format as well as across production, distribution, and reception processes. e-Readers, apps, Amazon, and transmedia storytelling make it so that we no longer expect a novel to be packaged in a codex, purchased at the familiar places, and read in the usual way, one page at a time. The novel genre no longer needs to be defined by its length or focus on human characters or even such standard expectations as an Aristotelian plot or the coming-of-age Bildungsroman narrative. Contemporary novels engage the digital in order to proclaim newness, and this chapter explores three novels exemplary in this regard. All published since 2000 – that momentous year of millennial change and moment of transition to Web 2.0 – these case studies show how the novel genre addresses the medial shift by aestheticizing materiality and by focusing attention on the artifactuality of literature. In an age when pundits proclaim the death of the book and the inevitable fallout from this situation – just think of the two most famous laments of this sort, Sven Birkerts’ The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age and Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains – contemporary novels illuminate a different path. They employ digital tools and practices to exploit the physical aspects of the book medium and thereby reveal the power of the codex. They present narratives about books that diegetically explore the continued impact of the book in the digital age. Such contemporary novels ensure that books remain part of our digital culture even as they also showcase new formats and possibilities for the novel genre. The novel in the digital age is actually quite bookish. As we will see, contemporary novels often exploit the possibilities of digital production and publishing with pages that contain multiple colors, die-cut holes, and 254

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images, all of which are made more possible (not to mention cheaper) with new production processes and technologies. They engage with the culture of big data by going big in the sheer number of pages and the material heft of their bodies or in their aesthetic ambitions to imitate a computer database (think of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King). They engage the digital technoculture by narrating the effects of social networking and global capitalism (think of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story). They narrate the medial shift as it affects literature’s institutions (think of Tom Engelhardt’s The Last Days of Publishing). They incorporate digital communication practices into their narratives, remediating hyperlinks or even actually linking up to the Web to form transmedia networks (think of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves). Of course, there are also those novels that fully embrace the digital from conception to distribution, as born-digital literature. I’m sure there are other categories and responses too, but the one thing that they share in common is a dedication to pushing the novel genre to remain new precisely by responding to new media. By addressing the digital, however, the novel in the digital age also prompts consideration of how media and materiality matter to literature, both now and in the past. The so-called digital turn is not just a forwardreaching movement; it also promotes reflection on the material history of the novel as a genre and the role of media in its development. Textual and bibliographic studies as well as scholarship in the history of the book make it clear that different forms (editions) and formats (medial platforms) have an impact on the way a text is read, understood, and used.1 The contemporary novel participates in this scholarly initiative by turning attention to literature’s media, which includes, but is not limited to, the book. Considering the novel in (and of) the digital age is not just about examining literature’s relationship to contemporary media but also enables recognition of how media serve literature and literary studies more broadly. In what follows, I will concentrate on three case studies, each of which will expose the impact of digital technologies on the novel genre: (1) a massive bookish novel, (2) an updated version of the classic “it-narrative” that presents an inanimate object, the book, as its protagonist, and (3) a recent innovative work of born-digital literature. Reading these works together, I hope to show how the novel in the digital age compels us to reconsider what aesthetics, affective modes, and reading practices are made possible by digital methods of production, distribution, and reception. In the process, we also confront how book-based norms shape our expectations of the novel genre and consider how media mediate our experience of literature. 255

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The Big Bookish Novel Some novels have responded to this digital turn by going big, proclaiming their continued importance through the sheer number of their physical pages. Recent work by writers such as William T. Vollmann, Roberto Bolaño, and Karen Tei Yamashita take up space on the shelf and demand that a reader commit to “deep attention” and the physical labor of holding a tome, not a tablet, in an age of “hyperattention.”2 Big novels are, of course, nothing new. From eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sprawling and serialized novels to the heavy hitters of the twentieth-century experimental novel – a lineage that includes Fielding, Melville, Faulkner, and Stein as much as Joyce, Pynchon, Silko, and Wallace – the novel has always taken up space as a material artifact. But, at a time when data and scale are configured on databases and interfaces that don’t seem to possess any heft – when Google Books and the World Wide Web can contain the content of infinite bookshelves within a slick machine whose girth measures little less an inch in width – the physical presence of information becomes an ontological and epistemological subject as well as an aesthetic one. In this moment of big data and the disembodied digital “cloud,” the bigness of the print-based bookbound novel registers particular significance. The contemporary trend toward bigness in novels is both an ironic and expected outcome of the book’s supposed obsolescence due to digital technologies. This paradox is exemplified in my first case study, a literary experiment in bringing back the nineteenth-century serial novel by using digital technologies to produce and market it. No other novel I know quite expresses the commitment to bigness as physical, conceptual, and hubristic ambition as Mark Z. Danielewski’s promise to publish an epic twenty-seven-volume serial narrative wherein each book is itself a massive tome. The first and second increments of this new series came out in 2015 and clocked in at over 800 pages each. New additions are planned at three-month increments for, and I repeat myself, twenty-seven total volumes.3 The Familiar4 employs the benefits of digital publishing technologies to adapt the production, distribution, and reception processes of the early novel for a contemporary digital readership that expects ever more searchable content beyond the text at hand. As The Familiar shows, the big novel mimics information overload in ways that resolutely proclaim that the novel is again made new – and thus remains ever novel. Danielewski is the popular and critically acclaimed author of House of Leaves (2000), a novel that is big in its own right (over 700 pages) and also big in that it seemed to contain within itself anything that could possibly be written about it. His Only Revolutions (2006) was a slimmer volume but also 256

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strives to contain centuries of American history, literature, and paratextual content. The first volume of The Familiar series, A Rainy Day in May, presents its bigness in a different manner than the author’s previous works. Vol. 1: A Rainy Day in May contains a constellation of intersecting characters stretched out across wide geographic space – from LA to Mexico, Singapore to Texas – and a carefully designed page space, constrained within the temporal limits of one rainy day in May. The narrative traces a large group of seemingly disassociated characters spread out across the nodes in what must be (assumes the reader of the first book in this large-scale project) a network. The fulcrum in the sprawling first volume is a smart and deeply feeling young girl, Xanther, who suffers from epilepsy. To fend off impending attacks, she pursues a strategy of taking her mind off of her problems by asking questions. Xanther endlessly asks acute and philosophical questions that often have no simple answers. These are not easy Google searches but complicated research questions. When asked, iteratively, by the novel’s central character, they suggest that this book is a type of database and that the reader is a user of it. Xanther is, to use the language of Google maps, the reader’s little pin; she gets dropped down in specific locales around Los Angeles and grounds us, bringing us back to the traditional kind of narrative we have grown to expect from the novel genre: psychologically deep and character driven. This is in stark contrast to some of the other sections in Vol. I, one of which is narrated by Narcons, which read like artificial intelligence (AI) agents but are self-identified as “narrative constructs” from a galaxy far, far away. Xanther moves around Los Angeles on a long rainy day. She is driven around by her stepfather, a computer programmer who is working on something big in the realm of AI and game design; her mother and sisters shop for the necessary accoutrements for the expensive new dog that is intended to serve as a companion for Xanther to help soothe her anxiety. The novel spirals out around Xanther and her little world into multiple narrative threads, reaching across global and galactic space and, of course, out into potentially real and chronotropic timelines. But that’s just the narrative. It is not just the content that is big and ambitious here. Readers have come to expect Danielewski to push the boundaries of book design and print-based poetics, and The Familiar does not disappoint. A faint, organic-looking gray pattern lines the gutter margins. The markings draw attention toward the innermost parts of the book’s spine and seem to present a visual metonym of an unfinished network that is only half visible and that evolves along with the reader’s progress. The top corners of each page (recto and verso) have brightly colored tips, and each color indexes a particular character’s narrative. The visual detail serves as a navigation tool for this book-based textual 257

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web, allowing readers to use the codex as a random-access memory (RAM) device; a reader can flip to Xanther sections, for example, by following the orange corners. In typical Danielewski fashion, the typographic presentation of printed text on the page is also experimentally ambitious: from the layering on of parentheses into an arsenal and archive of selected fonts that differentiate various narratives within the novel to the concrete visual poems that appear on certain pages (one version depicts rain falling across the page comprised of streams of tiny words). There is more, much more, than I can describe here about how this novel aims for bigness in form, content, and ambition. But all of these practices are employed to showcase how the novel genre remains robust by creatively employing its media. Danielewski exploits the properties and possibilities of the book medium, particularly the book that is designed and printed through innovative digital technologies and practices. It is digital printing technologies that render those glossy, color-tipped pages and their numerous fonts affordable (around $20 US). Though The Familiar engages digital technologies for production and poetics, it also rebels against them or, rather, against the assumptions about the reading practices that they promote. One cannot simply lose oneself in this novel. You cannot quickly consume it. This novel requires “deep attention,” not “hyperattention” (again, see Hayles), and thus seems a throwback to a time before clickable content and endless remixes. As Lydia Millet writes in her review of the novel for the Los Angeles Times, The Familiar “asks its readers to return to a culture where instant gratification is neither offered nor expected.”5 But this ambitious work does not simply reject digital reading practices and expectations. The possibility of making sense of the connections between so many characters over so much space (page space and geographic locations) requires a kind of a reading practice that draws from the digital: pattern recognition based on deciphering visual and semantic clues. We trace the numerous fonts and color-tipped pages to know which narrative we are reading, we apply digital competencies of reading nonlinear texts using hyperlinks, and we accept that an unfinished and potential narrative provides affective and aesthetic enjoyment. We can certainly imagine (and I will bet scholars are already at it) applying digital humanities practices of computational reading – data mining, pattern recognition, and information visualization – to understanding this text. Indeed, this book-bound novel begs digital reading practices. How else can one be expected to make sense of a narrative that sprawls across 22,000 pages? This big, ambitious project promotes book-based reading pleasures and expectations by showcasing how the book-bound novel is distinctly part of the digital information ecology. But The Familiar is not alone in exploiting its 258

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book-bound and bookish materiality to make us remember that literature has always been dependent on media. The It-Narrative Novel My second example of the novel in the digital age stands in direct contrast to the bulk, heft, and ambition of Danielewski’s serialized project. The House of Paper (2005),6 by Argentine writer Carlos María Domínguez (translated by Nick Castor and with fanciful illustrations by Peter Sís), is a lovely little book. This slim volume of only 100 pages contains a short but deceptively complex narrative about the power of books and our fascination with (and fetishization of) them. It is a bibiliophile’s dream and nightmare, for it is a novel about how “books are dangerous,”7 as the narrator’s German grandmother says and undoubtedly knows firsthand. The novel centers on a mysterious book that finds our narrator after its intended recipient is hit by a car. The first sentence informs: as Bluma Lennon “reached the second poem on the first street corner, she was knocked down by a car.”8 The novel quickly ventures to suggest that it is not the car that killed Bluma, a professor of literature, but the book she was reading. In this little novel, books are not just things to read but agents that act on us. “Books change people’s destinies,” the novel states; they prompt us “to become professors of literature in remote universities,” convert to Eastern philosophy, or, as the novel shows, something far worse.9 After Bluma’s death, our narrator takes over her position in the Department of Hispanic Studies at Cambridge University and inherits a package intended for Bluma that is adorned with Uruguayan stamps. The package contains a paperback copy of Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow-Line marked by “a filthy crust on its front and back covers” and “a film of cement particles on the page edges.”10 The strange object haunts the narrator: “no other book has affected me so much as that paperback, whose damp, warped pages seemed to be calling out to me.”11 It is not Conrad’s story that affects the narrator, for he does not attempt to read the novel, let alone open the book; it is the monstrous “book thing” that so “upset the balance of the room” that the narrator feels compelled to travel to South America to seek the story behind this strange artifact and return it to its sender. The book, the novel tells us, “deserved to be returned to whoever had sent it.”12 The object is described as a living thing, a character that acts and “deserves” actions in return. This book object, and not our human narrator, is the central character in The House of Paper, and this fact makes The House of Paper an “it-narrative,” a genre of fiction that turns an inanimate thing into a protagonist and follows that 259

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thing as it moves across space and time, affecting animate and inanimate agents alike. The it-narrative was popular in the eighteenth century but found a new emphasis and social importance in nineteenth-century England. Leah Price writes, “[w]hereas eighteenth-century it-narrative taught readers the rules governing cash and credit in a commercial society,” the it-narratives of the nineteenth century “take on a narrower topic: how one very particular kind of consumer good – books – should be bought, sold, borrowed, disposed of.”13 The nineteenth-century it-narrative trained readers to own books by figuring books as things and commodities that could be used, shared, sold, and gifted. Specifically, as Price explains, nineteenth-century it-narratives redirected awareness of books from things produced to things consumed: “[i]n the process, the novel’s bookishness – its allusions to the material forms that it takes and the social transactions that it occasions – goes from exemplifying the reader’s labor to instancing the buyer’s passivity.”14 In this way, the novel genre served as a form of metafiction and social pedagogy about the emergence of mass-produced books and the new range of middle-class readers who could own them. The nineteenth-century it-narrative thus supported a cultural shift in identifying a book as a medium to understanding it as an artifact and commodity. The copy of The Shadow Line in Dominguez’s novel is truly an “it,” a monstrous thing. It crosses the Atlantic to arrive at Cambridge University and beckons our narrator to travel with it back to his native Argentina, to cross the ocean in order to chase the history of this circulated thing. In Buenos Aires, the narrator learns not the publication history or interpretative meaning of the text contained within this book but the backstory of the artifact itself, the itinerary of its past movements. Here it is: when a brilliant book collector loses himself to his own bibliophilia – when he begins talking to his books and sleeping with “twenty or so books carefully laid out in such a way that they reproduced the mass and outline of a human body” – he then disappears and takes his vast and expensive book collection with him.15 He buys a plot of land by the sea and builds a house made completely out of books. He “turn[s] his books into bricks,” using them solely for their physical and material qualities: “[a]ll he worried about was their size, their thickness, how resistant their covers might be to lime, cement and sand.”16 No longer media for reading, the book objects in his collection are taken out of circulation as commodities in the usual marketplaces, either as books sold to readers or as collectable objects purchased for preservation. Fascinated by the story of this reader-collector-contractor, the narrator journeys to the apocryphal spot and finds that “[t]he books were there, they were still there,” indeed, “in their tomb of sand.”17 The books are depicted as bodies, 260

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not just commodities rejected from the system of use or as fetishized objects that refer to it, but as living, dying, and decomposing beings. The House of Paper is an it-narrative for the digital age. It updates the nineteenth-century version of the it-narrative, which inducted bourgeois buyers/readers into the marketplace of literature, to serve a twenty-firstcentury concern about the fate of books in the digital age. Price sees the itnarrative as something quite different from the traditional bildungsroman, which centers on the psychological development and education of a person, in part, because the it-narrative “reveals what the bildungsroman conceals: the backstory by which books reach their readers.”18 The it-narrative places the object, rather than the human, at the center of relations and actions. “Nothing could be further from the fantasy of the self-made reader,” Price writes, “than the it-narrative’s understanding of books as vectors for human relationships.”19 This understanding of the it-narrative is particularly suited to a contemporary culture in which social networking happens through computer systems and algorithms. The object-oriented paradigm of itnarratives also seems particularly attuned to recent critical movements such as Object-Oriented Ontology and other critiques of anthropocentrism that seek to reconsider the role of inanimate actors in networks of influence.20 The digital age is that of biotechnology, AI, and virtuality, wherein the boundaries between animate and inanimate objects blur and raise questions about what counts as human and what constitutes life. This book-bound novel from 2005 employs the it-narrative to focus attention (even fetishistic attention) on the object most associated with literature’s human-centered genre, the novel. The House of Paper is a homage to the book in the digital age, an age when books seemed threatened by the digital. Though digital technologies do not appear in the pages of this novel, The House of Paper is decidedly about the power and status of the book. The “it” at the center of this it-narrative is a powerful character not because of the content of this paperback novel but because of its presence. No one in this novel actually reads the book in the itnarrative; we are told that Bluma gifted it to the bibliophile collector-turnedhouse-constructor, who then sent it back to Bluma, where it reached our narrator after Bluma’s death – but we are never told that anyone actually reads it. The book is not presented as a medium for reading; it is powerful just by being there. In Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times, Andrew Piper adapts Gertrude Stein’s line “book was there” to point out that physicality and presence are part of the history of books and the experience of reading them.21 Piper writes, “[i]t is this thereness that is both essential for understanding the medium of the book (that books exist as finite objects in the world) and also for reminding us that we cannot think about our 261

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electronic future without contending with its antecedent, the bookish past.”22 This “thereness” is part of the big, bookish presence I am discussing here, which contemporary novelists pursue with acuity. The “thereness” of the particular book in Dominguez’s novel – a book that has survived encrusting cement, traveled across thousands of miles, and has undergone who knows what other challenging circumstances – allegorically represents the survival of the book medium in the digital age. The House of Paper stubbornly asserts the continued “thereness” and “itness” of the book into the digital age. The fact that The House of Paper is one of many recent itnarratives whose central character is a book suggests that the it-narrative is making a resurgence and points to the changing status of the book – as object, metaphor, and commodity – in our contemporary digital moment.23 The Digital Novel The book may survive in the digital age, but it will do so alongside other formats for the novel genre. My third case study is a novel that exploits the affordances of digital technologies for producing, presenting, and distributing a novel. Pry (2015)24 is an app-based novella for digital touch screens. It is “born-digital” electronic literature, meaning that its computational processes are part of its poetics. This is not digitized text; it cannot be printed out or read on a Kindle. You will see what I mean momentarily. Created by the collective known as Tender Claws, which is comprised of Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro, Pry is purchased as an app that you download to your iPad or similar device, but reading this work challenges recently established expectations of e-readers. One does not simply “turn the page” with a swipe of the finger or scroll down the sidebar. Such readerly gestures, which are themselves remediated from the interactions with the codex and prebook interfaces, are discarded by this innovative work, thrown out along with the pixelated bathwater of expectations about digital literature. Reading Pry requires performing its title and central metaphor. You read Pry by using your forefinger and thumb to pry open or pinch closed a virtual window, a space on the surface of the screen. Doing so produces a change onscreen wherein text appears beneath the immediate reading surface (see Figure 14.1). Reading between the lines is literalized as an activity, giving the reader the sense that she is diving deep into the story, which is particularly poetic and ironic because this reading machine (the iPad or tablet) is flat. Unlike a book, the reading medium that inspired depth-based metaphors of reading, the digital tablet is not comprised of physical layers or, of course, paper pages. Reading by prying, or reading as prying, also rhetorically references the 262

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Figure 14.1: Reading by pry-ing open a window in the interface of Tender Claw’s Pry (2015). Image used with permission.

voyeuristic desire at the heart of reading novels. We pry into the lives of others when we read novels, and Pry programs this impulse – and the ultimate ambition of the novel genre – into its navigation system. In Pry, we pry open a portal to someone else’s innermost thoughts, their unconscious. The mind we pry into here is that of a young veteran of the Persian Gulf War who is suffering from posttraumatic stress. It is an uncomfortable place to be, made more so by the novel’s use of multimodal and media storytelling. Pry begins with a cinematic prologue that you watch. The short film is slow moving and mostly wordless. It depicts a young man, our protagonist, in a suburban house preparing to go to war. He carefully packs his duffel bag before joining a driver, presumably his father, in a car that will then take him far away from home. Old home movies are sliced into the slick scene; the scratchy old video depicts a mother standing by her toddler son as he plays with a big ball and a dog at her feet. The prologue then speeds up and shifts to scenes depicting our protagonist at war, wearing military fatigues and relaxing with two peers in a sandy desert. The images from war move increasingly faster, pushing toward visceral discomfort before the chapter ends in darkness. When Chapter 1, “Below and Above,” begins, six years have passed, and we are again in darkness. The film is shot in black and white this time, and it opens with our protagonist lying face up on a hotel bed, staring at the ceiling 263

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with eyes that suggest fiery color and fearful depth. This is James, and as the chapter plays, he does not move, but we readers do. We pry with our fingers to access his thoughts: memories of the desert and a young female solider who seems to flirt, not with James, but with the third soldier. This action seems to upset James. We see all of this as the film plays. Then the screen goes black, and white text appears on it: “Awake, but not fully. What time is it? Check.” A caption in the bottom-right-hand corner informs us to “Spread and hold open to see through James’ eyes.” When we do pry open his eyes, we encounter a surreal vision: a swirl of black smoke or ink spirals and spreads over the white asbestos-encrusted ceiling. This is again replaced by the black screen with white words centered on it: “Right, can’t move.” A new set of captions: “Pinch and hold closed to access James’ subconscious.” When we pinch and hold, we see a montage of images from an optometrist’s office: vision tests and optical instruments that suggest that James, whose subconscious we have invaded, is suffering the onset of blindness and is traumatized by this fact. So here we are, in a hotel room with a young veteran suffering insomnia and flashbacks as well as the onset of blindness. Here we are, left to read by prying and pinching to encounter a novel “below and above” the surface of a character’s liminal consciousness. We readers of this digital novel find ourselves immersed in a work that demands that we engage multiple senses and navigational modes as well as methods of interpretation in order to access and appreciate a novel produced through digital technologies, a novel that is also about the digital age. I will linger on this latter point momentarily to show how Pry is not only distinctly digital in its performance but also diegetically about the impact of digital technologies, videogames in particular, on human (and particularly American) consciousness. Though I have been describing Pry as a novel, it is both a novel and a game. It has been recognized with awards in both genre categories,25 and it clearly blurs the boundaries between them. Pry contains many aspects of game play, including a built-in reward system that bestows glittering reddish diamonds when certain content is accessed. In addition to this reward system for reading, the novel’s appendix (titled “Album”) is a veritable “Easter egg” (to use the language of games), which changes and divulges different content based on how many of the chapters the reader completes. These reward-system completion strategies come to the novel from the world of games. In Pry, gaming is reading, and reading a novel is a game. Pry not only imitates an aesthetic of game play, but it also suggests how deeply videogames impact American consciousness, particularly when it comes to war. The novel depicts James playing war games on his Gameboy during downtimes in Desert Storm. Videogames are part of his wartime experience and his coping mechanism for fighting actual war. Pry juxtaposes 264

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images of James’ Gameboy, with its chartreuse green and black screen, to the CNN video footage of the Persian Gulf War that streamed into the living rooms of American families during the conflict. The iconic images of Baghdad at night are now part of American history and consciousness: flickering green lights against a black sky, an abstracted city at night, before bright flashes punctuate the darkness and show bombs dropped by American forces that appear like fireworks in the sky. The Persian Gulf War has been called the “videogame war” because media coverage of the war employed new satellite technology to broadcast “live” the bombing operations of Operation Desert Storm and because the war inspired many actual videogames. Pry shows a feedback loop between the aesthetic of the real, live footage from the war and the interface aesthetics of early videogames.26 This blurring of real and virtual war games in the early 1990s is part of the foundational history of contemporary American involvement in the Middle East and the history of our relationship with games. It is also a central source of conflict for Pry’s disturbed protagonist. Pry is a war novel that uses digital technologies to explore the relationship between videogames and war. Since we read this novel by playing it, using our thumb and index finger to navigate the threatening terrain of a young man’s mind, Pry also prompts us to consider the moral implications of the desires that compel the reading (and playing) of novels and games. Approaching Pry as a war novel illuminates the fact that though there is much new and novel about this work, particularly how we read it, there is also much that is quite familiar. Pry returns to rather traditional topoi of the novel genre: unrequited love, loss, and betrayal. More specifically, Pry explores the trauma of a mother’s abandonment (that central psychoanalytic plot device), the desire to rewind time so as to halt death and stave off survivor guilt, and the acute awareness that human memory is prone to mutation and loss. The work also uses digital technologies to update that narrative mode made famous by modernist novels: stream of consciousness. Pry employs multimedia to present human consciousness as multimodal and to stream it at paces that, unlike print literature, often exceed the comprehension of a reader’s cognition. The changes can be challenging, and the challenge is part of the point. We need to learn to navigate, play, and read this novel and literature like it. Pry pries open our eyes to confront our book-based assumptions about novels and how we read them. When we do open our eyes, we can see and appreciate how this novel participates in and updates literary tradition and the novel genre in particular. Pry propels readers to renew their understanding of what a novel is, what it can do, and how we read it. 265

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Conclusion Though the three works examined in this chapter are each quite different – in size, style, and the types of reading practices they elicit – they are each exemplary of the novel in the digital age. Collectively, they show that the contemporary novel is attentive to its status and purpose as well as its materiality. If one thing unites these works, it is their focus on literature’s media. The Familiar glorifies its bulk and exploits the physical materiality of the book medium; The House of Paper tells a metareflexive it-narrative about the power and endurance of books; and Pry employs digital technologies to update ways of reading even as it satisfies traditional desires for the novel genre. Taken together, these contemporary novels turn our attention to the media-specific aspects of the novel genre, present and past. In our introduction to Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era, N. Katherine Hayles and I write: “[a]s the era of print is passing, it is possible once again to see print in a comparative context with other textual media.”27 The novels I examined here all demonstrate this point. In their formal aesthetics, narrative content, and medial platforms, these works prompt consideration of how the novel genre, and literary studies more broadly, is not just about form and content but also about format and artifact. With stories that are not limited to linguistic and textual signifiers and platforms that are not limited to books, these works make materiality hard to ignore and thus invite us to read them with a focus on media and format. As these case studies show, the contemporary novel operates in a complex medial ecology that informs all aspects of the literary experience. Recognizing the inseparable relationship between literature and media prompts us to consider the longer history of the novel via this so-called digital turn and also to recognize, as the novel in the digital age demonstrates, literary studies as media studies. NO TES 1. Consider important work by Jerome McGann, from Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism, Princeton University Press, 1993, to The Textual Condition, Princeton University Press, 1991, and also, particularly on the use of books, Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian England, Princeton University Press, 2012. 2. N. Katherine Hayles, “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes,” in Profession (2007), pp.187–99. 3. On February 2, 2018, Mark Z. Danielewski posted to his Facebook page that The Familiar series would pause at volume 6. 4. Mark Z. Danielewski, The Familiar: A Rainy Day in May, Random House, 2015.

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The Novel in the Digital Age 5. Lydia Millet, “Review: Mark Z. Danielewski’s ‘Familiar’ a Monument to Semantic Encryption,” Los Angeles Times, May 7, 2015, available at www .latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-mark-danielewski-20150510-story.html. 6. Carlos María Domínguez, The House of Paper, trans. Nick Castor, Harcourt, 2005. 7. Ibid., p. 2. 8. Ibid., p. 1. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., p. 6. 11. Ibid., p. 8. 12. Ibid., p. 9. 13. Price, How to Do Things with Books, p. 110. 14. Ibid. 15. Domínguez, The House of Paper, p. 54. 16. Ibid., p. 70. 17. Ibid., p. 84. 18. Ibid., p. 124. 19. Ibid. 20. On object-oriented ontology, see Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures, Zero Books, 2010; for a different approach to critiquing anthropocentric thinking, see Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, Oxford University Press, 2005. 21. Andrew Piper, Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times, University of Chicago Press, 2012. 22. Ibid., p. ix. 23. The House of Paper is not alone in adapting the it-narrative for the contemporary age. I have written elsewhere (see Jessica Pressman, “Whither American Fiction?,” in Cambridge Companion to American Fiction after 1945, ed. John Duvall, Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 256–64) about Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows’ The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2008) as an it-narrative. There are others, too. Consider Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love, Stéphane Audeguy’s A Theory of Clouds, Geraldine Brooks’ People of the Book, and even Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, which, if not outright it-narratives, are pretty close and are all published since 2000. 24. Tender Claws, Pry, 2015, app for iPhone/iPad. 25. Such genre-bending awards include a finalist for Independent Games Festival Award in “Excellence in Narrative,” a finalist from Future of Storytelling, “Apple’s Top 25 iPhone Apps” in 2015, and the Robert Coover Award for Best Creative Work of Electronic Literature from the Electronic Literature Organization (2015). 26. For more on the war as simulacra, see Jean Baudrillard’s infamous La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (The Gulf War Did Not Take Place) (1991). 27. N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman, Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era, University of Minnesota Press, 2013, p. vii.

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15 J OS EP H K E ITH

The Novel as Planetary Form

In his 1973 work The Country and the City, Raymond Williams famously described novels as “largely knowable communities.”1 Williams was primarily looking backward to the nineteenth-century British novel in his depiction: to the rural estates of Jane Austen’s countryside, the webbed networks of Dickens’ London, and the intimate towns of George Eliot. Literary geographies, to mangle a well-worn expression, sure have changed. Today, some forty-five years later, many of the most pressing questions about the novel have to do with its relationship with what we might call unknowable communities. Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, amid ever-expanding and accelerating economic, technological, and individual movements across the world, a growing imperative has taken shape to rethink the literary history and future of the novel within far different and far vaster geographic frames of understanding: the transnational, the postnational, the cosmopolitan, the global, the worldly, or – the subject of this chapter – the planetary. Taken together, what each of these global analytics shares is a common – one might even say commonplace at this point – assumption that the nation is no longer an adequate container for the understanding of the novel (as it is not for so much of our current cultural, political, social, and economic life). That is, the global movements of transnational capital and migratory labor have been responsible for the deterritorialization or, in the words of Wai Chee Dimock, the “diminished sovereignty”2 of the nation-state, which has, in turn, disrupted the national or nationalist paradigms through which the sociology and generic history of the novel have so often and for so long been interpreted. One need think only of Benedict Anderson’s resonant thesis about the novel’s central role in fashioning “imagined communities” or Ian Watt’s and Michael McKeon’s classic statements on the novel’s eighteenthcentury emergence in conjunction with that of print culture, realism, and the middle class to appreciate how closely linked the “rise of the novel” has been to that of the nation-state.3 But the more recent global turn of literary studies has led to a shift in interpretive attention away from explanations of how the 268

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novel functions in relation to national culture and instead to efforts at reconceptualizing the novel on other cartographic, geographic, and historical scales of analysis that move us beyond the nation and national categories. What other literary landscapes should be employed? What would the novel look like when traced through these redrawn and realigned schemas? What new ways of thinking do these frames enable – and/or perhaps disable – about the novel: about its classification, its interpretation, its representational potential and limits, its literary history, and its literary future. In one sense, these efforts to move beyond the nation might be considered nothing new. As early as 1827, Goethe was beckoning the “age of world literature,” and in 1848, Marx and Engels saw a world literature emerging “from the many national and local literatures.” But what is new is an increasing recognition of our global interconnections in political, economic, technological, and ecological life, which has created a profound imperative to think in terms of worldly systems or planetary scales. Efforts to model forms of understanding and imagination commensurate with and perhaps counter to the rapid changes and risks being wrought by these global processes have become a central concern in literary, cultural, and social theory. There is an increasing imperative to think the planet because increasingly it seems the planet is at stake. But how does one take a planetary approach to the novel? Or think the novel as a planetary form? Or its planetary history? Just on a practical level, this would seem to pose real logistical difficulties. It is hard enough to become literate in a small selection of works within a national tradition, but how can one read the planet’s literature? Franco Moretti has observed how daunting this prospect is: “we are talking of hundreds of languages and literatures here. Reading ‘more’ seems hardly to be the solution.”4 Instead, Moretti, as have several other critics, including Gayatri Spivak, Susan Stanford Friedman, Wai Chee Dimock, Pascale Casanova, Christian Moraru, Ursula Heise, and others, has advanced various new methodologies of reading and/ or of literary history as coextensive with their turn to the planetary.5 These various efforts bear witness, in other words, to how the scale of the planetary (or world or globe) does not just enlarge the geographic and historical frame for our study and understanding of the novel (i.e., what or how much we read), but it also changes the perceptual field (i.e., how we read). Franco Moretti, for instance, has developed the notion of “distant reading” (in opposition to the better-known “close reading”): a form of “sociological formalism” or systematic analysis based on the models of Fernand Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Pierre Bourdieu. Briefly put, “distant reading” is a model for understanding literature not by studying particular texts but by aggregating and analyzing large-scale data. Quantitative data 269

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are collected and used to map what Moretti terms the laws of “literary evolution,” which can ostensibly account for the circulation, continuity, and change of literary forms over vast historical periods and space, providing a truly planetary or world approach to the genre of the novel. Gayatri Spivak has called for a supplementation of comparative literature with area studies; Susan Stanford Friedman has appealed for greater collaboration and a redivision of critical labor across different axes of analysis: revision, recovery, circulation, and collage; David Damrosch has put forth a circulatory model; and Ursula Heise has sought to reposition literature and the novel within “global risk analysis.” All in all, what is important to emphasize from these various examples is that thinking broader scales – specifically, thinking beyond the nation to the planetary – is not just an additive enterprise; it entails, more significantly, different methodologies, epistemologies, and politics of reading and thinking the novel and its literary history and future. But what exactly is the planet? Or at least what is the planet that the planetary calls forth? Is it the same as thinking the novel and the world or the novel and the globe or globalization? Do they all represent, as it were, the same “worldly” scale? This is a slightly leading question perhaps, but the answer is no. Indeed, one way to catch hold of the “planetary” is to think it precisely in distinction or even opposition to the globe or globalization. Granted, the “planetary” has been defined in various, and at times elusive and still evolving, ways. Indeed, this very undecidablility has proven to be one of the term’s conceptual allures, that is, a term not fully definable by the meanings provided by the current world and thus gesturing toward a world still waiting to be born. But however deferred or not yet adequate its meaning may be, the “planetary,” as an analytical term, represents an effort to think the world beyond, or “otherwise,” or in resistance to the historical processes and discourses of globalization. In the words of Gayatri Spivak, whose work has established a founding theorization of the term, “I propose the planet to overwrite the globe.”6 Planetary Comparisons Globalization has been a central discourse within the social sciences and humanities for at least the past three decades, and it has elicited its own array of analyses and, at times, competing periodizations. There are the modern world systems theorists, for instance, such as Immanuel Wallerstein and Ferdinand Braudel, or figures such as David Harvey and Leslie Sklair, who understand it as the most recent form of the longue durée of capitalist economic expansion. There is the work of Anthony Giddens and other 270

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sociologists for whom it is the result of processes of modernization unfolding over the past two centuries. There are still others, such as Ulrich Beck, who cast it as a more recent break into a different kind of modernity. But while acknowledging the many differences between these theories and methods (and this is not the place to fully map out the various positions), they nonetheless share certain underlying claims that have come to establish what we might consider a mainstream discourse of globalization. Namely, globalization is understood as centrally an economic and geopolitical phenomenon that describes the evolution of the modern as the gradual material, technological, and social incorporation of the world into a single (or sometimes multiple) interconnected and bounded frame. More specifically, or more pointedly, globalization defines a process in which the world has come increasingly to be organized around a single economic system that homogenizes spatial and temporal structures while simultaneously creating inequities in capital and power, especially across the axis of the global north and south. In Gayatri Spivak’s succinct definition, globalization is “the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere.”7 The “planetary” projects a different world. It is one at odds with the “globe” of globalization, though it is not its complete antinomy. Rather, the “planetary” emerges during and out of the same historical period as globalization but responds to the increasing interconnections of cultures and societies across the world in much different, often countervailing aesthetic, political, and epistemic terms. The planetary represents, at once, an effort to imagine or understand the “planet” as a shared ecology or global environment that is not reducible – or should be made resistant – to the economic and geopolitical mappings and rationalizations of globalization: to think of the living planet, as it were, for the sake of the Earth. As Susan Stanford Friedman writes, “I use the terms planetary and planetarity in an epistemological sense to imply a consciousness of the earth as planet, not restricted to geopolitical formations and potentially encompassing the non-human as well as human.”8 At the same time, or rather often in conjunction with this ecological understanding (to which I return later), the analytic of the “planetary” challenges the homogenizing historical and discursive pressures and logics of globalization by centering instead on a methodology and ethic of relationality – of thinking and reading comparatively as an alternative mode of address and potential redress to the global processes and networks that have increasingly put us in relation to others around the world. It is a methodology, in other words, that both recognizes and hinges on principles of difference, which, in turn, establishes an ethicopolitical framework through which to think the terms of our worldly interconnections and 271

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interdependencies other than the unitary logic of the globe. To paraphrase Christian Moraru’s distinction, if globalization integrates the world into the circuits of capital through the mechanism of financial debt, the planetary privileges a relational ethos of cultural debt, one that “worlds” us by making visible our physical and nonphysical “proximity,” our “cross-cultural, crossgeographical, indeed, world-scale contacts, juxtapositions, borrowings, and barterings.” “Whatever I am or become,” he summarizes, “comes about under the impact of remote, heterogeneous sources, places, and styles.”9 To put it in terms of the novel, with the increasing deterritorialization of the nation-state, the planetary calls on us to read and think the novel and its literary history – not as part of a “one and unequal” globalizing world system, nor as a self-sufficient expression of an autonomous national tradition – but rather in its worldly relation to others.10 That is, the planetary asks us to question territorial jurisdictions and instead think of the novel and its literary history comparatively – through its interconnectedness, interdependence, and indebtedness to other continents, other peoples, other histories, and other, often distant locales. This comparative ethos is very much at the heart of Gayatri Spivak’s invocation of planetarity in, among other places, her 2003 work Death of a Discipline. (The book was written in the context of heated debates, as the title implies, about the future of the discipline of comparative literature amid growing pressures that the field, and humanities education more broadly, conforms to a model of free-market utilitarianism.) As a direct counter to what she deems the totalizing horizon of the global, the planetary is a mode of thinking and reading committed to the principle of universal alterity and that centers and sustains an ethics of difference. Spivak is careful to underscore that “planetarity” is not to be mistaken for a liberal environmental exhortation – the “saving of the planet,” as it were, which can run the risk of reestablishing or realigning with a certain “global” or globalizing subject position and methodology. Rather, “planetarity” is meant to evoke a relationality of being toward others, which, as she states, is the very condition of our humanity. “To be human,” she writes, “is to be intended toward the other.”11 It is a relationality characterized by a structure of alterity, that is, by an irreducible, or unassimilable, or unknowable otherness, which when understood and embraced (via a certain comparative thinking and reading) can foster an ethical stance of humility and can defamiliarize – make unheimlich in Freud’s term – our place, our “home,” in the world. It is from this defamiliarizing or “unhomely” recognition of a constitutive otherness and the ethics of responsibility that this relationship animates – as opposed to the universalizing standpoint of the global – that we might, Spivak argues, “imagine ourselves as planetary subjects rather than 272

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global agents, planetary creatures rather than global entities, alterity remains underived from us; it is not our dialectical negation, it contains us as much as it flings us away.”12 “We must,” she concludes, “persistently educate ourselves into this particular mindset.”13 Spivak brings this “particular mindset” of “planet-thought” to bear on readings of several literary works – readings that not only elaborate “planetarity” but also its relationship to the form of the novel in particular. Mahasweta Devi’s “Pterodactyl,” to take one brief example (a novella that Spivak translated from Bengali), tells the story of Puran, an advocacy journalist who visits a remote aboriginal or tribal village, Pirtha, in eastern India that has been gripped by famine.14 Through his reporting, Puran hopes to raise awareness about what is happening so that the government might bring aid and relief to the villagers. Prior to his arrival, however, a tribal boy named Bikhia has drawn a pterodactyl on the wall of a cave, a drawing that takes on a life of its own in the consciousness of the village community, heralding the return of their ancestral soul that has been traumatized by contemporary events of starvation, water pollution, and poverty. But, for Puran, the appearance of this prehistoric creature in an outpost of modern-day India poses a political and ethical challenge to him and his method of advocacy, because he has no way to decipher it nor understand its “message.” The pterodactyl comes to represent, in this regard, the sign of the unrepresentable way in which the indigenous community understands its own history, its own relationship to the land, and its own uncertain future. It is, as such, a figure of radical alterity, a planetary figure that defamiliarizes – makes “uncanny” – the “imaginary map” of the “entire legal collectivity of the Indian nation,” by opening it to the incommunicable or illegible “historical other” of its prehistory – indeed to that which is even “prior to our thinking of continents.”15 Writes Spivak, “[t]he pterodactyl is not only the ungraspable other but also the ghost of the ancestors that haunts our present and our future. We must learn love (a simple name for ethical responsibility-insingularity) in view of the impossibility of communication.”16 Spivak reads a similar planetarity in Toni Morrison’s figuration of weather in Beloved. In the relationship between the mother and daughter, Spivak argues, the novel stages the untranslatablity of the transmission of the story or history of slavery. She quotes from the novel: “What Nan . . . told her she had forgotten, along with the language she told it in. The same language her ma’am spoke, and which would never come back. But the message that was – that was and had been there all along.”17 The message is thus one of a “withholding,” a marking of a language forgotten, which “would never come back.” Quoting again the novel: “By and by, all traces gone. And what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water and what is down there. 273

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The rest is weather. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for but wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather.”18 Signaling the effacement of “all traces,” weather here serves to delimit a history that cannot be transmitted, that cannot be rendered or accounted for. Thus, just as the “pterodactyl” represents a figure of planetarity in remapping or unmapping the modern Indian nation across the incommunicable histories and knowledges of an Aboriginal alterity, so Morrison uses “weather” as a figure of an equally planetary alterity to remap or unmap African America across the incommunicable histories and language of Africa and slavery. In both cases, furthermore, these figures of planetarity – marking histories and relationalities of radical otherness – produce or require different scales of temporality – planetary temporalities, we might say – that draw us far beyond and outside nation-time to that which, again, is “prior to our thinking of continents” – to the prehistoric and to the geologic. In this context, the relationship between the novel and the planetary is not about the novel representing the planet as a conceptual, social, or economic whole (which is a never-to-be-reached horizon) but rather that the metaphoric tendencies of the novel (and the literary mode more broadly) becomes a crucial medium for developing habits of reading that can “train the imagination to think the other,” which might enable us to reimagine the planet in ways that foster an ethics of collective responsibility, which is ever more needed in the context of and in opposition to our increasingly rationalized globalized world. Spivak’s notion of planetarity is also closely tied to the practice and politics of translation. After all, what is translation if not the enactment of precisely a relationality between self/other – between one’s own and an other’s words – that bears or marks the inevitable trace of what remains different, other, or irreducible – the indecipherable echoes of other places and voices. Here Spivak’s thinking aligns in important respects with Emily Apter’s notion of “untranslatablity” as a model for a literary “world system,” and both of which can be read as alternatives and explicit challenges to the globalizing and monolingual tendencies of “world literature” – for example, in the world-systems projects of Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova, for whom English becomes the universal solvent of comparison.19 (“[T]he Untranslatable,” writes Apter, is “a deflationary gesture toward the expansionism and gargantuan scale of world literary endeavors.”20) For Spivak, planetarity – as does Apter’s model of untranslatability – calls instead for an engagement with literatures in indigenous languages. Indeed, deep learning of ostensibly “marginal” languages represents the effort necessary to establish an ethics of alterity – an effort that recognizes a plurality of worlds, in particular, the worlds of often-neglected others. Thus Apter remarks that 274

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“planetarity would purge ‘global’ of its capitalist sublime . . . rendering it accountable to disempowered subjects.”21 In the end, if the planet is a multiplicity of worlds, then it is heterogeneity rather than homogeneity, relativity rather than singularity, that comprises it. And it is in this way that the planetary tells an other story, or stories, to the one of globalization. Space and Time If the planetary expands the geographic scale of our understanding and reading of the novel, it is also an analytic that challenges us to extend the temporal scale of how we think the novel and its history as well. Or rather, it asks us to consider how the two scales are intimately linked, how, for instance, expanding the temporal frame of our literary periodization leads – perhaps inevitably – to a broader spatial understanding as well, something captured in the very title of Wai Chee Dimock’s book Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time – through other spaces, through other times. More concretely, in serving as the conceptual frame within which the novel (and literature more generally) was, and still often is, situated, the nation not only conceptually assigns the novel to its territorial borders, but it also ties it to its histories and temporalities as well (e.g., the nineteenth-century American novel, the British modernist novel). To think the chronology of the planet, however, is to entertain far broader histories within which we might understand and periodize the novel and much different temporalities than what Benedict Anderson famously described as the “homogeneous, empty time” of the nation.22 The planetary operates through different temporalities, including geologic and prehistoric time, which prefigure and thus destabilize and decenter the nation (as well as the West and the human ultimately) as an organizing rubric, opening the novel instead to much wider-ranging temporal and spatial sets of relations and influences. This planetary remapping of literary temporality and, in turn, geography is very much at the heart of Wai Chee Dimock’s formative thesis of “deep time” that she develops in Through Other Continents. “Deep time,” for Dimock, depicts a temporal scale, a longue dureé, that far predates and postdates the relatively short chronology of the “American” nation. “[R]ather than taking our measure of time from the stipulated beginning of a territorial regime – I propose a more extended . . . duration to rethink the scope of American literature. This produces a map that . . . must depart significantly from a map based on the short life of the United States. It takes us to a time when this nation was nowhere in sight, though the world was already fully in existence.”23 Indeed, Dimmock sets out to rethink “American” literature 275

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and the novel against nothing less than the deep time of planet Earth itself, against the “history of and habitat of the human species,” mobilizing temporal scales, not of the nation, but of geology and cosmology that stretch back thousands, millions, and even billions of light-years into the past. Deep time thus deterritorializes and denationalizes the novel (and literature more generally), replacing it within a much longer and broader set of temporal and, in turn, spatial coordinates, which animate its global “indebtedness” – to invoke that phrase again – its interconnections and entanglements with, or “through,” other continents, other cultures, other languages, and other millennia. Thoreau, for instance, is rerouted through the Bhagavad Gita and “three continents,” Emerson is looped through Sanskrit and Ancient Egypt, E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime is relocated to Germany as a response to Heinrich von Kleist, and a long-distance “kinship” is established between Henry James’ novel The Golden Bowl and the epic of Gilgamesh. In the end, these cross-territorial, cross-cultural, and cross-linguistic readings animate pathways, networks, and forms of attachment that bind the novel and US culture – and any national culture for that matter – to the cumulative archive of the planet and that deconstruct the taxonomic divide between novel and epic, east and west, and ancient and modern. In her call for a “planetary modernism,” Susan Stanford Friedman makes a similar appeal for a dramatically extended temporal and, correspondingly, geographic scale for the study of literature, specifically for the study of modernism. For Friedman, extending the periodization of modernism as far back as human history itself serves, first and foremost, to liberate the field from its enduring Eurocentric orientation. That is, even if our understanding of modernism and the modernist novel is expanded geographically beyond the European and North American canon (e.g., of Joyce, Proust, Woolf, Faulkner, etc.) to include the literatures of a “global modernism” (in particular, the novels of the global south), if it remains bound to the periodizing frame of the early twentieth century, it is still inevitably Eurocentric because it reproduces a logic of modernity as a singular narrative whose origins are grounded in European and Eurocentric history. Indeed, even if we were to go back to the Enlightenment or, even further, to Columbus’ arrival in the Americas, we remain tied to a European frame. The same holds true for various emergent paradigms such as “alternative” or “minor” modernities in that their coherence is contingent on the acceptance of a primary or major (Euro-American) modernity. “Generalizations about historical periods,” she declares, “typically contain covert assumptions about space that privilege one location over others.”24 Time and space again. In turn, only an approach that takes the longue durée of the planet itself in its temporal approach – and does away with any and all periodizations – can be sufficiently planetary in 276

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its geocultural approach and avoid reinforcing “the ideological construction of ‘the West’ . . . as the defining center of World history.”25 Thus Friedman calls for a reconceptualization of modernisms and modernities that might be found anywhere on the planet and at any time in history during which a “powerful vortex of geohistorical conditions” has coalesced “to produce sharp ruptures from the past.”26 This means finding modernities not only after the rise of the West but also before the West’s period of rapid change, during the Tang Dynasty (618–907 ce ), for instance, or during the Abbasid Dynasty of the Muslim Empire (ad 750–1250), or the Mongol Empire (a d thirteenth–fourteenth century), all the way up into the twenty-first century and, one imagines, beyond. Friedman’s planetary approach enacts a profound decentering and transhistoricization of “modernism” and the “modernist” novel across a polycentric landscape. That is, the formal experimentations of the latenineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European and North American modernist novel (stream of consciousness, fragmentation, multiple perspectives, etc.) do not encapsulate the aesthetic strategies of modernism, nor are they expressive of a singular (or alternative) modernity. Instead, they are expressive dimensions of a modernity – one set among numerous expressive responses to various modernities – or radical historical ruptures – that have occurred across the geohistory of the planet. So how, finally, might the deep time of the planetary lead us to rethink, specifically, the novel and its history? What ultimately emerges from the planetary is a literary geography that expands the database for reading the novel beyond the ostensibly restrictive national(ist) and/or European temporal and geographic frame to that of the planet itself and which, in turn, articulates a comparative approach that centers the intricate interdependencies of an individual novel, or novelistic tradition, or the novel – between the near and there, the self and other, and the often distant then and now, which constitutes its full duration and extension as a planetary phenomenon. But if this is what is gained, what might be lost? Certainly, stepping back, as it were, to revision the literary terrain from afar enables one to see new and broader connections – networks, exchanges, trails of influence, and so on. But in zooming out to the scale of the planet do we also run the risk of losing focus on other things? Are we in danger, for instance, of losing what thick descriptions of one time and place can reveal (precisely the types of descriptions, as Raymond Williams was suggesting, to which the novel is so attuned)? Or do we run the risk of losing a certain sustained attention on the novel itself? The age of world literature has long seemed the age of the novel. This is what enables Franco Moretti, as Jonathan Arac points out, to turn his “Conjectures on World Literature,” “into a case study of the novel, 277

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and it is what makes his massive edited project, Il Romanzo/The Novel, the outstanding example to date of new literary history in a global age.”27 But what about the novel in the age of planetary literature – a conceptual frame that stretches back millennia into the deep time of the ancient and even geologic? On the one hand, this much broader canvas enables critics such as Dimock to generatively trace the novel’s “rise” far earlier than the eighteenth century to premodern and non-Western literature and to understand the novel, in turn, as a genre that not only expresses the heteroglossia of the modern world but also unsettles the permeable boundaries between modernity and antiquity. But, on the other hand, in taking up the planet itself as its literary schema, the planetary does seem potentially to diminish the centrality of the novel in the history of literature because the novel must inevitably take its place among an array of forms and genres (plays, scriptures, pamphlets, epistolary, poetry, etc.) that have arisen, circulated, and faded across the deep time of the planet’s long and deep geohistorical past. And what, finally, of the novel’s planetary future? That is, what might the planetary say not only about the novel’s relationship to the deep time of the planet’s past but also about its deep and increasingly dark future? Planet Earth This bring us, finally, to the biggest elephant in the global room: the environment. The “planetary turn” has been, in various and variegated ways, inspired and ethically informed by a growing awareness and concern with ecological crises – most notably rapid climate change and the Anthropocene – which are planetary in their scale and threat and which require, in turn, an ability to think the “big picture” in response. In its evocation of the Earth in “deep time” and in its capacity to include both the human and nonhuman worlds, the “planet” has proved a generative and grounding alternative conceptual term to both globalization and cosmopolitanism. It conjures the Earth as a threatened home of nature and biodiversity. In 2001, for instance, Masao Miyoshi declared that “for the first time in human history, one single commonality involves all those living on the planet: environmental deterioration as a result of the human consumption of natural resources.”28 This “total commonality” leads him to conclude that “[l]iterature and literary studies have one basis and goal: to nurture our common bonds to the planet – to replace the imaginaries of exclusionary familialism, communitarianism, nationhood, ethnic culture, regionalism, ‘globalization,’ or even humanism, with the ideal of planetarism.”29 Subsequent critics have nuanced Miyoshi’s totalizing communal portrait by 278

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stressing, in the words of Rob Nixon, how “the biocidal assault of human life is unevenly universal.”30 But Miyoshi’s ecological appeal to the planetary has remained a vital and growing concern within literary studies (as it has across an increasingly wide range of disciplines). This has become especially true in the context of the emergence of the concept of the Anthropocene, which, Dipesh Chakrabarty has formatively argued, signals our arrival at a “planetary conjuncture” – that is, a moment when humanity has emerged as a geologic agent (having rendered the end of the planet a real possibility), which has undermined the distinction between human and natural history (or “deep time”) – a hypothesis whose implications have unsettled the very idea of what it means to be human.31 As numerous critics have noted, climate change and the Anthropocene pose not only political, social, and philosophical crises but also representational crises.32 How do we render, on the one hand, the enormous spatial scale of the phenomenon, namely, that of the planet itself and its biodiversity? And what are the possibilities and pressures of recasting the human across the temporal scale of the geologic? How can we think or imagine across such a vastly expanded stage of deep time? (And here “deep time” refers not to a methodology of reading literary history but as a mode of novelistic representation.) Rob Nixon, for one, has theorized the concept of “slow violence,” in distinction to the more readable forms of spectacular violence (e.g., 9/11), to capture the representational dilemmas that environmental threats pose, albeit unequally, to the planet.33 This brings us back to the novel. What has it, or might it have, to say, as a genre, about any of this? Is it up to the representational challenges posed by these problems of massive scale? Might the novel be better suited “to watching society at street level,” as Bruce Robbins has pondered. “Most novels,” he writes, “do not train our eye to look very high or very low, or for that matter very far away.”34 Wai Chee Dimock has suggested that the visual might in fact be a better medium to take up the size of the current representational challenge of climate change. We might also consider Alex Woloch’s argument about character in the novel, namely, that there exists a formal and, correspondingly, political tension within the novel between a desire to tell the story of multiple characters (“the many”) and an inevitable turn to an attention to a few or a single protagonist (“the one”).35 What happens, then, when that “many” becomes nothing less than the planet itself? These questions about the novel and the crisis of scale have been raised, from a slightly different angle, by Raymond Williams, among others, in an appeal he made some ten years after The Country and City. There is a need, he wrote in 1983, for more novels that attend to the “close living substance” of the local while simultaneously tracing the “occluded relationship” – the 279

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vast transnational economic networks and webs of interconnectedness – that invisibly shape the local.36 Williams’ demand has become only more resonant within our ever-expanding and accelerating era of economic globalization; it is also, relatedly, evocative of the ecological imperative of the planetary turn. That is, rather than focusing on the recuperation of a sense of place, environmentalism, as Ursula Heise argues, now needs a “sense of planet” in light of the fact that the “average daily life, in the context of globality, is shaped by structures, processes, and products that originate elsewhere.”37 We certainly might see, as numerous critics have, the development within recent novels of various innovative and often hybrid formal techniques, the employment of new modes of modernist and postmodernist narrative strategies from around the world, and the emergence and ascendance of different genres such as speculative fiction, an effort to respond to the imaginative and representational challenge of developing a “sense of planet.” In her novel Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, for example, Karen Tei Yamashita integrates magical realism, stream of consciousness, juxtapositions of different discourses and languages, the introduction of mythic characters, and other techniques to render the webs of interconnection linking the local ecological and cultural systems of the Amazon jungle to larger global ones.38 In his monumental Ibis trilogy, Amitav Ghosh employs “entrelacement” – the interlacing of several simultaneous stories into one larger one – as a means of interweaving individual or local narratives into the vast networks of empire, colonialism, and ecological imperialism occurring on a planetary scale.39 Or there is Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel The Windup Girl – to choose but one from a growing number of ecological dystopian novels – that portrays a twenty-third-century Bangkok flooded by rising world sea levels – a speculative fiction that portrays the planet quite literally and tragically collapsing into the local.40 These are, of course, only a few brief examples, but they point to a much larger trend of recent novels that have fashioned narrative and formal efforts to animate or represent the occluded relationships linking “close living substance” to the planet. But finally, we might ask, whether the “problem” of scale that the planetary poses is genuinely a new one for the novel? How distinct is it, after all, from the questions Williams asked of the novel thirty-five years ago? And what about novels themselves? Might we not read, say, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – and its formal innovations – as a much earlier effort to address what is ostensibly a contemporary problem of scale? Marlow begins his tale within a tale on the river Thames by declaring, “And this also . . . has been one of the dark places of the Earth.”41 He is, of course, referring not to Africa here but to London. It is an orienting or disorienting gesture that 280

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suggests how Marlow – and the novel – are not only attempting to map the far-away imperial space of Africa into the metropolitan heart of London but are also, at the same time, remapping London backwards across the “deep time” of the ancient Roman Empire. Is this not a profoundly planetary turn? Thus, in the end, as we look forward into the future of the planet and the planetary – to contemplate what that might mean for the future of the novel – it might also be instructive to turn our attention backward, to consider whether the novel has not already, perhaps all along, been thinking the planet. Indeed, we might conclude by looking all the way back to what many scholars consider the very first novel, The Ethiopian Romance, by Heliodorus of Emesa from the third century a d .42 It is a tale of farflung adventure and romance, which likewise employs innovative formal aesthetic strategies – such as the interlacing of multiple narratives and voices and a structure of stories within stories – in order to represent the geographic and epistemic limits of human experience and what is knowable – to tackle, as it were, the problem of scale. Its example suggests, finally, that while the planetary poses vitally new representational – and ethical – challenges for the novel for us to consider, we might also consider the possibility that the novel, from its very inception, has always had a “sense of the planet.” N O T ES 1. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, Oxford University Press, 1975, p. 165. 2. Wai Chee Dimock, “Scales of Aggregation: Prenational, Subnational, Transnational,” American Literary History, vol. 18, no. 2, 2006, p. 219. 3. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, 1983; Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, University of California Press, 1957; and Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. 4. Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review, vol. 1, January–February 2000, p. 56. 5. For formative literary models of the planetary, see Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time, Princeton University Press, 2006, as well as her article “Literature for the Planet,” PMLA, vol. 116, no. 1, 2001, pp. 173–88; Mary Lou Emery, “Caribbean Modernism: Plantation to Planetary,” in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough, Oxford University Press, 2012; Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time, Columbia University Press, 2015; Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, Columbia University Press, 2005; Ursula Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global, Oxford University Press, 2008; Christian Moraru, Reading for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology, University of Michigan Press, 2015; Christian Moraru and Amy J. Elias, eds., The Planetary 281

joseph keith

6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

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Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century, Northwestern University Press, 2015; Gayatri Spivak, “Planetarity,” in Death of a Discipline, Columbia University Press, 2003, pp. 71–102. A few formative world literature models include Franco Moretti, Distant Reading, Verso, 2013, as well as his essay “Conjectures in World Literature”; Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise, Harvard University Press, 2007; David Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, Princeton University Press, 2003. Spivak, “Planetarity,” p. 72. Ibid. Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, p. 347, f9. Christian Moraru, “‘World,’ ‘Globe,’ ‘Planet’: Comparative Literature, Planetary Studies, and Cultural Debt after the Global Turn,” American Comparative Literature Association, 2014–15 Report on the State of the Discipline Website: Paradigms, available at http://stateofthediscipline.acla.org. Moretti, “Conjectures,” p. 57. Spivak, “Planetarity,” p. 73. Ibid. Ibid. See Mahasweta Devi’s Imaginary Maps, trans. Gayatri Spivak, Routledge, 1995, pp. 95–196. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, p. 80. Spivak, Imaginary Maps, p. 200. Gayatri Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, Routledge, 1993, pp. 218–19. Ibid., p. 219. See Emily Apter’s Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability, Verso, 2013. Ibid., p. 3. Emily Apter, “Untranslatables: A World System,” New Literary History, vol. 39, no. 3, 2008, p. 582. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 24. Dimock, Through Other Continents, p. 28. Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, p. 87. Ibid., p. 85. Ibid., p. 154. Jonathan Arac, “Commentary: Literary History in a Global Age,” New Literary History, vol. 39, no 3, 2008, p. 757. Masao Miyoshi, “Turn to the Planet: Literature, Diversity, and Totality,” Comparative Literature, vol. 53, no 4, 2001, p. 295. Ibid. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Harvard University Press, 2011, p. 65. See Dipesh Chakrabarty’s formative essay, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 2, 2009, pp. 197–222. A few examples of works that have addressed this representational crisis are Heise’s Sense of Place and Sense of Planet; Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor; Lawrence Buell, “Ecoglobalist Affects: The Emergence of U.S. Environmental Imagination on a Planetary Scale,” in

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33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

Shades of the Planet: American Literature As World Literature, Princeton University Press, 2007, pp. 227–48; and Elizabeth Deloughrey and George B. Handely, “Introduction: Towards an Aesthetics of the Earth,” in Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, ed. Elizabeth Deloughrey and George B. Handley, Oxford Universdity Press, 2011, pp. 3–40. See Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, pp. 1–44. Bruce Robbins, “The Worlding of the American Novel,” in The Cambridge History of the American Novel, ed. Leonard Cassuto, Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 1096. Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel, Princeton University Press, 2003. Raymond Williams, Writing in Society, Verso, 1983, p. 283; quoted in Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, p. 45. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet p. 54. Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rainforest, Coffee House Press, 1990. Amitav Ghosh, The Ibis Trilogy: Sea of Poppies (Book 1), Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009; River of Smoke (Book 2), Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012; Flood of Fire (Book 3), Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. Paulo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl, Night Shade Books, 2009. Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness (1899); reprinted by Dover Publications, 1990, p. 3. Heliodorus, The Ethiopian Romance, trans. Moses Hadas, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

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FURTHER READING

Theory of/and the Novel Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. and trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson. University of Texas Press, 1981. Figlerowicz, Marta. Flat Protagonists: A Theory of Novel Character. Oxford University Press, 2016. Ganguly, Debjani. This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as a Global Form. Duke University Press, 2016. Hale, Dorothy J. The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900–2000. Wiley-Blackwell, 2005. Jameson, Frederic. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Cornell University Press, 1981. Lukács, György. The Historical Novel, trans. Stanley and Hannah Mitchell (1937). Harmondsworth, 1962. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (1920). MIT Press, 1971. Writer and Critic, and Other Essays, trans. Arthur Kahn. Grosset & Dunlap, 1971. Lynch, Deirdre. The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning. University of Chicago Press, 1998. Mazzoni, Guido. Theory of the Novel, trans. Zakiya Hanafi. Harvard University Press, 2017. McKeon, Michael, ed. Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900. Verso, 1998. Distant Reading. Verso, 2013. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History. Verso, 2005. Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to Garcia Má rquez. Verso, 1996. The Novel, 2 vols. Princeton University Press, 2006. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage, 1993. Stevick, Philip. The Theory of the Novel. Free Press, 1967. Woloch, Alex. The One vs. The Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton University Press, 2003. Zhao, Henry. Uneasy Narrator: Chinese Fiction from the Traditional to the Modern. Oxford University Press, 1995.

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further reading Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Ohio State University Press, 2006.

History of/and the Novel Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford University Press, 1990. How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719–1900. Columbia University Press, 2006. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton University Press, 2013. Baker, Ernest Albert. History of the English Novel, 10 vols. Witherby, 1924–1936. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Harvard University Press, 1984. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise. Harvard University Press, 2004. Daiches, David. The Novel and the Modern World. University of Chicago Press, 1960. Dimock, Wai Chee. “Genre as World System: Epic and Novel on Four Continents.” Narrative 14(1), 2006, pp. 85–101. Doody, Margaret Anne. The True Story of the Novel. Rutgers University Press, 1996. English, James. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Harvard University Press, 2005. Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. Mariner Books, 1956. Hä gg, Tomas. The Novel in Antiquity. University of California Press, 1983. Hegel, R. E. The Novel in Seventeenth-Century China. Columbia University Press, 1981. Holzberg, Niklas. The Ancient Novel: An Introduction. University of Chicago Press, 1995. Howe, Irving. Politics and the Novel. Horizons, 1957. Hsia, Chih-tsing. The Classical Chinese Novel: A Critical Introduction. Columbia University Press, 1968. Kundera, Milan. The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher. Faber, 1988. Lubbock, Percy. The Craft of Fiction. Jonathan Cape, 1921. McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police. University of California Press, 1989. Moore, Steven. The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600. Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. Oxford History of the Novel in English, 12 vols. Oxford University Press, 2011–2017. Parrinder, Patrick. Nation and Novel: The English Novel from Its Origins to the Present Day. Oxford University Press, 2006. ed. New Directions in the History of the Novel. Palgrave, 2014. Pavel, Thomas G. The Lives of the Novel: A History. Princeton University Press, 2015. Schmidt, Michael. The Novel: A Biography. Harvard University Press, 2014. 285

further reading Schwarz, Roberto. Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture. Verso, 1992. Slaughter, Joseph. Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. Fordham University Press, 2007. Smiley, Jane. Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. Anchor, 2006. Spoo, Robert. Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain. Oxford University Press, 2013. Tatum, James, ed. The Search for the Ancient Novel. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe. University of California Press, 2001. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford University Press, 1973. The English Novel: From Dickens to Lawrence. Oxford University Press, 1970.

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INDEX

Certain characters are identified by the novels in which they appear, e.g., Ahab (in Moby Dick). Characters known only by Mr. or Mrs. or by titles are sorted by their last names, e.g., Ramsay (Mrs. Ramsay) (in To the Lighthouse); Vronsky (Count Vronsky in Anna Karenina). Most are double-posted. Titles in English are sorted by the word following the articles A, An, or The: “A Simple Heart” appears under S. Foreign-language titles are sorted by the lead article: À la recherche du temps perdu is sorted under A. Tables are indicated by t; figures are indicated by fig; footnotes are indicated by the page number followed by n. À la recherche du temps perdu (Proust). See In Search of Lost Time Abelard and Heloise (medieval lovers), 126 Abraham (in the Old Testament), 67–69 Achebe, Chinua, xvi Achilles (in The Iliad), 8, 53, 62, 70 Achilles Tatius (Greek proto-novelist), x, 45 The Adaptation Industry (Murray), 253n20 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 131, 141–42, 223, 232 adultery in literature, 32 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain). See Huckleberry Finn Aesop (Greek fabulist), 46 Aesthetics (Hegel), 59 Aethiopica (Aithiopika) (Heliodorus of Emesa). See The Ethiopian Romance African novels, 12–13. See also Coetzee, J.M.; Ngugi Wa Thiong’o The Age of Innocence (Wharton), xiv Agnes (in David Copperfield), 210–11 Ahab (in Moby Dick), 6–7, 10, 19, 71 Albertine Simonet (in In Search of Lost Time), 110 Alcott, Louisa May, xiii Alexander, Clare, 229 The Alexander Romance (Egyptian narrative attributed to Calisthenes), 24, 45 Alfred Knopf (publishing company), 177

Algee-Hewitt, Mark, viii, 18, 189–212 Al-Hariri of Basra (Arabic poet), 47 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll), xiii, 208 All the King’s Men (Warren), xv–xvi Amadís de Gaula (Rodriguez de Montalvo), x, 2–3 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Chabon), xviii The Ambassadors (Henry James), xiv American Pastoral (Roth), xvii–xviii American Splendor (graphic novel series and film) (Pekar), 251 Americanah (Adichie) as a Bildungsroman, 131 Ifemelu in, 223, 226, 234 Obinze in, 223, 226, 232 popular fiction in, 223, 227 prizes awarded to, 141–42 Amis, Martin, xvii Anatomy of Criticism (Frye), 23 ancient novels/proto-novels. See also rises of the novel Bakhtin on, 14 in Egypt, 1, 43, 45, 276 in Greece, 1, 14–15, 20n20, 24, 43 novels arising from, 43–49 in Rome, 24, 43 Anderson, Benedict, 38–39, 268–69

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index Andrew (Prince Andrew) (in War and Peace), 5–6, 10, 19 Andrews, Chris, 83 animal fables, 46, 47–48 Animal Farm (Orwell), xv–xvi Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), xiii Aphrodite (Louÿs), 173 The Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister (Goethe), xi, 131, 152 Apter, Emily, 274–75 Apuleius (Latin-language proto-novelist), x, 24, 45, 162 Arabic narrative fiction, 46–47, 48, 50, 138 Aragon, Louis, 118n2 Aristandros and Kallithea (Constantine Manasses), 46 Aristotle, 25, 95–96, 102, 144–45, 159, 254 Arjuna (in The Bhagavad-Gita), 124–25 Armstrong, Nancy, 38–39, 126, 135n12 Arnold, Matthew, 194 As I Lay Dying (Faulkner), xv, 33, 160 Ashton Doyne (in “The Real Right Thing”), 180–81 Aspects of the Novel (Forster), xiv–xv The Aspen Papers (Henry James), 179 At Swim Two Birds (Flann O’Brien), xv–xvi Atlas Shrugged (Rand), 19n6 Atonement (McEwan), xviii Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (Perec), 160–61 Atwood, Margaret, 33, 234 Aubain (Mme Aubain) (in “A Simple Heart”), 91–93, 133 Audeguy, Stéphane, 267n23 Auerbach, Erich on the Biblical epic, 66, 67–69 the epic/novel binary and, 8, 57, 65–71 exile of, 68 on history vs. legend, 68 Lukács and, 65–66 Mimesis, 65–66 on Père Goriot, 69 totalitarianism critiqued by, 68 Augustine (St. Augustine), 127 Austen, Jane Armstrong on, 126 character depth created by, 135n14 as domestic novelist, 32 Emma, 113 free indirect discourse of, 113 on greatest novelists lists, 145 Mansfield Park, xii Northanger Abbey, xii

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as novelist of community, 268 Pride and Prejudice, xii, 96–97, 116, 126 Sense and Sensibility, xii social relations in, 24, 126 Auster, Paul, xvii Austerlitz (Sebald), xviii, 19n6 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Stein), xv The Awakening (Chopin), xiii–xiv awards (literary). See prizes/awards for literary achievement Babley, Richard (in David Copperfield), 204–5 Bacigalupi, Paolo, 280 Badī’ al-Zaman al-Hamadhaˉni (Arabic poet), 47 Baetens, Jan, vii, 17, 238–51 Bakhtin, Mikhail M. on ancient novels, 14, 20n20 on ancient romance novelists, 162 on Bildungsromane, 130, 136n24 Bolaño and, 82 on chivalric romance literature, 162 in the chronology, xvii chronotopicality and, 36, 161–63, 165 on Don Quixote, 161 “Epic and Novel,”63 the epic/novel binary and, 8, 57, 63–71 exile of, 64 on the fluidity of the novel genre, 32–33 folkloric chronotopes, 162 “Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel,”161 on genres in novels, 9 on heteroglossia, 29, 36 on individual human life in novels, 27, 35–36 on language in novels, 29–30 literary preferences of, 3 Lukács and, 63–64, 65–66 Marcus on, 161 Moretti on, 161 on the newness of novels, 27 on the novel as genre encyclopedia, 29–30 on the novel as world genre, 35 on novels emerging from epics, 15 on the novel’s origins, 43 on Rabelais, 162 on Robinson Crusoe, 161 on spatiotemporality in the novel, 161–63 The Theory of the Novel and, 63

ind ex on time in novels, 29, 36 on the transformational quality in novels, 27 Baldwin, James, xvi Balzac, Honoré de Auerbach on, 65–66 European reception of, 227 as historic novelist, 32 literary cartography and, 157 Lost Illusions, xii, 4 the origins of realism and, 94 Père Goriot, xii, 69, 124 social concerns in, 24 Barakaˉt, Salīm, 132–33 Barchester Towers (Trollope), xii–xiii Barnaby Rudge (Dickens), 208 Barnes, Djuna, xv, 176–77, 247 Barrows, Annie, 267n23 Barth, John, xvii, 247 Barthes, Ronald classics books as subject of, 233 on readers and authors, 221, 231 on the reality effect, 10, 91–92, 96, 97 on “A Simple Heart,”91–93, 97, 133, 136–37n30 S/Z, 146 Basil Ransom (in The Bostonians), 179–80 Baudelaire, Charles, 173 Baum, L. Frank, 147 Bechdel, Alison, xviii, 17 Beck, Ulrich, 270–71 Beckett, Samuel characters dismantled by, 133–34 the failure of language and, 116, 117–18 humor in, 116 Joyce and, 116 Malone Dies, xvi, 117–18 as modernist, 106–7, 116–18 Molloy, xvi Murphy, xv, 117–18 Pascale Casanova and, 3 postmodernist doubt in, 117–18 reality critiqued by, 133–34 sequence privileged over plot by, 116–17 Ulysses and, 116–17 The Unnameable (Beckett), xvi, 117–18 Watt, xvi, 116–17 Beebee, Thomas, 25 Beecroft, Alexander, vii, 14–15, 43–54, 161 Before Reading (Rabinowitz), 150n13 The Beginning of Spring (Penelope Fitzgerald), xvii

Behn, Aphra, 24, 26 The Bell Jar (Plath), xvi–xvii, 176, 177, 181 Bellow, Saul, xvii Beloved (Morrison), xvii, 273–74 Bely, Andrei, 118n2 A Bend in the River (Naipaul), xvii Benim Adım Kırmızı (Pamuk), xvii–xviii Benjamin, Walter, 1, 30–31, 33, 250–51 Bennet, Elizabeth (Lizzy) (in Pride and Prejudice), 96 Bennett, Arnold, 176 Berlin Alexanderplatz (Döblin), xv Bertelsmann (publishing company), 228–29 Berthae Mason (in Jane Eyre), 142 The Betrothed (Manzoni), xii Between the Acts (Woolf), xv–xvi Bewes, Timothy, 35–36 Bhagat, Chetan, 233–34 The Bhagavad-Gita (6th book of the Mahabharata), 124–25, 276 the Bible, 136n25, 222 The Big Sleep (Chandler), 154 Bikhia (in “Pterodactyl”), 273 Bildungsromane (coming-of-age novels) Bakhtin on, 130, 136n24 character construction in, 128–29 character development in, 130–31, 142 digital novels and, 254 limitations of, 15, 30 postcolonialism and, 142 readers of novels and, 142 In Search of Lost Time as, 131 Birkerts, Sven, 254 Black Beauty (Sewell), 208 Bleak House (Dickens), xii–xiii, 207 The Blind Owl (Hedayat), xv Bloom, Leopold (in Ulysses), 8, 111–12, 172 Bloom, Molly (in Ulysses), 112, 114, 115 Bluma Lennon (in The House of Paper), 259, 261 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 9, 47, 53–54 Bolaño, Roberto, xvii–xviii, 81–83, 125, 256 Bold, Melanie Ramdarshan, 234 the bone people (Hulme), 141, 150n8 The Book of Disquiet (Pessoa), 127–28 Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times (Piper), 261–62 BookShots (novel line), 230 Booth, Wayne C., 146 Borges, Jorge Luis, 25, 100, 159 Bose, Ram Chandra, 226 The Bostonians (Henry James), xiii, 179–80 Bourdieu, Pierre, 194, 219, 269–70

289

index Bovary, Emma (in Madame Bovary), 16, 32, 96, 97, 156 Bowen, Elizabeth, xvi, 118n2 Bowers, Maggie Ann, 100 Brandeis, Louis D., 179, 181 Braudel, Ferdinand, 270–71 Brave New World (Aldous Huxley), xv, 38–39 Brazilian literature, 15, 99–100 Brennan, Timothy, 11, 20n18, 101–2 Breton, André, xv, 253n26 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Diaz), xviii, 131, 152 Brontë, Charlotte, xii, 142 Brontë, Emily, xii Brooks, Geraldine, 267n23 Brooks, Peter, 227 The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky), xiii Brown, Tina, 233 Brunetiere, Ferdinand, 25–26 Buck Rogers (comic strip), 242 Bucke, Richard Maurice, 173–74 Buddenbrooks (Mann), xiv, 226 Buddhism, 48 Bulghakov, Mikhail, xv, 132–33 Bulson, Eric, vii, 1–19, 157 Bunyan, John, x–xi Burgess, Anthony, xvi–xvii Burroughs, William S., xvi Butler, Octavia, 132–33 B.W. Huebsch (publishing company), 177 Calcutta, India, 100–1 The Call of the Wild (London), xiv Callirhoe (Chariton), x, 45 Callisthenes (Alexander the Great’s court historian), 24 Calvino, Italo, 133–34 Camus, Albert, xv–xvi Candy (Southern ad Hoffenberg), 176 Cannizzaro, Danny, 262 “Cantelman’s Spring-Mate” (Lewis), 172, 185n23 Cao, Xueqin, xi, 15, 135n9 capitalism the book as commodity in, 37–38 colonialism and, 26, 39 domestic fiction and, 39 global novel production and, 232 globalization and, 272 in Good Morning, Midnight, 115–16 Lukács on, 59 the modern novel and, 24

290

the novel vs. the epic and, 58–59 Oroonoko and, 26 phases of, 164 print capitalism, 30–31 Robinson Crusoe and, 26 space in the novel and, 12, 164 world systems of, 270–71 Carey, Peter, 142 Carr, Nicholas, 90n58, 254 Carroll, Lewis, xiii, 123, 208 Carter, Angela, 100 Casanova, Pascale, 3, 37, 140, 169, 232, 269, 274 The Castle (Kafka), xiv–xv The Castle of Otranto (Walpole), xi, 155 Castle Rackrent (Edgeworth), xii Castor, Nick, 259 Catch-22 (Heller), xvi The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger), xvi Catherine Linton (in Wuthering Heights), 32 Cerf, Bennet, 177 Certeau, Michel de, 221 Cervantes, Miguel de, x–xi, 12–13, 14–15, 27, 31–32, 77. See also Don Quixote Chabon, Michael, xviii Chadwyck-Healey novel collection, 207fig11.5, 207 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 279 A Chambermaid’s Diary (Mirabeau), 176–77 Chancellor, Olive (in The Bostonians), 179–80 Chandler, Raymond, 154, 230 characters in novels. See novels and characters Chariton (Greek proto-novelist), x, 45 Charles Augustus Milverton (in “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton”), 178 Charles Swann (in In Search of Lost Time), 109–10 Chase, James Hadley, 223–24, 225 Chatman, Seymour, 146 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 47, 53–54 Chekov, Anton, 94 Cher (singer and actress), 182 Children of Gebalawi (Mahfouz), 128–29 Chin P’ing Mei (anonymous Chinese novel), 12–13 Chinese novels/narrative fiction, 12–13, 15, 48, 53, 56n29 chivalric romance literature. See romance literature Chopin, Kate, xiii–xiv

ind ex A Christmas Carol (Dickens), 207–8 chronology, x–xviii chronotopicality, 28–29, 36, 161–63, 165, 257 Chu, Seo-Young, 132–33 chuanqi (Chinese stories), 53 Cien años de soleded (One Hundred Years of Solitude) (Garcia Marquez), xvii The Circle (Eggers), 88 Clarissa (in Mrs. Dalloway), 113–14, 119n22 Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady (Fielding), xi, 193–94 Clark, Katerina, 130 Classics Illustrated (literary-adaptation comics), 242 Cleland, John, xi, 170 Clitophon (Achilles Tatius), x A Clockwork Orange (Burgess), xvi–xvii close reading, 269–70. See also distant reading Cloud Atlas (Mitchell), 84 Clowes, Daniel, 247 Coelho, Paulo, 234 Coetzee, J.M., xvii–xviii, 97–100 Cohen, Margaret, 194 Colonial Library (literary export series), 225 colonialism, 26, 39, 101–2, 131, 280 The Color Purple (Walker), xvii Columbell’s circulating library, 194–95 comedy, 29–30 Comics and Sequential Art (Eisner), 243 commodification of the novel. See the novel as commodity The Communist Manifesto (Marx), 59 Community and Civil Society (Tonnies), 59 Comparative Textual Media (Pressman and Hayles), 266 Comstock laws, 172–73, 174 The Confessions of Saint Augustine, 127 “Conjectures on World Literature” (Moretti), 277–78 Conrad, Joseph empirical worldview of, 29–30 on greatest novelists lists, 145 Heart of Darkness, xiii–xiv, 280–81 Lord Jim, xiii–xiv, 107–8 Marlow as narrator for, 32–33, 107–8, 280–81 as modernist, 106–8 Nostromo, xiv the novel’s fluidity and, 32–33 scale in, 280–81 The Shadow-Line, 259, 260–61

Constantine Manasses (Byzantine romance proto-novelist), 46 A Contract With God (Eisner), 239, 241 Cooper, James Fenimore, xii Cooppan, Vilashini, vii, 13, 23–39 Coover, Robert, 247 The Corrections (Franzen), xviii Cortazar, Julio, xvi–xvii Cosmic Consciousness (Bucke), 173–74 The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas), xii The Country and the City (Raymond Williams), 268, 279–80 The Craft of Fiction (Lubbock), xiv Crane, Stephen, 94 Crécy, Odette de (in In Search of Lost Time), 109 Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky), xiii Culture and Imperialism (Said), 164–65 Cyropaedia (Xenophon of Athens), 24 Damrosch, David, 35, 270 Dana (in Kindred), 132–33 Dangarembga, Tsitsi, 131, 141 Daniel Deronda (George Eliot), xiii Daniela de Montecristo (in Nazi Literature in the Americas), 83 Danielewski, Mark Z., 18, 155, 254–55, 256–59, 267n23 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 118n2 Dante Alighieri, 77 Daphnis and Chloe (Longus), x, 45, 135n9 Dara, Evan, 84 Darcy (in Pride and Prejudice), 96 Darnton, Robert, 220–22, 231 Darwin, Charles, 104, 129 data and the novel. See the novel as data David B. (autofiction author), 241–42 David Copperfield (Dickens) character networks in, 197, 203, 204fig11.3 in the chronology, xii–xiii close reading of, 193 in The Dickens Concordance, 197t11.1, 198t11.2 distribution of word frequencies in, 199–200, 200fig11.1 mind-modeling in, 200 quantitative enhancement of qualitative analysis in, 195 virtual spaces in, 205–8 word distributions in, 199–203

291

index David Copperfield (Dickens) (cont.) word frequencies in, 190–91, 196–203, 201fig11.2, 206fig11.4, 209–11, 212n3, 214n37 Davis, Lennard, 157, 160 The Days of Abandonment (Ferrante), xviii De Landa, Manuel, 34 Death of a Discipline (Spivak), 272 The Death of Artemio Cruz (Fuentes), xvi–xvii The Decameron (Boccaccio), 9 decentered language, 29 Decolonizing the Mind (Ngugi Wa Thiong’o), 149–50n4 decolorization, 141 deep time, 35, 63, 275–76, 279 Defoe, Daniel. See also the novel as encyclopedia; Robinson Crusoe on factuality in the novel, 57 A Journal of the Plague Year, xi, 78–81, 85–86, 89n36 legal issues of, 174 Melville and, 81 Moll Flanders, xi, 8 repetition techniques used by, 86 the rise of the novel and, 12–13 self-referentiality and, 79, 81, 83 Deleuze, Gilles, 27, 34 DeLillo, Don, xvii–xviii, 101–2 Delillo, Don, xvii–xviii Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda (Stassen), 139 Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Musil), xv Der Prozess (Kafka), xiv–xv Derrida, Jacques, 25, 36–37 Desai, Kiran, 232, 233 Devi, Mahasweta, 273 dialectical historical materialism, 33 The Dialogic Imagination (Bakhtin), xvii Diaz, Junot, xviii, 131 Dickens, Charles, 208. See also David Copperfield; the novel in the digital age Barnaby Rudge, 208 Bleak House, xii–xiii, 207 A Christmas Carol, 207–8 copyright statutes and, 176, 177 The Dickens Concordance, 192–96, 197t11.1, 198t11.2 Great Expectations, xiii, 209 Hard Times, 207 literary cartography and, 157 Little Dorrit, 207 Mystery of Edwin Drood, 208 Nicholas Nickleby, 208

292

as novelist of community, 268 Oliver Twist, xii, 208 the origins of realism and, 94 Our Mutual Friend, 177 The Pickwick Papers, xii place fictionality in, 154 political satire in, 129 popular and classic fiction merged in, 228 secondary characters as types in, 129 social concerns in, 24 A Tale of Two Cities, xiii, 177, 208 The Dickens Concordance (Mary Williams), 192–96, 197t11.1, 198t11.2 Dickinson, Emily, 116 A Dictionary of Maqiao (Han Shaogong), 129 Diderot, Denis, xi Die Blechtrommel (Grass), xvi Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (Goethe), xi digital novels. See the novel in the digital age digitization, 17 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 136n24 Dimock, Wai Chee on climate change representation, 279 on deep time in novels, 35, 63, 275–76 Derrida and, 36–37 on epics and novels, 8, 63 on genre as virtual, 36 Lukács and, 63 planetarity of, 16, 36, 37–38, 269 the rise of the novel and, 277–78 Through Other Continents, 63, 275 Disgrace (Coetzee), xvii–xviii Disney corporation, 240 distant reading, 18, 145–49, 209, 269–70. See also close reading Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? (Chu), 132–33 Döblin, Alfred, xv, 118n2 Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as told by a Friend (Mann), xv–xvi Doctor Zhivago (Pasternak), xvi Doctorow, E.L., 276 domestic novels, 32 Domínguez, Carlos María, 259 Don Juan Manuel (Spanish prose writer), x Don Quixote (Cervantes) Bakhtin on, 161 Benjamin on, 30 character transformation in, 54 characters mocked in, 133 in the chronology, x–xi chronotopicality of, 161, 163

ind ex Don Quixote in, 2–3 as first great novel, 30 on greatest novels lists, 19n6, 193–94 hybrid forms in, 27 medieval worldview of, 29–30 Moore on, 29 as an old novel, 138 precursors to, 24 romance literature and, 29–30 time as subject in, 152 worldview dialectics in, 29–30 Doré, Gustave, 241 Dorian Gray (in The Picture of Dorian Gray), 178–79 Dorothea Brooke (in Middlemarch), 4, 19, 32 Dos Passos, John, xv Dostoevsky, Fyodor, xiii, 3, 64, 127–28, 154 Doyne, Ashton (in “The Real Right Thing”), 180–81 Dracula (Stoker), xiii–xiv drama, 14, 17, 51–52, 168 Drawn & Quarterly (publishing company), 252n8 Dream of Nectanebo (Egyptian narrative), 45 The Dream of the Red Chamber/The Story of the Stone (Cao), xi, 50, 54, 56n29, 135n9 Dreiser, Theodore, xiv, 96, 129–30 The Drifting Cloud (Futabatei Shimei), xiii–xiv Drosilla and Charikles (Niketas Eugeneianos), 46 Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way) (Proust), 226 Dumas, Alexander, 227 Duranty, Louis Edmond, 93 Eagleton, Terry, 226 Eastwood, Clint, 182 Eco, Umberto, xvii The Economy of Prestige (English), 150n8 Edelmira Thompson de Mendiluce (in Nazi Literature in the Americas), 82 Edgeworth, Maria, xii Eggers, Dave, 88 The Egyptian Book of the Dead, 136n25 Egyptian narrative fiction, 1, 44–45, 47–48 Eisner, Will, 239, 240, 243 El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha (Cervantes). See Don Quixote Eliot, George Daniel Deronda, xiii as domestic novelist, 32 on greatest novelists lists, 145

manufacturing clause and, 176 Middlemarch, xiii, 1, 4, 19, 32, 54, 157 on the novel, 1 as novelist of community, 268 and the origins of realism, 94 places as actual in, 157 scientific approaches characterization by, 129 social concerns in, 24 Eliot, T.S., 176–77 Elizabeth (Lizzy) Bennett (in Pride and Prejudice), 96, 8 Ellison, Ralph, xvi Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 276 Emma (Austen), 113 Emma Bovary (in Madame Bovary), 16, 32, 96, 97, 156 empathy, 10–11, 140, 143–44, 149, 150n15 empiricism, 27, 29, 32 Engelhardt, Tom, 254–55 English, James, 150n8, 232 environmentalism, 272, 278–81 Ephesian Tale (Xenophon of Ephesus), x, 45 “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel” (Bakhtin), 63 the epic and the novel overview, 57–71 ancient vs. modern life and, 59–62 coherent vs. fragmentary world views and, 163–64 epic/novel binary, 7–8 genre mixing and, 9 Lukács on, 8, 57–62, 63, 65–69, 71 newness and, 26 novels emerging from epics, 14 official vs. unofficial cultural voices in, 61, 63–65, 69 open vs. fixed cultures and, 59, 60, 61, 63–64, 71 shared qualities of, 59–60, 63 and World War I, 61–62 the epic as a genre. See also Auerbach, Erich; Bakhtin, Mikhail M.; Beebee, Thomas; Lukács, György absence of, in China, 14–15 Biblical epics, 66 genre mixing and, 9 Greek culture and, 58, 163 Homeric epics read in Egypt, 45 in India, 14–15 intimate character forms and, 126–27 large numbers of characters in, 124–25 length in, 53 literary cartography in, 158

293

index the epic as a genre (cont.) memory in, 30–31 the modern epic, 62–63 the novel’s response to, 14 repetition in, 53 small numbers of characters in, 125 transformations in, 30–31 Ulysses and, 164–65 World War culture and, 62 The Epic of Gilgamesh (Akkadian epic), 131, 276 Epileptic (David B.), 241–42 epistolary novels, 24, 32 Ernst, Morris L., 173 The Ethiopian Romance (Heliodorus of Emesa), x, 281 Eugene Onegin (Pushkin), xii Eumathios Makrembolites (Byzantine romance proto-novelist), 46 Eurocentrism, 14, 44, 46–47, 50, 54, 276 Euryclea (in The Odyssey), 66, 67 Every Man Dies Alone (Fallada), 128–29 Fagbamigbe, Olaiya, 223 Fallada, Hans, 128–29 The Familiar (Danielewski), 18, 256–59, 266 Fanny Hill (Cleland), xi, 168, 170, 171, 186n33 Fantagraphics (publishing company), 252n8 fascism, 81–82, 83 Fathers and Sons (Turgenev), xiii Faulkner, William As I Lay Dying, xv, 33, 160 in literary canons, 276 as modernist, 118n2, 247 place and space in, 12, 154, 160 readers of, 147–48 The Sound and the Fury, xv, 164–65 Faust (Goethe), 8, 62–63 Ferrante, Elena, xviii, 134 Fielding, Henry Clarissa, xi, 193–94 empirical worldview of, 29–30 Hellenistic elements in, 14–15 Joseph Andrews, xi, 33–34, 224 the rise of the novel and, 12–13 Tom Jones, xi, 193–94 voluminous novels of, 256 Fifty Shades of Grey (E.L. James), 231 Figlerowicz, Marta, vii, 11, 123–34 The Filter Bubble (Pariser), 90n58 Finnegans Wake (Joyce), xv–xvi, 184

294

Fitzgerald, F. Scott, xiv–xv, 157 Fitzgerald, Penelope, xvii Flaubert, Gustave. See also Emma Bovary; Madame Bovary censorship issues of, 173 characters mocked by, 133 Coetzee on, 98 empirical worldview of, 29–30 illustrations rejected by, 249 as modernist, 118n2 the origins of realism and, 94 places as Emma’s idea in, 156 Sentimental Education, xiii “A Simple Heart,”91–93, 97, 133 as a stylist, 246 Flood of Fire (Ghosh), 165 Flynn, Catherine, vii, 9, 104–18 Fontaine, Theodore, 94 Ford, Ford Madox, xiv, 62, 78, 118n2 formalism (narratological), 25–26 “Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel” (Bakhtin), 161 Forster, E.M. futurity in, 33–34 Howard’s End, xiv on the novel, 1, 2, 9 Passage to India, xiv, 33–34 A Room with a View, xiv on round and flat characters, 127–28 The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (Defoe), xi Foucault, Michel, 39, 153 The Foundation Pit (Platonov), 129–30 The Fountainhead (Rand), xv–xvi Frank, Joseph, 153, 158–59, 163 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (Shelley), xii Franzen, Jonathan, xviii, 229 Fredner, Erik, viii, 18, 189–212 free indirect discourse, 5, 16, 113–14, 127, 164 French novelistic tradition, 46–47, 49–50. See also romance literature Freud, Sigmund, 27–28, 39, 95, 104, 132, 272–73 Frey, Hugo, vii, 17, 238–51 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 16, 76, 269, 270, 271, 276–77 Frodo (in The Lord of the Rings), 156–57 Frye, Northrop, 23, 29–30 Fuentes, Carlos, xvi–xvii Fun Home (Bechdel), xviii, 17 Fuqahaˉʾ al- Ẓalaˉm (Barakaˉt), 132–33

ind ex Fusillo, Massimo, 14–15 The Future of Data Analysis (Tukey), 191 Gaddis, William, 247 Gallagher, Catherine, 10, 94–95, 123 Galland, Antoine, 46–47 Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, xvii, 8, 12–13, 100, 132–33, 152 Gardner, Jared, 250–51 Gaskell, Elizabeth, xii–xiii Genji (in The Tale of Genji), 125 Genji Monogatori (Murasaki), x–xi genre fiction. See the novel as genre George Withermore (in “The Real Right Thing”), 180–81 Ghosh, Amitav, 165, 280 Gibson, William, xvii, 84 Giddens, Antony, 270–71 Giles Goat-Boy (Barth), xvii Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 155 Girard, René, 126 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Larsson), 229 Gissing, George, xiii–xiv global geography of novels. See also the novel as commodity; the novel as planetary form ancient narrative fiction and, 44 the English language and, 139–40, 149–50n4 Pascale Casanova on, 3 readers and, 149 recognition of, 12–13 temporal dominance over time questioned in, 153 terminologies for, 16 the twenty-first-century world system and, 165 globalization/globalism. See also the novel as commodity; the novel as planetary form awareness of, increasing, 269 capitalism and, 272 economic globalization, 279–80 the graphic novel and, 239–40 monolingualism in, 274 the novel’s diversity and, 25 postmodernism and, 87 representational crises and, 165 social media and, 87 as social science focus, 270–72 Spivak on, 271 in the twenty-first century, 165 world literature and, 274

Gloeckner, Phoebe, 247 Go Tell It On the Mountain (Baldwin), xvi The God of Small Things (Roy), 147–49 Gods’ Man (Ward), xv Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von encyclopedic literature of, 77 Faust, 8, 62–63 The Sorrows of Young Werther, xi Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, xi, 131, 152 world literature and, 269 The Gold Bug Variations (Power), 84 The Golden Ass (Apuleius), x, 24, 139 The Golden Bowl (Henry James), xiv, 276 The Golden Notebook (Lessing), xvi–xvii Goldsmith, Oliver, xi Good Morning, Midnight (Rhys), xv, 114–16 The Good Soldier (Ford), xiv Gordon Pym (Poe), xii Gorman, Samantha, 262 Gothic novels, 32, 101, 155, 208 The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck), xv–xvi the graphic novel overview, 238–51 the novel and, 242, 243–44, 246–51 abstract comics as subgenre of, 238 as action driven, 252–53n19 Anglophone audience of, 252n8 authors’ styles displayed in, 238, 242, 244–45, 251 comic books and, 238–39, 240–44, 245–47, 250–51 dematerialization and, 246, 249, 253n22 digital productions of, 251 distant reading and, 145 drama and, 17 in Europe, 241–42 as an expanding subfield, 238–44 film and, 246, 248, 251 global expansion of, 239–40 graphic media of, 251 handicaps of, 245 hybrid nature of, 239, 245–46, 248–49 intramedial adaptations in, 253n27 length of, 238, 242 as literature, 243–44, 245–49 local audiences of, 240 as medium vs. genre, 252–53n19 modernism and, 247 originators of, 243–44, 245 in print and book culture, 243 publishers of, 238 remediation and, 16, 239–40

295

index the graphic novel (cont.) sales venues of, 238 serious subject matter in, 238 success of, 16–17, 239–40 terminologies for, 239 as transmedial, 249–51, 253n27 US hegemony of, 241 wordless novels, 241–42, 245, 252n11 world comics and, 252n6 Grass, Günter, xvi Gravett, Paul, 245 Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon), xvii, 6, 77, 85 Gray, Dorian (in The Picture of Dorian Gray), 178–79 Great Expectations (Dickens), xiii, 209 The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald), xiv–xv The Great Tradition (Leavis), 145 Greek novels/proto-novels, 3, 20n20, 47, 138, 161 Green Mansions (Hudson), 176, 177 Greene, Graham, xvi Groensteen, Thierry, 245 Guattari, Felix, 27, 34 The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Shaffer and Barrows), 267n23 Guillén, Claudio, 26 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), xi, 154, 193–94 The Gutenberg Elegies (Birkerts), 254 Guyana Quartet (Harris), 33 Haggard, H. Rider, 107 Hale, Dorothy, 39 Half of a Yellow Sun (Adichie), 141–42 Hall, Radclyffe, 16, 171 Hamid, Moshin, 232 Hamsun, Knut, xiii–xiv The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood), 38–39 Hard Times (Dickens), 207 Hardy, Thomas, xiii–xiv, 135n12 Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Rushdie), 147 Harper & Row (publishing company), 177 Harris, Frank, 176–77 Harris, Wilson, 33 Harry Potter (Rowling), xvii–xviii, 145 Hart, Matthew, 84 Harvey, David, 270–71 Harvey Kurtzman’s Jungle Book, 241 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, xii–xiii, 183–84 Haykal, Muhammad Husayn, xiv Hayles, N. Katherine, 258, 266 Haywood, Eliza, 227 Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓaˉn (Ibn Tufail), x

296

Heart of Darkness (Conrad), xiii–xiv, 280–81 The Heat of the Day (Bowen), xvi Hedayat, Sadegh, xv Heep, Uriah (in David Copperfield), 204–5 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 33, 59 Heise, Ursula, 269, 270, 279–80 Heliodorus of Emesa (Greek proto-novelist), x, 12–13, 14–15, 24, 45, 281 Hellenistic-era literature chronotopicality in, 161 decentered language and, 29 decline of authority and, 29 in Egypt, 1, 45, 46, 48, 53–54 on greatest novels lists, 3 novelistic elements in, 14–15 romance and prose fiction in, 24 Heller, Joseph, xvi Heloise and Abelard (medieval lovers), 126 Hemingway, Ernest, xiv–xv, 228–29 Herman, Luc, 78 Herzog (Bellow), xvii heteroglossia, 29–30, 35–36, 65, 76 H.F. (in A Journal of the Plague Year), 79–81, 86 historical novels, 32 historicism, 33 The History of Love (Krauss), 267n23 The History of Mr. Jabot (Töpffer), xii The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams (Fielding), xi, 33–34, 224 The History of Tom Jones, a foundling (Fielding), xi, 193–94 Hocking, Amanda, 234 Hoffenberg, Mason, 176 Holmes, Peter, 170 Holquist, Michael, 64 Holtzbrinck (publishing company), 228–29 Homer (epic poet). See also The Iliad; The Odyssey clarity/openness/simplicity in, 66–67, 68, 70, 71 Lukács on, 57–59 rewritings of, 33 significance of, 57–59 worldview of, 8, 60 Hopscotch (Cortazar), xvi–xvii A House for Mr. Biswas (Naipaul), 142 House of Leaves (Danielewski), 155, 254–55, 256–57, 267n23 The House of Paper (Domínguez, Sís, Castor), 18, 259–62, 266

ind ex The House of the Seven Gables (Hawthorne), xii–xiii, 183–84 Houser, Heather, 87–88 How the Steel Was Tempered (Ostrovsky), 130 Howard’s End (Forster), xiv Howells, William Dean, xiii, 94 Hoyos, Héctor, 82 Hsi-yu chi (anonymous Chinese novel), x–xi Huckleberry Finn (Twain), xiii, 8, 154–55 Hudson, W.H., 176 Hugo, Victor, xii, xiii Hulme, Keri, 141 The Human Beast (Zola), 129–30 The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Hugo), xii Hunger (Sult) (Hamsun), xiii–xiv Hurston, Zora Neale, xv, 131 Huxley, Aldous, xv Huysmans, J.K., 129 Hysmine and Hysminias (Eumathios Makrembolites), 46 I am a Cat (Natsume), xiv I giorni dell’ abbandano (Ferrante), xviii I Love Lucy (television series), 51 I promessi sposi (Manzoni), xii Ibis trilogy (Ghosh), 165, 280 Ibn Tufail (author of The Improvement of Human Reason), x Icelandic sagas, 139 The Ideology of Genre (Beebee), 25 If this were a man (Levi), xv–xvi Ifemelu (in Americanah), 223, 226, 234 Il Gattopardo (Tomasi di Lampedusa), xvi Il nome della rosse (Eco), xvii Il Romanzo (Moretti), 277–78 The Iliad (Homer), 8, 53, 60, 65 Illusions Perdues (Balzac), xii, 4 Immanuel of Rome (Hebrew/Italian poet), 47 imperialism, 32, 37, 280 impressionism (literary), 107 The Improvement of Human Reason (Ibn Tufail), x In Search of Lost Time (Proust) as a Bildungsroman, 131 characters as types in, 129, 131 in the chronology, xiv experience privileged over transcendent meaning in, 108–9, 110 the little phrase in, 109–10 the Narrator of, 109–11 nonlinear time in, 9, 108, 109 plot de-emphasized in, 108–9

scale research in, 214n25 time as subject in, 152 In the Castle of My Skin (Lamming), xvi Inaros (in Egyptian proto-novels), 45 Indian book markets, 225, 228, 233–234 Indian literature. See also Devi, Mahasweta; Roy, Arundhati; Seth, Vikram Egyptian narrative fiction and, 46 in the English language, 220 the epic as a genre in, 14–15 the epic in, 15 Great Britain and, 15 Indian independence and, 100–1 the maqaˉma and, 47 prizes literary achievement in, 141 realism rejected in, 226 The Thousand and One Nights and, 138 individualism, 24, 32, 38–39, 58–59, 115–16 Infinite Jest (Wallace), xvii–xviii, 84 Instructions of Amenemhet (Egyptian narrative), 44–45 The Invisible Man (Ellison), xvi Iraq War (second), 86 irony, 29–30 Isaac (in the Old Testament), 67–69 Iser, Wolfgang, 146 Ishiguro, Kazuo, xvii–xviii Ishmael (in Moby Dick), 71, 74–76 Islamic literature, 48 The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (Radcliffe), xi the it-narrative novel, 259–62, 267n23 Ivanhoe (Scott), xii Jack Maggs (Carey), 142 Jacques the Fatalist and His Master (Jacques le fataliste et son maître) (Diderot), xi Jagger (Mr. Jagger) (in Great Expectations), 209 Jakobson, Roman, 191–92 James (in Pry), 263–65 James, C.L.R., 37 James, David, vii, 7, 74–88 James, E. L., 231 James, Henry The Ambassadors, xiv The Aspen Papers, 179 The Bostonians, xiii, 179–80 first-person character experiences in, 127–28 The Golden Bowl, xiv, 276 on greatest novelists list, 145 illustrations tolerated by, 249

297

index James, Henry (cont.) as modernist, 118n2 on the novel, 23, 36, 39 point of view technique of, 39 Portrait of a Lady, xiii The Princess Cassamassima, xiii privacy doctrines and, 179–81, 187n62 “The Real Right Thing,”180–81 The Reverberator, 179 social concerns in, 24 What Maisie Knew, xiii–xiv James Steerforth (in David Copperfield), 204–5 Jameson, Fredric on the genre of the novel, 32, 34 global-colonial world system and, 35–36 on Henry James, 39 Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 164 readers of novels and, 149 on subjectivity in the novel, 25–26 on time in novels, 2 Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë), xii, 142 Japanese literature, 1, 12–13, 48, 138, 150n6. See also Ozeki, Ruth Jarry, Alfred, 118n2 Jataka (Indian tales of the Buddha), 47–48 Jenkins, Henry, 231 Jensen, Meg, 119n22 Jim (in Lord Jim), 107–8 Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth (Ware), xviii, 17, 247, 248 Jin Ping Mei (anonymous Chinese novel), x–xi Johannesburg, South Africa, 98–99 Johnston, Philip, 252n11 Jonathan Cape (publishing company), 238, 252n8 Jones, Lloyd, 141–42 Joseph Andrews (Fielding), xi, 33–34, 224 Joseph K. (in The Castle), 12 Joshi, Priya, viii, 13, 219–35 A Journal of the Plague Year (Defoe), xi, 78–81, 85–86, 89n36 Journey to the West (anonymous Chinese novel), x–xi Joyce, James. See also Ulysses Beckett and, 116 in the chronology, xiv copyright statutes and, 176–77, 182 critical studies of, 77 defamation issues and, 183 empirical worldview of, 29–30 encyclopedic fiction and, 77

298

estate issues of, 182 Finnegans Wake, xv–xvi, 184 first-person character experiences in, 127–28 free indirect discourse of, 113 interwar modernism of, 62 Lukács and, 3 as modernist, 106–7, 247 obscenity laws and, 171–73, 184 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, xiv, 113 sexuality in, 16 stream of consciousness techniques of, 106, 111–12, 113 temporal concerns in, 78 on Ulysses as an encyclopedia, 86–87 voluminous novels of, 256 Joyce v. Roth, 182 Jude the Obscure (Hardy), xiii–xiv Julia (in David Copperfield), 205 Julie, or the New Héloïse (Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse) (Rousseau), xi Julien Sorel (in The Red and the Black), 8 Kadarkay, Arpad, 61 Kafka, Franz, xiv–xv, 3, 118n2 Kama-Sutra (Hindu sexual practice guide), 147–48 Kapoor, Mini, 234 Keen, Suzanne, vii, 10–11, 138–49 Keith, Joseph, viii, 16, 268–81 Kerouac, Jack, xvi, 163 Kidnapped (Stevenson), xiii–xiv Kim (Kipling), xiv Kindle Singles (e-reader books), 230 Kindred (Butler), 132–33 King, Stephen, 155 Kipling, Rudyard, xiv, 107 Kitty (in Anna Karenina), 126–27 Kleist, Heinrich von, 276 Knausgaard, Karl Ove, xviii, 134 Knott (Mr. Knott) (in Watt), 117 Knückel, Otto, 241–42 Krauss, Nicole, 267n23 Krazy Kat (Herriman), 242 Krishna (in The Bhagavad-Gita), 124–25 Kundera, Milan, xvii, 1 La ciudad y los perros (Vargas Llosa), xvi–xvii La muerte de Artemio Cruz (Fuentes), xvi–xvii

ind ex La Princesse de Cleves (Madame de Lafayette), 24 Laclos, Charderlos, 24 Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence), xiv–xv, 170, 171, 172, 176–77, 186n33 L’amica geniale (Ferrante), xviii Lamming, George, xvi Lane, Allen, 229, 230 Larsen, Nella, xv Larsson, Stieg, 229 L’Ascension du haut mal (David B.), 241–42 The Last Days of Publishing, 254–55 The Last of the Mohicans (Cooper), xii the law and the novel. See the novel and the law “The Law of Genre” (Derrida), 36–37 Lawrence, D.H. in the chronology, xiv copyright statutes and, 176–77 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, xiv–xv, 170, 171, 172, 176–77 libel issues of, 118n2 as modernist, 118n2 on the novel’s future, 19, 20n27 The Rainbow, xiv, 172–73 sexuality in, 16 Women in Love, 183 Lazarillo de Tormes (anonymous Spanish romance), 2–3 Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (Alexandre Dumas), xii Le Père Goriot (Balzac), xii Le rouge et le noir (Stendhal), xii Leavis, F.R., 145 Leavis, Q.D., 227 L’Éducation Sentimentale (Flaubert), xiii Lefebvre, Henri, 163–64 Lem, Stanislaw, 132–33 length of novels, 14, 43–44, 53, 56n29, 229, 238, 254 Lennon, Bluma (in The House of Paper), 259, 261 The Leopard (Tomasi di Lampedusa), xvi Leopold Bloom (in Ulysses), 8, 111–12, 172 Les Misérables (Hugo), xiii Lessing, Doris, xvi–xvii L’Etranger (Camus), xv–xvi Leucippe and Clitophon (Achilles Tatius), x, 45 Levi, Primo, xv–xvi Levin (in Anna Karenina), 126–27 Lewis, Wyndham, xiv, 172, 183, 185n23

Libro de los ejemplos del conde Lucanor y de Patronio (Don Juan Manuel), x The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Sterne), xi, 193–94 Lila (in The Story of the lost Child), 134 L’Innomable (Beckett), xvi, 117–18 Lion and the Mouse fable, 46–47 literary cartography. See the space of the novel Literature as System (Guillén), 26 Little Dorrit (Dickens), 207 Little Nell (in The Old Curiosity Shop), 11 The Little Review (literary journal), 172 Little Women (Alcott), xiii Lives of the Saints (Butler), 173–74 Lizzy (Elizabeth) Bennett (in Pride and Prejudice), 8 Lodge, David, 105–6 Lolita (Nabokov), xvi London, Jack, xiv The Lonely Londoners (Selvon), xvi Longus (Greek proto-novelist), x, 45, 135n9 Lord Byron, 175 Lord Jim (Conrad), xiii–xiv, 107–8 The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien), xv, 139, 156–57 Lord of the Rings (Tolkien), 253n30 Los Detectives Salvajes (Bolaño), xvii–xviii The Lost Books of the Odyssey (Mason), 33 Lost Illusions (Illusions Perdus) (Balzac), xii, 4 The Lost Scrapbook (Dara), 84 Louÿs, Pierre, 173 Lubbock, Percy, xiv Lukács, György. See also the epic and the novel; The Theory of the Novel on ancient vs. modern culture, 59–62 Auerbach and, 65–66 Bakhtin and, 63–64, 65–66 on capitalism, 59 classics books as subject of, 233 Dimock and, 63 on the global geography of novels, 165 on Greek culture, 58 on Homer, 57–59 on individual life in history, 35–36 on the inexpressible meaning of life, 2 Joyce and, 3 literary cartography and, 163 literary preferences of, 3 on modernity’s complexities, 67 on the novel, 15, 35, 37 on novels post WWII, 8

299

index Lukács, György (cont.) on time in novels, 152 World War I and, 7–8, 57–59, 61–62 on the world without immanence of meaning, 35–36 Luo Guanzhong, x Lynch, Deidre, 127, 134n2, 135n14, 136n19 Machado de Assis, 127–28, 142 Macmillan and Company (publishing company), 225, 229 Mad Men (television series), 52 Madame Bovary (Flaubert) characters mocked in, 133 in the chronology, xii–xiii free indirect discourse of, 113 legal issues of, 15, 16 obscenity laws and, 184 places as Emma’s idea in, 156 plausibility in, 96 style privileged in, 246 magical realism American minority writers of, 100 characteristics of, 100–1 colonial realities represented in, 101–2 contentious issues in, 101–2 critiques of, 101–2 as the deformation of realism, 101–2 as a genre, 25 genre-mixing in, 100–1 minority cultures presented in, 101–2 national literary power relations reversed by, 101–2 novels and characters and, 132–33 in planet-oriented literature, 280 in postcolonial literature, 101–2 postcolonialism and, 100, 101–2 practitioners of, 100, 101–2, 132–33 Pynchon, Thomas and, 101–2 realism and, 93 slavery in, 101 terminologies for, 100 world literature and, 101–2 The Magnificent Ambersons (Tarkington), 19n6 Mahabharata (Sanskrit epic), 53 mahbarot (Hebrew narrative fiction form), 47 Mahfouz, Naguib, 128–29 Mahlberg, Michaela, 200 Mair, Victor, 48 The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress (Stein), xiv–xv Malachi O’Flynn (in Ulysses), 111

300

Malone Dies (Beckett), xvi, 117–18 The Man Without Qualities (Musil), xv manga (Japanese comics), 145, 245 Mann, Thomas, xiv, xv–xvi, 118n2 Mansfield, Katherine, 118n2 Mansfield Park (Austen), xii Manuel, Don Juan, x, 47 Manzoni, Alessandro, xii Maps of the Imagination (Turchi), 159 maqaˉma (Arabic narrative fiction form), 47, 48, 50 Marcus, Sharon, 161 Margarita López Santos (in 2666), 125 Mark, Karl, 59 Marlow (as Conrad’s narrator), 32–33, 107–8, 280–81 Marx, Groucho, 182 Marxist literary criticism and theory, 23, 32, 35–36, 39, 129–30, 221, 269 Masereel, Frans, 241–42 Mason, Bertha (in Jane Eyre), 142 Mason, Zachary, 33 The Master and Margarita (Bulghakov), xv, 132–33 Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (Spiegelman) in the chronology, xvii European avant-garde origins of, 241 graphic novel adaptation and, 247 the graphic novel’s success and, 243–44 the holocaust in, 17 Pulitzer Prize awarded to, 243–44 success of, 239 McCarthy, Cormac, xviii McEwan, Ian, xviii McKenzie, D.F., 222, 223, 231 McKeon, Michael, 24, 28–29, 34, 193–94, 268–69 medieval romance literature. See romance literature Melville, Herman. See also Moby Dick; the novel as encyclopedia Bolaño and, 82 Defoe and, 81 encyclopedic fiction and, 74–76, 88 vs. normalcy in characters, 71 Said on, 71 the ship as place in, 155 voluminous novels of, 256 Whitman and, 76 Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Cleland). See Fanny Hill memory in the novel, 30–31, 34 Mendelson, Edward, 77–78, 84, 85

ind ex Mendès, Catulle, 176–77 Mendiluce, Edelmira Thompson de (in Nazi Literature in the Americas), 82 Merry (in The Lord of the Rings), 156–57 Metamorphoses (Apuleius), 45–46 “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (Simmel), 59 Meyers, Stephenie, 231 Micawber, Wilkins (in David Copperfield), 204–5 Michelet, Jules, 91 Michima, Yukio, 135n11 Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life (Georges Eliot), xiii, 1, 4, 19, 32, 54, 157 Midnight’s Children (Rushdie), xvii, 100–1, 139, 141–42, 146–47, 227 Miéville, China, 160 Miller, Henry, xv, 16 Millet, Lydia, 258 Milverton, Charles Augustus (in “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton”), 178 Mimesis (Auerbach), 65–66 Min Kamp (Knausgaard), xviii “Mind-modelling with corpus stylistics in David Copperfield” (Stockwell and Mahlberg), 200 Mirabeau, Octave, 176–77 “Misplaced Ideas” (Schwarz), 99–100 Mister Pip (Jones), 141–42 Mitchell, David, 84 Miyoshi, Masao, 278–79 Moby Dick; or The Whale (Melville) Ahab in, 6–7, 10, 19, 71 Auerbach on, 70–71 in the chronology, xii–xiii encyclopedic fiction addressed in, 74–76 epistemological scope of, 85 Ishmael in, 71, 74–76 Moby Dick in, 6–7 modernism of, 7, 62–63, 76–77 A Journal of the Plague Year and, 81 Queequeg in, 70–71 realism in, 76–77 self-referentiality of, 81, 83 the ship as place in, 155 success of, 140 modernism and the novel. See also Moby Dick overview, 104–18 Abbasid Dynasty and, 277 alternative modernity concepts of, 276–77 Aristotle’s in media res and, 159

backward-looking nature of, 29–30 Barthes’ reality effect and, 92 Beckett and, 116–18 capitalism and, 164 Conrad and, 107–8 epistemological doubt in, 105 experience privileged over transcendent meaning in, 108–9, 110 externalized social/historical contexts and, 105–6 first-person character experiences in, 127–28 Good Morning, Midnight and, 114–16 individualism in, 115–16 interiority in, 105–6 language as essence of, 32 language as material of, 106 Lord Jim and, 107–8 loss and, 31 minor modernity concepts of, 276–77 Mongol Empire and, 277 nineteenth-century fiction misrepresented in, 104 nonlinear time in, 109 open-endedness in, 105–6 ordinary life experiences as subjects in, 8–9 philosophical exploration in, 105 planetary modernism, 276–77 plot de-emphasized in, 105–6, 108–9 postmodernism and, 116 practitioners of, 106–7, 118n2 pre-Western concepts of, 277 reconceptualizations of, 276–77 representational crises in, 164 Rhys and, 114–16 a sense of the planet in, 280 spatial form in, 158–59 stream of consciousness techniques in, 113, 277 subject focus and, 226 Tang Dynasty and, 277 twentieth-century origins of, 104–5 Ulysses and, 77 vs. the Victorian novel, 104–5, 107 modernity Benjamin vs., 30 blackmail and, 178–79 the epic and, 63, 67 mixed values of, 67 the novel as reflection of, 76–77 as the novel’s characteristic form, 60 the novel’s rise and, 24, 37 realism developing in, 92, 96

301

index modernity (cont.) “The Storyteller” and, 31 world systems and, 76, 270–71 Moll Flanders (Defoe), xi, 8 Molloy (Beckett), xvi, 117–18 Molly Bloom (in Ulysses), 112, 114, 115 Money: A Suicide (Martin Amis), xvii Montecristo, Daniela de (in Nazi Literature in the Americas), 83 Moore, Steven, 29, 32, 40n4, 138 Moraru, Christian, 269, 272 More, Thomas, 128–29 Moretti, Franco on Bakhtin’s “Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel,”161 on book vs. literary historians, 222 on Chinese novels, 15, 56n29 Columbell’s circulating library and, 194–95 “Conjectures on World Literature,”277–78 on distant reading, 145, 269–70 the epic/novel binary and, 8 Il Romanzo, 277–78 on language diversity, 269 on length of novels, 56n29 on literary genres in a world system, 37 Lukács and, 62–63 on modernity’s complexities, 62–63 on the nature of the novel’s rise, 32–33 on the novel as modern epic, 62–63 novel-based literary theory of, 23 on Pride and Prejudice, 96–97 on realism, 135n12, 227 “Serious Century,”96–97 “The Slaughterhouse of Literature,”194–95 Spivak vs., 23 world literature projects of, 274 Morgenstern, Karl von, 136n24 Morrison, Toni, xvii, 71, 100, 273–74 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), xiv, 112–14, 119n22, 152, 226 Mumford, Lewis, 76 Murasaki, Shikibu, x, 12–13, 125, 132–33 Murder, She Wrote (television series), 51 Murphy (Beckett), xv Murray, Padmini Ray, 231 Murray, Simone, 253n20 Musil, Robert, xv, 118n2 My Brilliant Friend (Ferrante), xviii My Name is Red (Pamuk), xvii–xviii My Struggle (Knausgard), xviii The Mysteries of Udolpho (Radcliffe), xi

302

Mystery of Edwin Drood (Dickens), 208 Myth of the Sun’s Eye (Egyptian narrative), 45, 46–47 n+1 (literary magazine), 232 Nabokov, Vladimir, xvi Nadja (Breton), xv, 253n26 Naipaul, V.S., xvii, 142 The Naked Lunch (Burroughs), xvi The Name of the Rose (Eco), xvii Nan (in Beloved), 273–74 Nana (Zola), xiii Nao Yasutani (in A Tale for the Time Being), 85–86 Narcons (in Vol 1: A Rainy Day in May), 257 narrative fiction. See also Arabic narrative fiction; Chinese novels/narrative fiction; Egyptian narrative fiction animal fables in, 47–48 Beecroft on, 14 global geography of, 47–49 the history of the novel and, 43 length in, 14, 43–44, 50–53, 229, 231 orality in, 52 origins of, 43 The Shipwrecked Sailor, 52–53 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (Poe), xii narratological formalism, 25–26 nationalism, 24, 32 Native Son (Wright), xv–xvi, 129–30 Native Speaker (Rae-Lee), 131 Natsume, Soˉseki, xiv naturalism, 25, 96 Nazi Literature in the Americas (Bolaño), 81–83 Nazism, 68 Nervous Conditions (Dangarembga), 131 Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí (Kundera), xvii Neuromancer (William Gibson), xvii New Grub Street (Gissing), xiii–xiv New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, 172 New York Trilogy (Auster), xvii Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, xvii, 149–50n4 Nicholas Nickleby (Dickens), 208 Nielsen BookScan, 228 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 59 Night and Day (Woolf), 176 Nightwood (Barnes), xv Niketas Eugeneianos (Byzantine romance proto-novelist), 46 Niland, D’Arcy, 131

ind ex 1984 (Orwell), xvi, 38–39 Nixon, Rob, 279 nonlinear time, 28–29, 31, 34–39 North and South (Gaskell), xii–xiii Northanger Abbey (Austen), xii Nostromo (Conrad), xiv Notre Dame de Paris (Hugo), xii Novalis (German poet/philosopher), 58 the novel (general) overview, 1–19 contradictory and dialectical forces in, 26, 28–29 as a dead end, 247 definitions of, 9–10, 32–33, 43, 138, 139, 268 dematerialization in, 246, 249, 253n22 etymology of, 1, 9, 104 film and, 246, 253n20 histories of, 40n4, 224–25 hybrid forms of, 27, 227 indeterminacy in, 163 length of, 14, 43–44, 50–53, 56n29, 231 television series and, 51–52 themes of existence in, 1–2 transformational nature of, 30–31 as transmedial, 249–51, 253n30 universal aims of, 60 The Novel, An Alternative History 1600– 1800 (Moore), 138 the novel and the law overview, 168–84 biographies in, 180–82 blackmail and, 178–79 British copyright laws and, 174 Casanova and, 169 copyright statutes and, 168–69, 174–78, 184 courtesy of the trade and, 177 defamation doctrines and, 168, 188n80 Defoe and, 174 digital reproduction as a threat in, 178 Fanny Hill and, 170 First Amendment/free speech issues and, 171 groups affected by, 168 the internet as a threat in, 178 legal ineffectiveness and, 175 libel actions and doctrines, 168, 178, 183–84, 188n80 literary vs. legal standards in, 171 The Little Review and, 172

the manufacturing clause and, 175–76 New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, 172 obscenity laws and, 168, 170–74, 178 privacy issues and, 168, 176, 178–84, 186–87n50 publicity and, 178, 180–82, 187–88n70 right of publicity and, 182 Robinson Crusoe and, 174 the roman à clef and, 168 Roth v. United States and, 170–71 slander doctrines and, 178 US Customs Agency and, 171, 173 the novel as commodity overview, 219–35 book culture in, 232–33 capitalism and, 37–38 circulation of novels and, 220–24, 225–27 commodity defined, 219 communication circuits of, 220–24, 221fig12.1, 231–32 consumption and, 221–22 Darnton on, 220–22 digital publishing and, 229 economy of prestige in, 232–33 emotional experience lacking in, 20n18 e-reader technology and, 230 genre fiction’s commercial sustainability and, 230 genre/popular fiction vs. literary fiction in, 223, 226–29, 233–34 in global markets, 219–20, 223, 224, 225–26 global publishing corporations in, 228, 231, 233–34 global readership base of, 233 histories of the novel and, 222–25 human motivations and presence in, 222, 223, 231 in India, 233–34 internet fan sites, 231, 235 it-narratives and, 260, 267n23 Nielsen BookScan reports on, 228 novel length and, 229, 231 participatory culture in, 231 printing technology and, 224 prizes for literary achievement and, 232 production of novels and, 221 readers as authors in, 231 rising book sales and, 228 scholarly analysis metrics and, 233 specialization and, 220–22

303

index the novel as commodity (cont.) types of, 219 the novel as data overview, 189–212 character networks in, 203, 204fig11.3 close reading and, 190, 192–93, 195–96, 211–12 computation and criticism in, 198–99 data and information considerations in, 190–92 David Copperfield and, 190–91, 193, 195, 197, 197t11.1 The Dickens Concordance and, 192–96, 197t11.1, 198t11.2 digitization of novels and, 198–99, 214n26 distribution of word frequencies in, 200fig11.1 falsification possibilities of, 196, 213n22 as information carriers, 190–91 as interpretation enhancement, 192–93 Jakobson and, 191–92 To the Lighthouse and, 193 literary canons and, 193–94 novels as objects and, 190–91, 207–8 quantification in, 192–96, 199–203, 205–6, 208, 210–12, 269–70 rationales for, 192–96 reading strategies and, 191 scale in, 198, 209–11, 214n25 Shannon on, 191 Stanford Literary Lab’s investigations of, 18 Tukey on, 191 unread literary works and, 194–95 virtual spaces in, 205–8 word distributions in, 199–203 word frequencies in, 196–206, 201fig11.2, 206fig11.4, 209–11, 212n3, 214n32, 214n37 word functions in, 190–91 working methodologies of, 196–203 the novel as encyclopedia overview, 74–88 author’s critical receptions and, 77 contradictory epic aspects in, 78–81 Defoe and, 78–81, 83, 88 ecological issues in, 84–86 the encyclopedic syndrome, 74–77 epistemological and geographical scope of, 77 genre classifications in, 76 globalism in, 84–86

304

indeterminacy in, 77 information overload and, 87–88, 90n58 A Journal of the Plague Year and, 78–81 limitations of, 78–81 Melville and, 88 Mendelson on, 77–78 Moby Dick and, 74–77 Nazi Literature in the Americas and, 81–83 plot’s significance in, 84 prophetic commentary in, 85, 86 Saint-Amour on, 78 self-referentiality of, 76–77, 79, 81, 83, 84–85, 86 temporal distinctions in, 77–78 textual ecology in, 84–86 women characters in, 84 the novel as genre. See also novel theory overview, 23–39 anthropomorphization and, 25–26, 27 Aristotle and, 25–26 backward-/forward-looking nature of, 26, 31, 33 the big bookish novel and, 255, 256–59 chronotopicality and, 28–29, 161–63 cultural homelessness of, 58–59 data-oriented definitions of, 189 death of, proclaimed, 90n56, 247, 254 The Ideology of Genre, 25 dialectical duality of, 24 the digital novel and, 262–65 eclectic nature of, 138 encyclopedic nature of, 17, 23–25, 35–36 factuality/fictionality transcended in, 24, 32 fluidity of, 32–33 forward-/backward-looking nature of, 26 genre defined, 26 genre mixing and, 7, 9–10 genre theory and, 23, 24–26, 33–34, 35, 36, 37 genre/popular fiction vs. literary fiction in, 223, 226–29, 233–34 global/planetary forms in, 36 heterogeneity of, 35–36 Homeric vs. Biblical, 66, 67–69 hybridity in, 227 interior melancholy of, 30, 37 the it-narrative novel and, 259–62 length in, 14, 43–44, 50–53, 56n29, 231 local categories of, 43 materiality aestheticized in, 254, 255 melancholy of form in, 35 memory in, 30–31 in a mode of becoming, 27

ind ex the nation in, 38–39 newness of, 1, 24, 26, 27, 29–30, 33, 36, 256 Nobody’s novel and, 24–26 nonlinear time in, 28–29, 31, 34–39, 109–10 novels as videogames and, 264–65 phylogeny of genres, 25–26 as a process, 33 production costs of, 17 reader conventions and, 25–26 realism in, 12 rules of, 25–26 spatiotemporality and, 30, 36 species of, 25–26 textual patterns in, 25–26 theories of, 25–26 time suspended in, 33 transformational nature of, 36–37 virtuality and, 36 as a world genre, 35 world systems in, 26, 35–36, 37 the novel as planetary form overview, 268–81 Beloved and, 273–74 comparative literature and, 270, 272 critical approaches to, 269–70 deep time in, 35, 275–76 definitions of, 270 environmentalism and, 16, 272, 278–81 geographic scale in, 36, 269, 275, 276, 277–78, 279, 280–81 globalization and, 270–72 knowable vs. unknowable communities in, 268 language diversity and, 269 literary geographic expansion and, 275–78 magical realism in, 280 modernist techniques in, 280 nation-state status and, 268–69, 272 the novel’s rise and, 277–78 planet consciousness and, 271 planetarity vs. globalization and, 271–75, 278–79 planetary modernism and, 276–77 “Pterodactyl” and, 273, 274 relationality and, 271–73, 274 representational crises in, 279, 282–83n32 risks in, 277–78 space and time in, 275–78 temporal scale in, 36, 274, 275–76, 279, 280–81 translation and, 274–75

the novel in the digital age overview, 254–66 the big bookish novel and, 255 book production and, 254–55 cinematic elements in, 263 color-coded pagination in, 257–58 the death of the novel and, 254 the digital novel and, 262–65 as digitally-born literature, 255 gameplay rewards in, 264 the it-narrative novel in, 259–62 length of novels and, 254 new technologies of, 254 newness in, 256 the novel as database in, 257 novels as objects and, 259–61 novels as videogames and, 264–65 Object-Oriented Ontology, 261 persistence of, 254 prizes awarded to, 267n25 typographical innovation in, 257–58 volume and, 256 “The Novel is Dead (This time It’s for Real)” (Self), 90n56 novel theory. See theories of the novel novellas, 9, 50 novels and characters overview, 123–34 authors’ agendas voiced through, 128–29 Bildungsromane and, 130–31 character types in, 129, 131, 136n19 as compromises with reality, 123–24, 133, 134n2 definitions/characteristics of, 11 didactic literature and, 128–29 epic/intimate syntheses of, 126–27 in epics, 124–25 as experimental selves, 1 first-person experience of, 127–28 free indirect discourse of, 127 individual psychology of, 127–28 as individuals, 27 large numbers of, 124–25 magical realism and, 132–33 minor characters, 65 mocking of, 133 networks of, 203–5 non-fictional accounts of, 127 reality of, 132–34, 136n25 scientific approaches to, 129–30 semantics of terminology of, 123 single character focus in, 127–28 small numbers of, 125–26, 135n9

305

index novels and characters (cont.) social relations among, 125–27 stream of consciousness in, 127 novels and readers overview, 138–49 awards for literary achievement and, 141–42 close reading and, 190, 192–93, 195–96, 211–12 as co-creators of novels, 139, 140, 149 commercial success of novels and, 140–41, 150n6 controversy and, 141–42 cultural diversity among, 149 data-driven reading strategies and, 191 in the digital age, 255 digital reading practices and, 257–59 empathy and, 10–11, 140, 143–44, 149, 150n15 the English language and, 149–50n4 gameplay rewards for, 264 global expanse of, 139–40, 141–42 ideological incongruities and, 142 ironic credulity of, 10–11 literary awards and, 141–42 multiplicities of, 140 novelists’ strategies and, 140 prizes for literary achievement and, 141–42, 143 Proteus Principle and, 146 Pry and, 262–65 Reader-Response criticism and, 144–45 reading across scales and, 209–11 real vs. implied, 145–49, 151n19 realistic portrayals preferred by, 138 technological data developments and, 189 theories of, 145–49 varieties of, 150n13 Nowell, Jonathan, 228 NW (Zadie Smith), 88 Obinze (in Americanah), 223, 226, 232 O’Brien, Flann, xv–xvi, 226 O’Brien, Tim, xvii–xviii The Odyssey (Homer) Good Morning, Midnight and, 115 Homer’s worldview in, 60 modern epics and, 8 as novelistic epic, 24 Odysseus in, 24–25, 53, 65, 66 repetition in, 53 Ulysses and, 111 “Of Exactitude in Science” (Borges), 159

306

O’Flynn, Malachi (in Ulysses), 105–6 Old Goriot (Balzac), xii the Old Testament, 67–69 The Old Wives’ Tale (Bennett), 176 Olive Chancellor (in The Bostonians), 179–80 Oliver Twist (Dickens), xii, 208 Omeros (Walcott), 33 Omiya (Princess Omiya) (in The Tale of Genji), 125 On the Road (Kerouac), xvi, 163 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Solzhenitsyn), 152 One Hundred Years of Solitude (Garcia Marquez), xvii, 8, 12–13, 132–33, 152 The One vs. The Many (Woloch), 65, 124 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die (Gravett, ed.), 245 Only Revolutions (Danielewski), 256–57 The Origins of the English Novel (McKeon), 193–94 Origins of the Novel (Robert), 27–28 Oroonoko (Behn), 24, 26 Ortega y Gasset, José, 12 Orwell, George, xv, 38–39, 118n2, 223 Oryx and Crake (Atwood), 139 Oscar Woo (in The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Woo), 131 Ostrovsky, Nikolai, 130 Otto Quangel (in Every Man Dies Alone), 128–29 Our Mutual Friend (Dickens), 177 Outcault, R.F., 239 Outside in the Teaching Machine (Spivak), 273–74 Ozeki, Ruth, 84–86 Padma (in Midnight’s Children), 146–47 Padrón, Ricardo, 158 Palace of the Peacock (Harris), 33 The Pale King (Wallace), 254–55 The Palm-Wine Drinkard (Tutuola), xvi, 12–13 Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded (Samuel Richardson), xi, 126, 128–29, 132, 168, 193–94, 224–25 Pamela Andrews (in Pamela), 168 Pamuk, Orhan, xvii–xviii, 134 Pañcatantra (Sanskrit animal fable collection), 46, 47–48, 53–54 Pantheon (publishing company), 238, 252n8 Pariser, Eli, 90n58 A Passage to India (Forster), xiv, 33–34 Passing (Larsen), xv

ind ex Pasternak, Boris, xvi Patterson, James, 230, 232, 234 Pavel, Thomas, 14–15, 133 Pekar, Harvey, 247, 251 Penelopiad (Atwood), 33 Penguin (publishing company), 228–30, 234 People of the Book (Brooks), 267n23 Père Goriot (Balzac), xii, 69, 124 Perec, Georges, 160–61 The Peripheral (Gibson), 84 Persepolis (Satrapi), xviii, 17, 240, 241–42 Pessoa, Fernando, 127–28 Petronius (Roman-proto novelist), 24, 45, 50, 54 The Pickwick Papers (Dickens), xii The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde), xiii–xiv, 24, 92, 178–79 Pilgrimage (Dorothy Richardson), xv The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World, to That Which is to Come (Bunyan), x–xi, 19n6, 193–94 The Pillow Book (Shonagon), 127 Piper, Andrew, 195, 261–62 Pippen (in The Lord of the Rings), 156–57 planetarity. See also the novel as planetary form overview, 271–75 global geography of novels and, 16, 37–38 literature’s goals and, 278–79 readers of novels and, 269 sources on, 281–82n5 temporal/geographical scale on, 36 Plath, Sylvia, xvi–xvii, 176, 177, 181 Platonov, Andrei, 129–30 The Plum in the Golden Vase (anonymous Chinese novel), x–xi, 12–13 Poe, Edgar Allan, xii, 155 Poetics (Aristotle), 95–96 The Portrait of a Lady (Henry James), xiii A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce), xiv, 113 positivist literature. See realism and the novel postcolonialism Anglophone novels and, 11 the Bildungsroman and, 142 magical realism and, 100, 101–2 non-mainstream authors in, 240 the novel readership and, 141 postcolonial criticism, 153 the rise of the novel and, 37 The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (Dickens), xiii postmodernism

Beckett and, 117–18 experimental fiction and, 247 globalization and, 87, 165 modernism and, 116 the novel as genre and, 25, 31–32 planetarity and, 280 space in the novel and, 153 Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Jameson), 164 poststructuralism, 39, 153 Pound, Ezra, 172, 176 Power, Richard, 84 Pratchett, Terry, 154 Presley, Elvis, 182 Pressman, Jessica, viii, 17, 254–66 Price, Leigh, 260, 261, 266n1 Pride and Prejudice (Austen), xii, 96–97, 116, 126 Prince Andrew (in War and Peace), 5–6, 10, 19 The Princess Cassamassima (Henry James), xiii prizes/awards for literary achievement to Americanah, 141–42 to the bone people, 141, 150n8 to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 223 to The God of Small Things, 148 to Half of a Yellow Sun, 141–42 to Kiran Desai, 233 to Maus, 243–44 to Midnight’s Children, 141–42 the novel as commodity and, 232 to novels in the digital age, 267n25 to Pry, 264 to Purple Hibiscus, 141–42 readers of novels and, 141–42, 143 to The Satanic Verses, 141–42 The Production of Space (Lefebvre), 163–64 Project Gutenberg, 214n26 Proteus Principle, 146 proto-novels. See ancient novels/proto-novels Proust, Marcel, 9, 106–7, 127–28, 129, 131, 226, 276. See also In Search of Lost Time Pry (Gorman and Cannizzaro), 262–65, 263fig14.1, 266 psychological realism, 95–96 “Pterodactyl” (Devi), 273, 274 Puckett, Kent, viii, 8, 57–71 Puran (in “Pterodactyl”), 273 Purple Hibiscus (Adichie), 141–42 Pushkin, Alexander, xii

307

index Pynchon, Thomas Bolaño and, 82 Cervantes and, 31–32 in the chronology, xvi critical commentary on, 77 empirical worldview of, 29–30 encyclopedic fiction and, 77, 88 Gravity’s Rainbow, xvii, 6, 77, 85 magical realism and, 101–2 V., xvi–xvii voluminous novels of, 256 Quangel, Otto (in Every Man Dies Alone), 128–29 quantitative literary analysis. See the novel as data Queequeg (in Moby Dick), 70–71 The Quiet American (Greene), xvi the Qu’ran, 136n25 Rabbit Run (Updike), xvi Rabelais, François, 64, 77, 162 Rabinowitz, Peter, 143, 150n13 Radcliffe, Ann, xi Rae-Lee, Chang, 131 Ragtime (Doctorow), 276 The Rainbow (Lawrence), xiv, 172–73 A Rainy Day in May (Danielewski), 256–57 Mrs. Ramsay (in To The Lighthouse), 5, 10, 19 Rand, Ayn, xv–xvi, 19n6 Random House (publishing company), 173, 177, 181 Ransom, Basil (in The Bostonians), 179–80 Rastignac (in Père Goriot), 124 RAW magazine, 241 Rayuela (Cortazar), xvi–xvii readers and novels. See novels and readers “The Real Right Thing” (Henry James), 180–81 realism and the novel. See also magical realism overview, 91–102 ambiguous nature of, 76 Aristotle and, 95–96 Barthes’ reality effect and, 10, 91–92, 96, 97 capitalism and, 164 Coetzee and, 97–100 domestic realism, 32 Dreiser and, 96 English development of, 139 vs. external reality, 97–100 factuality/fictionality in, 95

308

vs. fantasy, 95 historical realism, 32 intimate character portraits in, 126 legal issues of, 15 length and, 44, 51 limits of, 10 literary originators of, 94 Moby Dick and, 76–77 Mrs. Dalloway vs., 112–13 naturalism and, 96 nineteenth-century emergence of, 93 the novel’s definitions and, 32, 43 origins of, 94 plausibility and, 95–96 pre-nineteenth century, 94–95 psychological realism, 95–96 rationales for, 91–93 readers’ attraction on, 226 rejection of, 226 rise of, 268–69 romance literature and, 49, 50, 94 vs. romance narratives, 49, 50 vs. Romanticism, 94 “A Simple Heart” and, 91–93 Sister Carrie and, 96 slavery and, 99–100 social relations in, 125–27 socialist realism, 130 torture and, 98–99 Watt on, 226, 268–69 Wilde on, 92, 93, 102n3 worldwide expansion of, 135n12 Réalisme (literary journal), 93 The Red and the Black (Stendhal), xii Regina v. Hicklin (British obscenity case), 173 relationality, 35, 271–73, 274 The Remains of the Day (Ishiguro), xvii–xviii Remembrance of Things Past (Proust). See In Search of Lost Time Reséndiz, Rigoberto (in 2666), 125 Resisting Novels (Davis), 157 The Reverberator (Henry James), 179 Rhodanthe and Dosikles (Theodore Prodromos), 46 Rhys, Jean Good Morning, Midnight, xv, 114–16 Joyce and, 114, 115 as modernist, 106–7 stream of consciousness techniques of, 114 Wide Sargasso Sea, xvii, 142 Woolf and, 114 Richard Babley (in David Copperfield), 204–5 Richardson, Brian, 140

ind ex Richardson, Dorothy, xv Richardson, Samuel copyright statutes and, 176 as epistolary novelist, 24 Hellenistic elements in, 14–15 Pamela, xi, 128–29, 132, 224–25 popular and classic fiction merged in, 228 as a printer, 224–25 production of novels and, 224–25 the rise of the novel and, 12–13 Richetti, John, 81 “The Right to Privacy” (Warren and Brandeis), 179 Rigoberto Reséndiz (in 2666), 125 The Rise of Silas Lapham (Howells), xiii The Rise of the Novel (Watt), 49, 193–94 rises of the novel. See also Watt, Ian overview, 43–54 anthology vs. extended narrative continuum in, 53–54 Bakhtin on, 43 character development/transformation in, 53 in England, 43, 49–50 Eurocentric views of, 14, 44, 46–47, 50 global nature of, 12–13, 138–39 length and, 50–53, 56n29 planetary literature and, 277–78 plot extension/development in, 54 realism and, 268–69 in the Renaissance, 43 television series and, 51–52 theories of the novel and, 50 River of Smoke (Ghosh), 165 The Road (McCarthy), xviii The Roaring Queen, 183 Rob Roy (Scott), 208 Robbins, Bruce, 279 Robert, Marthe, 27–28, 39 Roberts, David, 81, 89n36 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) Bakhtin on, 161 capitalism and, 26 in the chronology, xi chronotopicality of, 161 Crusoe’s struggles in, 4–5 factuality/fictionality in, 32 as first English novel, 8, 26 as history of fact, 57 in literary canons, 193–94 originality of, 24 Rodríguez de Montalvo, Garci, x Rogin, Michael, 71

roman à clef, 168 Roman de Thèbes (anonymous Old French romance), x, 46 Roman literature, 29 romance literature ancient, 162 Byzantine Greek, 46 chastity/promiscuity in, 49–50 in China, 1 chivalric/medieval romance, 2–3, 27, 29, 49, 107, 162 definitions/characteristics of, 49–50 Don Quixote and, 29–30 in France, 1, 45–46, 50 genre-mixing and, 9 in Germany, 45–46 global manifestations of, 24 literary cartography in, 158 newness vs., 26 vs. the novel, 49–50 otherness in, 27–28 primal romance, 28 realism and, 49, 50, 94 Robert on, 27–28 Watt on, 49–50 Romance of Three Kingdoms (Luo Guanzhong), x Romanticism, 94, 125–26, 163 A Room with a View (Forster), xiv Rosenblatt, Louise, 139 Roth, Philip, xvii–xviii Roth, Samuel, 176–77, 186n33 Roth v. United States (1957) (US Supreme Court), 170–71, 174, 182 Rousseau,Jean-Jacques, xi, 38–39, 126, 135n11 Rowling, J.K., xvii–xviii, 145 Roy, Arundhati, 147–49 Rushdie, Salman in the chronology, xvii critiques of, 101–2 the economy of prestige and, 232, 234 Haroun and the Sea of Stories, 147 Midnight’s Children, xvii, 100–1, 139, 141–42, 146–47, 227 as narrator, 147 personal growth as theme of, 131 The Satanic Verses, xvii, 15, 19n6, 131, 132–33, 141–42, 147 in world literature, 232 Ruth (in A Tale for the Time Being), 85–86 The Sages of Darkness (Barakaˉt), 132–33 Said, Edward, 71, 149, 164–65

309

index Saint-Amour, Paul, 62, 78, 81, 86 Saint-Preux (in Julie, or, The New Heloïse), 126 Salinger, J.D., xvi, 181 Sam (in The Lord of the Rings), 156–57 Sancho Panza (in Don Quixote), 29–30 Sanguo yanyi (Luo Guanzhong), x Santos, Margarita López (in 2666), 125 Sarraute, Nathalie, 133–34 Sasha Jansen (in Good Morning, Midnight), 114 The Satanic Verses (Rushdie), xvii, 15, 19n6, 131, 132–33, 141–42, 147 Satrapi, Marjane, xviii, 17, 240, 241–42, 247 Satyricon (Petronius), 24, 45, 50, 54 The Savage Detectives (Bolaño), xvii–xviii Sayeau, Michael, viii, 10, 91–102 Sayers, Dorothy, 228–29 The Scarlet Letter: A Romance (Hawthorne), xii–xiii Schwarz, Roberto, 15, 37, 50, 99–100, 102, 142 Schwindel. Gefühle (Sebald), xvii–xviii “Science as a Vocation” (Max Weber), 59 Scott, Walter, xii, 32, 176, 208, 228 Se questo è un uomo (Levi), xv–xvi Sea of Fertility (Michima), 135n11 Sea of Poppies (Ghosh), 165 Sebald, W.G., xvii–xviii, 19n6, 248–49, 253n26 secularism (done), 24, 35–36 Self, Will, 90n56 Selvon, Sam, xvi Sense and Sensibility (Austen), xii Sentimental Education (Flaubert), xiii sentimentalism, 25 Septimus Warren Smith (in Mrs. Dalloway), 113–14, 119n22 “Serious Century” (Moretti), 96–97 Seth, Vikram, 141 Setne Khamwas (Egyptian historical narrative), 53–54 Sewell, Anna, 208 The Shadow-Line (Conrad), 259, 260–61 Shaffer, Mary Ann, 267n23 The Shallows (Carr), 90n58, 254 Shannon, Claude, 191 Shaogong, Han, 129 Shelley, Mary, xii Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 175 Sherlock Holmes (in “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton”), 178 Shimei, Futabatei, xiii–xiv The Shining (King), 155

310

The Shipwrecked Sailor (Egyptian fictional narrative), 52–53 The Shiralee (Niland), 131 Shonagon, Sei, 127 short stories of Beckett, 118 A Contract with God and, 242 the graphic novel and, 239, 242 Harvey Kurtzman’s Jungle Book and, 241 the Italian novella and, 9 length of, 50, 52, 53–54 orality and, 52 “The Real Right Thing,”180–81 “A Simple Heart,”91–93, 97 Shteyngart, Gary, 254–55 Shui-hu chuan (anonymous Chinese novel), x–xi Silko, Leslie Marmon, 256 Simmel, Georg, 59 Simonet, Albertine (in In Search of Lost Time), 110 “A Simple Heart” (Flaubert), 91–93, 97, 133 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (anonymous Middle English romance), x Sís, Peter, 259 Sister Carrie (Dreiser), xiv, 96, 129–30 Six Feet Under (television series), 52 Sklair, Leslie, 270–71 “The Slaughterhouse of Literature” (Moretti), 194–95 Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut), xvii slavery, 99–100, 101, 135n16 Smith, Septimus Warren (in Mrs. Dalloway), 113–14, 119n22 Smith, Zadie, xviii, 88, 101–2 socialist realism, 130 Solaris (Lem), 132–33 Song of Solomon (Morrison), xvii The Sopranos (television series), 52 The Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe), xi The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner), xv, 164–65 South Africa, 98–99 South American novels, 12–13 Southern, Terry, 176 Southy, Robert, 175 the space of the novel overview, 152–65 as actual, physical, or renamed, 157 Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris and, 160–61 Bakhtin and, 161–63, 165 capitalism and, 12, 164

ind ex as characters’ ideas, 156 chronotopicality and, 161–63, 165 in David Copperfield, 205–8 as disorienting, 157 Dublin in Ulysses and, 159–60 duration of reading and, 152 in the epic vs. the novel, 163–64 exactitude in, 159 in Faulkner, 12, 154, 160 imperialism, 164–65 Joyce’s Dublin and, 159–60 as literary cartography, 153, 156–61, 165 the modern novel and, 163–65 the novel as encyclopedia and, 164–65 Ortega y Gasset on, 14 place and, 154–56 production of, 158 representation of, 156–59 rooms in, 155 settings in, 154–55 significance of, 153 societies’ productions of, 163–64 spatial types in, 155–56 spatiotemporality and, 12, 154–55, 161–63 as storyworld, 154, 155 theoretical considerations of, 153 time as subject and, 152, 153 timespace and, 14 virtual spaces in, 205–8 “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” (Frank), 153, 163 spatiotemporality, 30, 154–55, 161–63 Spiegelman, Art Maus, xvii, 17, 239, 241, 243–44, 247 Wordless!, 252n11 Spiral (Australian feminist literary collective), 141 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 16, 23, 269, 270, 271, 272–75 Spoo, Robert, viii, 15, 168–84 Squires, Claire, 231 St. Martins (publishing company), 234 Stanford Literary Lab, viii, 18. See also the novel as data Steerforth, James (in David Copperfield), 204–5 Stein, Gertrude, xiv, xv, 118n2, 256, 261–62 Steinbeck, John, xv–xvi Stendhal, Maurice, xii, 65–66, 227 Sternberg, Meir, 146 Sterne, Laurence, xi, 226 Stevenson, Robert Louis, xiii–xiv Stockwell, Peter, 200

Stoker, Bram, xiii–xiv Story of Sinuhe (Egyptian narrative), 44, 45 The Story of the Lost Child (Ferrante), 134 The Story of the Stone/The Dream of the Red Chamber (Cao), 15 The Story of Thebes (anonymous Old French novel), x “The Storyteller” (Benjamin), 30–31 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, xii–xiii The Stranger (L’Etranger) (Camus), xv–xvi stream of consciousness techniques, 106, 111–12, 113–14, 127–28, 164, 280 Strecker, Trey, 84 structuralism, 25–26, 153 Sue, Eugene, 227 Sula (Morrison), xvii Sult (Hamsun), xiii–xiv Summer, John S., 172 The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway), xiv–xv Super Sad True Love Story, 254–55 Svevo, Italo, xiv “The Swallow and the Sea” (Hellenistic era Egyptian fable), 46 Swann, Charles (in In Search of Lost Time), 109–10, 131 Swift, Jonathan, xi, 29–30, 147 Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (Carroll), 123 S/Z (Barthes), 146 Tale for the Time Being (Ozeki), 84–86 The Tale of Genji (Murasaki), x, 12–13, 24, 50, 54, 125, 152 A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens), xiii, 177, 208 Tales of Count Lucanor (Don Juan Manuel), x, 47 Tally, Robert, Jr., viii, 12, 152–65 tankoˉbon (individual vs. serial Japanese publications or manga), 145 Tanner, Tony, 32 Tarr (Lewis), xiv Tarrant, Verena (in The Bostonians), 179–80 Tartt, Donna, 229 television series, 51–52 Tender Claws (digital novel collective), 262 Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (Saint-Amour), 62 Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Hardy), xiii–xiv Thackeray, W.M., xii–xiii Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston), xv, 131 Theodore Prodromos (Byzantine romance proto-novelist), 46

311

index theories of the novel. See also Auerbach, Erich; Bakhtin, Mikhail M.; Beebee, Thomas; Benjamin, Walter; Lukács, György; Marxist literary criticism and theory backward-/forward-looking nature of, 26 dialectics in, 24, 26, 28–29 history in, 35–36 human time in, 27–28 indeterminate nature of, 24–26, 57 methodology for, 14 the novel privileged in, 23 as process, 25–26 rises of the novel and, 50 time in, 28–29 A Theory of Clouds (Audeguy), 267n23 The Theory of the Novel (Lukács) Auerbach and, 65–66 Bakhtin and, 63 chronotopicality and, 163 epic/novel binary in, 57, 60, 61–62 time in, 152 wartime origins of, 7–8, 61–62 Thersites (in The Iliad), 65, 67 “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (Benjamin), 33 Things Fall Apart (Achebe), xvi The Things They Carried (Tim O’Brien), xvii–xviii Thoreau, Henry David, 276 Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Art in Painting and Sculpture (Winckelman), 59 Thousand and One Nights (Arabic narrative fiction), 46–47, 138 A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guarrari), 34 A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (De Landa), 34 Three’s Company (television series), 51 Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Dimock), 63, 275 Through the Arc of the Rainforest (Yamashita), 280 The Time Machine (Wells), xiii–xiv The Time of the Hero (Vargas Llosa), xvi–xvii timespace, 14 The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel) (Grass), xvi To the Lighthouse (Woolf), 5 Tolkien, J.R.R., xv, 156–57 Tolstoy, Leo, xiii, 5–6, 24, 32, 94, 126–27 Tom Jones (Fielding), xi, 193–94

312

Tom Sawyer (Twain), xiii Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe, xvi Tommy Traddles (in David Copperfield), 204–5 Tonnies, Ferdinand, 59 Töpffer, Rodolphe, xii, 16–17, 239, 243–44 Traddles, Tommy (in David Copperfield), 204–5 tragedy, 29–30, 57 transmediality, 249–51, 253n27 The Trial (Der Prozess) (Kafka), xiv–xv Tristram Shandy (Sterne), xi, 193–94 Trollope, Anthony, xii, 32, 135n12 Tropic of Cancer (Miller), xv True History of the Kelly Gang (Carey), 19n6 Trump, Donald, 38–39 Tukey, John W., 191 Turchi, Peter, 159 Turgenev, Ivan, xiii Turner, James Granthan, 132 Tutuola, Amos, xvi, 12–13 Twain, Mark, xiii, 8, 29–30, 94, 154–55 Twilight (Meyers), 231 The Twilight Zone (television series), 51 2666 (Bolaño), xviii, 125 Tyrone Slothrop (in Gravity’s Rainbow), 6, 10 Ukigumo (Futabatei Shimei), xiii–xiv Ulysses (Joyce) affirmative ending of, 112, 114, 115 Beckett and, 116–17 British suppression of, 173 in the chronology, xiv copyright statutes and, 176, 182 defamation issues and, 183 encyclopedic nature of, 77, 86–87 as an epic, 62–63 French publication of, 173 the graphic novel and, 17 on greatest novels lists, 19n6 interiority in, 110–11 legal issues of, 15 modernism of, 8, 77, 111 obscenity laws and, 171–73, 177 The Odyssey and, 33, 111 realism in, 12 seizure of, 186n33 stream of consciousness in, 106, 111–12 subject focus in, 226 throwaway in, 110–12 transformational processes in, 111–12 unexpurgated publication of, 173

ind ex The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Kundera), xvii Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), xii–xiii Underworld (Delillo), xvii–xviii United States Supreme Court, 170–71, 182 United States v. One Book Entitled Ulysses by James Joyce (U.S. Federal Court case), 173 The Unnameable (Beckett), xvi, 117–18 Updike, John, xvi, 147–48 Uriah Heep (in David Copperfield), 204–5 U.S.A. Trilogy (Dos Passos), xv Utopia (More), 128–29 V. (Pynchon), xvi–xvii van Ewijk, Petrus, 78 Vanderham, Paul, 185n23 Vanity Fair (Thackeray), xii–xiii Vargas Llosa, Mario, xvi–xvii Vauquer (Madame Vauquer) (in Père Goriot), 69, 71 the Verdurins (in In Search of Lost Time), 109 Verena Tarrant (in The Bostonians), 179–80 Vertigo (Schwindel. Gefühle) (Sebald), xvii–xviii The Vicar of Wakefield (Goldsmith), xi Victorian literature data analysis of, 193, 201, 207fig11.5, 207–8 modernism vs., 104–5 narrators in, 107 the novel as commodity and, 224 realism and, 226 word frequencies in, 209 Vinteuil (in In Search of Lost Time), 9, 109 Vol 1: A Rainy Day in May (Danielewski), 257–59 Vollmann, William T., 84, 256 Vonnegut, Kurt, xvii Voprosy literatury I estetiji (Bakhtin), xvii The Voyage Out (Woolf), 176 Vronsky (Count Vronsky) (in Anna Karenina), 126–27 Wagahai wa Neko de Aru (Natsume), xiv Waiting for the Barbarians (Coetzee), xvii Walcott, Derek, 33 Walker, Alice, xvii Wallace, David Foster, xvii–xviii, 29–30, 84, 88, 101–2, 254–55, 256 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 37, 269–71 Walpole, Horace, xi, 155 Walser, Hannah, viii, 18, 189–212

Wang Shuo, 128–29 War and Peace (Tolstoy), xiii, 5–6, 7, 53, 54 The War of the Worlds (Wells), xiii–xiv Ward, Lynd, xv Ware, Chris, xviii, 17, 247 Warner, Michael, 135n16 Warren, Robert Penn, xv–xvi Warren, Samuel D., 179, 181 Wash Tubbs (comic strip), 242 The Water Margin (anonymous Chinese novel), x–xi Watership Down (Richard Adams), 139 Watt (Beckett), 116–18 Watt, Ian anthology vs. extended narrative continuum and, 54 classics books as subject of, 233 in individual characterizations in novels, 8 literary preferences of, 3 McKeon and, 24, 28–29 novels analyzed by, 193–94 on the novel’s imitation of reality and trial juries, 184n3 on the novel’s origins, 43 on realism, 94, 226, 268–69 on the rise of the novel, 12–13, 28–29, 138, 225 The Rise of the Novel, 49, 193–94 on romance vs. the novel, 49–50 Wattpad (reading application), 234 Waverley (Walter Scott), xii The Waves (Woolf), xv The Way We Live Now (Trollope), xiii Weber, Max, 59 Weep Not, Child (Ngugi Wa Thiong’o), xvii The Well of Loneliness (Hall), 171, 172–73 Wells, H.G., xiii–xiv Wen Yiduo (Chinese poet/scholar), 48 Wharton, Edith, xiv What Maisie Knew (Henry James), xiii–xiv White Noise (Delillo), xvii White Teeth (Zadie Smith), xviii Whitman, Walt, 76 Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys), xvii, 142 Wilde, Oscar in the chronology, xiii–xiv empirical worldview of, 29–30 The Picture of Dorian Gray, 24, 92, 178–79 prosecution of, 178–79 on realism, 92, 93, 102n3 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Goethe), xi, 131, 152

313

index Wilkins Micawber (in David Copperfield), 204–5 Williams, Eric, 37 Williams, Mary, 192–96 Williams, Raymond, 268, 277, 279–80 Winckelmann, Johann J., 59 The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Murakami), 132–33 The Windup Girl (Bacigalupi), 280 Withermore, George (in “The Real Right Thing”), 180–81 The Wizard of the Crow (Ngugi Wa Thiong’o), 149–50n4 Woloch, Alex, 65, 124, 279 Women in Love (Lawrence), 183 Wood, James, 101–2 Woolf, Virginia Between the Acts, xv–xvi in the chronology, xv, xiv domestic relations portrayed by, 135n12 first-person character experiences in, 127–28 To the Lighthouse, 5 in literary canons, 276 in Mimesis, 65–66 as modernist, 106–7 Mrs. Dalloway, xiv, 112–14, 119n22, 152, 226 Night and Day, 176 on place fictionality, 154 Rhys and, 114 rooms as places in, 155 temporal concerns in, 78 The Voyage Out, 176 Woolsey, John M., 171–72, 173, 174 Wordless! (Spiegelman), 252n11 Wordsworth, William, 181 world literature the epic in, 67–69 globalization and, 274 Goethe on, 269 magical realism and, 101–2

314

monolingualism in, 274 Moretti on, 274, 277–78 n+1 on, 232 the novel as genre and, 23, 35 the rise of the novel and, 37–38 Rushdie in, 232 world literary systems vs., 274 world systems of capitalist economic expansion, 270–71 global-colonial world systems, 35–36 history as, 35–36 modernity and, 76 in novels, 26, 35–36, 37 relationality vs. globalism as, 272, 274 of the twenty-first century, 165 world literature vs., 274 World War I, 7–8, 57–59, 61–62 World War II, 86, 116 Wright, Richard, xv–xvi, 129–30 Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte), xii Xanther (in Vol 1: A Rainy Day in May), 257–58 Xenophon of Athens (Greek protonovelist), 24 Xenophon of Ephesus (Greek proto-novelist), x, 45 Yamashita, Karen Tei, 256, 280 Yanagihara, Hanya, 229 Yasutani, Nao (in A Tale for the Time Being), 85–86 The Yellow Kid (Outcault), 239 “The Yellow Wallpaper” (Gilman), 155 You Bright and Risen Angels (Vollman), 84 Zaynab: Country Scenes and Morals (Zaynab: Manazir wa’akhlaq rifiyyah) (Haykal), xiv Zeno’s Conscience (Svevo), xiv Zola, Émile, xiii, 24, 65–66, 129–30

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Goethe edited by Lesley Sharpe

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Thomas Hardy edited by Dale Kramer

Chaucer edited by Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (second edition)

David Hare edited by Richard Boon

Chekhov edited by Vera Gottlieb and Paul Allain

Nathaniel Hawthorne edited by Richard Millington

Kate Chopin edited by Janet Beer

Seamus Heaney edited by Bernard O’Donoghue

Caryl Churchill edited by Elaine Aston and Elin Diamond

Ernest Hemingway edited by Scott Donaldson

Cicero edited by Catherine Steel Coleridge edited by Lucy Newlyn Wilkie Collins edited by Jenny Bourne Taylor Joseph Conrad edited by J. H. Stape H. D. edited by Nephie J. Christodoulides and Polina Mackay Dante edited by Rachel Jacoff (second edition) Daniel Defoe edited by John Richetti Don DeLillo edited by John N. Duvall

Homer edited by Robert Fowler Horace edited by Stephen Harrison Ted Hughes edited by Terry Gifford Ibsen edited by James McFarlane Henry James edited by Jonathan Freedman Samuel Johnson edited by Greg Clingham Ben Jonson edited by Richard Harp and Stanley Stewart James Joyce edited by Derek Attridge (second edition)

Charles Dickens edited by John O. Jordan

Kafka edited by Julian Preece

Emily Dickinson edited by Wendy Martin

Keats edited by Susan J. Wolfson

John Donne edited by Achsah Guibbory

Rudyard Kipling edited by Howard J. Booth

Dostoevskii edited by W. J. Leatherbarrow

Lacan edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté

D. H. Lawrence edited by Anne Fernihough Primo Levi edited by Robert Gordon

Shakespearean Tragedy edited by Claire McEachern (second edition)

Lucretius edited by Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie

Shakespeare on Film edited by Russell Jackson (second edition)

Machiavelli edited by John M. Najemy

Shakespeare on Stage edited by Stanley Wells and Sarah Stanton

David Mamet edited by Christopher Bigsby Thomas Mann edited by Ritchie Robertson

Shakespeare’s First Folio edited by Emma Smith

Christopher Marlowe edited byPatrick Cheney

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Andrew Marvell edited by Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker

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Herman Melville edited by Robert S. Levine

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George Bernard Shaw edited by Christopher Innes

Milton edited by Dennis Danielson (second edition) Molière edited by David Bradby and Andrew Calder

Shelley edited by Timothy Morton Mary Shelley edited by Esther Schor Sam Shepard edited by Matthew C. Roudané

Toni Morrison edited by Justine Tally

Spenser edited by Andrew Hadfield

Alice Munro edited by David Staines

Laurence Sterne edited by Thomas Keymer

Nabokov edited by Julian W. Connolly

Wallace Stevens edited by John N. Serio

Eugene O’Neill edited by Michael Manheim

Tom Stoppard edited by Katherine E. Kelly

George Orwell edited by John Rodden

Harriet Beecher Stowe edited by Cindy Weinstein

Ovid edited by Philip Hardie Petrarch edited by Albert Russell Ascoli and Unn Falkeid Harold Pinter edited by Peter Raby (second edition)

August Strindberg edited by Michael Robinson Jonathan Swift edited by Christopher Fox J. M. Synge edited by P. J. Mathews

Sylvia Plath edited by Jo Gill

Tacitus edited by A. J. Woodman

Edgar Allan Poe edited by Kevin J. Hayes

Henry David Thoreau edited by Joel Myerson

Alexander Pope edited by Pat Rogers

Tolstoy edited by Donna Tussing Orwin

Ezra Pound edited by Ira B. Nadel

Anthony Trollope edited by Carolyn Dever and Lisa Niles

Proust edited by Richard Bales Pushkin edited by Andrew Kahn Rabelais edited by John O’Brien Rilke edited by Karen Leeder and Robert Vilain Philip Roth edited by Timothy Parrish Salman Rushdie edited by Abdulrazak Gurnah John Ruskin edited by Francis O’Gorman Shakespeare edited by Margareta de Grazia and Stanley Wells (second edition) Shakespearean Comedy edited by Alexander Leggatt

Mark Twain edited by Forrest G. Robinson John Updike edited by Stacey Olster Mario Vargas Llosa edited by Efrain Kristal and John King Virgil edited by Charles Martindale Voltaire edited by Nicholas Cronk David Foster Wallace edited by Ralph Clare Edith Wharton edited by Millicent Bell Walt Whitman edited by Ezra Greenspan Oscar Wilde edited by Peter Raby Tennessee Williams edited by Matthew C. Roudané

Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists edited by Ton Hoenselaars

August Wilson edited by Christopher Bigsby

Shakespeare and Popular Culture edited by Robert Shaughnessy

Mary Wollstonecraft edited by Claudia L. Johnson

Virginia Woolf edited by Susan Sellers (second edition)

W. B. Yeats edited by Marjorie Howes and John Kelly

Wordsworth edited by Stephen Gill

Xenophon edited by Michael A. Flower Zola edited by Brian Nelson

TOPICS The Actress edited by Maggie B. Gale and John Stokes

The Classic Russian Novel edited by Malcolm V. Jones and Robin Feuer Miller

The African American Novel edited by Maryemma Graham

Contemporary Irish Poetry edited by Matthew Campbell

The African American Slave Narrative edited by Audrey A. Fisch

Creative Writing edited by David Morley and Philip Neilsen

Theatre History by David Wiles and Christine Dymkowski

Crime Fiction edited by Martin Priestman

African American Theatre by Harvey Young

Early Modern Women’s Writing edited by Laura Lunger Knoppers

Allegory edited by Rita Copeland and Peter Struck American Crime Fiction edited by Catherine Ross Nickerson American Gothic edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock American Modernism edited by Walter Kalaidjian American Poetry Since 1945 edited by Jennifer Ashton American Realism and Naturalism edited by Donald Pizer American Travel Writing edited by Alfred Bendixen and Judith Hamera American Women Playwrights edited by Brenda Murphy Ancient Rhetoric edited by Erik Gunderson Arthurian Legend edited by Elizabeth Archibald and Ad Putter Australian Literature edited by Elizabeth Webby The Beats edited by Stephen Belletto British Black and Asian Literature (1945–2010) edited by Deirdre Osborne British Literature of the French Revolution edited by Pamela Clemit British Romanticism edited by Stuart Curran (second edition) British Romantic Poetry edited by James Chandler and Maureen N. McLane British Theatre, 1730–1830, edited by Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn

Dracula edited by Roger Luckhurst

The Eighteenth-Century Novel edited by John Richetti Eighteenth-Century Poetry edited by John Sitter Emma edited by Peter Sabor English Literature, 1500–1600 edited by Arthur F. Kinney English Literature, 1650–1740 edited by Steven N. Zwicker English Literature, 1740–1830 edited by Thomas Keymer and Jon Mee English Literature, 1830–1914 edited by Joanne Shattock English Novelists edited by Adrian Poole English Poetry, Donne to Marvell edited by Thomas N. Corns English Poets edited by Claude Rawson English Renaissance Drama edited by A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (second edition) English Renaissance Tragedy edited by Emma Smith and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr. English Restoration Theatre edited by Deborah C. Payne Fisk The Epic edited by Catherine Bates Erotic Literature edited by Bradford Mudge European Modernism edited by Pericles Lewis European Novelists edited by Michael Bell Fairy Tales edited by Maria Tatar Fantasy Literature edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn

Canadian Literature edited by Eva-Marie Kröller (second edition)

Feminist Literary Theory edited by Ellen Rooney

Children’s Literature edited by M. O. Grenby and Andrea Immel

Fiction in the Romantic Period edited by Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener

Frankenstein edited by Andrew Smith

The Literature of World War II edited by Marina MacKay

The French Enlightenment edited by Daniel Brewer

Literature and Disability edited by Clare Barker and Stuart Murray

The Fin de Siècle edited by Gail Marshall

French Literature edited by John D. Lyons

Literature and Science edited by Steven Meyer

The French Novel: From 1800 to the Present edited by Timothy Unwin

Literature on Screen edited by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan

Gay and Lesbian Writing edited by Hugh Stevens

Medieval English Culture edited by Andrew Galloway

German Romanticism edited by Nicholas Saul

Medieval English Literature edited by Larry Scanlon

Gothic Fiction edited by Jerrold E. Hogle The Graphic Novel edited by Stephen Tabachnick

Medieval English Mysticism edited by Samuel Fanous and Vincent Gillespie

The Greek and Roman Novel edited by Tim Whitmarsh

Medieval English Theatre edited by Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher (second edition)

Greek and Roman Theatre edited by Marianne McDonald and J. Michael Walton

Medieval French Literature edited by Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay

Greek Comedy edited by Martin Revermann

Medieval Romance edited by Roberta L. Krueger

Greek Lyric edited by Felix Budelmann

Medieval Women’s Writing edited by Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace

Greek Mythology edited by Roger D. Woodard Greek Tragedy edited by P. E. Easterling The Harlem Renaissance edited by George Hutchinson The History of the Book edited by Leslie Howsam The Irish Novel edited by John Wilson Foster Irish Poets edited by Gerald Dawe The Italian Novel edited by Peter Bondanella and Andrea Ciccarelli The Italian Renaissance edited by Michael Wyatt Jewish American Literature edited by Hana Wirth-Nesher and Michael P. Kramer Latin American Poetry edited by Stephen Hart The Latin American Novel edited by Efraín Kristal The Literature of the American Renaissance edited by Christopher N. Phillips The Literature of Berlin edited by Andrew J. Webber The Literature of the First World War edited by Vincent Sherry The Literature of London edited by Lawrence Manley

Modern American Culture edited by Christopher Bigsby Modern British Women Playwrights edited by Elaine Aston and Janelle Reinelt Modern French Culture edited by Nicholas Hewitt Modern German Culture edited by Eva Kolinsky and Wilfried van der Will The Modern German Novel edited by Graham Bartram The Modern Gothic edited by Jerrold E. Hogle Modern Irish Culture edited by Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly Modern Italian Culture edited by Zygmunt G. Baranski and Rebecca J. West Modern Latin American Culture edited by John King Modern Russian Culture edited by Nicholas Rzhevsky Modern Spanish Culture edited by David T. Gies Modernism edited by Michael Levenson (second edition) The Modernist Novel edited by Morag Shiach

The Literature of Los Angeles edited by Kevin R. McNamara

Modernist Poetry edited by Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins

The Literature of New York edited by Cyrus Patell and Bryan Waterman

Modernist Women Writers edited by Maren Tova Linett

The Literature of Paris edited by Anna-Louise Milne

Narrative Theory edited by Matthew Garrett

Narrative edited by David Herman

Native American Literature edited by Joy Porter and Kenneth M. Roemer Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing edited by Dale M. Bauer and Philip Gould The Novel edited by Eric Bulson Old English Literature edited by Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge (second edition) Performance Studies edited by Tracy C. Davis Piers Plowman by Andrew Cole and Andrew Galloway Popular Fiction edited by David Glover and Scott McCracken Postcolonial Literary Studies edited by Neil Lazarus

The Spanish Novel: From 1600 to the Present edited by Harriet Turner and Adelaida López de Martínez Textual Scholarship edited by Neil Fraistat and Julia Flanders Transnational American Literature edited by Yogita Goyal Travel Writing edited by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs Twentieth-Century British and Irish Women’s Poetry edited by Jane Dowson The Twentieth-Century English Novel edited by Robert L. Caserio Twentieth-Century English Poetry edited by Neil Corcoran

Postcolonial Poetry edited by Jahan Ramazani

Twentieth-Century Irish Drama edited by Shaun Richards

Postcolonial Travel Writing edited by Robert Clarke

Twentieth-Century Russian Literature edited by Marina Balina and Evgeny Dobrenko

Postmodern American Fiction edited by Paula Geyh

Utopian Literature edited by Gregory Claeys

Postmodernism edited by Steven Connor

Victorian and Edwardian Theatre edited by Kerry Powell

The Pre-Raphaelites edited by Elizabeth Prettejohn

The Victorian Novel edited by Deirdre David (second edition)

Pride and Prejudice edited by Janet Todd

Victorian Poetry edited by Joseph Bristow

Renaissance Humanism edited by Jill Kraye

Victorian Women’s Writing edited by Linda H. Peterson

Robinson Crusoe edited by John Richetti The Roman Historians edited by Andrew Feldherr Roman Satire edited by Kirk Freudenburg Science Fiction edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn Scottish Literature edited by Gerald Carruthers and Liam McIlvanney

War Writing edited by Kate McLoughlin Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789 edited by Catherine Ingrassia Women’s Writing in the Romantic Period edited by Devoney Looser World Literature edited by Ben Etherington and Jarad Zimbler

Sensation Fiction edited by Andrew Mangham

Writing of the English Revolution edited by N. H. Keeble

The Sonnet edited by A. D. Cousins and Peter Howarth

The Writings of Julius Caesar edited by Christopher Krebs and Luca Grillo