Novel worship

MARGARET ANNE DOODY, The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), pp. 580, $44.95.

Novelists of the eighteenth century claimed their works were both new and true. As Margaret Doody's title indicates, hers is a book with a claim to make as well. But, if one had the illusion this title was perhaps a whimsical, if not self-deprecating, reference to that tradition, a brief reading would confirm that Doody's boast was no mere exercise in the academic "dozens." Rather, the title amounts to more of a cri du coeur or at least de guerre. Doody declares open season on all historians of the novel who see a "rise" of this genre in the early modern period. On the contrary, she maintains that the novel is as old as Methuselah and attempts to get a rise out of anyone who does not think so.

Strangely, Doody's war is waged against no one in particular, like a gauntlet thrown down in an empty room. Individual scholars and their arguments are not attacked directly; in fact, they are barely mentioned. In the body of this very long text there are only two sentences on Ian Watt, scant two on Georg Lukacs, only one on Michael McKeon, one on Ruth Perry, and not a single sentence on Terry Castle, William Warner, Nancy Armstrong, John Bender, John Richetti, Raymond Williams, or J. Paul Hunter, to name only a few of the many influential writers on the origins of the novel who do not make an appearance in Doody's work. Yet, unaccountably, menstruation, baptism, eating, genitals, and Camille Paglia are discussed more frequently than the work of any of the above scholars. The reason for this redlining of other's opinions is clear. Doody does not really wish to contend with or advertise opinion contrary to her own. When one has the "truth" one need not bother with its contrary.

So what is the nature of Doody's truth? The truth is that the novel, rather than arising in the early modern period, has "a continuous history of about two thousand years" (1). This is "a very well-kept secret" (1), but students have been "bred to believe," by jingoist "English-speaking critics" (like those anglophones Georg Lukacs, Marth6 Robert, or Jurgen Habermas?), the nationalist, Protestant-centered idea that the novel was really an exclusive creation of English culture. Doody then goes back to ancient Greece and Rome, medieval Europe and the Middle East, the Italian Renaissance, and then onward to show us this continuous history of "the novel." Why are people so dense as to have missed the obviousness of this argument all along? What grand conspiracy led to the dumbing down of critics all of whom have failed to grasp the essential continuity of the novel form?

Doody sits high on her throne of truth but only with the help of shaky assumptions. Indeed, she uses argument the way a drunkard uses a light post-more for support than illumination. In fact, the rise-of-the-novel theory at which she takes aim has a complex history of its own. It was initiated not so much by demented imperialists but by sociologically and culturally oriented critics seeking to dispel the notion that the novel was a timeless expression of universal truths concerning the human condition. Their aim also was to correct the rather simplistic notion of literary influence that dominated literary history at the beginning of the twentieth century. Rather, these critics like Ian Watt and Raymond Williams were trying to account historically for the appearance of a form of symbolic production unlike what had ever been in place before. Their claim was not so much that people did not write long narratives in prose (or poetry) but that the type of productions occuring in the seventeenth and eighteenth century were different enough that European society came up with other names for this tradition, wrote books and pamphlets debating this cultural construct called the "novel," and seemed aware in their own time that something new was happening. And while the French held onto the word "roman" it is clear that they themselves were able to see a difference between say Rousseau's Emile and Scudery's Artambne. In other words, the appearance of a wide-spread industry and technology of producing narrative texts, and the ideological apparatus of the novel as well, is dramatically different from anything that preceded it. This assumption is hardly jingoistic. In fact for many critics, like myself, it is a somewhat nightmarish development of a technology enabling an indoctrination of power on behalf of those who produce over those who consume, of those who visualize the body and power in ways consonant with that form of production.

The problem area in Doody's argument concerns this very notion of genre and taxonomy. For Doody, "a work is a novel if it is fictional, if it is in prose, and if it is of a certain length" (16). That latitudinous definition allows Doody to see novels hiding under beds and behind bushes. To illustrate the problematics of such a wide definition, an analogy might be useful. Let us say that the novel is like a golden retriever. If one, then, is hired to write a study of the golden retriever, one starts in the nineteenth century when the first of these animals was bred. But if you are Margaret Anne Doody, you decry those who fail to see that the golden retriever is a first and foremost a dog. Then you go ahead and write a history of "the dog," when in fact you were contracted to write a history of golden retrievers. To turn back from pets to prose, what Doody is actually doing is writing a history of prose narrative. But that history has already been written by the likes of Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg in their The Nature of Narrative (never mentioned by Doody). Indeed that project is really a quasi-nineteenth century project that seeks universal histories, an oddity in a time that finds it difficult to conceive of the universal in any incarnation.

Doody's bombshell, that the novel already existed in the ancient past, turns out to be really a bit of a dud. Changing the terms slightly, there probably is no one who would bother to doubt that longish, fictional narratives did indeed occur before 1700. But the Achilles's heel of Doody's argument is the assumption that all fictional prose works of a certain length are novels; the mistake is to conclude that a history of long, written narratives is a history of novels. This assumption is akin to the mistake of, for example, writing a history of film by beginning with Greek theater. Of course both are dramatic; both are about characters in conflict; both are performed by actors before audiences, and so on. But the intervening technology, changing social functions, and economic developments make the claim ludicrous. So too is it a very weak argument to say that Apuleius's The Golden Ass, Boccaccio's Lady Fiammetta, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, and Toni Morrison's Sula are really all the same thing. I would not want to have to claim that David Lynch's Lost Highway and Euripides's The Bacchae are genetically and generically identical. Doody does acknowledge that she is not the first to assert that the ancient Greek world produced novels. Arthur Heiserman's well-known book The Novel Before the Novel (barely mentioned by Doody) makes this claim, but as its title suggests, the study keeps alive a dialectical tension between modernity and antiquity.

Doody makes the suggestion that contemporary critics, by claiming the centrality of the novel's rise in Europe, and particularly England, are only acting out of imperialist motives and reinforcing a Eurocentric view of narrative. This is a claim that deserves serious consideration. Doody wants us to see that the novel began all around the world coterminous with the beginning of writing. For this reason, she argues we should consider the African, Asian, or Indian origin of the noveL This argument appears initially to out-left the cultural studies types who see the novel's connection to early modern culture and production as a radical revisionist stance against those who would see the rise of the novel as a triumph of humanism. However, Doody's claim to liberate the Third World or the East from Western cultural dominance is disingenuous. Rather, she wants to enforce a notion that novels are universal, apolitical, and uphold universal human truths. In other words, her argument is more in line with bourgeois readings of art and literature as embodying the human spirit and individualism. No anti-imperialist, pro-multicultural agenda here but rather an attempt to hijack those issues to essentially regressive goals. Studies by people like Edward Said, Benedict Anderson, Gauri Viswanathan, Masao Miyoshi, Mary Layoun, and others have looked at novels of the non-western world but tend to see that "the novel" was brought to the colonies and others spheres of influence as a way of creating compliance with an imperialist ideology rather than giving us a universal narrative form to contain human wishes.

Having said all this, I do think the book is a valuable one for readers who would like an introduction to prose narratives of the past two thousand years. More accurately, the study covers ancient Greece and Rome and then jumps more than 1300 years to some medieval texts-none of which are unfamiliar including, as they do, writers like Chaucer, Chretien de Troyes, and Boccaccio. The medieval and renaissance sections are a bit skimpy; pausing mid-gallop to point out the relatively few works that can conceivably be called novels. The seventeenth century only gets about twenty pages and the eighteenth century fewer. Ironically, Doody has precious little to say about the novel of the past three hundred years, what many would consider the heyday of the form.

Having proved the truth of the true story of the novel, Doody stops in medias res and does an extremely odd thing. She essentially starts a new book. The True Story of the Novel begins again on page 301, this time not as a historical study of the novel as a form but as a study of the "deep rhetoric" of the novel. Doody wants to study the "Tropes of Fiction" (304), which she describes as "more like narrative symbols" than techniques or modes. These tropes are listed somewhat arbitrarily as-breaking and entering, marshes, shores and muddy margins, tomb, cave, and labyrinth, Eros, Ekphrasis, and The Goddess. For Doody, these "tropes of a novel act like moments in a liturgy; or more precisely like ritual acts of observances [like] the fracture of the Host in the Eucharist, and ... the lighting of the Shabbos candles" (305). But they are also like "Stations of the Cross [or] like the major sites of Mecca" (305). Novelists pick up tropes unconsciously from other novelists and readers are unconscious of tropes that nevertheless affect readers and writers in a kind of religious and Jungian symbolic way. Since all novelists from time immemorial use these tropes, one can of course "place novels of the third century, of the sixteenth century, and of the twentieth century beside each other and keep nothing in separation" (308). The same holds true for Chinese and Japanese novels, which predictably contain these tropes as well.

This new-age, ahistoric universalism is the good news of Doody's aesthetic/religious view of the novel. Novel readers participate in a sacrament offered up to all humans for all times. All characters in novels seem to begin with a break, wander into the muck, marshes, shores and muddy margins, go through death, caves, and labyrinths, get tangled up with Eros who might be manifested in pictures, dreams, or eating, and ultimately end up with the goddess. If this reads like Northrop Frye with a crystal pyramid and a meditation mat, you might want to hold out for Doody's more incredible conclusion-a loopy, ditzy, wide-eyed one that celebrates the appearance of "The Goddess." Literary criticism turns to worship of the Eternal Feminine in lines like "The Novel participates, as it has always done, as a sort of undercover agent for the celebration of the Goddess.... It is the openness within some novels of the 1980's and 1990's about the importance of the Goddess that allows us to see clearly and unmistakably a basic element that has always been present, even if disguised and abased" (462). Readers may rub their eyes in incredulity. Yes, Doody is really advocating that novel reading is closely akin to experiencing prayer and revelation.

The true story of the novel, then, is ultimately a religious one-that is the hidden truth that atheistic marxist critics have been hiding. Doody comes clean finally and says, "As a Christian, a participant in certain regular and mystical enactments and a hearer of stories regarded by the enlightened as myth, I see both mystery and myth as enabling conditions of insight and change" (480). Like many millennialists, she sees the present moment as needing the intervention of a divinity, if not behind a comet, then at least behind the covers of a book. "At a time when we need such [divine female] figures to realign ourselves in relation to the earth, we are not really going to cast away such a tempting figure of reconciliation as the Goddess-Mother represents" (466). And so there is nothing left for Doody to do but to bask in the presence of the diety, to wit, she actually composes a ludic vision of "our Goddess of the Novel": "I see her now, the Goddess of the Novel.... She stands in a green field.... Her head is rayed like the moon.... Her feet are on the muddy bank of a brook, and a labyrinth runs through her groin" (484).

What a shame that so much scholarship finally crashes on the reef of pseudo-religion. The modus operandi of this study is not unlike that of a cult, appearing at first to be rational and helpful and ending up sucking the initiate deeper and deeper into a world of strange religious assumptions and salvations. Are we really supposed to genuflect before these ideas? The novel is a sacred text that conceals the goddess? Reading is a sacrament akin to taking the Host? Doody has created a new kind of analysis that seems to combine the insights of Shirley MacLaine, Mother Theresa, and Lucille Ball with a touch of Rene Girard and a smattering of The Golden Bough and Madame Blavatsky. Can monkey glands be far behind? It is sometimes difficult to tell whether one is reading a literary critic, listening to a Hyde Park Corner seer, or hanging out with Trekkies.

Perhaps Doody did aptly name her work. It had to have been the true story of the novel, because if it were not true no one would believe it.

LENNARD J. DAVIS, Binghamton University

Copyright Novel, Inc. Spring 1997
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