EN201 The European Novel

Introduction: THE/EUROPEAN/NOVEL 5.10.11

1. NOVEL. A fictitious prose narrative or tale of considerable length (now usually one long enough to fill one or more volumes), in which characters and actions representative of the real life of past or present times are portrayed in a plot of more or less complexity.In 17-18th c. freq. contrasted with a romance, as being shorter than this, and having more relation to real life. (OED, 2nd edition)

2. The point about the novel […] is not just that it eludes definitions, but that it actively undermines them. It is less a genre than an anti-genre. It cannibalizes other literary modes and mixes the bits and pieces promiscuously together. You can find poetry and dramatic dialogue in the novel, along with epic, pastoral, satire, history, elegy, tragedy and any number of other literary modes. Virginia Woolf described it as ‘this most pliable of all forms’. The novel quotes, parodies and transforms other genres, converting its literary ancestors into mere components of itself in a kind of Oedipal vengeance on them. It is the queen of literary genres in a rather less elevated sense of the word than one might hear around Buckingham palace.

The novel is a mighty melting pot, a mongrel among literary thoroughbreds. There seems to be nothing it cannot do. It can investigate a single human consciousness for eight hundred pages. Or it can recount the adventures of an onion, chart the history of a family over six generations, or recreate the Napoleonic wars. If it is a form particularly associated with the middle class, it is partly because the ideology of that class centres on a dream of total freedom from restraint. In a word in which God is dead, everything, so Dostoevsky remarked, is permitted; and the same goes for a world in which the old autocratic order is dead and the middle class reigns triumphant. The novel is an anarchic genre, since its rule is not to have rules.[…] Myths are cyclical and repetitive, while the novel appears excitingly unpredictable. In fact, the novel has a finite repertoire of forms and motifs. But it is an extraordinary capacious one even so. […] It is hard to say when the form first arose. […] Most commentators agree that the novel has its roots in the literary form we know as romance. Indeed, these are roots that it has never entirely cut. Novels are romances – but romances which have to negotiate the prosaic world of modern civilisation […] If the novel is a romance, it is a disenchanted one, which has nothing to learn about the baffled desires and recalcitrant realities. […] The novel presents us with a changing, concrete, open-ended history rather than a closed symbolic universe. Time and narrative are of its essence. In the modern era, fewer and fewer things are immutable, and every phenomenon, including the self, seems historical to its roots. The novel is the form in which history goes all the way down.Terry Eagleton, ‘What is a Novel?’, The English Novel: An Introduction (2005)

3. The Editor believes the thing to be a just history of fact; neither is there any appearance of fiction in it.Daniel Defoe, ‘Preface’ to Robinson Crusoe (1719)

4. As we are now entering upon a book, in which the course of our history will oblige us to relate some matters of a more strange and surprising kind than any which have hitherto occurred, it may not be amiss in the prolegomenous, or introductory chapter, to say something of that species of writing which is called the marvellous. […] First then, I think, it may very reasonably be required of every writer, that he keeps within

the bounds of possibility; and still remembers that what it is not possible for man to perform, it is scarce possible for man to believe he did perform. […] we must keep likewise within the rules of probability. […] To say the truth, if the historian will confine himself to what really happened, and utterly reject any circumstance, which, tho’ never so well attested, he must be well assured is false, he will sometime fall into the marvellous, but never into the incredible. […] It is by falling into fiction, therefore, that we generally offend against this rule, of deserting probability, which the historian seldom, if ever quits, till he forsakes his character, and commences a writer of romance. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (Bk 8, Ch 1) (1746)

5. I have diligently collected everything I have been able to discover concerning the story of poor Werther, and here present it to you in the knowledge that you will be grateful for it. You cannot deny your admiration and love for his spirit and character, nor your tears at his fate.

And you, good soul, who feels a compulsive longing such as his, draw consolation from his sorrows, and let this little book be your friend whenever through fate or through your own fault you can find no closer companion. Preface to Werther (trans Michael Hulse)

6. THE EDITOR TO THE READERI wish very much that we had enough of our friend’s own testimony, concerning the last remarkable days of his life, to render it unnecessary for me to interrupt this series of preserved letters with narration.

I have seen it as my duty to gather precise information from the mouths of those likely to be best acquainted with his history; it is a simple story, and all the accounts agree except on a few insignificant details; though opinions and judgements vary with respect to the fundamental attitudes of the people involved.

We have no alternative but conscientiously relate what repeated endeavours have brought to light, to include letters written by the deceased, and to attend to even the slightest scrap of paper we have found; especially as it is so difficult to discern the true and peculiar motives of even a single action of men who are not of a common order.The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) (trans. Michael Hulse)

Recommended ReadingEric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946)André Brink, The Novel: Language and Narrative from Cervantes to Calvino (1998)Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (1996)Terry Eagleton, The English Novel (2005)Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (1960, revsd. 2005)Georg Lukács, - The Historical Novel (1962)

- Studies in European Realism (1950)- The Theory of the Novel (1971)

Michael McKeon, - Theory of the novel: a historical approach (2000) - The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (1987)

Franco Moretti, - The Novel Volume 1: History, Geography and Culture (2006)- The Novel Volume Two: Forms and Themes (2006)- An Atlas of the European novel, 1800-1900 (1998)- The Way of the World: the Bildungsroman in European Culture (1987) - Modern Epic : the world-system from Goethe to García Márquez

(1996)Martin Travers, An Introduction to Modern European Literature: From Romanticism to Postmodernism (1998)

M Moses Valdez, The Novel and the Globalization of Culture (1995)Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (1957)