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Overview
Originally published in 1990.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691630717 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1055 |
| Pages: | 286 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.90(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Travels of a Genre
The Modern Novel and Ideology
By Mary N. Layoun
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1990 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06834-3
CHAPTER 1
FICTIONAL GENEALOGIES
If genealogy is typically the tracing of "natural," biological — and often patriarchal — lines of descent, fictional genealogies proposes the pluralization of that presumably singular generative line and its character as a fictional narrative. It also, of course, refers to the fictional genealogies of the genre of the modern novel. Much of what follows, then, will suggest that there was very little that was "natural" about the development of the modern novel. Rather, the suggestion is what should be by now a familiar one — that literary (and cultural) genres and texts are the site of active struggles and conflicts as well as of propositions about "resolutions" for those struggles and conflicts. Neither a culture nor its constituent "texts" are seamless, internally coherent, and essentialist but, as Eric Wolf points out in his Europe and the People without History, a "rough and tumble of social interaction" between contending forces. And rather than assuming that interaction as causative in its own right — as, in other words, a self-propagating genealogy, it is perhaps more usefully considered as a complex network of relationships themselves in dynamic exchange with political, economic, and social contexts. So, while there are various genealogies cited for the modern European and English novel, one of the dominant categories for these genealogical discussions of genre has been the (perhaps equally genealogical) national.
Thus, the origins of the modern West European novel have typically been located within the national boundaries of the modern West European nation-state. Considerations of the novel as a genre, an endeavor admittedly fraught with difficulty, are far fewer than national cultural histories of the novel — the history of the modern German novel, of the modern French novel, of the modern English novel, and, there, at what some consider the outermost edge of Western Europe, of the modern Spanish novel. The arguably unavoidable underpinning of such discussions is no doubt the attempt to account for the regional specificity of particular texts. But the extent to which such histories, not unlike the novels they describe, define and bound a regional or particularly national specificity is striking. National histories of the novel and the modern West European novel itself stake out the fictional terrain of a particular definition of the nation. This is not a totally coincidental maneuver. Bakhtin's magisterial linguistic and cultural history of the multiple discourses of the Western novel — which he traces as far back as the ancient Greek romances — in spite of the broad inclusivity of its definition of the novel, posits a noteworthy threshold for the early modern, late seventeenth-and eighteenth-century European novel. That is the extent to which, at that point, the novel begins to delineate and make familiar (everyday or ordinary) the national landscape, both literally and metaphorically. Such novels are marked by their fictional postulations of what amounts to a national language, of national character, of an inclusive national culture, of national topos and history. Much of Bakhtin's critical work on the novel pursues the various narrative "voices" that make up Western "novelistic discourse." He traces a concatenation of those voices — the "dialogic imagination" — that marks his own critical history and prehistory of the novel as much as it does the novelistic discourses of which he writes. But, I would suggest, the symphony of those voices is, elsewhere, heard rather differently — selectively and not quite so symphonically.
If there is considerable critical divergence over the location of originary points and subsequent genealogies, there might be somewhat fewer differences over the relations of the modern European novel as a cultural and specifically literary form to its various historical and social contexts. So, the modern novel is linked to the rise of a literate bourgeoisie with particular social and cultural values and narrative expectations; to the development of industrial capitalism; to the powerful claims of the Enlightenment; to the spread of printing presses, the increased circulation of magazines and newspapers, to circulating libraries; to the penetration of the vernacular and certain popular cultural forms — popular theater, storytelling, folktales — into what had been more exclusive or "high" literary genres. The emergence of the modern novel can also, at least in retrospect, be situated in the contexts of the picaresque "travelogues," the baroque rupture or distortion of the "real," the rise of a romantic individualism, and the assertion of the totalizing frame of history and of a "rational" thinking self in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosopical and historical narratives. No one of these contexts is necessarily the "correct" and essential one — the single answer to a multiple-choice question about the origins of the modern novel. It is far more useful to consider some configuration of the contexts above as the foreground of the modern West European novel.
But in the move to what is foregrounded, there would undoubtedly be more argument over the specific characteristics of the modern novel. What formally or structurally distinguishes the modern novel from earlier narratives? Terry Lovell's Consuming Fiction, while acknowledging the significance of Ian Watt's location of coherent, rational, and orderly individualism and realism in the rise of the English novel, astutely critiques that position for its disregard of the simultaneously dominant presence of the gothic, of the less-than-rational, and the desirous. Lovell's analysis also offers a crucial corrective to Watt's exclusion of the women who dominated not only the consumption of the early novel but also, until the mid-nineteenth century and the novel's entry into the fields of high literature, its production. Consuming Fiction pays rather more careful attention to the initial status of the novel as a "debased," "debasing," and just barely literary form. Steele's aside, "I am afraid thy Brains are a little disordered with Novels and Romances," in his early eighteenth-century newspaper The Spectator, is an apt reminder of the novel's originally questionable status. For as Lovell and others have pointed out, it is only later that the novel comes to occupy a stable and exalted role in bourgeois literary culture. For Lukács, the novel emerges from and is characterized by the degradation, the problematization, of the epic hero and his collective social world. The novel is the literary form of a world marked by a metaphoric and literal "homelessness" and "exile." It is a world and a hero that are no longer objects of contemplation for a Judaeo-Christian god, even less, as Walter Benjamin reminds us, objects of contemplation for the Olympian gods. With encompassment in the divine look an impossibility, the novel is marked by the predominance of a narrative perspective that takes itself as the object of its own contemplation. The novel, in this definition, emphasizes the "rational" and phenomenal; its unifying element is the individual and her or his consciousness. But, in an interesting rereading of Lukács, J. M. Bernstein replaces Lukács's location of Cervantes's Don Quixote as the originary moment of the modern novel with Descartes's Discourse on Method. For Bernstein, as in fact for Ian Watt some thirty years earlier, it is Descartes's Discourse that, like Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, marks the "moment of the narrative installation of the self" that is equally "the moment of the emergence of the novel." Without foregoing Terry Lovell's qualification of the dominance of the realistic novel, the narrative perspective of and focus on a problematized individual and his life do distinguish the modern novel from earlier narratives. That fiction of the individual is not necessarily the preferred bourgeois (male) self-image — the coherent, orderly, and rational narrative perspective. As pleasing or reassuring as that image might be, it is one through which seep other images of repressed desires, of fancies and fantasies and fears that modern capitalism titillates but does not and cannot satisfy. Perhaps, though, one can characterize the early modern novel as a genre that focuses on the perspective and world of the "average" and "ordinary" individual who attempts to order, contain, and narrate his or her surroundings — human and nonhuman — without clear benefit of preexisting and socially agreed upon models and paradigms (i.e., with emphasis on the novelty of that individual and her perspective). It is an attempt that only occasionally succeeds. But it would seem to be precisely those occasional "successes" that are typically designated as literary exemplars of the modern novel.
It is not an attempt to draw a literary or social history of the modern European or "non-European" novel that will occupy the following pages. I would only suggest that what is presumably the naturalness or coherent internal development of the modern West European novel is far more a retrospective construct than an "objective" description. The emergence and subsequent literary predominance of the modern novel was attended by cultural, political, and social strife in which the discourse of the novel participated and by which it was shaped. Clearly, then, the novel was not and is not a singular, monolithic, and fixed genre but one that emerged in a particular conjunction of sociocultural and literary circumstances and that developed variously in relation to its circumstances. Within the various national definitions of hegemonic culture at a given historical moment, the modern novel assumed a dominant position. And, adapting to changing contexts, it arguably continues to occupy that position of dominance. The specific shape(s) of the novel are, ultimately perhaps, inseparable from those contexts. But there is, simultaneously, an organizing view that the novel proposes, modulated and modified though it is, that does distinguish the modern novel from earlier narrative forms — from epics, folktales, the lyric poem, salon drama, historical chronicles, or even, for here I would agree with Bernstein, from the picaresque novel. Whether, in the tracks of national histories, we locate the novel within the boundaries of a nation-state as, at least implicitly, a modern genre, or, with Bakhtin, we consider "novelistic discourse" from its ("Western") prehistory to the present as multiple and historically pervasive, there is a substantially different and diverse novel that begins to circulate in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and that, ensconced in a by then hegemonic bourgeois culture, reigns relatively supreme in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is in this latter period that the modern European novel is introduced to the Middle East, Japan, and Greece. Specific textual consequences of this introduction and subsequent development, rather than the origins and developments of the modern European or non-European novel itself, will be the focus here.
* * *
If the modern European novel is the textual site (and cite) of cultural, linguistic, and social struggle, there is a crucial eighteenth-and nineteenth-century context of struggle in which the European novel was indubitably implicated and by which it was marked — but in a rather distinctly different way than other participants in that same context. That is the global, and distinctly extra national, context of imperialism. For the "non-European" or "third world" or "minor" novels examined in the following pages, imperialism and the distinctly unequal relations between the imperial and "imperialized" nations was a virtually unavoidable crisis. This is not to propose that imperialism burned its indelible imprint directly onto the pages of every novel produced in the "third world." Rather, the political, economic, social, and cultural fact(s) of imperialism pervade their modes of production, their structural frameworks, their formal concerns. For, there is no special privilege or sacrosanctity that would preserve literary production outside of that context. In fact, the analyses of the following chapters begin with the attempt to demonstrate just that point — that there was no such exclusion and further, to consider the specific ways in which that imperial inclusion informs the content and form of the novel "elsewhere." Thus, within a certain framework, what the novel as a genre actually was in Europe or England is very nearly beside the point. Setting aside for the moment in-fact generic history (if there is such a thing), the modern West European novel was apprehended and, at least initially, produced in Greece or Egypt or Japan as the paradigmatic genre of the rational, modern, and democratic West, as an "advanced" cultural technology. Of course, to designate a genre (or a text) as inherently and definitively anything ahistorically ignores the extent to which such designations are themselves historically situated and produced. So, then, the characterization(s) by other cultures of the modern European novel are not misapprehensions or distortions of what the novel "really" was. What could seem "inaccurate" or static or even naive perceptions of the novel as a genre appear so only as they are isolated from the network of which they are a part — (grossly unequal) relationships between an imperially expanding West Europe and England in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries and the rest of the world. The ideology of an imperial "civilizing mission" rather explicitly designated its task as the bringing of an advanced and rational culture, and of course the "true" faith, to the rest of the world. That this was subterfuge for the rapacious conquest and control of what was consequently made the "underdeveloped" or "third" world does not negate what was the hegemonic power of modern Western culture and of the novel as one specific aspect of that culture. And so, perhaps ironically in keeping with imperialism's claims about its own cultural mission, the novel (variously defined) flourished as the dominant narrative mode in Greece, the Middle East, and Japan.
Not that there were no traditional narrative forms in the Arabic or Greek or Japanese cultures. Quite the contrary. But, in Arabic culture, for example, there was no single narrative form that was clearly preeminent. This is discussed in rather more detail in chapter 3 in the consideration of the fiction of the Egyptian writer, Yahya Haqqi. But it should be mentioned here that, in something of a parallel to the situation in early twentieth-century Greece (see chap. 2), the folktale, religious hagiography, myth, chronicles, biography, and the essay all predate the modern novel. But, prior to the twentieth century, no one of these narrative forms predominates. The situation in Japan provides an interesting counterpoint, for there things were somewhat different. There is, of course, the famous Japanese exception of what is sometimes considered Murasaki Shikibu's tenth-century "novel," Tale of Genji. But, throughout Japan's literary tradition, there were many and varied narrative forms other than the Genji. Classical poetry was sorted and gathered into official imperial anthologies; the various poems of many of those anthologies were typically linked with prose headnotes that provided a distinctly narrative and often fictional framework for the collections. On the other hand, both fictional and nonfictional prose was frequently interspersed with poetry. In the Tokugawa era (1600–1860), prose narratives, often illustrated with wood-block prints, flourished in the rapidly growing merchant culture of the cities. There was even a prolific production of what we might call cartoon books, closer perhaps to the "fotonovelas" of contemporary Latin America — strip illustrations with accompanying narrative and dialogue. Whether or not Murasaki's singular narrative is considered evidence of a novelistic tradition, Japanese narrative in the late nineteenth century was scarcely dormant.
Yet, in spite of the multiplicity of possible narrative forms already in circulation in other cultures and regardless of whether it was heralded as a "liberating instrument" or condemned as the narrative mode of a secularizing and degraded West, the novel did become the dominant literary narrative mode. From a certain perspective, the novel metaphorically "colonized" preexistent narrative production; already existent modes of narrative production were subjugated and refashioned in the image of the novel. But here there are at least two qualifications. First, as one of the hegemonic cultural trappings of an imperial Europe or Britain, as a challenge to preexistent narrative forms, the novel also proposed radically different ways of organizing narratives and perspectives. As a particular form of narrative discourse, it made available certain narrative or discursive possibilities. At the same time, of course, it foreclosed other possibilities and postulated them as impossibilities or aporias. And also, the postulations of the "imported" novel about its generic possibility and impossibility and its implication in the exercise of cultural imperialism — through its self-proclaimed structural boundaries if nothing else — occasion something other than "imitation," other than narrative production in a mode defined elsewhere. They also occasion opposition and resistance. That oppositional narrative practice challenges but does not necessarily refuse the novel.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Travels of a Genre by Mary N. Layoun. Copyright © 1990 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. ix
- PREFACE, pg. xi
- Chapter 1. FICTIONAL GENEALOGIES, pg. 3
- Chapter 2. THE GOD ABANDONS THE MURDERESS: OR, MURDER AS OPPOSITION?, pg. 21
- Chapter 3. IN THE FLICKERING LIGHT OF UMM HASHIM'S LAMP, pg. 56
- Chapter 4. OF NOISY TRAINS AND GRASS PILLOWS, pg. 105
- Chapter 5. DOUBLING: THE (IMMIGRANT) WORKER AS (EXILED) WRITER, pg. 148
- Chapter 6. DESERTS OF MEMORY, pg. 177
- Chapter 7. HUNTING WHALES AND ELEPHANTS, (RE)PRODUCING NARRATIVES, pg. 209
- Chapter 8. IN OTHER WORDS, IN OTHER WORLDS: IN PLACE OF A CONCLUSION, pg. 243
- BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 259
- INDEX, pg. 269