I find, Gentlemen, when you read with me in private, that nine out of ten of you dislike the 18th century and all its literary works.
asserted
nine → find → century
As for the Women students, they one and all abominate it.
asserted
they → abominate → it
All eighteenth-century novels are weird in one way or another, if only because the novelists of the time didn’t yet know a standard by which to make them not-weird.
asserted
them → know → which
Robinson Crusoe (1719) famously has no chapter breaks.
asserted
Crusoe → have → breaks
Tristram Shandy (1767) famously contains a blank page, with instructions for readers to “call for pen and ink” and hack out a portrait of one of the characters on their own.
asserted
readers → contain → own
The Man of Feeling (1771) is hardly a novel at all: An anonymous “editor” explains how a fat curate of his acquaintance had used torn pages from a small memorandum book as wadding paper while hunting; the few surviving pages of that memorandum, representing the scattered observations of an eccentric parishioner, make up the slim novel The Man of Feeling.
asserted
pages → explain → Feeling
It’s pretty weird.
asserted
It → ’ → ?
It is, in fact, by my estimation, weirder than any book written before Modernists of the twentieth-century started pushing the (riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay) weird envelope.
asserted
Modernists → write → envelope
That champion is Tobias Smollett’s 1769 The History and Adventures of an Atom, a book of exquisite beauty and mind-numbing tedium, of obscurity and libel, featuring some top-notch humorous set-pieces and also really a lot of gratuitous filth.
asserted
champion → numb → filth
In the course of this review I’d like to step back and see how novels in general had reached a point at which Atom became possible; quickly touch upon Smollett’s career to find why he found Atom necessary; and only then delve into what makes Atom so weird.
asserted
Atom → like → career
If you have no interest in the history of the novel, or of one random Scotsman, but you do want to learn about what it was like inside a medieval Japanese politician’s butthole, skip to part 3.
asserted
it → have → part
That’s where the Atom resides.
asserted
Atom → ’ → ?
Don Quixote (1605–1615) is often called (e.g.g. here, here, and here) the first modern novel…which is weird because of course Don Quixote is about a man who is obsessed with reading fiction.
asserted
who → call → fiction
A romance is (broadly speaking) a book about a knight wandering around fighting dragons etc. and having martial adventures1.
asserted
knight → speak → adventures1
A picaresque (broadly speaking) is about a lowlife wandering around having comical misadventures; Huckleberry Finn (1884) would be a notable American example.
asserted
Finn → speak → misadventures
The main joke of Don Quixote is that the Don thinks he’s in one kind of book and he’s actually in the other.
asserted
he → think → other
So how can Don Quixote be the first modern novel when both picaresques and romances by necessity must predate it?
asserted
picaresques → predate → it
Do they not count as novels?
asserted
they → count → novels
A lot of weight is borne by the word modern.
asserted
lot → bear → word
In the first place, the novel (as a concept) is old enough that isolating the first novel qua novel is literally impossible.
asserted
isolating → isolate → novel
Doubtless the first novel ever written has not survived.
asserted
novel → write → ?
Various writing guides will give a minimum word count for a novel (40k or 50k words), but how do those numbers translate into ancient Greek?
asserted
numbers → give → Greek
The real problem is that, word count aside, no one can authoritatively define the rubric that covers short stories, novellas, and novels—all of what we might call fiction.
uncertain
we → define → what
You know it when you see it, as Potter Stewart would say.
asserted
Stewart → know → it
The basic elements—that it must be a prose narrative that is not true—are clear enough, but Parnassus is littered with examples of such narratives that don’t feel particularly like our idea of fiction—that do not seem, for lack of a better word, novelistic.
asserted
that → litter → word
I think the average reader, if handed a pre-DQ picaresque (such as Lazarillo de Tormes (1554)) or a pre-DQ romance (such as Amadis the Gaul (1508)), would have a hard time calling each a novel.
asserted
reader → think → each
somehow that’s not enough.
(The most famous prose romance in English—Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) starts off sounding like a (fictional) history and ends almost novelistically.
asserted
romance → ’ → history
Reading it through is like reading Return of the King backwards, starting with the appendix.)
asserted
Reading → read → appendix
Some of the things (I’ll call them points of alienation) that make sixteenth-century protonovels strange to modern eyes survive two hundred years or so past Don Quixote’s publication.
asserted
protonovels → call → publication
They survive, in fact, up to and into (remember Smollett?) the writings of Tobias Smollett.
asserted
They → survive → Smollett
They’re part of what makes eighteenth-century novels weird.
asserted
novels → ’re → ?
Maybe you can come up a dozen points of alienation, but I’ll quickly name three:
1 Misemphasis
Early narratives—protonovel or novel—tend to place emphasis on the wrong (or “wrong”) things, or at least in the wrong proportions.
asserted
narratives → come → proportions
In Thomas Nashe’s picaresque The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), for example, we find [CW for everything, because Nashe] the following four entirely conventional and novelistic incidents:
1
asserted
we → find → incidents
A murderer named Esdras rapes Heraclide (“a noble & chaste matrone”).
asserted
murderer → name → Heraclide
2 Heraclide, in shame, commits suicide.
asserted
Heraclide → commit → suicide
3 Jack Wilton (the narrator and eponymous unfortunate traveler) is falsely accused of rape and murder.
asserted
Wilton → accuse → rape
He is tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death.
asserted
He → try → death
He is marching up to the gibbet to be hanged, when…
4 …the testimony of a passing Englishman frees him.
asserted
testimony → march → him
But how long does it take the book to narrate these four incidents?
asserted
it → take → incidents
1a Heraclide begs Esdras for mercy: 4 ½ pages
1b The rape: The first half of a sentence
2a Heraclide ponders suicide:
asserted
Heraclide → beg → suicide
…and 195 more, not listed.
The Aporia
