A Long History of the Novel

Steve Donoghue has an excellent review/essay of The Novel: An Alternative History by Steven Moore (aka, the man who edited the first draft of Infinite Jest).

Here’s what it does:

The entertaining part hits you right away and, amazingly, stays with the book for what amounts to a 600-page Wikipedia-style itemized plot breakdown of the some 200 or so works of literature he claims illustrate the long history of the novel. . . .

Having enthusiasms that cover such a wide range allows Moore to haul in everything but the kitchen sink into his discussion, and that’s the main source of his book’s entertainment. Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (with its “firking flantado amphibologies”) rubs elbows with William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat (1553, published in 1570 – about which Moore says, “The English novel has arrived, baby! Hail Britannia!”). We’re told of ancient works containing “bitchy remarks” and “home invasions.” Characters in Njal’s Saga “exchange witty barbs ala Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and Moore confesses that the reason he likes nikki monogatari as a name for novelistic diaries like that of Sei Shonagon is “because it sounds like the name of a Japanese pop idol.”

And here’s why it does it:

In order to defend the ‘literary’ and ‘experimental’ (he uses the two terms as synonyms) novels decried by Myers, Peck, and Franzen (he dubs them ‘MPF’ and says they do stand-in duty for all such sniffing, dismissive, conservative readers) fiction he so loves from accusations of upstart tomfoolery, Moore must demonstrate that the avant garde is actually old enough to qualify as an Ancien Regime. The ‘history’ of his book’s title therefore starts not with the usual Cervantes-Richardson-Fielding paradigm he himself was taught in school but with ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and ancient everywhere else. He goes rummaging through these archives in search not only of things he can call novels but things he can proudly display as experimental novels, and he finds a boatload of them.

I’m sympathetic to a lot of what Moore says (via Steve; I haven’t read the book), but this contention of Moore’s comes across as pure blather:

I would argue further that this should be the lifelong goal of every intelligent person: to see through the polite lies promulgated by political, corporate, media, and religious entities, the often irrational customs, beliefs, and prejudices of one’s social group … to arrive at a clear understanding of the true nature of things. This is why the novel is invaluable, for more than any other art form it encourages and assists us on that goal. Traditionally, the sacred scriptures of various cultures have claimed that prerogative, but they are merely fictions of a different sort – giving a false view of the world and promoting repression – inferior to the “secular scriptures” of imaginative literature.

Moore seems to conveniently forget the fact “literary author/critic/intellectual” is another social group. True, I’d say that my group’s customs, beliefs, etc are far more rational and constructive than those for on average in, say, the corporate world, but to say that all these dolts are wrong and us writers are right, as Moore seems to here, is pure nonsense. Steve’s response to this point, and many others he finds in Moore’s book, is well worth your time.

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