So Defoe Was a Latecomer?

By DENIS DONOGHUE

Most readers think that the novel—or at least the English novel—came into its own with the emergence of the middle class at the beginning of the 18th century. Members of that class were primarily concerned with getting on in the world, living by the values we now think of as bourgeois: being comfortable, making enough money, getting congenially married. Readers in that class, mostly women with time on their hands, read novels to divert themselves and to gain a keener sense of their own lives, the men in their vicinity, the other women in their social milieux and, within limits, strangers. Those readers enjoyed romances, but they mainly wanted novels to be realistic, to present recognizable pictures of interesting men and women in social situations: strongly individual characters, social environments well drawn.

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Don't tell that to Steven Moore. In "The Novel: An Alternative History," he holds that the novel actually began about 4,000 years ago. The earliest example he gives is "The Tale of Sinuhe," an Egyptian story about the picaresque adventures of a royal attendant; Mr. Moore dates it from the 20th century B.C. But since "The Tale of Sinuhe" in translation is only about 12 pages long, he urges us to call it "a mininovel."

To enforce his "alternative history" standard, Mr. Moore employs a questionable tactic: He designates as novels just about any fictional narrative, whether it is written in prose or verse or a mixture of the two; whether it is long or short, tells one story or many. Any style is acceptable. He brushes aside the standard distinctions between novels, romances and confessions: He simply designates all works of fiction as novels or proto-novels or "mininovels."

The problem with this tactic is that it doesn't exclude anything. "The Odyssey," "The Iliad," "The Aeneid," "The Divine Comedy," "The Canterbury Tales" are novels if you say that they are: They tell stories, they have characters, they feature beginnings, middles and ends. But if you put every work of fiction on the same shelf, you soon find yourself wanting to make distinctions, devising smaller units to acknowledge that "The Tale of Sinuhe" is not at all like "Robinson Crusoe" and that "Robinson Crusoe" is not much like "Bleak House."

Persist in such differentiations and you'll find yourself back where the standard account of the rise of the novel began, except that you needn't correlate the novel with the emergence of a particular social class. That exception is evidently congenial to Mr. Moore, because his likes and dislikes seem not to be related to social distinctions. He is happy to divide the novel along geographical and racial lines. So we have chapters on varieties of the "novel": Egyptian, Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Irish, Icelandic, Byzantine, Jewish, Arthurian, Italian, Spanish, French, Indian, Arabic, Chinese. Oh, yes, and the English novel.

No one knows all the languages required to read the works involved in the original, so Mr. Moore has consulted anthologies of modern-English translation. Questions of style in the originals are impossible to address. Mr. Moore prefers one translation to another on grounds difficult to establish. Mostly he settles on reciting the stories—which he does with verve, as with "Celestina," the bawdy 1499 Spanish "novel in dialogue" that he also calls "a blaring boombox" of "rude vitality."

Mr. Moore likes long, difficult novels that ask to be read, he thinks, as stylish performances: He approaches them in the same spirit as that of watching a ballet or a figure-skating competition. "The reason some of us consider [Joyce's] Ulysses the greatest novel ever written is not because it has a gripping story, lovable characters, or unique insights into the human situation, but because it is the most elaborate rhetorical performance ever mounted, making wider and more masterful use of all the forms and techniques of prose than any other novel."

Mr. Moore is the author of "A Reader's Guide to William Gaddis's 'The Recognitions' " (1982), explicating a notoriously difficult novel, and he has written enthusiastically about other challenging work, including Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow," Richard Brautigan's "Trout Fishing in America" and Alexander Theroux's "Darconville's Cat." In "The Novel: An Alternative History," he notes: "Every author of an innovative novel mixing literary forms and genres in an extravagant style is indebted to Rabelais [1494-1553], directly or indirectly. Out of his codpiece came"—and here he proceeds to list with evident approval 77 novels or novelists, from "Moby-Dick" to "A Clockwork Orange," from Cervantes and Henry Fielding to Robert Coover and John Barth. One senses that it is novels of "rhetorical performance" that earn Mr. Moore's esteem above all others, diminishing the traditions out of which came so many other major novelists—Jane Austen, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Proust—whose works are less performances than transcripts of imagined lives meant to seem real.

The novel, Mr. Moore says (following a well-known remark by Vladimir Nabokov), is "essentially a delivery system for aesthetic bliss." He reports that "reading Marguerite Young's 1,200-page Miss MacIntosh, My Darling was like slipping into a luxurious opium dream." Little wonder: For him, "the novel is primarily about the workings of art; it doesn't represent 'the experience of the soul in search of God,' as one commentator enthused, so much as the experience of the poet in search of metaphors."

"The Novel: An Alternative History" does not exert much pressure on the common understanding of the history of the novel. Vehement in opinion, combative in tone, it might well have simply been called "These Novels I Have Loved."