Review: Review Reviewed Work(s): The Lives of the Novel: A History by Thomas G. Pavel; The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600–1800 by Steven Moore Review by: Jeanne-Marie Jackson Source: Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 53, No. 4, Special Issue: The Indiscipline of Comparison (2016), pp. 847-851 Published by: Penn State University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/complitstudies.53.4.0847 Accessed: 20-02-2017 17:17 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Penn State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Comparative Literature Studies This content downloaded from 128.220.159.5 on Mon, 20 Feb 2017 17:17:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms BOOK REVIEWS 847 being—The Letter of the Law: Literature, Justice and the Other—(Peter Lang, 2013) and has served in both the board of the Hellenic Association for the Study of English and the Fulbright Alumni of Greece. Notes 1. Neera Kapur Badhwar, Friendship: A Philosophical Reader (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 2. Liz Spencer and Raymond Pahl, Rethinking Friendship: Hidden Solidarities Today (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 3. Nancy K. Baym, Personal Connections in the Digital Age (Cambridge: Polity, 2010). 4. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg (New York: Routledge, 1992), 277–94. The Lives of the Novel: A History. By Thomas G. Pavel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2013. xvi + 346 pp. Hardcover $35, paperback $24.95. The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600–1800. By Steven Moore. New York/ London: Bloomsbury, 2013. xvi + 1013 pp. $39.95. Reviewed by Jeanne-Marie Jackson, Johns Hopkins University Studies of the novel tend to take one of three forms, all of which necessarily make trade-offs between depth and breadth. There is the single-author study that advances a theory of the novel’s evolution using exemplary case studies; there is the comparative study of how novelistic traditions interact; and finally, there is the multiauthor anthology that explores a novelistic period, method, or theme. Thomas G. Pavel’s The Lives of the Novel: A History and Steven Moore’s The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600–1800 both showcase individual scholars who defy the temporal and geographical restrictions that any of the aforementioned approaches entails. In each case, their capacious vision makes for exhilarating if sometimes overwhelming reading, as well as offers an important recontextualization of the novel’s maturity in the nineteenth century. While both Pavel and Moore announce their work as primarily historical rather than theoretical in nature, Pavel skews more toward a theory of the novel approach. He organizes The Lives of the Novel around a central tension between idealist and anti-idealist relations to the world, or “the tendency to idealize human behavior and the desire to censure it” (x). Crucially, in beginning his book with the ancient Greek novel instead of the more usual eighteenth-century starting point, Pavel argues that, This content downloaded from 128.220.159.5 on Mon, 20 Feb 2017 17:17:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 848 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES “the epic has not been ‘replaced’ by the novel,” so much as the form at the pinnacle of its development “is the newer, sometimes bourgeois and prosaic incarnation of the novel” (10). His central focus here is on Heliodorus’ third or fourth century Ethiopian Story, though he discusses it alongside numerous lesser-known works. This is, generally, an outstanding feature of Pavel’s method: chapters are organized by conceptual subheadings like “Helpless Souls” and “Foreign Explorations,” affording a great deal of fluidity among texts. At key junctures, however, such as Defoe’s deviation from “celebrating . . . star-crossed lovers” to create the “bleak world” of Moll Flanders, Pavel offers more sustained reflection on canonical works. He thus “de-centers” the nineteenth century even while acknowledging it as the point at which the idealist and critical lineages he proposes converge. In this way, realism seems to mark both a formal culmination and a loss of possibility, though Pavel steers clear of Lukacsian juxtapositions between the modern period and a romanticized antiquity. He reads the “two sides” of Richardson’s work, for example, as indicating that “historians who assert the deep continuity of the novel’s history” as well as “those for whom English eighteenth-century fiction represents a new departure” can both be correct. In emphasizing material reality and an implausible individual, Pamela makes possible “the internationalization of the ideal that enjoins people, whatever their place in society, to be guided by their own hearts” (122), but also confronts “social prejudice and obtuseness” (125). Pavel suggests that Dostoevsky, in contrast, rejects “both narrative idealism, which extols human greatness and independence, and anti-idealism, which finds human imperfection either amusing or dismal” (249). Instead of a contrast between two strains of the novel’s historical development, the nineteenth century is characterized by the moral confusion of one. Pavel does not see this as auguring the novel’s downfall, and he goes on to conclude The Lives of the Novel with a brief but enthusiastic tour through the modernist regeneration of form, and then the sheer multiplicity of forms in twenty-first-century writing. To understand modernism within his schema, Pavel notes, one needs to “differentiate between fully crafted novels with neatly constructed plots, and rough, unprocessed works, like Ulysses and The Sound and the Fury” (280). The overriding impression is that the nineteenth-century convergence of idealist and anti-idealist forms might seem to leave the question of human freedom frustratingly unresolved, with novels unable to herald it as an ideal or denounce it as naïve. And yet this strain of social-realist writing, by “the literary progeny of Balzac, George Eliot, and Tolstoy” (294), persists as only one option among many as Pavel approaches the contemporary moment. The novelist, then, is presented This content downloaded from 128.220.159.5 on Mon, 20 Feb 2017 17:17:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms BOOK REVIEWS 849 with a more dazzling array of choices to “sustain the hope that we are not solitary beings” (296). Moore’s book, though it spans two centuries as opposed to Pavel’s fifteen, is an even more gargantuan undertaking at nearly 1000 pages. Unlike The Lives of the Novel, The Novel: An Alternative History does not have a clear theoretical gambit. This is a difference in orientation, not a failing of the latter work: Moore is very much a literary historian, and focuses rather on detail concerning print history, translation, and the like. One area in which Moore does come up short in relation to Pavel, given the ambitious geographical scope of The Novel: An Alternative History in reaching from Europe to East Asia, is in terms of scholarly training and background. While Pavel is a central European comparatist with strong grounding in continental traditions as well as Russian, Moore confesses his lack of either French or Asian language ability. This is not enough of a problem to interfere with what his book does well, but it is a liability that plagues the field of world literature, as a whole. Rather than advance a core conceptual argument, Moore seeks novelistic innovation wherever it may lurk in a series of complex contexts, beginning with Spanish fiction and ending in America, with many far-flung sections in between. His working definition of a “good” novel is one that furthers a project of self-theorization, from works that feature characters engaged in long, verbal contemplation, such as Honoré d'Urfé seventeenth-century French pastoral L’Astrée, to the mixed-race, cross-continental, and intertextually allusive narrator of the anonymously authored The Peregrinations of Jeremiah Grant, reviewed in England by Tobias Smollett in 1763. The closest Moore comes to articulating his standard of novelistic achievement is in the book’s early section on Spanish Fiction: “if the tales are the main attraction and their narrators are merely talking heads,” he writes of works like the Arabian Nights and the Decameron, “it’s a thematic anthology, but if the function of the tales is to dramatize the concerns of their narrators and listeners in the frame, it can be read as a novel” (39). And thus we can conclude that The Novel: An Alternative History is primarily a record of how novels come to prioritize structural dynamics over content, as such. This loose though detailed conceptual framework encompasses a wide range of formal developments: “fictionality,” as Moore repeatedly puts it, along with the unreliability and ultimate effacement of the narrator; pacing and temporality; a frequent tendency toward memoiristic rather than purely imaginative narrative; and generic hybridity. Like Pavel, Moore frequently identifies forks in the road of the novel’s maturation, including the split between “d’Urfé’s way” of the heroic romance and “Sorel’s way” of This content downloaded from 128.220.159.5 on Mon, 20 Feb 2017 17:17:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 850 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES sharp satire, middle-class verisimilitude, and ribaldry (217). The immense sweep and interlocking junctures of Moore’s book also means that he can encompass many writers who are easily recognized but choose to amplify those who are less so, when deserving. So, for example, the “dream-content” generated “via puns and wordplay” that Moore suggests most readers would associate with James Joyce is credited instead to the young seventh-century Chinese writer Tung Yueh (447–49). This does raise questions about the point at which periods and traditions become comparable in any developed sense, but Moore’s efforts to construct a transnational meritocracy of sorts are nonetheless admirable. Likewise, he singles out novels that he thinks are best-in-class for sustained attention, as opposed to those that are best studied. While most discussions of Pamela focus on Henry Fielding’s 1741 An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews as the most relevant response text, Moore prefers the female writer Eliza Haywood’s Anti-Pamela; or, Feigned Innocence Detected, published during the same year (716–17). At this point, it is important to note how significant a role these scholars’ forceful and idiosyncratic voices play in the studies at hand. A good deal of the persuasiveness of Pavel’s The Lives of the Novel is due to the candor with which he professes the commitments that inform it. “Four core beliefs give this book its direction,” he announces, “First, narratives are about human beings, the ideals and norms that guide their lives, the passions that drive them, and the action they take” (17). The other beliefs suggest some broad typologies for this focus on the individual, and finally aver a degree of artistic autonomy despite refusing the idea that the history of the novel “consist[s] in great writers relentlessly pushing the genre forward ” (19). Pavel’s tone is warm and inviting throughout, and it would be shortsighted to neglect the obvious delight he takes in his subject. Moore’s personality equally permeates The Novel: An Alternative History. He is similarly invested in his subject to the point of endearing obsession, as a short interlude—one of a few such helpful segments—called “A Brief Digression on the Novel that Changed My Life” attests in relation to Tristram Shandy. At points, however, the refreshing assertiveness of his position may be distracting to some readers. Moore makes his stance on religion clear from the outset discussing Sancho Panza and Don Quixote: “When I hear religious people today call for ecumenical tolerance and respect for the religions of others,” he opines, “I hear the pathetic pact made by these two fools: I’ll believe in your fantasy if you’ll believe in mine” (13). In just slightly less judgmental fashion, Moore describes Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s eighteenth-century French novel Paul and Virginia as “wimpy” (435), and sundry forms of mysticism as “trash” (282). Such derision This content downloaded from 128.220.159.5 on Mon, 20 Feb 2017 17:17:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms BOOK REVIEWS 851 is hard to swallow when it relates to traditions on which Moore is not an expert. He jokes, for example, that while Japanese novelists in the 1600–1800 period “treated Buddhism with a great deal of contempt . . . Buddhism still befuddled the minds of sentient beings” (521). Ultimately, however, The Lives of the Novel and The Novel: An Alternative History testify to the vibrancy, ambition, and resilient humanism of the conjoined fields of novel theory and novel history. The sheer scope of both books and the dazzling array of plot summaries it entails can be tiring, at times, for a reader in search of an argumentative through-line. But Pavel and Moore offer a welcome and impressive dose of far-reaching literacy in what often seems like an overly subdivided field. Their efforts should be welcome additions to any critical library. jeanne-marie jackson is an assistant professor of English at Johns Hopkins. She is the author of South African Literature’s Russian Soul: Narrative Forms of Global Isolation (Bloomsbury, 2015). The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory: The Crisis and Return of Storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier. By Hanna Meretoja. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014. xvi + 304 pp. Hardcover $95.00. Reviewed by Gianluca Cinelli, University of Rome That “ours is an age of storytelling” is the basic assumption of this book, whose author analyzes the crisis of storytelling triggered by World War II (Part 1) and the return, in theory and fiction, to storytelling as a fundamental structure of human life (Part 2). The author first focuses on Robbe-Grillet as the champion of the antinarrative turn of the early 1950s, characterized by a strong refusal of the so-called myth of naturalness (the idea that history is as necessary as a natural phenomenon), and of the self-aware subject. Starting from existentialism, the nouveau roman challenged such ideas as instruments of power and oppression. By analyzing Dans le labyrinth by Robbe-Grillet, the author interprets the antinarrative turn as a critical response to the disillusionment toward history caused by the war. Fludernik’s notion of “experientiality,” according to which any narrative requires a subjective perspective on reality in order to organize experience, provides the basis to interpret such critique of narrativity made in the nouveaux romans. From this point of view, Robbe-Grillet’s novel challenged not only the traditional aesthetics of novel but also its connection This content downloaded from 128.220.159.5 on Mon, 20 Feb 2017 17:17:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms