10 ARCHITECTURE & LITERARY CRITICISM LITERARY CRITICISM & LITERATURE 11 the wall of the lounge”. Beacham devotes a Unimpressed by the severity of Ian Watt’s on Moore’s “Beginnings to 1600” volume to page to the showmanship of its castle devices, Illuminating retrievals canon, he ridicules – though only, of course, by buttress his case for the novel as an ancient phe- Lives cut short and the unparalleled opportunity that this caricaturing – literary histories that identify nomenon with widely dispersed global roots. building offers to “experience the heady mix Robinson Crusoe as “the first novel” or Rich- Pavel has none of Moore’s ambition for com- of Arthurian drama and late nineteenth century he great historians and theoreticians of THOMAS KEYMER definition “will not take a second” (oh dear, ardson’s 1740 debut as “Year Zero . . . a B.C./ prehensive description, however, and one KATE HEXT Apollo, is killed accidentally by an invading luxury that Trevail intended for the visitor the novel haven’t always had access, in yes) and gets no further than “a fiction in prose A.D. demarcation to indicate the sea change senses he wouldn’t be seen dead with Le Grand army on his wedding night. Rare survivors, . . . . Melodramatic it may be, but as a stage set Tpractice, to quite enough novels. In his of a certain extent”. But Moore has none of that occurred in British fiction after it like Florian Deleal in “The Child in the Steven Moore Cyrus (though he does offer a wry tribute to the Walter Pater for Trevail’s tourist theatre it is a triumph”. He Theory of Prose (1925), Viktor Shklovsky’s Forster’s languid assumption that nothing appeared”. Defoe bears the brunt of Moore’s heroine’s unruffled way with evil brigands). House”, are left forever in medias res, for, as also provides a delicious description of Fred- view of Sterne as a parodist of techniques that THE NOVEL before Richardson and Fielding is worth the attack: Moll Flanders is bland, prolix, vague Instead, he offers a brisk critique of the mid- IMAGINARY PORTRAITS Pater wrote to his editor on submitting this erick Glassock’s “Fellowship of the Knights were yet to develop – an advance parodist of An alternative history: 1600–1800 effort of picking up. He reads everything he and sketchy, with weaker credentials as a twentieth-century approaches that still influ- Edited by Lene Østermark-Johansen story, “I . . . mean readers, as they might do on of the Round Table of Arthur”, which opened nineteenth-century realism – says more about 1,024pp. Bloomsbury. £25 (US $39.95). can, and his prodigious appetite for forgotten breakthrough in realism than “the better crimi- ence modern debates – Watt’s social and 321pp. MHRA. Paperback, £9.99 (US $15.99). seeing a portrait, to begin speculating – what nearby in 1933, with its “walls of Polyphant Soviet-era libraries than about Tristram 978 1 4411 8869 4 fiction, together with his eye-popping struggle nal novels like The London Jilt”– The London intellectual history, Mikhail Bakhtin’s history 978 1 907322 55 6 came of him?” and stone, floor of Polyphant inset Shandy’s relationship to earlier fiction. Erich Thomas G. Pavel to get through it all, becomes an entertaining Jilt being an obscure whore narrative of 1683: of narrative techniques, György Lukács’s These fractured Bildungsromane are lent with patterns of the round table in red porphyry Auerbach wrote Mimesis (1946) as a refugee running theme throughout the book. Only vigorous, to be sure, but also invisible. Until “reflective history of the novel” – and proposes riting on a square scrap of paper in poignancy by their setting in a series of his- THE LIVES OF THE NOVEL and the cross of the knights in white elvan” in wartime Istanbul, where limited resources rarely does he admit defeat, and when he does, Broadview republished this anonymous work an alternative view of the genre better able, he 1878, Walter Pater reflected on toric moments of conflict and renewal, from A history it hurts. Of Madeleine de Scudéry and her Whis first “imaginary portrait”: (another eye-catcher that stood beyond the and blocked communications made it impossi- 360pp. Princeton University Press. in 2008, it survived in a single copy at Harvard suggests, to connect its pre- and post-realist medieval France to nineteenth-century Ger- pale for Pevsner). As Beacham amply demon- ble, he regrets in an epilogue, to research a £24.95 (US $35). seventeenth-century romans de longue hal- University. Richardson fares little better. Cla- phases. Central to this account is an ongoing “Child in the House: voilà, the germinating, many. In Pater’s first and most famous work, strates, there remains so much more to Tinta- projected chapter on seventeenth-century Ger- 978 0 691 12189 5 eine (one of which, Artamène, ou le Grand rissa turns out to be Le Grand Cyrus all over dialectic between idealizing and satirical original, source, specimen, of all my imagi- Studies in the History of the Renaissance gel than its ruined thirteenth-century castle. man realism. The extreme case is Ian Watt’s Cyrus, decorously recounts its heroine’s trials again, and though Moore makes it to the end of strains of fiction, analogous to Michael native work”. This is a rare moment of self- (1873), such pivotal moments had promised Beacham does not attempt to improve on or classic account of generic innovation in The on realism, inwardness, contradistinction to in more than 2 million words), Moore writes: Angus Ross’s 1,500-page Penguin edition (his McKeon’s dialectic of truth and virtue, though revelation from a man whom Henry James to resurrect an aesthetic sensuality dormant expand everything that his predecessor wrote. Rise of the Novel, with its minimalist triumvi- romance, or any other limiting factor, techni- “I’ve given four months to this woman, I need first attempt runs aground after the first of four only passing reference is made to McKeon. described as “the mask without the face”. since classical Greece. In Imaginary Por- Rather pleasingly, both the 1951 and the 2014 rate of protagonists, Defoe, Richardson and cal or thematic. A novel is “a book-length to move on. She would charge me with ‘incon- volumes in the Everyman edition), his eyes are With this comes a secularization thesis con- Pater’s magical-realist short stories, or traits, sensuality is altogether darker, lapsing editions begin with the tiny settlement of Fielding, the third of whom, it turns out, didn’t work of fiction”, written in prose; whatever the stancy’”. plainly beginning to glaze over. In this novel’s cerning “the slow, diversified, halting move- “imaginary portraits”, may be the most often into violence or self-destruction. These Advent, and Pevsner’s fairytale opening really count. The Rise of the Novel was pub- period, whatever the style, any such book is a The advantages of Moore’s broad scope are struggle between “angelic Clarissa Harlowe ment from souls to hearts to psyches as the personal of his writings; they are almost cer- stories become elegies for, rather than cele- describing St Adwena’s Church, a medieval lished in 1957, but its bold outline took shape novel. Even with this capacious definition, obvious and real. He writes with gusto and . . . and diabolic Lovelace”, Moore complains, center of novelists’ attention”. tainly his most successful fictions. Despite brations of, Pater’s hedonistic declaration in building “in a lonely spot just off the edge of inWatt’smindashelabouredinappallingcon- Moore can’t resist his inclusive instincts, so acumen, and even when he takes against an “the clichéd adjectives are Richardson’s, and Pavel sustains this argument through deft, their importance in Pater’s slim oeuvre, Studies that “To burn always with this hard, Moor”. Beacham notices the tower’s ditions on the Burma Railway, reading a few that “book-length” turns out to mean forty author or work, he does so with engaging repeated ad nauseam”. Yet Richardson is a incisive readings of instances ranging in time though, they have, like most of his work, been gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is eight pinnacles; Pevsner did not. But Pevsner precious salvaged books and recycling pages pages, and numerous fact–fiction hybrids verve. Among his early victims – since the good deal more creative with his clichés than and place from the Ethiopian Story of Heliodo- out of print for decades. success in life”. This sentence echoes through was almost always able to conclude his descrip- as he finished them to make cigarette wrap- make the cut, too: intriguing generic mongrels book is organized by national boundaries, and that. In the original edition, “angelic” occurs rus – rightly, he stresses the crucial importance Lene Østermark-Johansen’s expanded Imaginary Portraits, as it echoed – often hol- tion with the church’s silver, thus: “Chalice by pers. like Ginés Pérez de Hita’s Las guerras civiles only then chronologically – are Sophie von La roughly once every 200 pages, normally in of early modern translations of Heliodorus into and scholarly edition of Pater’s Imaginary lowly – through Pater’s life. If “success in Fons of Exeter, the usual 1576 date”, whereas Not so Steven Moore. Based in Ann Arbor, de Granada or Delarivier Manley’s Adven- Roche for Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von ironic contexts. There are just four occurrences several European languages – to the modern- life” is to burn always with a hard gem-like suchvaluablesarelockeduporstowedinalocal Michigan – birthplace of the once alarming, tures of Rivella. At the outset he considers – Sternheim (“the plot is trite and the tone trea- of “diabolic” (in fact “diabolical”), none with ism of Proust, Musil and Joyce. Along the way, flame, then these protagonists are failures, museum now. At the other end of this gazetteer, now lamented Borders chain, and home to one though he stops short in practice – the candi- cly”) and Søren Kierkegaard (“this dis- reference to Lovelace. The nausea about cliché and despite his focus on early sources, he embers after just the briefest blaze. there is the far western hamlet of Zennor, which of the biggest research libraries in North dacy of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and tempered grouch”) for disliking Schlegel’s is self-induced. And though Moore makes no emphatically restores 1740 as a generic water- Although it bears the same title, this is not Pevsner dispatched in his usual businesslike America – he has everything he needs except Descartes’s Discours de la méthode. The Dun- Lucinde. Next comes the unfortunate Fried- criticism of Watt here for establishing Richard- shed, not because of ex nihilo innovation but exactly a new edition of Pater’s 1887 work. way with a brief résumé of its church and local a grant. “Completion of this book was not ciad is there by analogy with Pale Fire. rich Hölderlin, whose Hyperion is “an episto- son’s modern reputation, he takes Terry Castle because Pamela achieved “an unprecedented That slim volume contained only four stories Neolithic tombs. Beacham’s tour of Zennor is made possible by the Guggenheim Founda- As his huge chronicle of world fiction lary novel in lyrical prose of surpassing to task not only for calling Clarissa “the eigh- synthesis of the moral splendour of the idealist to which Østermark-Johansen has added six far more prolix, bringing in the old school- tion, the National Endowment for the Humani- unfolds, Moore works in a brisk account of beauty”, but at the same time “a bit stilted (and teenth century’s supreme fictional master- novel, the inner tremors described by the pas- more to provide a truly representative collec- house, rectory, cottages and pub and opening ties,nor[sic]theAmericanCouncilofLearned Marriage à-la-mode by William Hogarth as kinda gay)”. Further back in the German tradi- piece”, but also for missing a supposed lesbian toral and the elegiac story, the picaresque’s tion of Pater’s short fiction: beginning with with a honey-sweet pen portrait of “an espe- Societies”, he writes in a brief, truculent a graphic novel, and includes fascinating tion, Moore allots generous space to all those subtext between Clarissa and Anna. Here – to closeness to everyday life, and the unity of “Diaphaneitè”, presented to Oxford’s Old cially lovely and unspoilt churchtown, its mod- passageofanti-acknowledgements.Unfunded material about the survival of medieval works that Auerbach’s Turkish libraries didn’t recall Castle’s day in the stocks some years ago action perfected in the novella”. Mortality Society in 1864, and ending with estbuildingsgatheredunassuminglyaroundthe but undeterred, he sets to work nonetheless, prosimetrum, isolated oddities like Anna have, and though his claims for their signifi- about Jane Austen’s sleeping arrangements – is Pavel is keen to distance himself from the “Apollo in Picardy”, published in Harper’s church and churchyard and giving immediately and there’s a lot to read. As in his gargantuan Seward’s Louisa: A poetical novel, and the cance are too casual to make real headway – a case of damned if you do, damned if you historical formalisms of both Watt and Monthly Magazine in 1893, less than a year into the fields of the rich prehistoric and The Novel: An alternative history: Beginnings breakdown of the prose-verse binary in “Just as the Continuation anticipates Robinson don’t. Bakhtin, and protests that the latter “makes the before his death. Pragmatic re-presentation of medieval Penwith landscape”. to 1600 (reviewed in the TLS of November 19, German Romanticism. In some respects we’re Crusoe, this short novel [Die Landstörtzerin Instead, Moore’s hero is Watt’s also-ran, history of narrative techniques into a mere Pater’s writing is in evidence elsewhere too, In , Pevsner noted that the town 2010), Moore makes a rod for his own back back in the carefree world of E. M. Forster’s Courasche] anticipates Defoe’s Moll Flan- Henry Fielding, praised for just the qualities inventory of formal features”. Yet in practice and to good effect. After all, Pater’s ambigu- was burned by the Spanish in 1595, so that by rejecting definitions of the genre based Aspects of the Novel (1927), where generic ders” – he constructs an eloquent case for of literariness and flaunted artifice that Watt he organizes much of his own book in terms of ous distinction of being a highly influential, “nothing older survives, and not much either seeing Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmels- (notoriously) thought irrelevant to the main narrative traditions or fictional subgenres much-cited but little-read fin-de-siècle that could belong to the seventeenth century”. hausen as a pioneer of the grotesque, with high road of novelistic realism. Realism is a defined by formal features, and this can be a author is in large part a mark of the fact that Drawing on a huge array of research sources, “a grim, grunt’s-eye view of war”. There are problematic term for Moore – sometimes used limitation. Moll Flanders and Roxana are per- his prose can be difficult. He wrote long, lab- Beacham paints an antidote to this bleak pic- countless illuminating retrievals in his Hercu- to mean mere plausibility, sometimes cyni- fect raw material for his soul-to-psyche model yrinthine sentences, the meanings of which ture which feels far truer. He finds a captivat- lean chapters about fiction in France and Brit- cism, sometimes grotesquerie, only rarely of generic development, but by constraining are further obscured by multiple allusions to ing town, “beautifully set within the generous ain (265 and 362 pages, respectively: Mme de Watt’s strictly formal concept – but he is con- these novels within his discussion of the pica- classical mythology and the history of art. arms of Mounts Bay . . . a place set apart, at the Scudéry, take that), and the book is a trove of sistently acute about Fielding, above all for the resque, and saying almost nothing about the “The Bride, the Bridegroom, and the In this new edition, Østermark-Johansen’s end of the line . . . the most surprising of all unexpected discoveries throughout. Moore is metafictional pyrotechnics of Tom Jones. And no less pertinent tradition of spiritual autobio- Friend of the Bridegroom”, 1868, introduction and critical apparatus (including ’s historic towns with an enjoyably especially good at drawing out the literary and this is Moore’s valuable emphasis all along. graphy, he misses the opportunity to see his by Frederick Hollyer well-chosen appendices from Heine and the diverse architectural personality”, a fishing material self-consciousness of much early fic- Some may find his account of the emergent crucial shift foreshadowed within a single Goncourts as well as other works by Pater) settlement turned resort town, which slumped tion. In Le Roman comique, Paul Scarron’s novel as forever proto-modernist, or proto- novel. His disinclination to quote Defoe’s text Portraits (1887) is thus most welcome. It masterfully mitigate this problem. She com- in the twentieth century and is coming back to narrator harps on the difficulty of organizing postmodern, heavy-handed or grating: the on these key distinctions – Moll’s yearning presents a witty, compelling, even experi- bines an encyclopedic knowledge of Pater’s life. His description of the Egyptian House in his work into a coherent whole; in Le Roman “modernist ambiguity” of Prévost, or Cré- soul, her sinking heart, her burdened mind – mental Pater, playing deftly with different influences and allusions, and an astute under- Chapel Street is a case in point, the showroom bourgeois, Antoine Furetière considers insert- billon’s “uncannily modern” Égarements du deprives the argument of nuance. But Pavel is genres, structures and voices, to remind us standing of his works and life, with enviable built in the reign of William IV for a dealer in ing blank sheets for frustrated readers to fill in coeur et de l’esprit; Francion’s resemblance to far stronger on the Anglo-French lines of influ- how his literary forms shaped and haunted the lightness of touch. Pater himself resisted the fossils and minerals, its door flanked by “fat with scenes of their own; in Lamékis, Charles RobertCoover,MmedeLafayette’stoThomas ence he sketches out for later decades – episto- fictions of Vernon Lee, James Joyce and Vir- idea of illustrating his works, but this edition closed papyrus bud columns reminiscent of de Fieux de Mouhy pretends that thirty crucial Pynchon, Cyrano de Bergerac’s to Kurt Von- lary interiority in Richardson and Rousseau, ginia Woolf. Sepulchral metaphors readily very successfully restores the visual allusions the inner courts of Egyptian temples and pages have been cut from his text in the cen- negut; the amazing ability of “a 21-year-old ludic virtuosity in Sterne and Diderot – and come to mind when discussing Pater’s fic- of his writing with the inclusion of nineteen shrines”, its windows with “torus mouldings, sor’s office. With these and numerous other student writing at the end of the Ming Dynasty” gives masterly accounts of Madame Bovary, tion, and in Imaginary Portraits his life-long pictures alongside the text. shaped in situ . . . to represent bundles of reeds examples, the list Moore later gives of self- (Tung Yueh, in The Tower of Myriad Mirrors) Middlemarch and less widely known nine- fascination with the classical idea that “some Handsome yet inexpensive, Imaginary lashed together” . This truly astonishing build- reflexive novels before Sterne is longer than to “create a fiction that anticipates in so many teenth-century landmarks like Os Maias of those whom the gods love die young” is Portraits is the first in a new series of annotated ing was ticked off by Pevsner as “a crazy front Shklovsky could have dreamed. At the same particulars the works of Carroll, Freud, Kafka, (1888), by the Portuguese realist Eça de Quei- given free rein. Most of these homoerotically and affordable critical editions of aesthetic and in a consistent if not correct Egyptian style”. time, he corrects a longstanding confusion in Jung, Joyce, and Borges”. But Moore is right rós. For this novel’s protagonist, “the most charged “portraits” have at their heart a prom- decadent literature, under the editorship of Herein lies the difference between these critical editions of Tristram Shandy between about the playful self-consciousness that insupportable thing about realism was its great ising young man whose life is senselessly cut Catherine Maxwell and Stefano Evangelista, two “Pevsners”, written sixty years apart. Ger- Scarron and Furetière, whose Roman bour- suffuses so much pioneering fiction of the scientific airs, its pretentious aesthetics short. Denys, in a rewriting of the Dionysus and with the arresting title of “The Jewelled manic correctness has been supplanted by geois first appeared in under the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and his deduced from an alien philosophy . . . when it Zagreus myth, is torn from limb to limb Tortoise”. Devotees of Huysmans will recall something more English, closer to Betjeman’s opportunistic title Scarron’s City Romance. energetic study conveys the freshness of this was simply a matter of describing a washer- by a crowd inflamed by the desire for intense that in À Rebours that unfortunate creature poetical evocations of standing stones, holy Footnotes like this lay bare Moore’s guilty fiction with insight and wit. woman sleeping with a carpenter”. Yet it was sensations; Emerald Uthwart, a young dis- expires under the weight of the stones with wells and the small fry of fisher cottages, secret, the bluster and cheek notwithstanding: In The Lives of the Novel: A history, Thomas always more than such a matter, and Thomas graced soldier and reserved aesthete, suffers which the decadent Des Esseintes has studded miners’ terraces, tabernacles and windy he’s a scholar at heart. G. Pavel translates and updates his classic Pavel is a superb guide to the range and endur- a drawn-out and mysterious death in his its shell. MHRA’s admirable venture will tamerisk-fringed holiday houses. Lovelace’s Kidnapping of Clarissa Harlowe, 1867, by Édouard Louis Dubufe But he is also a feisty controversialist. study, La Pensée du roman (2003), and calls ing power of the realist mode. childhood home; Duke Carl, a follower of surely better sustain its own gem-like flame.

TLS AUGUST 8 2014 TLS AUGUST 8 2014