Reading the European Novel to 1900

Daniel R. Schwarz

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118604823
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire européenne

"Schwarz's study is chock full of judicious evaluation of characters, narrative devices, ethical commentary, and helpful information about historical and political contexts including the role of Napoleon, the rise of capitalism, trains, class divisions, transformation of rural life, and the struggle to define human values in a period characterized by debates between and among rationalism, spiritualism, and determinism. One experiences the pleasure of watching a master critic as he re-reads, savors, and passes on his hard-won wisdom about how we as humans read and why.
Daniel Morris, Professor of English, Purdue University

Written by one of literature's most esteemed scholars and critics, Reading the European Novel to 1900 is an engaging and in-depth examination of major works of the European novel from Cervantes' Don Quixote to Zola's Germinal. In Daniel R. Schwarz's inimitable style, which balances formal and historical criticism in precise, readable prose, this book offers close readings of individual texts with attention to each one's cultural and canonical context.

Major texts that he discusses: Cervantes' Don Quixote; Stendhal's The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma; Balzac's Père Goriot; Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education; Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov; Tolstoy's War and Peace and Anna Karenina; and Zola's Germinal.

Schwarz examines the history and evolution of the novel during this period and defines each author's aesthetic, cultural, political, and historical significance. Incorporating important pedagogical suggestions and the latest research, this text provides accessible and lucid discussion of the European novel to 1900 for students, teachers, and general readers interested in the evolution of the novelistic form.

Chapter 1
Introduction
The Odyssey of Reading Novels

She speaks of complexities of translation,

its postcolonial and diasporic nature,

how translated text

is torn from original

as if it were unwillingly

sundered from its parent.

As she triumphantly

concludes her perfectly

paced performance,

she crosses her arms,

returning to herself

as if to say

her ideas have been

translated into words

as best she could.

(“Brett de Bary,” Daniel R. Schwarz)

Beginnings

This book, the first of a two-volume study, includes major novels published before 1900 that are frequently taught in European novel courses. The high tide of the European novel was the nineteenth century but no discussion of the European novel can ignore Don Quixote. Thus there is well over a two hundred-year jump from Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote (1615) to Stendhal's The Red and the Black (1830) and The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) and Honoré de Balzac's Père Goriot (1835). Much of this study deals with works by the great Russians: Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), The Brothers Karamazov (1880), and Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877).¹ Among the French nineteenth-century novelists, in addition to the aforementioned, I include Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857) and Sentimental Education (1869) and Emile Zola's Germinal (1885).

I have been rereading most of these books for a lifetime, although important new translations of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Cervantes have been published in recent decades. But do we really reread or is every reading a fresh reading? As Verlyn Klinkenborg rightly observes, “The real secret of re-reading is simply this: It is impossible. The characters remain the same, and the words never change, but the reader always does.”² We are different readers each time we pick up a text, maybe a different reader each day, changed ever so slightly depending on our life experience, our psyche that day, and the texts we are reading. For reading is a transaction in which the text changes us even as we change the text. While Klinkenborg has written that, “Part of the fun of re-reading is that you are no longer bothered by the business of finding out what happens” (ibid.), I find that rereading makes me aware of nuances I missed, even while making me aware that my memory of what happens is not accurate. What we recall is not a novel but a selection and arrangement of the novel, and as time passes what we retain is a memory of a memory rather than the full text in all its plenitude.

I am addressing the novels under discussion not only diachronically but also synchronically. That is, I am aware of the evolution of the novel and how major novels strongly influence their successors. For example, we will see in Don Quixote how the first person narrator's familiarity with his readers, his combining realism with fantasy and tall tale, his efforts to distinguish story from history, provide a model for subsequent novels, including The Brothers Karamazov. As Harold Bloom would argue, each major novelist is a strong misreader of his predecessors and thus each is also an original. We read major texts, as T. S. Eliot rightly contended in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” not only in the context of their predecessors and the possible influence of those predecessors, but also in the context of their successors. Thus each major work changes our view of its predecessors.

I also want to think of the novels on which I focus as being in conversation with one another, as if they were all present simultaneously at the same discussion or colloquium and were making claims for how and why they exist. Put another way, if we substitute “words” for “object,” our novelists are all following Jasper Johns's oft-repeated axiom for art: “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.”³ I want to think about what is unique to what the novelist in each doing has created, and how these doings are similar and different.

I have not written completely symmetrical chapters. But each of my chapters will: (1) first and foremost provide a close reading of the novel or novels under discussion; (2) speak to what defines the essence of the author's oeuvre; (3) place the focal novel or novels within the context of the author's canon and culture; and (4) define the author's aesthetic, cultural, political, and historical significance. On occasion, I may focus on two works within a chapter when one adumbrates or complements the other.

We read in part to learn the wisdom of experience that the novelist fused in his vision of life and his historical scope. Those who provide notable wisdom include Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Stendhal, and Balzac. These writers at times show what Thomas Mann – who might have been writing about himself – called in an essay on Theodor Fontaine, “classic old men, ordained to show humanity the ideal qualities of that last stage of life: benignity, kindness, justice, humor, and shrewd wisdom – in short a recrudescence on a higher plane of childhood's ancient unrestraint.”⁴ Of course there is no particular age when one achieves such a temperament. As we shall see in my Volume 2, Mann, writing Death in Venice in his thirties, as well as Albert Camus, had this temperament at quite an early age, and it pervades every page of Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard.

Why are there no women novelists in my study of the European novel to 1900? While Jane Austen, the Brontës, and George Eliot played a pivotal role in defining the nineteenth-century English novel, women played a much less important role in the European novel. Few would argue that George Sand (the pseudonym of Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, 1804–1876) was the equal of the aforementioned French novelists.

We do have fully realized and psychologically complex women characters in the person of the title characters of Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary as well as the Marchesa in The Charterhouse of Parma and Natasha in War and Peace. But in too many of the included novels, the women are depicted as objects of desire and relatively passive figures, as Madonnas or Mary Magdalenes, innocents or whores. Some of the more passive figures, like Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov, do have some aspects of complexity.

Usually in the European novel before 1900, women – even fully realized ones – are not as intellectually gifted or ambitious in terms of achievement as men, and seem to be the creations of men who do not think of women as equals. How these male writers think of women is culturally determined, but it is hard not to wish for something more. It is the English novel where female writers – Austen, Brontës, Woolf – and their characters make their mark. Indeed, even the male writers such as Dickens and Thackeray create more vibrant, rounded women characters than we usually find in the European novel.

Since I am writing in English, I occasionally make comparisons to the English and American literary traditions. It is by similarities and differences – the entire context of major novel texts – that we best understand how novels work formally and thematically.

The Function of Literature: What Literature Is and Does

According to Lionel Trilling, “[L]iterature has a unique relevance … because literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.”⁵

Literature is a report on human experience, but, we need to ask, does its aesthetic form make it a privileged report and, if so, privileged in what way? Is literature part of the history of ideas, or only in a special sense where the aesthetic inflects the ideas? As a cause, literature, I argue, affects its historical context – its Zeitgeist – but literature is also a result of its historical context. Imaginative literature and, in particular, novels are indexes of a culture as well as critiques, but they do not – nor do other arts – exist in some separate higher universe. As Michael Chabon asserts, “[T]he idea for a book, the beckoning fair prospect of it, is the dream; the writing of it is breakfast-table recitation, groping, approximation, and ultimately, always, a failure. It was not like that at all.… The limits of language are not the stopping points, says [James Joyce's] the Wake; they are the point at which we must begin to tell the tale.”⁶

In this study, I try to balance the how with the what, and to balance the way that novels give us insight into human experience at a particular time and place and have significance for contemporary readers with how that is accomplished in terms of aesthetic choices and stra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Introduction: The Odyssey of Reading Novels
• Chapter 2 Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605, 1615): Inventing the Novel
• Chapter 3 Reading Stendhal's The Red and the Black (1830) and The Charterhouse of Parma (1839): Character and Caricature
• Chapter 4 Predatory Behavior in Balzac's Père Goriot (1835): Paris as a Trope for Moral Cannibalism
• Chapter 5 Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857) and Sentimental Education (1869): The Aesthetic Novel
• Chapter 6 Reading Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground (1864) and Crime and Punishment (1866)
• Chapter 7 Hyperbole and Incongruity in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (1880): Excess and Turmoil as Modes of Being
• Chapter 8 Tolstoy's War and Peace (1869): The Novel as Historical Epic
• Chapter 9 Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1877): Exploring Passions and Values in Nineteenth-Century Russia
• Chapter 10 Emile Zola's Germinal (1885): The Aesthetics, Thematics, and Ideology of the Novel of Purpose
• Selected Bibliography (Including Works Cited)
• Index
• End User License Agreement