Shaping the Development of the Novel in English: A Review of Michael Schmidt s The Novel: A Biography

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1 Shaping the Development of the Novel in English: A Review of Michael Schmidt s The Novel: A Biography Yang Jincai Abstract:For centuries many literary scholars in the West have pursued to study the novel as a genre but few have done it successfully as Michael Schmidt does in his recent achievement The Novel: A Biography which tells the story of the novel s transformation through time. To show how significant the work is, this essay tries to sketch its framework and discuss some of the major views Schmidt holds towards the development of the novel in English. Key words:michael Schmidt; the novel in English; development; global significance Author:Yang Jincai is professor of English at the School of Foreign Studies, Nanjing University (Nanjing , China). He is currently engaged in the studies of 21st century British and American fiction as well as contemporary Western critical theories. jcyang@nju.edu.cn 标题 : 英语小说的形成与发展 评迈克尔 西米特的 小说传记 内容摘要 : 作为文类之一的小说一直是西方文学界探讨的命题, 但很少有学者像迈克尔 西米特那样纵横驰骋, 将英语小说的形成与发展置于七个多世纪的绵延历史中加以考察, 揭示其复杂而多变且具有全球意义的生命传记历程 本文拟简要分析和评述其新作 小说传记 的主要内容及其学术成就 关键词 : 迈克尔 西米特 ; 英语小说 ; 发展 ; 全球意义作者简介 : 杨金才, 南京大学外国语学院教授, 近期主要从事 21 世纪英美小说与当代西方批评理论研究 本文系江苏高校哲学社会科学重点研究基地重大招标课题阶段性研究成果, 受国家社科基金重大项目 战后世界进程与外国文学进程研究 项目批号: 11&ZD137 资助 Michael Schmidt s The Novel: A Biography(2014) is an ambitious, erudite study exploring the 700-year history of the novel in English. Tracing the intensification of interest in the story of the novel in English as a privileged unit of world literature, Schmidt rethinks its complexity that unfoldslike a richly varied landscape one would like to explore in depth. Exquisitely written, meticulously conceived, and deeply learned, The Novel: A Biographydraws our attention to tensions within the logics of substitution, representation, and identification upon which novelists both male and female often stake their claims. Drawing on their biographies, Schmidt further invites us into the creative dialogues between authors and between books and suggests how these dialogues have shaped the development of the novel in English. Speaking about the novel, Schmidt maintains that a novelist makes formal calculations that may not present themselves in

2 Yang Jincai: Shaping the Development of the Novel in English: A Review of Michael Schmidt s The Novel: A Biography 155 this deliberate form, but are choices whose rightness, more than the detail of the story, engages a reader (16). Schmidt focuses upon a novelistic phenomenon that is immediately recognizable once described, reminding us of Jan-Melissa Schramm s account of the spectrum of practices and values informed by 19 th century writers who unveiled the dynamic tension between moments of expansive imaginative projection and identification which foster shared feeling, and the relentless narrative pressure towards singularity, which furthers the assignment of responsibility (Schramm 190). Yet for all the intuitive familiarity of such tension to readers of the novel in English, Schmidt s rich chapters imply how many novelists must be studied in order to name and clarify their possible interrelatedness. Schmidt examines contributions from Great Britain, Ireland, America, Canada, Australia, India, the Caribbean, and Southern Africa, influenced by great novelists working in other cultures. The story of the novel in English is then told mainly by novelists and through novels and to read a novel is a difficult and complex art (1). According to Schmidt, the aspects of novelists lives that matter are those that cast light on their work and on that of other writers. He sets out to write this book without an overarching theory of the novel. What he proposes to do is to cultivate a brief life as in any biography to concentrate on things that shape, distort, and reconfigure it (2). Schmidt s study takes as its context the history of the novel whose development is not invariably progressive, assimilative, or linear. And the novel form is not singular, even in its earliest stages. Its manifestations alter in relation to language, histories, and geography that Schmidt sees as fundamental in shaping the story of novel in English.What he has done is to illuminate the properties and values of this diverse literary form, in which English-language writers in different ages and societies have excelled (3). At first blush, The Novel: A Biography is a greatest hits album, if you will, of contemporary scholarship on the genre. Its author readily admits in his prologue: [T]here is something fundamentally subversive about art, for the novel serves in a given era, a work endures not because of its subject, themes, political stance, or social aims but because of its language, its sheer invention, and its resistance to cliché some irreducible quality (3). Like a greatest hits album, the work showcases some of Schmidt s finest work on literary genre studies that may remind us of his earlier undertakings such as Reading Modern Poetry (1989), Lives of the Poets (1998), The First Poets: Lives of the Ancient Greek Poets (2004), The Great Modern Poets (2006), and 3 volumes of The Story of Poetry ( ). However, this new book is much more nuanced, for Schmidt succeeds in pursuing two strands that have involved studying both the development of the novel in English and its artistry as a whole and over time on the one hand and interpreted section by section various novelists through their individual novels with a particular exploration of the dynamic of the English novel s changing ideas on the other. The first section of the book focuses on a range of subjects that a novelist would write about and each subject forms a chapter in which a group of novelists are closely examined with reference to their affinities between each other. Schmidt argues that a novel is a kind of rabbit hole (6), for it led Gorky s Nastiah into all-absorbing emotion, the Victorian schoolboy into

3 56 外国文学研究 2015 年第 4 期 adventure, and a young Mexican into an imaginary, heroic Europe (6).There are 8 chapters in this part and Schmidt begins in earnest with Sir John Mandeville, the first invented English narrator, highlighting the English prose tradition from which the novel emerges (21). Chapter 2 turns to the history of the novel in which Schmidt discovers relevant English and European antecedents. In his opinion, what would develop into a core readership for the novel was shaping in the late fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries. In the sixteenth it developed and grew (25). Here Schmidt sees the novel as a form rooted in medieval soil growing with protestant individualism, education, technology, and capitalism. What follows is an exploration of the three springs of the novel in English namely Sir Philip Sidney, Samuel Richardson and Thomas Lodgeforeseeing Charles Dickens who has the same rich abundance of matter, the sense of words and events pressing for admission (53). John Bunyan stands alone as the subject of Chapter 4 in which Schmidt elaborates what makes Bunyan s predictable story, passage by passage derivative of the Bible, so compelling and durable, offering in his The Pilgrim s Progress a reality of allegorical figuration and good humor. Chapter 5, in a similar vein, examines two novelists AphraBehn and Zora Neale Hurston who both touch on issues of imperialism, colonialism, class and race, central to modern academic discourse (65). Unique as it is, this chapter singles out how the novel in English enters America, for Behn anticipates both Alex Hayley s Roots: The Saga of An American Family (1976) and Zora Neale Hurston s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), for they root their language not only in speech but in specific speech (70). Alongside this geographical traveling of the novel is his transnational discussion of Daniel Defoe, Truman Capote and J. M. Coetzee in Chapter 6 titled Impersonation which continues to argue about the stereotypes imprinted on the Anglophone reader. It is a comparative study of Robinson Crusoe s man Friday and Behn s black-skinned European Oroonoko, offering a contrasted view of the other embodied in both Friday and Oroonoke. Defoe perceived a set of physical and qualitative differences that set Friday apart while Behn wanted to include Oroonoke among us (74). When he embodies and formalizes a division, Defoe actually animates his stories by way of characterization setting a far better example for his heirs of three kinds in the twentieth century: those who try for his sort of verisimilitude and thematic relevance in journalistic terms, those who revisit his themes from modern points of view, and those who build on the moral force of his single-mindedness with a refining artistry (85). They are Thomas Keneally, Truman Capote and J. M. Coetzee. The remaining two chapters of this section address respectively proportion and sex and sensibility bringing about an array of novelists who have acted upon each other. In Chapter 7, for example, Jonathan Swift is a brilliant savage who understands, though he cannot control, the spiritual, political, and literary jungle in which he exists (93), but in the eye of Schmidt Swift is largely indebted to the French writer François Rabelais who found his way into English in the midseventeenth century and was fortunate to have been translated by the inventive, spirited, if not always accurate Scot Sir Thomas Urquhart (97) who [is] irresistible to Alasdair Gray, most of all for his language, his crazy bagatelles (109). Urquhart s Rabelais, though steeped in medieval allegory, represents a decisive break with its constraints. Whereas, in Chapter 8, Diderot is approached from a comparative perspective, exhibiting how Samuel Richardson, a moral hubris

4 Yang Jincai: Shaping the Development of the Novel in English: A Review of Michael Schmidt s The Novel: A Biography 157 has sprung from his wide reading of Diderot and Behn. Richardson did not invent the epistolary novel, maintains Schmidt, but his influence on Jane Austen is remarkable, for she liked his focus on individuals, the inherence of the informing historical and moral contexts (119). If there is a lacuna in Schmidt s biographical outline of the novel, it is the way he groups the authors, which is not quite easy for the reader to grasp if there is no mention of how they interrelate each other across languages and cultures. The slightly disconcerting result isthat many significant facts get no mention at all, and they are noticedonly fleetingly. The second section mirrors the trajectory of the novel in English, covering chapters from 9 to 19 which exploreinvariably the thematic issues such as nuvvles, a cock and a bull, listening, declarations of independence, the fiction industry, gothic romance, and thought-divers. The topics in this section feature one of the unifying strands in this book,namely Schmidt s interest in comparative biography. In a particularly rewarding chapter, he looks at threeclassic lives of Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë and Anne Bronë, examining how they have contributed in varying degree to the subgenre of gothic romance in English literary tradition. His comparison results in an enlightening view of the form that [has] become versatile and capacious (294). Emily Brontë s novel is finished and achieved in the sense that Jane Austen s best novels are, though different in kind, Schmidt contends, and both differ in handling order, for in Austen order is rational and proportionate, applied, as it seems, from the outside, while in Emily Brontë order is integral, with a solidity and consistency contained (294). Obviously, Schmidt pays close attention to a novelist s private life and personal motivations. Another valuable, and unusual, chapter that deals with the subject of real worlds is striking as well, for it delves into the normative force of nineteenth-century England in which Schmidt examines closely how William Makepeace Thackeray has interacted with his contemporary peers and beyond such as Anthony Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli and Frances Trollope putting out under his own name a cluster of ambitious and large scale novels. It is amazing to notice in this chapter that Anthony Trollop did not respect Thackeray s sense of moral propriety. As a novelist who came up after Thackeray, Trollop was overly proud of his abundance, concluding his Autobiography with a list of his books, their publication dates, and an account of the income he derived from them (311). This life of the eminent literary genre is especially interesting to novel readers who are compelled to appreciate its biographer s craft. Schmidt covers so huge a body of novelists who have acted upon each other throughout ages. The book also treats individually a novelist s personal life from his or her toilet training to the sexual and marital affairs which have impaired his or her education and career. The following chapters form a vast landscape of the novel in English as Schmidt states clearly in his prologue, the writers came together in configurations that seemed to [him] expressive: there was a dialogue between them or their works, for example, Salman Rushdie and Anita Desai have more to say to Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood, and to Peter Carey and David Malouf, than they do to R. K. Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand (3). Here we are occasionally getting immersed in fascinating dialogues featured by geographical, ideological, cultural and sexual zoning. Many interesting things surface as we read on and find chapters 23 and 27, or 27 and 29, 37, 38 and 43 could be combined. Schmidt s argument of modern core

5 58 外国文学研究 2015 年第 4 期 lies in Chapters 30 through 36 in which the succession and juxtaposition of modernists, their beneficiaries and detractors, in an academic account might have taken other forms (3). While speaking about enchantment and disenchantment, Schmidt cites a group of authors and parallels them with Vladimir Nabokov who, like Beckett, made the transition between language alive to the different semantic and expressive properties of each (812). His unexpected comparison of Muriel Spark and Nabokov is illuminative, showcasing possible interrelatedness among writers like Ayn Rand, Radclyffe Hall, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth Taylor, Muriel Spark, Nabokov, William Cass, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, B. S. Johnson and Jonathan Franzen. In his discussion of Johnson, Schmidt emphasizes in particular his radicalism defined by personal and political, not academic, experience (835), believing that Johnson exploited and undermined the conventional novel form despite his occasional inheritance from the literary tradition as any of his fellow writers does, for he cut holes through pages so the reader could see forward. Johnson, Schmidt goes on, left unbound chapters to shuffle the text and give it the anachronic quality of memory (835). Also, he analyzes Pynchon s point of departure from Kafka s novel The Trial (848) and Franzen s main personal risk in his fiction to leave satire behind, highlighting their varying contributions to the novel (849-50). Of equal significance is Chapter 37 which offers a meticulously researched extension of genre studies bringing together various authors and works which will be appealing to a wide range of scholars interested in the study of genre and writing practices of the novel. In tracing the various manifestations of the novel in English, Schmidt offers a brilliant life of it in which he identifies a significant nexus of national, international, and cosmopolitan interests that accompany the development of the novel. His detailed reading of the novel in English is particularly valuable in this respect. This major instance of the most recent scholarship centers on the novel and its influence on the human mind. As has been demonstrated in the last two chapters, the novel in English, having survived more than 700 years, is now going beyond its border exhibiting its global significances. A case in point is Chapter 44 titled Truth in Fiction, the Metamorphosis of Journalism which, starting from a study of E. L. Doctorow s novels, explores deftly how Doctorow sets the scene with Camus, Sartre, Tolstoy (1051). Overall, then, Michael Schmidt s The Novel: A Biography enriches rather than merely adds detail to the novel s 700-year history of cultural and literary life. For this, he has skillfully mined and then deployed anecdotes and ideas from various writers of the novel in English in addition to quoting largely from their voluminous letters, diaries, journals, reviews and notebooks. Though not so much an intellectual biography as the biography of an intellectual such as Alfred Kazin: A Biography, The Novel: A Biography does recreate the essential intellectual, moral and political framework with which we can grasp the centrality of the novel throughout its development. Rather than exhaustinginterest in the novel, Schmidt has succeeded in offering a fresh re-introductionto one of the most powerful literary genres of what Schmidt refers to as a liberalizing force and a revolutionary stimulus (479). The value of Schmidt s work, after all, lies not in the conclusions he has arrived at, but in the process he has gone through to reach such conclusions. In addition, the timeline section appendixed at the end of the book is extremely informative and resourceful,

6 Yang Jincai: Shaping the Development of the Novel in English: A Review of Michael Schmidt s The Novel: A Biography 159 sorting out major authors of the novel in English and notions regarding each one s year of birth. Fittingly in some ways, Schmidt concludes with a chapter on Pariahs reiterating not only the cultural and historical transformation of the novel but its far-reaching supernatural interventions across languages and cultures. For him, North American novelists who intend to throw off Europe never altogether manage it (1082). The same is true of Australian writers as well as Canadian ones. Having quibbled with the book s framework and a few passing remarks on it, however, I must end by reiterating my strong admiration for Schmidt s overall achievement. His The Novel: A Biography is the most thoroughgoing and insightful treatment of the genre to date, and a mandatory purchase for all literary scholars. 引用作品 Works Cited Schmidt, Michael. The Novel: A Biography. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap P of Harvard UP, Schramm, Jan-Melissa.Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 责任编辑 : 四维 中美诗歌诗学协会第四届年会会讯 ( 中国山东济南 2015 年 11 月 日 ) 中美诗歌诗学协会第四届年会将于 2015 年 11 月 日在山东师范大学举行 本次会议由山东师范大学承办, 华中师范大学英语文学研究中心 外国文学研究 世界文学研究论坛 山东外语教学 美国宾夕法尼亚大学等单位协办 具体信息如下 : 一 会议议题 :1 诗歌中的战争与创伤;2 诗歌 诗学与伦理;3 英语诗歌与儒家文化;4 现代主义诗歌与大众文化 ;5 声音 视觉 表演: 诗歌文本研究 ;6 谱系学视野下的诗歌: 诗歌文体的演化 ;7 诗歌翻译研究;8 诗歌文本研究 二 重要时间 :2015 年 9 月 30 日前, 提交回执 ;10 月 31 日前, 提交论文全文 ;11 月 27 日, 会议报到 ;11 月 日, 会议 ( 山东师范大学, 山东济南文化东路 88 号 ) 三 会务联系人 : 山东师范大学外国语学院王卓教授 ( 手机 : ) 华中师范大学外国语学院罗良功教授 ( 手机 : ) 会务组电子邮箱 :caapconvention@yahoo.com