Dædalus Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Winter 2021 On the Novel Michael Wood, guest editor with Lorrie Moore · Franco Moretti Simon Goldhill · Nancy Armstrong Ruth Bernard Yeazell · Sharon Cameron Daphne A. Brooks · Rey Chow · Austin Sarfan Wai Chee Dimock · Robyn Creswell Garrett Stewart · Eric Hayot & Jonathan Greenberg Dædalus Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences “On the Novel” Volume 150, Number 1; Winter 2021 Michael Wood, Guest Editor Phyllis S. Bendell, Managing Editor and Director of Publications Peter Walton, Associate Editor Heather M. Struntz, Assistant Editor Committee on Studies and Publications John Mark Hansen, Chair; Rosina Bierbaum, Johanna Drucker, Gerald Early, Carol Gluck, Linda Greenhouse, John Hildebrand, Philip Khoury, Arthur Kleinman, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Alan I. Leshner, Rose McDermott, Michael S. McPherson, Frances McCall Rosenbluth, Scott D. Sagan, Nancy C. Andrews (ex officio), David W. Oxtoby (ex officio), Diane P. Wood (ex officio) Inside front cover: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s annotated first edition of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones, 1818). This copy, held at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City, includes extensive hand-written additions and emendations, revealing Shelley’s dissatisfaction with parts of her novel. Contents 5 Introduction: In This World Michael Wood 14 What Is It Like to Write a Novel? Lorrie Moore 16 Two Theories Franco Moretti 26 Finding the Time for Ancient Novels Simon Goldhill 40 Some Endangered Feeling Nancy Armstrong 62 Henry James in–and out of–the Classroom Ruth Bernard Yeazell 78 The Hole in the Carpet: Henry James’s The Bostonians Sharon Cameron 98 “A Woman Is a Sometime Thing”: (Re)Covering Black Womanhood in Porgy Daphne A. Brooks 118 We “Other Victorians”? Novelistic Remains, Therapeutic Devices, Contemporary Televisual Dramas Rey Chow & Austin Sarfan 134 The Survival of the Unfit Wai Chee Dimock 147 Poets in Prose: Genre & History in the Arabic Novel Robyn Creswell 160 Organic Reformations in Richard Powers’s The Overstory Garrett Stewart 178 Video Games & the Novel Eric Hayot 188 Losing Track of Time Jonathan Greenberg Dædalus Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences The labyrinth designed by Dædalus for King Minos of Crete, on a silver tetradrachma from Cnossos, Crete, c. 350–300 BC (35 mm, Cabinet des Médailles, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris). “Such was the work, so intricate the place, / That scarce the workman all its turns cou’d trace; / And Dædalus was puzzled how to find / The secret ways of what himself design’d.” –Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 8 Dædalus was founded in 1955 and established as a quarterly in 1958. The journal’s namesake was renowned in ancient Greece as an inventor, scientist, and unriddler of riddles. 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The typeface is Cycles, designed by Sumner Stone at the Stone Type Foundry of Guinda CA. Each size of Cycles has been sep arately designed in the tradition of metal types. Introduction: In This World Michael Wood he death of the novel, like the not unrelated deaths of God and the author, appears to be an event that is always happening; a sign of life, perhaps. T This life is a metaphor, of course, a form of fiction itself, but it is also an instrument, a way of seeing. One of its virtues is that it invites us to consider both the practice and the theory of the novel, allows us to ask what novels do, and how they have been thought about over time. We know what a novel is, but can we say the same about the novel? The definite article implies a rather reckless conceptual confidence, even when we drop an ad- jective into the mix: the novel, the Russian novel, the picaresque novel. We have only to attempt a definition to start thinking of exceptions to our own rule. E. M. Forster, lecturing in Cambridge on the English novel, settled for the broadest remit he could envisage: “any fictitious prose work,” adding only a stipulation of length (“over 50,000 words”).1 This generous category is still too narrow, since it excludes the novel in verse (from Don Juan and Eugene Onegin to The Golden Gate), and we may not think length is a real issue. I would not, in theory, discount the possibility of the very brief novel. Augusto Monterroso’s one sentence tale–“when he (or she) awoke the dinosaur was still there”2–is most easily described as the shortest of short stories, but in certain readings it might well grow into a novel. Applying the same principle in reverse, Italo Calvino thought Robert Musil’s immense, unfin- ished The Man without Qualities might in some senses be too short. These thoughts are not meant to lead us to a frivolous abandonment of classi- fication but to a cautious awareness of what a classification is. The fact that there may be no definition of the novel that will not fail us at some point does not mean we cannot talk about novels, and indeed some classifications may help us most where they are weakest, closest to running out of persuasive steam. Wittgen- stein’s thought about the “indistinct picture” is helpful here. “Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn’t the indistinct one often exactly what we need?”3 The interesting question, we might say, is not what the novel is but what work the word novel does when we use it, or what reasons we may give for using it or not. © 2021 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Published under a Creative Commons Attribution- 5 NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license https://doi.org/10.1162/DAED_e_01829 Introduction: In This World Dictionaries are helpful here as long as we take them as starting points, first stages in a collaborative process. Here is part of what the entries in the Oxford En- glish Dictionary and Merriam-Webster, respectively, say a novel is: A long fictional prose narrative . typically representing character and action with some degree of realism and complexity. An invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that deals imaginatively with human experience through a connected sequence of events involv- ing a group of persons in a specific setting. The terms are all fairly bland, of course, but they become a little stricter if we think of what they may be meant to exclude. What do we make of “realism,” “complex- ity,” “imaginatively”? Does “realism” mean notional fidelity to a non-fictional material world? If so, it covers many nineteenth-century novels admirably, but will not take us very far into times before or after that date. If it means “a disposi- tion of mind,”4 as J. P. Stern says, then it can comprehend all kinds of unrealistic fictions, as long as they grapple in some way with the real.