Without the Novel: Romance and the History of Prose Fiction

By Scott Black

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Aug 23, 2019
• ISBN: 9780813942858

Book preview

Without the Novel

Without the Novel

Romance and the History of Prose Fiction

Scott Black

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2019 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2019

ISBN 978-0-8139-4284-1 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-8139-4285-8 (e-book)

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title.

Cover art: Page from Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, London: Folio Society, 1970

For Rona

I’m so glad you’re hungry too.

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

Acknowledgments

Like the books it explores, this project has involved a meandering journey, with unexpected twists and some surprising developments. It wouldn’t have been possible without the generosity, encouragement, and conversation of many friends and colleagues. Most particularly, Lauren Shohet and Barry Weller have been constant interlocutors and even more constant friends throughout the whole process; sharing it with them has been a joy. Robert Caserio and Marcie Frank have also been crucial enablers, and helpful in innumerable ways. My colleagues at the University of Utah have patiently heard, and endured, many versions of these readings and arguments. For their suggestions, collegiality, and support, many thanks to Andy Franta, Vince Cheng, Nadja Durbach, Craig Dworkin, Disa Gambera, Howard Horwitz, Anne Jamison, Lance Olsen, Matt Potolsky, Richard Preiss, Jeremy Rosen, Alf Seegert, Angela Smith, Tom Stillinger, Kathryn Stockton, Jessica Straley, and Melanie Thon. For fruitful conversations, comments on specific chapters, help at pivotal times, as well as general good cheer and friendship, I’m indebted to Laura Baudot, Bob Chibka, Ariana Reilly Codr, Alan Downing, Robert Glick, David Glimp, Stephanie Hershinow, Tony Jarrells, Sam Otter, Kathy Rowe, Anne Royston, Wolfram Schmidgen, Jane Thrailkill, and Julian Yates. Thanks to Montreal’s NOVANOV Group and the Burney Center for providing an opportunity to test-drive the Burney chapter. Brooke Hopkins was an early and enthusiastic supporter of this project, and I wish he were here to see it completed.

I am grateful to the Huntington Library and the Folger Shakespeare Library for fellowships, to the University of Utah for a faculty fellowship, and to Dean Dianne Harris of the University of Utah’s College of Humanities for a teaching release that allowed me to complete the manuscript. An earlier version of chapter 1 was published in Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 52, nos. 3–4 (2011), 343–60; © 2011 University of Pennsylvania Press, reprinted with the permission of University of Pennsylvania Press. A version of chapter 3 originally appeared in The Cambridge History of the English Novel, edited by Robert L. Caserio and Clement C. Hawes; © 2012 Cambridge University Press, reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press. Chapter 4 originally appeared in Henry Fielding in Our Time: Papers Presented at the Tercentenary Conference, edited by J. A. Downie; published with the permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing. A version of chapter 5 was first published in ELH 82, no. 3 (2015), 869–96; © 2015 The Johns Hopkins University Press, reprinted with the permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press.

Without the Novel

Introduction

Romance and the Turbulence of Literary History

Reading is not always a modern activity. Readers may get carried away by their books, lose themselves, or discover themselves enchanted. An activity of temporal displacement as much as historical placement, reading may short-circuit the progress assumed by modernity, producing eddies in time or introducing pockets of the past into the present. At such moments, books too are carried along and realized anew, resurfacing in strange worlds, out of place, reanimated in other minds. The genre of romance is formed at such seams of time, when ancient forms seem to live on like zombies refusing to die and stalking us through our daylight worlds with fantastic anxieties and embarrassing pleasures.¹ Romance is also formed of the seams of time, of temporal knots, loops, or vortices that register and provoke an experience of transhistorical reading—across different times, irresolvable into one. At the genre’s several sites of origin, foundational romances present themselves as secondary, belated, and critical adaptations of strange, archaic, or foreign narratives. In updating such alien stories, these originary romances also self-consciously relay them, offering a space in the contemporary world in which to stage, explore, and enjoy the continuing force of old forms. This gesture of temporal recursion structures the genre in its form, history, and affordances.

If, as Fredric Jameson says, the history of novel is inevitably the history of the realist novel, the history of fiction is not inevitably the history of the novel.² Jameson has defined the ideal of realism as a narrative discourse which in one form or another unites the experience of daily life with a properly cognitive, mapping, or well-nigh scientific perspective.³ In this book I address what comes into focus if we discard the category of the novel, with its timely mapping of ordinary experience, and consider a mode of fiction that operates outside those exigencies. What becomes visible if we reject the seemingly automatic assumptions that the novel is what modern prose fiction is and the tendency and telos of literary history? For Georg Lukács, the novel is the indigenous genre of modernity, the form of mature virility by which we moderns comprehend ourselves as modern, estranged from the immanence of traditional meaning but compensated by an enlightened, demystified understanding and what Michael McKeon characterizes as the negative freedom of autonomous self-recognition.⁴ But is that all we read fiction for?

Romance has shadowed the history of the novel like a bad dream and a guilty secret. Rather than ignoring or demystifying it, this book explores the form and history of fiction in the mode of romance. In attending to this black sheep of literary history, I suggest that the category of the novel, with its focus on mapping, maturity, and modernity, is not adequate for all fiction—and not even in the modern world. I ask three intertwined questions. What is fiction without the novel? What is literary history without the novel? What is reading without the novel?

What other forms might we recognize, and what other demands, pleasures, and practices of reading might emerge?

Scott’s Essay on Romance

Fiction without the novel is romance. In his Essay on Romance, Walter Scott broadens Samuel Johnson’s account of romance as a military fable of the middle ages; a tale of wild adventures in love and chivalry by saying that ‘wild adventures’ are almost the only absolutely essential ingredient in Johnson’s definition. For Scott, romance is fiction that turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents. It is thus distinguished from the novel, fiction accommodated to the ordinary train of human events, and the modern state of society.⁵ Scott’s revision of Johnson’s definition identifies the central core of romance by separating its modal force from its historical situation (the Middle Ages) and theme (love and chivalry): a less accommodated definition. This points the way to an exploration of romance in its own terms, not defined by its historical placement but by the displacements—the adventures—that define the genre’s form and provocations.

The chronotope of adventure is both the most ancient type of prose fiction, according to Mikhail Bakhtin, and the most enduring.⁶ Bakhtin characterizes the adventure time that organizes ancient prose fiction as a gap, a pause, an extratemporal hiatus between two moments of biographical 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. . . . In this kind of time, nothing changes; the world remains as it was, the biographical life of the heroes does not change, their feelings do not change, people do not even age. This empty time leaves no traces anywhere, no indication of its passing.⁷ In such pockets of extraordinary time, events are random and characters are passive, absolutely private, and isolated, without social or political significance.⁸

For Bakhtin this is the formal structure of adventure stories, but it also outlines the experience of readers of such stories as well. Georg Simmel describes adventure as an island, separated, isolated, and bounded: We speak of adventure precisely when continuity with life is thus disregarded on principle . . . something alien, untouchable, out of the ordinary. The adventure lacks that reciprocal interpenetration with adjacent parts of life which constitutes life-as-a-whole. It is like an island.⁹ But though separated from ordinary life, such extraterritorial experiences produce a new, significant necessity in one’s life, connecting with the character and identity of the bearer of that life . . . in the widest sense, transcending, by a mysterious necessity, life’s more narrowly rational aspects.¹⁰ Simmel describes this strange connection, this mysterious necessity, as a foreign body in our existence which is somehow connected with the center, and which can make you alien to yourself: adventure often moves so far away from center of ego and the course of life which the ego guides and organizes that we may think of it as something experienced by another person . . . we could appropriately assign to the adventure a subject other than the ego.¹¹ The chronotope of adventure offers extraordinary experiences for both characters and readers—a form of fiction about extraordinary experiences in bubbles of time that offers readers, in turn, versions of such experiences. In Henry James’s terms, these experiences are disengaged from and disencumbered of ordinary relations: "The only general attribute of projected romance that I can see, the only one that fits in all its cases, is the fact of the kind of experience with which it deals—experience liberated, so to speak; experience disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered, exempt from the conditions that we usually know to attach to it and, if we wish so to put the matter, drag upon it, and operating in a medium which relieves it, in a particular interest, of the inconvenience of a related, a measurable state, a state subject to all our vulgar communities."¹² In both its form and the experience it affords, romance is a release from the ordinary, unrelated to development or sociality, a traceless bubble that records and affords strange but vital experiences in an empty, or at least measureless, time.

Michel de Certeau’s characterization of readers as poachers captures this kind of dislocated reading. "Sometimes [the reader] loses the fictive securities of reality when he reads: his escapades exile him from the assurances that give the self its location on the social checkerboard. Who reads, in fact? Is it I, or some part of me?"¹³ Such reading touches a mysterious, unknowable foreign body at my center, which isn’t me but also reminds me that I am not only me, and offers a necessarily fleeting, transitory experience of being without relations, without measure, and without connection to ordinary life. These moments of exemption and exception can be exhilarating, as James’s liberated registers, but the point of such reading, its dubious pleasure, is to suffer exile and the loss of assurance, to face a world that is not mastered or understood, a world of accidents—a wild—that is not for you and that reminds you of the limits of what you think you are. These are strange bubbles to be caught up in, strange gaps to cross. And though I do think they can be pointed out, shared, and communicated (the very premise of this book is that they can be), these adventures can’t fully be captured but only passed through, on the condition of letting them go. "Reading takes no measures against the erosion of time (one forgets oneself and also forgets), it does not keep what it acquires, or it does so poorly, and each of the places it passes through is a repetition of a lost paradise."¹⁴ It’s worth saying here at the outset that to follow the traces of such trackless passages is to embrace the kind of transience we habitually resist. So hold lightly, reader, let go, and let’s go.

The suspension of ordinary life and development that defines the chronotope of adventure at the center of romance likewise defines its history. As I’ve noted, for Bakhtin the chronotope of adventure is both the oldest and the most enduring form of fiction, and scholars regularly note what Victor Skretkowicz calls the other worldly consistency of the genre even through vast historical changes.¹⁵ What would the history of fiction in the guise of romance and from the perspective of romance look like? How would one write a history of a genre organized by enclosures of stasis, withdrawal, and untimeliness? Romance suggests a timescape of holes, loops, and eddies that ripple at the edges of ordinary history, displaced and displacing. The story of realism’s development, and the novel, is a story of how fiction accommodates the ordinary. A history of romance, by contrast, would trace the displacements of adventures, the ways stories of strange intrusions—and stories as strange intrusions—create, preserve, and transmit pockets of unaccommodated time within the ordinary world.

Once Scott distinguishes between novels and romance, he immediately notes that things are messier when it comes to specifics: there may be works which it is difficult to assign precisely or exactly to one class or the other; and which, in fact, partake of the nature of both.¹⁶ In his review of Emma, he includes all eighteenth-century fiction among these mixed works. Only with Austen does Scott find fiction fully copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life and offering a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place.¹⁷ Austen draws characters and incidents more immediately from the current of ordinary life than was permitted by the former rules of the novel; prior to her, fiction was assimilated to the old romances, presenting its characteristic structures—extraordinary stories of idealized characters—in modern dress.¹⁸ In Scott’s literary history, the novel doesn’t rise in the eighteenth century as a new literary form shaped by ordinary life; rather, the traditional form of romance absorbs new contents. And, Scott continues, such stories did their work as extraordinary stories, appealing to the pleasures one has in contemplating virtue even when confessedly unable to imitate its excellencies.¹⁹ If romance doesn’t imitate the ordinary, it isn’t supposed to be imitated itself, offering instead an experience disengaged from the exigencies of daily life that the novel seeks to represent and shape.

I agree that the development of the novel is best understood as a nineteenth-century phenomenon, whether viewed in terms of the stabilization of the category in essays like Scott’s or Clara Reeve’s Progress of Romance or the institutionalization of the genre in collections by Scott or Anna Laetitia Barbauld.²⁰ But rather than simply move the advent of realism forward to Austen, I take seriously the continuity of romance as a literary phenomenon interesting in its own right. Indeed, Austen’s exemplary novels are romances in both theme and form, organized by updated conceptions of chivalry and traditional love stories alike. And her continued popularity certainly has as much to do with those aspects of her books that allow them to be experienced as romantic fantasies as with their close study of everyday life.²¹ It may be hard to keep these apart over time. In his "Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote," Jorge Luis Borges outlines this aspect of literary history:

For both the dreamer and the dreamed [Cervantes and Don Quixote], that entire adventure had been the clash of two worlds; the unreal world of romances and the common everyday world of the seventeenth century.

They never suspected that the years would at last smooth away the discord, never suspected that in the eyes of the future, La Mancha and Montiel and the lean figure of the Knight of the Mournful Countenance would be no less poetic than the adventures of Sinbad or the vast geographies of Ariosto.

For in the beginning of literature there is myth, as there is also in the end of it.²²

For Borges, literary history is a process of remythification that moves through demystification. With time, the common everyday world, of Cervantes’s Spain, of Austen’s England, the world of the novel, is re-assimilated to romance. The achievements of realism give shape to the future of romance. Romance as a genre of extraordinary stories is formed of the continual interplay between wild adventures and ordinary reality: a recurring series of cycles of realities becoming fictions and fictions re-seeding reality that is only half told by the emergence of realism.

The Persistence of Romance

The intertwining of the extraordinary and ordinary, romance and realism, is as central and defining a problem of literary history as any—and perhaps of literature itself. When Odysseus narrates his adventures to Alcinous’s court, Homer lodges the enchanting improbabilities of ancient Greek storytelling at the heart of what will become its written literature as well. But in the modern world, and especially in modern literary histories that tell the story of modernity in its own terms, such mixtures can start to look like dangerous backslidings in the progress of enlightenment. McKeon solves the historical puzzle of the persistence of romance (why do archaic forms outlive their historical moments?) by reformulating the genre in novelistic terms, explaining romance as a genre of epistemological naivete and aristocratic ideology that’s then repurposed for new philosophical and social projects.²³ Read in reference to the contexts that define the novel, romance doubly disappears. Its distinct generic profile is overwritten in terms of another genre (it is accommodated to the ordinary train of human events, and the modern state of society). And once so novelized, as Homer Obed Brown and Lori Humphrey Newcomb point out, the genre effectively disappears from literary histories that are concerned with the development of a realism that is at once their formal precondition and historical end—literary histories that narrate the development of the narrative procedures they themselves depend on.²⁴

If McKeon resolves the puzzle of the persistence of romance into a history of the emergence of the novel, Northrop Frye resolves it into a history of the fading of myth. Romance is the half-life of myth, the formulaic, conventional structures of the imagination that are displaced into increasingly more ordinary, credible stories.²⁵ Concerned to trace the intertextual echoes of a literary tradition that is inflected but not revised by historical change, Frye’s model is the mirror of McKeon’s.²⁶ While McKeon addresses the refilling of conventional structures with new, historically specific contents, Frye addresses the use of new, local structures to convey old materials. For both, the persistence of romance is a central dynamic of literary history, but each construes it as an effect of the opposing force that drives his particular magisterial account, the progressive novelization of prose fiction in a story of historical change or the reverberating echoes of myth in a story of literary continuity.

In her True Story of the Novel, Margaret Doody offers another model of continuity (which is more modern than Frye’s) and another kind of novelization (which is more ancient than McKeon’s). Tracing a long, continuous history of prose fiction from the late classical world through the modern novel, Doody adopts the privileged term novel for all prose fiction and argues there is no distinction between romance and novel.²⁷ Following recent scholarship, Doody describes the ancient novel as a mixed, cosmopolitan form for a mixed, multiracial, and multilingual Alexandrian culture.²⁸ A post-epic form for the Hellenistic world, the genre is allusive, intertextual, and self-conscious in form and addresses questions of personal, rather than civic, identity in content.²⁹ (The modern world, in this account, begins in the ancient world.) Novels stress individuality for both characters and readers alike. They tell stories of characters forged through experiences of love and suffering that take place away from the civic realm, and they value personal affection and individual desire.³⁰ In so valuing individual experience, rather than social identity, novels resemble Hellenistic mystery religions and offer ritual experiences of reading that provide an escape from necessity, an intimation of a new life, a ritual of the Alternative.³¹ Doody’s history intertwines two aspects of identity, a generic identity across time that is defined by the development of individual identity for characters and readers alike.

Doody’s adoption of novel for prose fiction is apt for her project, as she reads the history of prose fiction in relation to the kind of individuality that Ian Watt defines as the core of the novel.³² But this erases the difference of romance—the chronotope of adventure and the static characters who journey through those adventures—and reads modern problems of individual identity as the problems of the ancient novel. If, however, Scott and Bakhtin are right and romance is centrally concerned with adventure, romance offers an experience that might be thought of as something experienced by another person . . . a subject other than the ego, an experience of losing rather than forming identity. So while I follow Doody in her important efforts to claim the prestige of the novel for works often dismissed as romance, and so lengthen and broaden the history of prose fiction, I want to preserve the difference between romance and the novel and continue to use romance to name the extraordinary nature, indeed the sheer weirdness, of the mode of storytelling at its core.³³

I read the persistence of romance as a defining modern literary problem, one that is coextensive with the development of modernity’s characteristic literary form, the novel, but not explicable in its terms. Romance is the reminder that we have never been as fully modern as we say, and the remainder of a much longer, wider, and weirder literary history than that told by our familiar stories.³⁴ Such accounts tend to work between binary poles—epic and novel, myth and history—with romance as the excluded middle. But recognizing the genre in its own specificity opens a space for a literary history of many forms, many projects, and many trajectories—some of which don’t move in straight, developmental lines, and which are valuable for just that reason. R. Bracht Branham argues that a third generic concept is needed to account for the ambiguous compromise between the canonical values of oral epic and those of the novel that defines ancient Greek romance as a distinct tradition of idealized fiction.³⁵ As a genre defined by its intermediate status as a compromise between epic and novel, romance is an enabling hinge in literary history, an in-between, mediating genre.³⁶ And it has its own formal profile, its own projects, and its own affordances that are irreducible to either the residual or emergent forms it mediates. In holding, as Robert Scholes, Robert Kellogg, and James Phelan elegantly put it, the mutually repellent poles of fiction and empiricism in nervous and vibrant conjunction, romance is organized by an internal difference, an enabling temporal distortion, which organizes both its history and its form in less linear terms.³⁷

The persistence of romance is less a problem of history than a problem of form. Corinne Saunders defines romance as a self-consciously mixed mode, employing old structures to new purposes, often at war within itself.³⁸ The genre is always already organized around the historical problem of the meeting of old forms and new worlds, and indeed often the intrusion of old forms into new worlds. But unlike the novel, which adapts old forms for new projects, romance tends to use old forms for both new and old purposes, adapting their structures but also adopting their force. Formed by imperfect translations to contemporary idioms, romance is an irresolvably double genre in which, as Edward Dudley writes of medieval romance, the original and the later meaning [of an old story] are inscribed as an integral component of the text: "the author’s translatio from one set of hermeneutic expectations to another is never without problems. Something of the original purpose may still persist in the story, giving the reader a sense of the presence of another ‘meaning’ buried in the text.³⁹ Clive Probyn sketches an Enlightenment view of romance in similar terms: romance always contains the ingredients of what it denies, and it is conscious of its own excluded origins; what it suppresses is always present."⁴⁰ At the core of romance, formally, is the problem of the persistence of dislocated but still viable, vital stories and the leaky, local compromises they make with their new hosts.

If the form of romance is defined by the tenacity of old forms, its history follows a more Borgesian trajectory within the grand narratives of literary history. McKeon reformulates Frye’s decay of myth as the persistence of romance—romance serves as the dialectical negation that allows for the development of the novel. But as Borges’s parable reminds us, as realism persists, it too decays. If romance registers the decay of myth, it likewise registers the decay of history and the various realisms that aspire to grasp it. Realism persists as romance, and if the novel is formed of a struggle with older forms, romance in turn blooms from the aging of newer forms. Romance names the entropy of literary history, the way forms decay but also drift, survive, and sometimes even thrive in foreign and distant worlds. The puzzles of such persistence are surprising only in light of assumptions, based on the novel, that the accommodations of realism define the course of literary history. Time keeps moving, though, and every modern solution wears down to reveal a partial compromise that reminds us of time’s turbulence. A literary history without the novel would not be organized by the trajectories of modernity and progress but would be a record of decay and delay, indirection, improper passion, and sometimes willful mistakes. These are the dynamics that form romance. We need a looser, more turbulent literary history to register the entropy named by romance, as well as its accidents, untimely intrusions, and anachronistic incitements.

The Future of Literary History

Literary history without the novel is recursive. "Nothing is