Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Boswell. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Boswell. Sort by date Show all posts

Friday, January 18, 2019

Kipling and the Cross-Correspondences



Deborah Blum: Ghost Hunters (2006)


Among the founders of the British Society for Psychical Research in 1882 were psychologist Edmund Gurney (1847-1888), philosopher Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900) and classicist Frederic W. H. Myers (1843-1901).

It was hoped, not unreasonably, that these learned and dedicated pioneers in the field of parapsychology might make some concerted attempt to "come through" after their deaths, given their sustained interest in the question of some kind of survival of bodily dissolution.



Myers' immense tome Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death was published posthumously, in 1903. He certainly believed that he had provided in its pages both strong evidence for survival and for the existence of a soul.

The strange phenomenon of the "cross-correspondences" (so-called) which unfolded over two decades, beginning with some automatic writing scripts by Cambridge Classics lecturer Margaret Verrall in 1901, is therefore either the strongest - albeit, also, one of the strangest - chains of evidence for human survival of bodily death, or else a colossal piece of delusion and self-deception afflicting some of the acutest minds of the time.

Essentially, by choosing your authority, you choose the view you will be encouraged to take of the story. If, for instance, you read Deborah Blum's Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life after Death (2006), you will be left with a lingering sense of mystery and doubt surrounding the whole business.



Ruth Brandon: The Spiritualists (1983)


If, however, you read Ruth Brandon's trenchant The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1983), you may be left wondering why anyone could ever take seriously so bizarre a congerie of frauds and misfits?

The essence of the cross-correspondences was that it involved different mediums, on different continents, who separately received obscure and apparently nonsensical scripts which - when pieced together - produced more-or-less complete statements from (allegedly) specific individuals on "the other side."



The three principal conduits for these scripts were Mrs. Verrall (mentioned above), together with her daughter Helen; Mrs. Winifred Tennant (disguised under her professional name "Mrs. Willett"); and Mrs Alice Fleming, sister of Rudyard Kipling (who practised under the name of "Mrs Holland", thanks mainly to family disapproval).

As well as these, there was also some involvement from William James's favourite medium Leonora Piper in America. This geographical range from the United States to India has undoubtedly contributed something to the continuing fascination that still surrounds this psychic cause célèbre. And yet, what do these supposed "correspondences" actually amount to?

One of the earliest instances was noted by Alice Johnson, research officer of the Society for Psychical Research. While sorting through some of the papers held at their office in London, she noted some strange similarities between them:
in one case, Mrs. Forbes' script, purporting to come from her son, Talbot, stated that he must now leave her, since he was looking for a sensitive who wrote automatically, in order that he might obtain corroboration of her own writing. Mrs. Verrall, on the same day, wrote of a fir-tree planted in a garden, and the script was signed with a sword and a suspended bugle. The latter was part of the badge of the regiment to which Talbot Forbes had belonged, and Mrs. Forbes had in her garden some fir-trees, grown from seed sent to her by her son. These facts were unknown to Mrs. Verrall.
Taken alone, this might easily pass for coincidence, especially since, as she went on to say: "We have reason to believe that the idea of making a statement in one script complementary of a statement in another had not occurred to Mr. Myers in his lifetime — for there is no reference to it in any of his written utterances on the subject that I have been able to discover." However, in aggregate, she found the phenomenon less easy to dismiss:
Neither did those who have been investigating automatic script since his death invent this plan, if plan it be. It was not the automatists themselves that detected it, but a student of their scripts; it has every appearance of being an element imported from outside; it suggests an independent invention, an active intelligence constantly at work in the present, not a mere echo or remnant of individualities of the past.


Robert Browning: Abt Vogler (1864)


Another frequently mentioned example was the famous (or infamous) “Hope, Star, and Browning” correspondence. In this case three mediums made independent allusions to the poetry of Robert Browning. As Jill Galvan describes it:
First, Margaret Verrall wrote a script mentioning “anagram” and containing the phrases “rats star stars” and “tears stare,” along with a second script with the word “Aster,” which is both Greek for star and another anagram for tears and stare. Additionally, this second script contained a phrase beginning with the Greek word for passion and continuing, “the hope that leaves the earth for sky — Abt Vogler for earth too hard that found itself or lost itself — in the sky.” The investigators took the phrase to be an allusion to Browning’s “Abt Vogler” (1864), specifically to line 78, “The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky”; the script substitutes Browning’s original skyward “passion” with “hope.” Then, a couple of weeks later, a script by Piper asked if Margaret Verrall had gotten the message about “Hope Star and Browning.” Around the same time, Helen Verrall received a couple of scripts that each mentioned “star” and featured a drawing of one, as well as [alluding] to Browning’s “Pied Piper of Hamelin” (1842), and one of these scripts also offered anagrams for star in “arts” and “rats.”
This is the case which so impressed occult investigator Colin Wilson. And it does, on the face of it, seem difficult to interpret except as a series of allusions to essentially the same matter. Though precisely what was meant to be conveyed remains unclear.



One explanation for this, however, may be supplied by the sheer difficulty of transmission of ideas when one has left the earthly plain. Or so the defunct Frederic Myers explained at a séance with fellow psychical researcher Sir Oliver Lodge:
Lodge, it is not as easy as I thought in my impatience ... Gurney says I am getting on first rate. But I am short of breath ... I am more stupid than some of those I deal with ... It is funny to hear myself talking when it is not myself talking. It is not my whole self talking. When I am awake I know where I am.
He stated further:
We communicate an impression through the inner mind of the medium. It receives the impression in a curious way. It has to contribute to the body of the message; we furnish the spirit of it ... In other words, we send the thoughts and the words usually in which they must be framed, but the actual letters or spelling of the words is drawn from the medium’s memory. Sometimes we only send the thoughts and the medium’s unconscious mind clothes them in words.
Another explanation of the process came from another psychic researcher, Dr. Richard Hodgson, via American medium Leonora Piper:
I find now difficulties such as a blind man would experience in trying to find his hat, and I am not wholly conscious of my own utterances because they come out automatically, impressed upon the machine [the medium’s body] … I impress my thoughts on the machine which registers them at random, and which are at times doubtless difficult to understand. I understand so much better the modus operandi than I did when I was in your world.
The last word, though, must remain with Myers:
Oh, if I could only leave you the proof that I continue. Yet another attempt to run the blockade - to strive to get a message through. How can I make your hand docile enough - how can I convince them? I am trying, amid unspeakable difficulties. It is impossible for me to know how much of what I send reaches you. I feel as if I had presented my credentials - reiterated the proofs of my identity in a wearisomely repetitive manner. The nearest simile I can find to express the difficulty of sending a message is that I appear to be standing behind a sheet of frosted glass, which blurs sight and deadens sound, dictating feebly to a reluctant and somewhat obtuse secretary. A feeling of terrible impotence burdens me. Oh it is a dark road.





On April 24, 1907, while in trance in the United States, ... Mrs [Leonora] Piper three times uttered the word Thanatos, a Greek word meaning "death," despite the fact that she had no knowledge of Greek. Such repetitions were often a signal that cross-correspondences were about to begin. But it had begun already. About a week earlier, in India, Mrs Holland [ie: Alice Kipling] had done some automatic writing, and in that script the following enigmatic communication had appeared: "Mors [Latin for death]. And with that the shadow of death fell upon his limbs." On April 29th, in England, Mrs Verrall, writing automatically, produced the words: "Warmed both hands before the fire of life. It fades and I am ready to depart." This is a quotation from a poem by nineteenth-century English poet, Walter [Savage] Landor. Mrs Verrall next drew a triangle. This could be Delta, the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet. She had always considered it a symbol of death. She then wrote: "Manibus date lilia plenis" [give lilies with full hands]. This is a quotation from Virgil's Aeneid, in which an early death is foretold. This was followed by the statement: "Come away, come away, Pallida mors [Latin for pale death]," and, finally, an explicit statement from the communicator: "You have got the word plainly written all along in your writing. Look back." The "word," or "theme," was quite obvious when these fragments, given in the same month to three mediums thousands of miles apart, were put together and scrutinized. And in view of the lifelong interest of the communicator, it was certainly an appropriate theme. Death.


Rudyard and John Lockwood Kipling (c.1880)

When asked whether there was any basis to spiritualism,
Kipling replied “There is; I know. Have nothing to do with it.”
- George M. Johnson. Mourning and Mysticism in First World War Literature and Beyond: Grappling with Ghosts. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.


Kipling's famous poem "En-dor" (1919) warns sternly of the dangers of false comfort from spirits - or, rather, their dubious lieutenants, mediums:
The road to En-dor is easy to tread
For Mother or yearning Wife.
There, it is sure, we shall meet our Dead
As they were even in life.
Earth has not dreamed of the blessing in store
For desolate hearts on the road to En-dor.
He was himself no stranger to the subject. The death of his son John in combat at the Battle of Loos in 1915 was a blow he never really recovered from. It was made worse by the fact that he had had to exert all his special influence to ensure that John would be allowed to serve. He had already been rejected for active service due to his poor eyesight.

His poem "My Boy Jack," though ostensibly about the drowned dead of the Battle of Jutland, seems to refer obliquely to his own grief, also:
“Have you news of my boy Jack?”
Not this tide.
“When d’you think that he’ll come back?”
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Has any one else had word of him?”
Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.


“Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?”
None this tide,
Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind —
Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.
There's an almost Modernist fragmentedness about the gradual breakdown of the ballad form in this poem: a grief too great for the traditional forms Kipling had hitherto been sedulous in preserving.



Charles Sturridge, dir.: FairyTale (1997)


If you want some sense of the contemporary atmosphere of a kind of half-life lived in the shadow of these immense crowds of thronging war dead, Charles Sturridge's 1997 film FairyTale - about the strange saga of the Cottingley Fairies - does a wonderful job of conveying it. Virtually all the literature of the time, the immediate post-war era - not simply such obvious examples as Eliot's Waste Land or Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" - should be read with this in mind.

Kipling's own short stories and poems chart his own steadily less unavailing attempts to come to term with his own intolerable loss. From the harsh "Mary Postgate" (1915) he moved through the healing mechanisms of "A Madonna of the Trenches" and "The Janeites" (both 1924) to his most emotional and heartbreaking story of all, "The Gardener" (1925).

John Radcliffe & John McGivering's 2011 notes on “En-dor” (on the Kipling Society website) record the history of Kipling's engagements with spiritualism and the occult in general:

This ranges from his early story "The Sending of Dana Da" (Plain Tales from the Hills, 1888) - inspired by his father's scepticism about the claims of Madame Blavatsky, one of whose séances he attended in 1880 - to "They" (1904), whose unnamed narrator suggests that the company of the dead may be permitted to those who have not known them in life, but not to those who (like himself) are searching for a particular dead child. This story appears to have been inspired by the death from pneumonia of his elder daughter Josephine, or "Josie" (1892-1899).



Kipling was, it seems, only too aware of the presence in himself of something resembling the "second sight" common among the MacDonalds, on his mother's side of the family. He wrote sceptically of this ability in his autobiography, Something of Myself (1937), but is careful - if one reads between the lines - not so much to deny its existence as to disavow its usefulness to the living:
... there is a type of mind that dives after what it calls ‘psychical experiences.’ And I am in no way ‘psychic.’ Dealing as I have done with large, superficial areas of incident and occasion, one is bound to make a few lucky hits or happy deductions. But there is no need to drag in the ‘clairvoyance,’ or the rest of the modern jargon. I have seen too much evil and sorrow and wreck of good minds on the road to Endor to take one step along that perilous track.
Any unbiassed reader of his work will find it difficult to ignore the obvious fascination with telepathy, precognition, and other paranormal gifts which lies behind such stories as "Wireless" (1902), "The Wish House" (1924) and (perhaps most autobiographical of all) "The House Surgeon" (1909).

Nor would it be true to say that the perils of the "Road to En-dor" were more apparent to him after the First World War than before it. His simultaneous attraction-repulsion towards the occult seems to date from all stages of his career as a writer.

There are no reliable accounts of his own return from beyond the grave to answer any of the many questions raised by his works. His own comment on that is unequivocal. His late poem "The Appeal" - first published in 1939 - reads as follows:
It I have given you delight
By aught that I have done,
Let me lie quiet in that night
Which shall be yours anon:

And for the little, little, span
The dead are born in mind,
Seek not to question other than
The books I leave behind.




Rudyard Kipling: Something of Myself (1937)


The fear of such "unknown forces" was certainly great in Rudyard Kipling, but the temptation to write about them was evidently greater.

His younger sister Alice, known to the family as "Trix," who shared with him the appalling experiences of child-abuse and neglect - recorded in his classic story "Baa Baa Black Sheep" (1888) - which occurred when they were sent "home" to England from India in 1870, and who showed almost equal literary promise in her youth, took a rather different approach.

On her return to India at the age of 16, she married British army officer John Fleming, and, in 1893, "initially experimented with automatic writing." Her biography in the Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology remarks somewhat euphemistically:
After a long illness she returned to England in 1902 and in the following year read the classic study Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, by F. W. H. Myers. As a result she contacted the secretary of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), London, regarding her own automatic writing.
This "long illness" is presumably the "recurrent mental illness" referred to in Radcliffe & McGivering's notes on her brother's poem "En-dor" (quoted above), which overtook her in "her thirtieth year":
Trix's family linked her madness with her psychic interests. When asked whether he thought there was anything in spiritualism, Rudyard Kipling replied "with a shudder": "There is; I know. Have nothing to do with it." He is presumed to have been thinking of his sister.
The Society for Psychical Research appears to have treated her abilities equally seriously, but rather more analytically, as is evidenced by a series of papers on the "cross-correspondences" controversy published by their research officer Alice Johnson in the Society's Proceedings:
  • "On the Automatic Writing of Mrs. Holland." Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 21 (1908).
  • "Second Report on Mrs. Holland's Script." Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 24 (1910).
  • "Supplementary Notes on Mrs. Holland's Scripts." Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 22 (1909).
  • "Third Report on Mrs. Holland's Scripts." Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 25 (1911).
Then (as now) we are left with a stark choice: either to follow the hints, the half-stated truths "known to nobody else", and the endlessly frustrating lack of definitive, convincing evidence of "survival" - or else to reject the whole business as cruel deception on the part of "sensitives" together with wish-fulfilment on the part of the client. Dr Johnson perhaps summed it up best, when remarking of ghosts:
It is wonderful that five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has ever been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against it; but all belief is for it.
- Boswell: Life of Johnson (1791)


James Boswell: The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791)


And yet, and yet ... thirty years before, in Rasselas (1759) he had commented with almost equal cogency:
That the dead are seen no more ... I will not undertake to maintain, against the concurrent and unvaried testimony of all ages and all nations. There is no people, rude or learned, among whom apparitions of the dead are not related and believed. This opinion, which perhaps prevails as far as human nature is diffused, could become universal only by its truth; those that never heard of one another would not have agreed in a tale which nothing but experience can make credible. That it is doubted by single cavillers can very little weaken the general evidence; and some who deny it with their tongues confess it by their fears.
"Some who deny it with their tongues, confess it by their fears." Kipling was very afraid of mental disturbances in the late 1890s, in the middle of a devastating quarrel with one of his wife's brothers (the "unstable" Beatty Balestier) which threatened to undermine his and Carrie's experiment of living in the United States.

His sister's mental illness, followed swiftly by the death of the Kiplings' daughter Josie, must have constituted a great temptation to give in to what Sigmund Freud, in 1910, referred to as "the black tide of mud of occultism." That temptation is already achingly strong in the story "They," and after John's avoidable death ten years later at the Battle of Loos, it may have seemed almost overwhelming.

The poem "En-Dor," then, is simply one instalment in that ongoing struggle with himself and with circumstances. For all the cogency of its description of spiritualism, one can't avoid the fact that - unlike Robert Browning, whose "Mr. Sludge, 'The Medium'" (1864) comes from a place of total non-belief - Kipling's resistance to communication with the dead seems to arise more from his conviction of its dangers to the living than from any inherent improbability in its claims:


Dmitry Nikiforovich Martynov: The Witch of Endor (1857)


Whispers shall comfort us out of the dark —
Hands — ah, God! — that we knew!
Visions and voices — look and hark! —
Shall prove that the tale is true,
And that those who have passed to the further shore
May be hailed — at a price — on the road to En-dor.

But they are so deep in their new eclipse
Nothing they say can reach,
Unless it be uttered by alien lips
And framed in a stranger's speech.
The son must send word to the mother that bore,
Through an hireling's mouth. 'Tis the rule of En-dor.
And what better summary of the cross-correspondences themselves can be found than the one contained in the following stanza?
Even so, we have need of faith
And patience to follow the clue.
Often, at first, what the dear one saith
Is babble, or jest, or untrue.
(Lying spirits perplex us sore
Till our loves — and their lives — are well-known at En-dor)....


Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018)


"All argument is against it; but all belief is for it." Quite so. There are no atheists in foxholes, as the saying has it. It's not that the question is - or, it seems, ever can be - definitively settled. But I think Ursula Le Guin was right to say, in the third book of her "Earthsea" series, The Farthest Shore:
The counsel of the dead is not profitable to the living.
Rudyard Kipling, I suspect, would have agreed with her wholeheartedly.



Ursula Le Guin: The Farthest Shore (1972)


Thursday, January 02, 2014

The True Story of the Novel (7): The Modern Novel



Gustave Doré: Don Quixote and Sancho Setting Out (1863)


One of the best university courses I ever did was a lecture series on the eighteenth-century novel, with Dr Jonathan Lamb. It must have been about thirty years ago: in 1982, I think - shortly before he forsook Auckland university for the brighter lights of the United States, in any case.



His idea was to trace the "Cervantine novel" from its origins in Don Quixote; thence to Fielding's Shamela, Joseph Andrews, and Tom Jones; and finally on to Smollett's Roderick Random and Humphrey Clinker, with side-excursions into Hogarth and Le Sage - though not, interestingly, Defoe or Richardson. I'd been expecting something far more akin to Ian Watts' standard doctrine of the rise of the bourgeois novel, whereas this offered a whole new perspective on the (so-called) "picaresque" novel of incident. Fielding's idea of the novel as a "comic epic in prose" was much to the fore, as I recall.

I don't how original this approach actually was, but it seemed brilliantly insightful to me at the time, and offered me a whole new way of thinking about a series of books I'd previously known mainly as the contents of a cupboard in David Copperfield's house:
My father had left a small collection of books in a little room upstairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined my own) and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time ...



I guess that's what started me off questioning Ian Watt's account of the Rise of the Novel. Successive unsuccessful attempts to read Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa did contrast rather sharply with the entertainment and profit I found in such works as The Golden Ass, The Tale of Genji, and The Red Chamber Dream, not one of which could be regarded as a "novel" according to Watts's somewhat reductionist genealogy.

In short, if the coveted title of "first novelist" came down to a stark choice between Samuel Richardson and Lady Murasaki (ignoring for a moment the prior claims of Apuleius or Heliodorus), I was always going to vote for the Japanese candidate. Watts's vision (somewhat inevitably, given the fact that his book first appeared in 1957) seemed to culminate in the stultifying confines of the pre-60s British novel: John Braine, C. P. Snow, Muriel Spark, and even duller apostles of the middle class tea-&-adultery-in-the-provinces school.

The vistas opened up for me by Jonathan Lamb (together with my own reading in the non-European fictional traditions of Arabia, China, Iceland, India, Japan, Persia) appeared to offer a far more fruitful explanation of the magic realism and postmodern game-playing which had come to characterise the novels of the 60s, 70s and 80s.

So if it's that obvious that Watts's schema is inadequate, why has it taken so long for people to wake up to the fact? Why do people still teach his outdated doctrines in so many schools and universities?



Well, one partial answer - sheer ignorance - is given in the essay "Farther Away: Robinson Crusoe, David Foster Wallace, and the Island of Solitude," by American novelist Jonathan Franzen, published in the New Yorker in 2011. Franzen begins with a brief account of his personal experience of the boredom and alienation of modern life:
... every morning the same revving doses of nicotine and caffeine; every evening the same assault on my e-mail queue; every night the same drinking for the same brain-dulling pop of pleasure. At a certain point, having read about Masafuera [the island on which the alleged model for Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Alexander Selkirk, was marooned - or, rather, marooned himself - from 1704 to 1709], I began to imagine running away and being alone there, like Selkirk, in the interior of the island, where nobody lives even seasonally.



Carl Scottsberg: The Ruin of a Hut On Masafuera (1924)


No doubt with his eventual essay already in mind, he is careful to take with him a copy of Defoe's novel:
I also thought it might be good, while I was there, to reread the book generally considered to be the first English novel [my italics]. “Robinson Crusoe” was the great early document of radical individualism, the story of an ordinary person’s practical and psychic survival in profound isolation. The novelistic enterprise associated with individualism — the search for meaning in realistic narrative — went on to become the culture’s dominant literary mode for the next three centuries. Crusoe’s voice can be heard in the voice of Jane Eyre, the Underground Man, the Invisible Man, and Sartre’s Roquentin.

That list of places where Crusoe's voice "can be heard" - in novels by (respectively) Charlotte Brontë, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ralph Ellison (presumably: rather than H. G. Wells), and Jean-Paul Sartre - sounds impressively erudite. One can't help wondering, though, if it's linguistic and cultural diversity isn't intended as some kind of corrective to an previous list in another essay by Franzen, "Mr. Difficult: William Gaddis and the Problem of Hard-to-Read Books," where he came clean about his own problems with some of the more difficult nuts to crack in the canon of world fiction:
Even as an adult, I consider myself a slattern of a reader. I have started (in many cases, more than once) "Moby-Dick," "The Man Without Qualities," "Mason & Dixon," "Don Quixote," "Remembrance of Things Past," "Doctor Faustus," "Naked Lunch," "The Golden Bowl," and "The Golden Notebook" without coming anywhere near finishing them. Indeed, by a comfortable margin, the most difficult book I ever voluntarily read in its entirety was Gaddis's nine-hundred-and-fifty-six-page first novel, "The Recognitions."



It's seldom a great idea to confess to your own ignorance. I haven't read all of the above either, but I'm not going to tell you which ones are still sitting on the ol' too-hard pile. More to the point, however, Franzen's infamous dissing of Oprah Winfrey, after she had selected his breakthrough novel The Corrections for her book club in 2001 (she responded by unselecting it), had given him a rep as an uppity intellectual snob, which he seemed - back then, at any rate - eager to correct. Later he appears to have decided just to go with it. You can never feign enough dumbness to satisfy the truly dumb. To return to the "Robinson Crusoe" essay, though, Franzen continues to elaborate on his theme of the dullness of existence for quite some time:
... there persisted, in the very word “novel,” with its promise of novelty, a memory of more youthful experiences so engrossing that I could sit quietly for hours and never think of boredom. Ian Watt, in his classic “The Rise of the Novel,” correlated the eighteenth-century burgeoning of novelistic production with the growing demand for at-home entertainment by women who’d been liberated from traditional household tasks and had too much time on their hands. In a very direct way, according to Watt, the English novel had risen from the ashes of boredom.

Really? I think Ian Watt might be a bit surprised to read this précis of his argument, but it is at least interesting to discover that: 1/ the novel arose primarily as a response to boredom (doesn't all literature? one is tempted to add); and 2/ since middle-class women weren't any longer more usefully employed by doing chores, and therefore had "too much time on their hands," it became necessary to produce novels for them instead.

This evidence-free set of assertions (which unfortunately founders on the rock of the innumerable pre-eighteenth century novels of all kinds chronicled with such relentless industry by Steven Moore in his 2,000 page tome The Novel: An Alternative History) unfortunately signals another dominant theme in Franzen's writing: misognyny.

Here are some choice plums from Franzen's New Yorker piece on turn-of-the-century American female novelist Edith Wharton:
Wharton did have one potentially redeeming disadvantage: she wasn't pretty.

That her ... twenty-eight years of marriage were almost entirely sexless was perhaps less a function of her looks than of her sexual ignorance.

Wharton might well be more congenial to us now, if alongside her other advantages, she’d looked like Grace Kelly or Jacqueline Kennedy.

[The House of Mirth] can be read … as a sadistically slow and thorough punishment of the pretty girl she couldn’t be.



Franzen's bizarre line of argument prompted a response, "Not Pretty", by novelist Victoria Patterson in the LA Review of Books, where she complains that "He’d taken a literary hero and written about her as if ranking a Maxim photo spread”:
Do we even have to say that physical beauty is beside the point when discussing the work of a major author? Was Tolstoy pretty? Is Franzen? Wharton’s appearance has no relevance to her work. Franzen perpetuates the typically patriarchal standard of ranking a woman’s beauty before discussing her merits, whether she is an intellectual, artist, politician, activist, or musician.



I don't myself have strong views on whether or not Franzen is really "anti-women" - though one can certainly find some hair-raising comments on the subject scattered throughout his oeuvre, not least in Freedom, his fourth novel. His diagnosis, quoted above, of the "origins" of the English novel (bored women with too much time on their hands), does, however, sound startlingly close to his explanation, in a radio interview, of just why he felt so uncomfortable about seeing Oprah's bookclub logo on the cover of The Corrections:
So much of reading is sustained in this country, I think, by the fact that women read while men are off golfing or watching football on TV or playing with their flight simulator or whatever. I worry — I'm sorry that it's, uh — I had some hope of actually reaching a male audience and I've heard more than one reader in signing lines now at bookstores say "If I hadn't heard you, I would have been put off by the fact that it is an Oprah pick. I figure those books are for women. I would never touch it." Those are male readers speaking ...

Oink, oink, Mr. Franzen? "I had some hope of actually [my emphasis] reaching a male audience" -- not just those pesky females who squander their time reading "while men are off" doing manly things such as "golfing or watching football on TV or playing with their flight simulator" ...

Be that as it may - returning to our starting-point, his essay on Robinson Crusoe and Aelxander Selkirk (with a few reflections on the recent suicide of his friend David Foster Wallace thrown in for good measure):
With three more days to fill and my knees worn out by downhill hiking, I had no choice but to start reading Samuel Richardson’s first novel, “Pamela,” which I’d brought along mainly because it’s a lot shorter than “Clarissa.” All I’d known about “Pamela” was that Henry Fielding had satirized it in “Shamela,” his own first venture into novel writing. I hadn’t known that “Shamela” was only one of many works published in immediate response to “Pamela,” and that “Pamela,” indeed, had been possibly the biggest news of any kind in London in 1741. But as soon as I started reading it I could see why: the novel is compelling and electric with sex and class conflicts, and it details psychological extremes at a level of specificity like nothing before it [my emphasis]. Pamela Andrews isn’t everything and more. She’s simply and uniquely Pamela, a beautiful servant girl whose virtue is under sustained and ingenious assault by the son of her late employer. Her story is told through her letters to her parents, and when she finds out that these letters are being intercepted and read by her would-be seducer, Mr. B., she continues to write them while knowing that Mr. B. will read them. Pamela’s piousness and self-dramatizing hysterics were bound to infuriate a certain kind of reader (one of the books published in response satirized Richardson’s subtitle, “Virtue Rewarded,” as “Feign’d Innocence Detected”), but underneath her strident virtue and Mr. B.’s lascivious machinations is a fascinatingly rendered love story. The realistic power of this story was what made the book such a groundbreaking sensation. Defoe had staked out the territory of radical individualism, which has remained a fruitful subject for novelists as late as Beckett and Wallace, but it was Richardson who first granted full fictional access to the hearts and minds of individuals whose solitude has been overwhelmed by love for someone else.



It all sounds so learned, so well-informed. He even knows the date of Pamela's publication! The fact that it was parodied by Fielding! Talk about an egghead! But the clincher comes when he explains why this was such a crucial first step for the novel:
The realistic power of this story was what made the book such a groundbreaking sensation.

No more or less "real" than Marivaux's Vie de Marianne (which he began publishing in 1731); far less psychologically insightful than Prévost's Manon Lescaut (1731), themselves much influenced by earlier English novels in the genre, such as Aphra Behn's Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684-87): "groundbreaking," then, in what sense?
Defoe had staked out the territory of radical individualism, which has remained a fruitful subject for novelists as late as Beckett and Wallace, but it was Richardson who first granted full fictional access to the hearts and minds of individuals whose solitude has been overwhelmed by love for someone else.

The "desert-island" narrative goes back at least as far as Homer's Odyssey (not to mention the colossally successful novelisation of his story by François Fénelon, Les Aventures de Télémaque (1693-94)), though it's true that Defoe's particular version of it certainly did exercise a huge influence on subsequent European writers. It's that comment about how Richardson "first granted full fictional access to the hearts and minds of individuals whose solitude has been overwhelmed by love for someone else" which really grates on me, though. Has anyone ever shown greater insight into the "hearts and minds of individuals whose solitude has been overwhelmed by love for someone else" than Lady Murasaki, for instance? Actually, more to the point, few writers have ever shown less knowledge of the subject than Richardson, I would have thought. Have a quick squizz through his own self-proclaimed chef d'oeuvre Sir Charles Grandison (1753) and tell me that I'm wrong.



There's no shame in not having read all of these great novels which predated Defoe and Richardson - not much, even, in not even having heard of most of them: our educational system is monstrously, monotonously monolingual. If it wasn't written in English, then don't bother me with it, is the attitude of many professed experts on the subject even now.

Just as with Franzen's fatuous comments about Edith Wharton (nudge-nudge remarks about her sex-life or lack of same; man-of-the-world judgements on her "attractiveness"), it isn't so much the content of these (kind of foolish and offensive) opinions as the knowing, superior tone he affects which is really irritating. His adventures on the island of Masafuera are otherwise quite entertaining to read - and the stuff on Defoe and Richardson is (presumably) a fairly faithful summary of his lecture notes from Freshman English. But just please stop pretending to be well-informed on the subject.

To put it in terms that might make more sense to a birdwatcher as keen as Franzen, it's more or less the equivalent of claiming that birds were unknown in the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492.



Margaret Anne Doody: A Natural Passion (1974)


For all his unfortunate biases, though, Franzen at least has the virtue of actually being a novelist and knowing something about how they work (rather a fine one, too, I think, since I've somehow managed to read all four of his huge novels to date, not to mention his autobiography and one of his essay collections). There are deeper, darker sinners than he. You recall the responses to Margaret Anne Doody's own theories on the subject which I quoted from in my first piece on this topic?
When I gave a talk on the early novels and their influence on eighteenth-century literature ... in April 1993, I was asked during the question period "why I wanted to bash everything down to one level?" I had not hitherto thought of my thesis in that way, but I could see that, to anyone used to the Rise of the Novel as a story of hierarchy and spatial erection, my narrative could seem like a loss of attributed eminence.

Doody also quotes distinguished critic J. Paul Hunter to the effect that "getting rid of the categories 'Novel' and 'Romance' would be 'dangerous.' He expresses a fear of a 'new literary history built thoughtlessly on the rubble of the old'." She goes on to summarise his views as follows:
A change in the categories would be a kind of bomb, reducing structures to leveled rubble and encouraging the mushrooming of jerry-built hutments. ...



Who cares about the truth, after all? Ptolemaic astronomy was good enough for the Ancients; it's good enough for most practical purposes; what do we need with this new-fangled Copernican stuff about the earth going around the sun? It just unsettles people and forces us to revise all the textbooks ...

You may think I'm exaggerating, but anyone who's spent any time reading - or even just leafing through - Steven Moore's immense work on the novel from its origins until 1800 knows that the contention that Richardson and Defoe "began" the novel, or even the English novel, or even the English psychological realist novel is talking through his hat.

When the evidence is this overwhelming, it's time to dust off the lecture notes and acknowledge the paradigm-change. It does no favours to (especially) Defoe to see his writing in this way. He was a great novelist in his own right, not simply as a "precursor" or "progenitor" of later Man Alone-like, Robinsonade writers.

As for Richardson, I fear he's been forced down so many impressionable young readers' throats as a result of his undeserved reputation as the "father of the novel" that the unreadable wastes of Clarissa or Grandison have come to characterise all pre-nineteenth century fiction for them. Poor sods. They could have been reading Apuleius or the Genji instead - and would have enjoyed themselves a good deal more.

As Franzen puts it, so eloquently, above: "there persisted, in the very word 'novel,' with its promise of novelty, a memory of more youthful experiences so engrossing that I could sit quietly for hours and never think of boredom." Novels are not boring. That's their very essence: they're compounded of the latest novelties (hence the name) - whatever's currently most exciting, most engrossing, most titillating, most depraved ...

I know that a lot of novels are boring: dull, poorly constructed, hard to follow, vaguely plotted, simplistically motivated - but that's because they've failed in their prime directive of interesting readers. The pompous, hypocritical maunderings of Richardson are a perfect example of just such a failure. Critics often quote Dr. Johnson's remark to Boswell: "Why, sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story … you would hang yourself … you must read him for the sentiment." They don't seem to understand that this is not exactly a ringing endorsement of their hero, though.

There's no real need to dethrone Richardson in order to appreciate the 2,000 years of novel writing that preceded him. Clarissa does appear, still, to have its fans - in fact it comes fourth in a recent Guardian listing of the 100 Best Novels [in English? They don't bother to specify], where it's praised for "the subtlety with which [Richardson] unfolds the dark tragedy of Clarissa's fatal attraction to Lovelace." Go figure. Personally I'd see all those hundreds and hundreds of pages of completely implausible letters concocted by his characters as about as psychologically "subtle" as John Bunyan's nuanced portrait of the Pope in the Pilgrim's Progress (no. 1 on the list):
Now I saw in my dream, that at the end of this valley lay blood, bones, ashes, and mangled bodies of men, even of pilgrims that had gone this way formerly; and while I was musing what should be the reason, I espied a little before me a cave, where two giants, POPE and PAGAN, dwelt in old time; by whose power and tyranny the men whose bones, blood, and ashes, &c., lay there, were cruelly put to death. But by this place Christian went without much danger, whereat I somewhat wondered; but I have learnt since, that PAGAN has been dead many a day; and as for the other, though he be yet alive, he is, by reason of age, and also of the many shrewd brushes that he met with in his younger days, grown so crazy and stiff in his joints, that he can now do little more than sit in his cave's mouth, grinning at pilgrims as they go by, and biting his nails because he cannot come at them.



Great stuff! All I can say about Clarissa is that its magic passed me by. I saw a BBC dramatisation once which, by cutting out all the verbiage, did seem to get to the dark, grimy heart of the matter - but when I discovered that the villainous Lovelace was (if anything) a more tedious and logorrhoeic correspondent than his victim - I still find it difficult to understand how that's even possible - I concluded it was not for me.

I love novels. I like reading them, and I like trying to write them. I've published three of them, and have recently completed the first draft of a fourth. I simply do not accept Richardson as the great-grandaddy of the genre, and it's for that reason that I'll always be grateful to Jonathan Lamb for simply leaving him out of his account of the growth of the form, and starting with the fascinating metafictional complexities of Cervantes instead.

Cervantes (of course) did not consider himself to be originating a genre, either. So far as he was concerned, he was building a new edifice on the very well-established foundations laid by Heliodorus and the other classical novelists, not to mention their medieval and renaissance successors: Giovanni Boccaccio principal among them. For him, it was an old form which needed to be revivified. How can it be thought to have "begun" in 1741?



Abraham Bloemaert: Theagenes and Chariclea (1626)


There's an interesting clue to be found in John J. Winkler's fascinating 1985 book on Apuleius, Auctor & Actor, which I mentioned above in my post on the classical novel. In it he quotes from an essay by a certain B. A. Babcock on the various genres underlying the picaresque novel (or "romance", as he prefers to call it):
Underlying the episodic and antidevelopmental narrative of the picaresque is yet another important pattern of organization: the structure of the narrative genre (or genres) being parodied. While numerous critics have discussed the picaresque as "antiromance," as a "countergenre" that develops diacritically as an inversion of the pattern of chivalric romance, few have realized that it embodies the structures of the romance at the same time as it inverts them. The code which is being broken is always implicitly there [my emphasis], for every act of deconstructing reconstructs and reaffirms the structure of romance. This formal, generic, nondisjunction is central to the picaresque's problematic ambiguity: the pattern of expectation created by the inverted form (i.e. the picaresque) competes with the still somewhat operant, formal constraint of the genre or genres that have been inverted. in other words, the reader receives at least two sets of competing formal metacode signals: "this is a romance"; "this is a picaresque antiromance." As a consequence, even a reader familiar with the tradition is somewhat confused and frustrated, and the narrative "message" has an initial appearance of chaos.

- B. A. Babcock, "'Liberty's a Whore': Inversions, Marginalia, and Picaresque Narrative," in The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society, ed. B. A. Babcock (Ithaca, NY, 1978): 99.
[Quoted in John J. Winkler, Auctor & Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius's Golden Ass. 1985 (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991): 271-72].



William-Adolphe Bouguereau: Cupid & Psyche (1889)


"The code which is being broken is always implicitly there" - that's the vital point to be gleaned from this passage, I think. Like Cervantes', Apuleius' novel functions as a parody of various pre-existing narrative genres: the confessional autobiography (like St. Augustine's); the episodic tale of implausible adventure (like Lucian's "True History," and his other narrative sketches - including "The Ass", which Apuleius's story may well have been based on); the supernatural tale (found in profusion in Petronius's earlier Satyricon), the allegorical fairy tale ("Cupid and Psyche"). But by parodying them, he also embodies them. Their conventions underlie his. Without recognition of these patterns, little sense can be made of the intention of his work. The same rule applies to Cervantes' "anti-romance." He didn't dislike romances (in fact he wrote two of them) - he simply saw an opportunity to mock their excesses and thus undermine their hegemony.

This rule also accounts for the success of Fielding's inversions of Richardson: Shamela, its sequel Joseph Andrews, and his masterpiece Tom Jones. The facile nature of his initial mockery of Pamela quickly grew into a realisation that it could provide him with a prototype for his "comic epic in prose." An inversion, by definition, contains both itself and the thing inverted, or else it would make no sense to the reader. We don't laugh at jokes unless we can easily spot their targets.

All novelists, in other words, work in the shadow of their immediate predecessors (as well as under the influence of more distant ancestors). Whether they seek to build on and perfect what has gone before (as Lady Murasaki did with the pre-existing monogatari tradition, or as Snorri and his contemporaries did with the oral family traditions of Iceland), or try to subvert and transform them (as Cervantes did with the chivalric romance, and Fielding with the novel of sentiment), they require a prior knowledge of these traditions in their readers before their innovations can make sense.

The fallacy lying behind Ian Watt's model of the Rise of the Novel (or the very literal and reductionist way in which it's been interpreted and propagated, at any rate), is that it tries to construct a kind of novelistic "Big Bang" in the early eighteenth century which has given rise to the fictional universes we now see around us. Such an event may well have taken place at some point in the past, but I fear that it must have predated literacy, since it has left few traces beyond the existence of an already thriving and sophisticated novel tradition in Ancient Greece and Rome - not to mention interesting hints of something similar in Egyptian narrative literature.

Given the tenuous nature of diffusionist models of literary transmission over evolutionary explanations of genre transformations, I'd prefer myself to postulate a "Steady State" theory of continual growth and renewal in that most natural - and certainly not least widespread - of human literary forms, the long prose narrative, or "novel."



To conclude, then, here are some of the more interesting stops in the development of the post-Cervantine novel:


Translation of Heliodorus (1560)

The Spanish Novel


Authors:
  1. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616)
  2. Anthologies & Secondary Literature

_____________________________________

    Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616)

  1. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Obras Completas: Don Quijote de la Mancha / La Galatea / Los trabjaos de Persiles y Sigismunda / Las doce novelas ejemplares /Las once obras teatrales / Los once entremeses / Viaje del Parnaso / Poesías sueltas. Biografía de Lorenzo Hernáiz. Madrid: M. Aguilar, Editor, n.d. [c.1929].

  2. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. 1605 & 1615. Ed. Martín de Ricquer. 1962. Clásicos Universales Planeta. Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, S. A., 1994.

  3. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha: Edicion conforme a la ultima corregida por la Academia Española, con la vida del autor y notas para la buena inteligencia del texto. 1605 & 1615. Paris: Librería de Garnier Hermanos, 1889.

  4. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Don Quijote de la Mancha. 1605 & 1615. Ed. Martín de Ricquer. 1944. 2 vols. Colección “Libros de Bolsillo Z”, 4-5. Barcelona: Editorial Juventud, S. A., 1979.

  5. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Don Quixote. 1605 & 1615. Trans. P. Motteux. 1700-12. Introduction by J. G. Lockhart. 2 vols. Everyman’s Library, 385-86. 1906 & 1909. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1943.

  6. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. The Adventures of Don Quixote. 1605 & 1615. Trans. J. M. Cohen. 1950. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964.

  7. Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. 1605 & 1615. Trans. Edith Grossman. Introduction by Harold Bloom. 2003. Vintage Classics. London: Random House, 2005.

  8. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Journey to Parnassus: Translated into English Tercets with Preface and Illustrative Notes, to which are Subjoined the Antique Text and Translation of the Letter of Cervantes to Mateo Vazquez. 1614. Trans. James Y. Gibson. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Co., 1883.

  9. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Teatro Completo. Ed. Agustín Blánquez. 2 vols. Obras Maestras. Barcelona: Editorial Iberia, S. A., 1966.

  10. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Exemplary Stories. Trans. C. A. Jones. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.


  11. Anthologies & Secondary Literature

  12. Alpert, Michael, trans. Two Spanish Picaresque Novels: Lazarillo de Tormes (Anon.) / The Swindler (El Buscón), Francisco de Quevedo. 1554 & 1626. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.



Miguel de Cervantes: La Galatea (1585)






Longus: Les Amours pastorales de Daphnis et Chloé (1718)

The French Novel


Authors:
  1. Jacques Cazotte (1719-1792)
  2. Choderlos de Laclos (1741-1803)
  3. Denis Diderot (1713-1784)
  4. François Fénelon (1651-1715)
  5. Madame de La Fayette (1634-1693)
  6. Alain-René Lesage (1668-1747)
  7. Pierre de Marivaux (1688-1763)
  8. Comte de Mirabeau (1749-1791)
  9. L'Abbé Prévost (1697-1763)
  10. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737-1814)
  11. Anthologies & Secondary Literature

_____________________________________

    Jacques Cazotte (1719-1792)

  1. Cazotte, Jacques. Le Diable Amoureux. 1772. Ed. Max Milner. GF. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1979.


  2. Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos (1741-1803)

  3. Choderlos de Laclos. Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Maurice Allem. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 6. 1951. Paris: Gallimard, 1959.

  4. Choderlos de Laclos. Les liaisons dangereuses. 1782. Ed. Jean Mistler. Paris: Livre de Poche, 1972.

  5. Laclos, Choderlos de. Les Liaisons Dangereuses. 1782. Trans. P. W. K. Stone. 1961. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.


  6. Denis Diderot (1713-1784)

  7. Diderot, Denis. Oeuvres. Ed. André Billy. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 25. Paris: Gallimard, 1969.

  8. Diderot, Denis. Pensées Philosophiques: Édition critique. 1746. Ed. Robert Niklaus. Textes Littéraires Français. Génève: Librairie Droz / Paris: Librairie Minard, 1957.

  9. Diderot, Denis. Pensées philosophiques / Lettre sur les aveugles / Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville. 1746, 1749, 1772. Ed. Antoine Adam. GF. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1972.

  10. Diderot, Denis. Entretien entre D’Alembert et Diderot / Le Rêve de D’Alembert / Suite de l’entretien. 1769. Ed. Jacques Roger. 1965. GF. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1973.

  11. Diderot, Denis. Le Neveu de Rameau et autres dialogues philosophiques. Ed. Jean Varloot. Notes by Nicole Évrard. Collection Folio, 171. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1972.

  12. Diderot, Denis. Jacques the Fatalist and His Master. 1796. Trans. Michael Henry. Introduction & Notes by Martin Hall. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.

  13. Diderot, Denis. The Nun (La Religieuse). 1796. Trans. Marianne Sinclair. Introduction & Afterword by Richard Griffiths. New English Library Classics. London: The New English Library Ltd., 1966.


  14. François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon [François Fénelon] (1651-1715)

  15. Fénelon. Les Aventures de Télémaque. 1699. Les Meilleurs Auteurs Classiques: Français et Étrangers. Paris: Ernest Flammarion, Éditeur, 1925.


  16. Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, comtesse de La Fayette [Madame de La Fayette] (1634-1693)

  17. Lafayette, Madame de. La Princesse de Clèves. 1678. Ed. Émile Magne. Textes Littéraires Français. Génève: Librairie Droz / Lille: Librairie Giard, 1950.

  18. Lafayette, Madame de. Romans et nouvelles: Textes revus sur les editions originales. Édition illustrée. Ed. Émile Magne. Classiques Garnier. Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1958.


  19. Alain-René Lesage / Le Sage (1668-1747)

  20. Le Sage, Alain-René. Le Diable Boiteux. 1707. Oeuvres de Le Sage. Avec une notice par Anatole France. 2 vols. Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, Éditeur, 1878.

  21. Le Sage, René. The Devil on Two Sticks. Trans. William Strange. 1841. Introduction by Arthur Symons. Illustrated by Philip Hagreen. London: The Navarre Society Limited, 1940.

  22. Le Sage, Alain-René. Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane. 1715, 1724 & 1735. Ed. Roger Laufer. GF. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1977.

  23. Le Sage, A. R. The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane. 1715, 1724 & 1735. Trans. B. H. Malkin. Collins’ Lotus Library. London & Glasgow: Collins Clear-Type Press, n.d.

  24. Le Sage, René. Théâtre: Turcaret; Crispin Rival de son maître; La Tontine. Ed. Maurice Bardon. Classiques Garnier. Paris: Éditions Garner Frères, 1948.


  25. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux (1688-1763)

  26. Marivaux, Pierre. La Vie de Marianne, ou Les Aventures de Madame la Comtesse de ***. 1731-1742. Ed. Frédéric Deloffre. Classiques Garnier. Paris: Éditions Garner Frères, 1963.

  27. Marivaux, Pierre. Le Paysan Parvenu. 1734-35 & 1756. Ed. Michel Gilot. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1965.

  28. Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de. Théâtre. Paris: Bibliothèque Hachette, n.d.

  29. Marivaux, Pierre. Up from the Country / Infidelities / The Game of Love and Chance. Trans. Leonard Tancock & David Cohen. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980.


  30. Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau (1749-1791)

  31. Mirabeau, Le Comte de. The Lifted Curtain & My Conversion. Trans. Howard Nelson. Introduction by J-P Spencer. A Star Book. W. H. Allen & Co. PLC, 1986.


  32. Antoine François Prévost d'Exiles [Abbé Prévost] (1697-1763)

  33. Prévost, Abbé. Manon Lescaut: Édition illustrée. 1731. Ed. Frédéric Deloffre & Raymond Picard. Classiques Garnier. Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1965.

  34. Prévost, Abbé. Manon Lescaut. 1731. Préface de Pierre Mac Orlan. 1959. Le Livre de Poche, 460. Paris: Gallimard / Librarie Générale Française, 1968.

  35. Prévost, Abbé. Manon Lescaut. 1731. Trans. L. W. Tancock. 1949. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951.

  36. Prévost, Abbé. The History of the Chevalier des Grieux and of Manon Lescaut. 1731. Trans. Helen Waddell. Essay by Edward Sackville-West. Wood Engravings by Valentin Le Campion. London: the Folio Society, 1950.


  37. Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737-1814)

  38. Saint-Pierre, Bernardin de. Paul et Virginie: Édition illustrée. 1787. Ed. Pierre Trahard. Classiques Garnier. Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1958.


  39. Anthologies & Secondary Literature

  40. Romanciers du XVIIème siècle: Sorel – Scarron – Furetière – Madame de la Fayette. Ed. Antoine Adam. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 131. 1958. Paris: Gallimard, 1962.



Abbé Prévost: Manon Lescaut (1731 / 1753)






Henry Fielding: Shamela (1741)

The English Novel


Authors:
  1. Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
  2. Aphra Behn (1640-1689)
  3. John Bunyan (1628-1688)
  4. Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673)
  5. John Cleland (1709-1789)
  6. Daniel Defoe (c.1660-1731)
  7. Henry Fielding (1707–1754)
  8. Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)
  9. Henry Mackenzie (1745–1831)
  10. Sir Thomas More (1478-1535)
  11. Thomas Nashe (1567-c.1601)
  12. Samuel Richardson (1689-1761)
  13. Tobias George Smollett (1721–1771)
  14. Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
  15. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
  16. Anthologies & Secondary Literature

_____________________________________

    Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban (1561-1626)

  1. Bacon, Francis, Lord Verulam. The New Atlantis. 1627. Ed. G. C. Moore Smith. Cambridge: University Press, 1900.


  2. Aphra Behn (1640-1689)

  3. Behn, Aphra. The Novels of Mrs. Aphra Behn [The Royal Slave and Other Novels]. Introduction by Ernest A. Baker. London: George Routledge & Sons, Limited / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., n.d.

  4. Behn, Aphra. Selected Writings of the Ingenious Mrs. Aphra Behn: Comprising the four novels: The Adventure of the Black Lady, The Court of the King of Bantam, The Unfortunate Happy Lady, & The Fair Jilt; a comedy in five acts: The Dutch Lover; and selected verse and translations. Introduction by Robert Phelps. An Evergreen Book. New York: Grove Press, 1950.

  5. Behn, Aphra. The Ten Pleasures of Marriage; and The Second Part: The Confession of the New Married Couple. 1682-1683. Ed. John Harvey. London: The Navarre Society Limited, 1950

  6. Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave. A True History. 1688. Introduction by Lore Metzger. The Norton Library. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973.

  7. Behn, Aphra. Oroonoko: An Authoritative Text; Historical Backgrounds; Criticism. 1688. Ed. Joanna Lipking. A Norton Critical Edition. New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.

  8. Behn, Aphra. Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister. 1684-87. Introduction by Maureen Duffy. Virago Modern Classic, 240. London: Virago Press Limited, 1987.

  9. Cameron, W. J. New Light on Aphra Behn: An investigation into the facts and fictions surrounding her journey co Surinam in 1663 and her activities as a spy in Flanders in 1666. University of Auckland Monograph, 5. Auckland: Wakefield Press Ltd., 1961.

  10. Duffy, Maureen. The Passionate Shepherdess: Aphra Behn, 1640-89. London: Jonathan Cape, 1977.

  11. Hahn, Emily. Aphra Behn. London: Jonathan Cape, 1951.


  12. John Bunyan (1628-1688)

  13. Bunyan, John. The Complete Works. Introduction by John P. Gulliver. Illustrated Edition. Philadelphia; Brantford, Ont.: Bradley, Garretson & Co. / Chicago, Ills.; Columbus, Ohio; Nashville, Tenn.; St. Louis, Mo.; San Francisco, Cal.: Wm. Garretson & Co., 1881.

  14. Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is To Come: Delivered Under the Similitude of a Dream. London: The Religious Tract Society, n.d. [1877].

  15. Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim’s Progress. Ed. Roger Sharrock. 1965. The Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.

  16. Bunyan, John. Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners and The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to that which is to come. 1666, 1678, & 1684. Ed. Roger Sharrock. 1962 & 1960. Oxford Standard Authors. London: Oxford University Press, 1966.

  17. Bunyan, John. Grace Abounding & The Life and Death of Mr Badman. 1666 & 1680. Introduction by G. B. Harrison. An Everyman Paperback. Everyman’s Library, 1815. 1928. London: J. M. Dent & Sons / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1969.

  18. Bunyan, John. The Life and Death of Mr. Badman. 1680. Introduction by Bonamy Dobrée. The Worlds’ Classics, 338. London: Humphrey Milford / Oxford University Press, 1929.

  19. Bunyan, John. The Holy War Made by King Shaddai upon Diabolus To regain the Metropolis of the World or, The Losing and Taking Again of the Town of Mansoul. 1682. Ed. Wilbur M. Smith. The Wycliffe Series of Christian Classics. Chicago: Moody Press, 1948.

  20. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne [nee Lucas] (1623–1673)

  21. Cavendish, Margaret. The Blazing World and Other Writings. 1666. Ed. Kate Lilly. 1992. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994.


  22. John Cleland (1709-1789)

  23. Cleland, John. Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. 1749. Ed. Peter Sabor. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.


  24. Daniel Defoe (c.1660-1731)

  25. Defoe, Daniel. The Shakespeare Head Edition of the Novels and Selected Writings of Daniel Defoe. 1927-28. Oxford: Basil Blackwell / Stratford-upon-Avon: The Shakespeare Head Press / London: William Clowes & Sons Limited, 1974.
    • The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner. 1719. Vol. I.
    • The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner. 1719. Vol. II.
    • The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. 1719. Vol. III.
    • The Fortunate Mistress. 1724. Vol. I.
    • The Fortunate Mistress. 1724. Vol. II.
    • A Journal of the Plague Year. 1722.

  26. Defoe, Daniel. The True-Born Englishman and Other Writings. 1700. Ed. P. N. Furbank & W. R. Owens. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997.

  27. Defoe, Daniel. The Storm. 1704. Ed. Richard Hamblyn. London: Allen Lane, 2003.

  28. Defoe, Daniel. The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. 1719. Ed. Angus Ross. 1965. Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.

  29. Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe / The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. 1719. Introduction by Frederick Brereton. Collins Classics. London & Glasgow: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1961.

  30. Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe: The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner; The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. 1719. Introduction by Guy N. Pocock. 1945. Everyman’s Library, 1059. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1966.

  31. Defoe, Daniel. The Life, Adventures and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton. 1720. Introduction by James Sutherland. 1963. Everyman’s Library, 1074. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1969.

  32. Defoe, Daniel. Captain Singleton. 1720. Ed. Shiv K. Kumar. Oxford English Novels. Ed. James Kinsley. 1969. London: Oxford University Press, 1973.

  33. Defoe, Daniel. Memoirs of a Cavalier. 1720. Introduction by G. A. Aitken. 1908. Everyman’s Library, 283. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1933.

  34. Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year: Being Observations or Memorials of the Most Remarkable Occurrences, as well Public as Private, which Happened in London during the Last Great Visitation in 1665. Written by a Citizen who Continued all the while in London. Never made Public Before. 1722. Ed. Anthony Burgess & Christopher Bristow. Introduction by Anthony Burgess. 1966. Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.

  35. Defoe, Daniel. The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c. Who Was Born in Newgate, and During a Life of Continued Variety for Threescore Years, Besides Her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, Five Times a Wife (Whereof Once to Her Own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at Last Grew Rich, Lived Honest & Died a Penitent, Written From Her Own Memorandums. 1722. Foreword by Oliver St. John Gogarty. Black & White Illustrations by Arthur Wragg. 1948. London: Rockliff Publishing Corporation Limited, 1950.

  36. Defoe, Daniel. The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders. 1722. Ed. Juliet Mitchell. Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.

  37. Defoe, Daniel. Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress. 1724. Ed. Jane Jack. 1964. Oxford English Novels. London: Oxford University Press, 1969.

  38. Defoe, Daniel [as ‘Captain Charles Johnson’]. A General History of the Pyrates. 1724. Ed. Manuel Schonhorn. 1972. Dover Maritime Books. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1999.

  39. Defoe, Daniel. A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain. 1724-26. Ed. Pat Rogers. Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.

  40. Hazlitt, William, ed. The Works of Daniel De Foe, with a Memoir of His Life and Writings. 2 vols. London: John Clements, 1840-41.


  41. Henry Fielding (1707–1754)

  42. Fielding, Henry. The History of the Adventures of Mr. Joseph Andrews and of His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams & An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews. 1741 & 1742. Ed. Douglas Brooks. 1970. Oxford English Novels. London: Oxford University Press, 1971.

  43. Fielding, Henry. A Journey from This World to the Next. 1743. Introduction by Claude Rawson. Everyman’s Library, 1112. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1973.

  44. Fielding, Henry. Jonathan Wild & The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. 1743 & 1755. Ed. Douglas Brooks. Introduction by A. R. Humphreys. 1932. Everyman’s Library, 1877. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1973.

  45. Fielding, Henry. The History of Tom Jones. 1749. Ed. R. P. C. Mutter. Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966.

  46. Fielding, Henry. The History of Amelia. 1752. Illustrated by George Cruickshank. 2 vols. Classic Novels. London: Hutchinson & Co., n.d.

  47. Fielding, Henry. The Works: Complete in One Volume, with Memoir of the Author, by Thomas Roscoe. London: Henry Washbourne et al., 1840.


  48. Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)

  49. Fielding, Sarah. The Adventures of David Simple, and The Adventures of David Simple, Volume the Last. 1744 & 1753. Ed. Linda Bree. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2002.

  50. Fielding, Sarah. The Governess, or, Little Female Academy. 1749. Ed. Jill E. Grey. The Juvenile Library. Ed. Brian W. Alderson. London: Oxford University Press, 1968.


  51. Henry Mackenzie (1745–1831)

  52. Mackenzie, Henry. The Man of Feeling. 1771. Ed. Brian Vickers. 1967. Oxford English Novels. London: Oxford University Press, 1970.


  53. Sir Thomas More (1478-1535)

  54. More, Thomas. Utopia. 1516. Trans. Paul Turner. 1965. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.


  55. Thomas Nashe (1567-c.1601)

  56. Nashe, Thomas. The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works. Ed. J. B. Steane. The Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.


  57. Samuel Richardson (1689-1761)

  58. Richardson, Samuel. Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded. 1740-41. Introduction by M. Kinkead-Weekes. 1962. 2 vols. Everyman’s Library, 683-4. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1969.

  59. Richardson, Samuel. Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady. 1747-48. Ed. Angus Ross. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.

  60. Richardson, Samuel. The History of Clarissa Harlowe. 1747-48. Introduction by John Butt. 4 vols. Everyman’s Library, 882-5. 1932. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1962.

  61. Richardson, Samuel. The History of Sir Charles Grandison. 1753-54. Ed. Jocelyn Harris. 3 vols. Oxford English Novels. London: Oxford University Press, 1972.


  62. Tobias George Smollett (1721–1771)

  63. Smollett, Tobias. Roderick Random. 1748. Introduction by H. W. Hodges. Everyman’s Library, 790. 1927. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1964.

  64. Smollett, Tobias. The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, in which are included Memoirs of a Lady of Quality. 1751. Ed. James L. Clifford. 1964. Oxford English Novels. London: Oxford University Press, 1969.

  65. Smollett, Tobias. The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom. 1753. Ed. Damian Grant. Oxford English Novels. London: Oxford University Press, 1971.

  66. Smollett, Tobias. Travels through France and Italy. 1766. Introduction by Thomas Secombe. The World’s Classics, 90. 1907. London: Humphrey Milford / Oxford University Press, 1919.

  67. Smollett, Tobias. The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves & The History and Adventures of an Atom. 1762 & 1769. London: The Waverley Book Company, Ltd., n.d.

  68. Smollett, Tobias. The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker. 1771. Ed. Angus Ross. 1967. Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.


  69. Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)

  70. Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. 1759-67. Ed. Graham Petrie. Introduction by Christopher Ricks. Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.

  71. Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick, to which are added The Journal to Eliza & A Political Romance. 1768. Ed. Ian Jack. 1968. Oxford English Novels. London: Oxford University Press, 1972.

  72. Sterne, Laurence. The Works: Comprising The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent., A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, Sermons, Letters, &c., with A Life of the Author, Written by Himself. London: Henry G. Bohn., 1853.

  73. Sterne, Laurence. Memoirs of Mr. Laurence Sterne; The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey; Selected Sermons and Letters. Ed. Douglas Grant. The Reynard Library. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1950.

  74. Traugott, John, ed. Laurence Sterne: A Collection of Critical Essays. Twentieth Century Views. Englewood Clifs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968.


  75. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

  76. Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels and Selected Writings in Prose & Verse. Ed. John Hayward. The Compendious Series. London: The Nonesuch Press / New York: Random House, 1934.

  77. Swift, Jonathan. The Annotated Gulliver's Travels: Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. 1726 / 1734 / 1896. Ed. Isaac Asimov. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc. / Publishers, 1980.

  78. Swift, Jonathan. Journal to Stella. Ed. Harold Williams. 1948. 2 vols. Oxford English Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963.

  79. Swift, Jonathan. The Poems. Ed. Harold Williams. 1937. Second ed. 1958. 3 vols. Oxford English Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966.

  80. Swift, Jonathan. Poetical Works. Ed. Herbert Davis. Oxford Standard Authors. London: Oxford University Press, 1967.

  81. Swift, Jonathan. Satires and Personal Writings. Ed. William Alfred Eddy. 1932. Oxford Standard Authors. London: Oxford University Press, 1967.

  82. Nokes, David. Jonathan Swift: A Hypocrite Reversed. A Critical Biography. 1985. Oxford Lives. London: Oxford University Press, 1987.


  83. Anthologies & Secondary Literature

  84. Birkett, Sir Norman, ed. The Newgate Calendar: With Contemporary Engravings. 1951. London: The Folio Society, 1993.

  85. Birkett, Lord, ed. The New Newgate Calendar. 1960. London: The Folio Society, 1993.

  86. Henderson, Philip, ed. Shorter Novels. Volume 1: Elizabethan and Jacobean. Thomas Deloney: Jack of Newberie and Thomas of Reading; Robert Greene: The Carde of Fancie; Thomas Nashe: The Unfortunate Traveller. 1597, 1600, 1587, & 1594. Introduction by George Saintsbury. 1929. Everyman’s Library, 824. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1943.

  87. Henderson, Philip, ed. Shorter Novels. Volume 2: Jacobean and Restoration. Emmanuel Ford: Ornatus & Artesia; Aphra Behn: Oroonoko; Henry Neville: The Isle of Pines; William Congreve: Incognita. 1634, 1688, 1668, & 1713. Everyman’s Library, 841. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1930.

  88. Kerby-Miller, Charles, ed. The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus. Written in Collaboration by the Members of the Scriblerus Club: John Arbuthnot, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, John Gay, Thomas Parnell & Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford. 1950. New York: Russell & Russell, 1966.

  89. McBurney, W. H., ed. Four Before Richardson: Selected English Novels, 1720-1727. Luck at Last, or the Happy Unfortunate, by Arthur Blackamore; The Jamaica Lady, or the Life of Bavia, by W. P; Philidore and Placentia, or L’Amour trop Delicat, by Eliza Haywood; The Accomplished Rake, or Modern Fine Gentleman, by Mary Davys. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963.

  90. Painter, William. The Palace of Pleasure: Elizabethan Versions of Italian and French Novels from Boccaccio, Bandello, Cinthio, Straparola, Queen Margaret of Navarre, and Others. 1566-67, 1575. Ed. Joseph Jacobs. 1890. 3 vols. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1966.

  91. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. 1957. Peregrine Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966.



Samuel Richardson: Pamela (1741)




  1. Folktale roots: characterised by excessive patterning and repetition of motifs (as seen in the Eastern Framestory Tradition)


  2. Confessional: the various forms of auto/biography (of which there are many different potential models in classical literature: Xenophon's Cyropaedia, Plutarch's Parallel Lives, Caesar & Augustus's third-person autobiographies, The Confessions of St. Augustine, to name just a few ...)


  3. Poetry anthology: with commentaries on the individual poems becoming chapters (seen in the Japanese Tales of Ise - as well as Egil's Saga in Iceland)


  4. Medieval romance: characterised by C. S. Lewis (in The Allegory of Love) as "Ovid misunderstood:" earnest, Christian mis-applications of Ovid's witty urban satirical epics, epistles and tales


  5. Historiography: as it evolves into historical fiction (the shift from Ari's Lándnámabók and Íslendingabók to the first, anonymous Sagas of Icelanders



  6. Wu Ch'eng-en: Journey to the West

  7. Religious narratives: stories of saints and demons as a backdrop for the satirical fantasy (and realism) of the Chinese novel



  8. Henry Fielding: Tom Jones (1749)

  9. Fielding's (secular) "comic epic in prose": a kind of culmination of the Cervantine tradition of deliberately parody of absurd literary excess as a vehicle for (so-called) "realism"