Without the Novel

Romance and the History of Prose Fiction

Scott Black

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780813942858
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Primordi della storia moderna

No genre manifests the pleasure of reading—and its power to consume and enchant—more than romance. In suspending the category of the novel to rethink the way prose fiction works, Without the Novel demonstrates what literary history looks like from the perspective of such readerly excesses and adventures.

Rejecting the assumption that novelistic realism is the most significant tendency in the history of prose fiction, Black asks three intertwined questions: What is fiction without the novel? What is literary history without the novel? What is reading without the novel? In answer, this study draws on the neglected genre of romance to reintegrate eighteenth-century British fiction with its classical and Continental counterparts. Black addresses works of prose fiction that self-consciously experiment with the formal structures and readerly affordances of romance: Heliodorus's Ethiopian Story, Cervantes's Don Quixote, Fielding's Tom Jones, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and Burney's The Wanderer. Each text presents itself as a secondary, satiric adaptation of anachronistic and alien narratives, but in revising foreign stories each text also relays them. The recursive reading that these works portray and demand makes each a self-reflexive parable of romance itself. Ultimately, Without the Novel writes a wider, weirder history of fiction organized by the recurrences of romance and informed by the pleasures of reading that define the genre.

1

Reading Mistakes in Heliodorus

With only a touch of hyperbole, it can be said that ancient literature ends with Heliodorus and modern literature begins with it. The Ethiopian Story starts out as a final, consolidating example of the postclassical genre of Hellenistic romance, and then a millennium later, a blast from the past, it is rediscovered and taken as a model of classical epic romance. The Ethiopian Story is a uniquely double hinge in literary history, both a modernizing ancient text and a classicizing modern one: a founding moment of modern romance and an example of the historical pattern of romance’s recurrent recycling. Further, and more strangely, the Ethiopian Story not only manifests that process in its literary history but reflects on it at the core of its own story.

The exact origin of the Ethiopian Story is uncertain. It is a Greek text from the eastern Mediterranean province of Syria in the late Roman Empire, dating from either the third or fourth century.1 And it is a late example of the ancient prose fiction (anachronistically called either romance or novel) that is associated with the “new style Hellenism” of late antiquity, a genre that emerges in post-traditional urban centers at the crossroads of trade in goods, forms, and traditions.2 A loose and baggy form, to coin (or counterfeit) a phrase, romance was not a classical genre. There was no ancient critical discussion of it and no category for it. Rather, it was a self-consciously belated, syncretic mix of old and new forms, local and foreign traditions.3 N. J. Lowe describes romance as New Comedy transposed across the ancient medium of epic, and scholars have found echoes in it of many classical genres and traced its sources into Egypt, Persia, and India.4 Heliodorus’s work is the last and greatest surviving example of this fertile genre, as Lowe writes: “The Aethiopica is the ancient world’s narrative summa, a self-consciously encyclopedic synthesis of a thousand years of accumulated pagan plot techniques, of the game of story as a way of understanding the world. For the next millennium or more, it remained the final word.”5 And it was a buried root that bore fruit long after its first cultivators were gone.

I imagine an illiterate Bavarian mercenary, not brave enough to compete for the real wealth of the plundered city, snatching what he can from a burning library, selling that scrap of paper on the road for a crust of bread to a slightly less starving student, who trades it in turn for passage west out of the war zone, and so on, until the book lands on the desk of a clerk who recognizes it as Greek. The manuscript of the Ethiopian Story was found in the Bibliotheca Corviniana (the great humanist library assembled by Matthias Corvinus) during the sack of Buda (1526), printed in Basel (1534), and translated into French by Jacques Amyot (1547), Latin by Stanislaus Warschewiczki (1551), and English by Thomas Underdowne (from the Latin, 1569). It was taken by early modern writers and scholars (Tasso, El Pinciano, Scaliger, Sidney, Cervantes, Scudéry, Lafayette) as a classical model for a corrective modern romance.6 Renaissance critics looked to the discussion of epic in Aristotle’s Poetics, in wide circulation among sixteenth-century humanists, for a guide to the shapely “classical plot” that reconciles economy and amplitude and models the “large scale narrative coherence” that distinguishes early modern fiction from the earlier unwieldy, formally sprawling, and morally disordered narratives of medieval romance.7 The Ethiopian Story was taken to exemplify these Aristotelian principles and served as the model of classical prose fiction throughout early modern Europe.8 Pierre-Daniel Huet summarizes this critical tradition in his Traité de l’origine des Romans (1670): the Ethiopian Story offered the definitive example of probable and regular romance and “served as a model to all writers of romans who followed it, and it may be said just as truthfully that they have all drawn upon it, as it is said that all [epic] poets have drawn upon the model of Homer.”9 This claim was regularly repeated. In 1716 Richard Blackmore writes that Heliodorus “became the Model on which the numerous Authors of Romances in following Times form’d themselves, as the Poets imitated that of Homer,” and the anonymous translator of the 1717 English version calls it the “Mother Romance of the World.”10 Because of the instability of critical categories throughout the eighteenth century, Heliodorus is called “the first author of novels” in 1751, and in 1810 Anna Laetitia Barbauld recommends the Ethiopian Story as “a romance or novel . . . a genuine novel.”11

Through its many translations and reprints, the Ethiopian Story reminds us that the story of prose fiction is as much a story of potent anachronisms as new inventions. What is most special and interesting about Heliodorus is that he self-consciously reflects on these processes, embeds their patterns within his narrative, and reflexively invites his readers to enact them. This gives the Ethiopian Story the weird and thrilling effect of anticipating, at the very heart of its story, its own future history. At its origin (or one of its several origins), romance is formed by the dynamics of literary recursion—belatedness and anachronism, adaptation and adoption—that will continue to organize the genre and its history throughout that history. I begin my exploration of romance with this reflexive model of the genre, and the puzzles and pleasures of reading in which it involves us.

Rise and Invention (Novel)

In standard histories of prose fiction, the novel is a modern form articulated against a past left, however tentatively, behind. Two such conceptions of the novel can be sketched by juxtaposing Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel and Anthony Cascardi’s “Don Quixote and the Invention of the Novel.” For Watt, the novel is a tool of empiricism, and its formal realism, a “more largely referential” use of language, directs one to read the genre in relation to (extratextual) contexts; the “issue the novel raises more sharply than any other literary form [is] the problem of the correspondence between the literary work and the reality it imitates.”12 Watt’s particular account of the novel’s context may now seem dated (the middle class, for instance, the sociological plank of the triple rise, does not rise so definitively).13 But the realist protocols of reading Watt outlined still organize many histories of the novel, which line up texts and contexts and read novels in relation to social and historical developments.

Cascardi’s ironic and Continental model of the genre contrasts with Watt’s English and empiricist model. Rather than offering a mode of representation able to express the terms of emerging modernity, Cascardi’s novel (paradigmatically Don Quixote) is a second-order genre, a tool of critique and irony that makes such claims impossible. Defined by its formal variety, openness, and self-conscious irony, the novel in this model refashions and recodes other literary forms and discourses.14 Any truth claim in a novel or any realist claim for transparency (offering access to reality or the illusion of access to it) is qualified by its situation in the ironic, polyvocal, heteroglossic form of the genre itself.15 Juxtaposing several perspectives, novels alternately draw readers in and qualify those attractions. Don Quixote “is built around a plot that is woven of many, mutually interrupting strands. As the reader makes his or her way through the text, there is a temptation to become fully absorbed in each one of the interpolated stories, but there is likewise a requirement to see that each is part of a multi-layered whole. Indeed, the question is whether Cervantes offers us any position from which to survey this incredibly complex literary structure as a whole.”16 Novels shift readers between various kinds of discourse, alternating between absorption in familiar stories and the ironic distance available from the perspectival multiplicity of the whole. If Watt’s conception of realism serves to authorize historicist reading practices, reading for correspondences, Cascardi’s model of the genre suggests a history of the novel as a tool of ironic reflection on that process, critiquing the kinds of claims that define the genre for Watt. What kind of history of the novel issues from this conception of its form?

Cascardi’s own brief, telegraphic sketch of literary history pegs his novel, like Watt’s, to modernity. (For Watt the modern means a new way of comprehending reality, for Cascardi it means self-consciousness about ways of comprehending reality, but for both the novel is a tool of modernity, however understood.) The dialogic self-consciousness of Don Quixote is distinguished from, among other earlier genres, “archaic adventure romances, such as Heliodorus’s Ethiopian History and the anonymous Apollonius of Tyre.”17 Although in this essay Cascardi explicitly refers to Bakhtin’s “Dialogue in the Novel,” here he adopts Bakhtin’s conception of the ancient novel from “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.” Set between the poles of betrothal and marriage, ancient novels are structured as a series of adventures in what Bakhtin calls “an alien world in adventure time”: “all of the action in a Greek romance, all the events and adventures that fill it, constitute time-sequences that are neither historical, quotidian, biographical, nor even biological and maturational.”18 As I’ve discussed above, nothing changes in adventure time, and the hectic activities of the characters adrift in this “extratemporal hiatus” (shipwreck! imprisonment! seduction!) leave no trace on them.19 In situating the Ethiopian Story in this category of adventure story, though, Bakhtin flattens the work and overlooks its baroque and self-reflexive narrative complexity.20 Bakhtin focuses on the plot and the characters, not the dense layering of the narrative, and indeed the heroine, Charikleia, is beautifully static and enduring, simply becoming who she is.21 But the Ethiopian Story does not allow us simply to bask in her beauty or to drift in the reveries of her adventures. Rather, it is organized around the persistent puzzle of Charikleia’s identity, and it stages a series of responses to her unfolding story that foreground issues of interpretation and reading. If Charikleia remains who she has always been (discovering, not forging, her identity), much of the pleasure of the Ethiopian Story, and much of its suspense, comes from the difficulties of figuring out who she is. Though Charikleia remains unchanged as she moves through an alien world in adventure time, the work itself raises questions about the significance of such adventures.

Cascardi takes Bakhtin at his word about Heliodorus, but the Ethiopian Story has as much in common with Apollonius as Don Quixote does with the books of chivalry in Quixote’s library, and indeed it stands in the same relation to earlier works as Don Quixote does, a sophisticated, self-conscious examination of their effects.22 Gerald Sandy, who translated Apollonius for the standard English edition of ancient Greek novels, says that the content of that work is “built on a core of strong popular stories and folktales, and embodies an uncomplicated, satisfying morality and a happy ending”; its manner likewise is “excited, hasty, often inconsistent, and anything but subtle.”23 The version of Apollonius we have is probably a Latin translation of an earlier, lost Greek text, and it is almost certainly stitched together from various sources (there are numerous inconsistencies, gaps, and hasty patches). But if the whole is not a shapely example of Bakhtin’s ancient novel (there is no single framing story of betrothal, adventures, and marriage), it seems assembled from such stories and does offer an example of the isolated and passive individuals undergoing a series of trials that defines the genre.24 Apollonius is the work of accident, time, and chance, an authorless agglomeration of fragments of popular stories. In contrast, while Heliodorus’s work is also organized by the chronotope of adventure, it is self-conscious about the compositional structures and readerly effects of its genre. Like Cervantes, Heliodorus structures his work by the tension between immersive reading and ironic reflection, and the Ethiopian Story is more properly grouped with Don Quixote as an example of a self-conscious fiction than with Apollonius as a putative example of the novel’s prehistory.

I say putative because in pushing the moment of novelistic self-consciousness back from Cervantes to Heliodorus, I do not want to echo the critical habit of positing some simple form of narrative against which to view the reflexivity and complexity of novels. Indeed, even Apollonius has moments that seem self-reflective. Part of its labyrinthine plot turns on a Shahrazad-like transformation of violence into story, as Tarsia, sold into prostitution, tells her story to her johns, making them cry and pay her for that pleasure instead of sex.25 The sublimation of sexual assault into narrative pleasure is a plot twist that can be read as a thematic reflection on the kind of civilizing work done by this kind of frankly brutal storytelling. It is less a story with a moral (it is hard to assign guilt to the women of the story, victimized by fathers and fate) than moral storytelling, which asks its readers, too, to take the pleasures of humane pity, not bestial lust, from its representations of cruelty and violence—and perhaps even asks us to think about how that works and what that means. Tarsia will also use her gift for speaking to return the suicidal Apollonius to light and life.26 This archaic adventure celebrates, perhaps self-consciously, compelling and fluent storytelling. I doubt there is such a thing as simple narrative at all—any narrative is at some level the work of human reflection—and even if there is, I am sure there is no such thing as simple reading. Any reading entails both work and pleasures that can become self-aware.

I do not, then, simply want to push back the horizon to find an older modern novel and argue that self-conscious novels are an invention of the ancient world (though they certainly are).27 Rather, I want to supplement Bakhtin’s account of adventure in two ways. First, adventure names an experience of reading as well as a mode of representation. And second, if adventure is inconsequential in historical or biographical terms, it does have its own peculiar significance. Works like the Ethiopian Story (and Don Quixote) are not just modern, critical reflections on inconsequential adventure stories but also self-conscious versions of them that seek to preserve and transmit the strangely productive, and seductive, mode of reading such stories enable.

The alien world in adventure time that defines the ancient novel for Bakhtin can be understood as an account of the mode of reading such extraordinary narratives call for. Readers of such stories, no less than their characters, are private, passive, and isolated as they are buffeted by the forces of fate, passion, and trial in another world. As Marie-Laure Ryan writes, “the frozen metaphors of language dramatize the reading experience as an adventure worthy of the most thrilling novel: the reader plunges under the sea (immersion), reaches a foreign land (transportation), is taken prisoner (being caught up in a story, being a captured audience), and loses ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Romance and the Turbulence of Literary History
• 1 · Reading Mistakes in Heliodorus
• 2 · The Origins of Romance
• 3 · Romance Redivivus
• 4 · The Adventures of Love in Tom Jones
• 5 · Tristram Shandy’s Strange Loops of Reading
• 6 · Stasis and Static in The Wanderer
• Coda: Reading Romance
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index