R e v i e w E s s a y

Eighteenth-Century Life Volume 40, Number 2, April 2016 doi 10.1215/00982601-3483976

Copyright 2016 by Duke University Press

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The Novel’s High Road

Scott BlackUniversity of Utah

Thomas G. Pavel. The Lives of the Novel: A History (Princeton: Princeton Univ., 2013). Pp. xii + 346. $35

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The novel is an idealist genre. In Thomas Pavel’s eloquent and generous book, the history of the novel is a discussion about the shape, and the possibility, of the ideal human life. The realist novel is part of this history, but for Pavel, real-ism is neither the genre’s defining formal trait nor its only historical tendency. Rather, realism is one phase in a millennia-long conversation about the chang-ing ways human greatness has been understood and depicted—and questioned and challenged—that takes place through, and as, the history of the novel. The greatest strength of this book is the catholicity of its explanations and its appreciations of an impressive breadth of novels. A loose and flexible ensemble of dynamics, centered on questions of character and plot, allows Pavel to show what the novel has been for a wide array of novelists with a wide variety of aes-thetic and moral projects and rationales.

The novel is not only a modern genre. Pavel’s study participates in recent efforts to lengthen and broaden the novel’s history, which have challenged the standard account of the novel as a modern genre, indeed, the genre of moder-nity.1 Pavel roots his book in Georg Lukács’s account of the novel’s “concept,” the way it represents the world, and the way it develops through the stages of abstract idealism (Don Quixote), romantic disillusionment (Oblomov), and

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reconciliation (Wilhelm Meister)—a very abstract, foreshortened, and unchro-nological account of the novel’s trajectory, as Pavel notes. So while adopting Lukács’s insight about the basis of the novel in the struggle of homeless indi-viduals in a hostile world, Pavel offers a broader historical analysis of various relationships between people and worlds over a much longer time frame and in relation to a wider set of cultural, aesthetic, and formal concepts. Pavel’s story centers on a long-term debate between idealist and anti-idealist accounts of human behavior, a debate that informs the entire history of the genre, though its terms change over time. With the development of a more plausible idealism in the eighteenth century and a historicized understanding of the individual’s place in world in the nineteenth, the locus of individual integrity changes from strong souls to sensitive hearts, and then to enigmatic psyches.

Pavel is perhaps best known for his work on the semantics of fiction and his adaptation of the theory of “possible worlds” for the study of narrative. As was the case with his indispensable Fictional Worlds (1986), Pavel again focuses on content: “Novels propose substantial hypotheses about human life and imagine fictional worlds governed by them” (17). For Pavel, the novel is first and foremost a genre of story, and he emphasizes character and plot to a degree that is both refreshing and instructive. The first part of the book presents the “confederation of genres” that organized the first millennium and a half of the novel’s history. Pavel is superb at reading with the grain, presenting the range of problems and pleasures of these works in their own terms. His first stop is Heliodorus’s Ethiopian Story, the summative masterpiece that capped two centuries of classical narrative experiment, and then provoked two centuries of further experimentation when it was rediscovered by European humanists in the sixteenth century. (Pavel does not play the game of “secret histories,” but if one were to do so, there is no work that, in its historical trajectory and influence, offers a better example of the novel’s history: a late classical fruit that becomes a modern seed.) Ancient Greek novels present idealized characters struggling against a hostile fortune. In contrast to earlier epic heroes, they are not defined by hearth and kin, nor are they sponsored by friendly divinities. Rather, Heliodorus’s adventuring lovers Chariclea and Theagenes are defined by a double removal from both social and divine ties. What characterizes them instead is what Pavel strikingly calls an alliance between a hidden space within, and a silent Providence above (33). This formal innovation, which reg-isters a new ideal of individual and universal spirituality in the Roman empire, marks the difference between novel and epic. And it gives the ideal heroine her particular form of perfection. Chariclea is defined by her constancy, endurance, and statuesque calm in the face of continual batterings by enamored bandits, jealous queens, warring armies, and other accidents of fortune. The luminous beauty that attracts all this attention is also the badge of destiny that steers

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her safely through her adventures. Chariclea does not develop as a character, because she is already perfect. She embodies the ideal of resisting the effects of the world, not growing into it or adapting to it, as the long, ping-ponging plot tests her but does not affect her. Her extraordinary fortitude is finally vin-dicated in a spectacular denouement that reveals the accidents of fate to have been secretly directed by a higher plan, a hidden order working within—and with—the passions, desires, and vanities she faces on her way to an unexpected home, identity, and destiny. In its broad outlines, this is the plot—not origi-nal to Heliodorus, but hugely influential in his example—that organizes a key tradition of the novel throughout its history.

If Greek heroines rise above the world and express the ideal of patient endurance, chivalric heroes tower over their worlds in order to correct them. The chivalric novel, the other influential form of idealist narrative in the West, offers stories of extraordinary characters who are of their societies and tasked with the duty of bringing justice to them. Such heroes are driven by a desire for fame, and serve both their kings and ladies by addressing the upsurges of violence endemic to a social order based on personal loyalties. Pavel’s account of Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain as an exemplary medieval hero is deft, as is his discussion of the later, more perfect Renaissance avatar of chivalry, Amadis. But my favorite part is Pavel’s examination of the “dangerous depths” of Tris-tram and Isolde’s passionate love, which is atypical, unchivalric, and fails to realize the ideal of keeping lovers in the world by raising them above it. Here love is not a sign of the characters’ proximity to divinity, as with Chariclea and Theagenes, but a mark of their tragic humanity. Their story serves as a warn-ing about the individuating, isolating dangers of passionate love in a world defined by the ideal of chivalry and service.

While exemplary characters appeal to “our instinctive Platonism, the plea-sure we feel when contemplating perfection” (51), anti-idealist characters offer other pleasures. Pavel briefly touches on Petronius’s Satyricon and Apuleius’s Golden Ass as ancient examples of anti-idealist novels (both complicated cases in ways his brief sketches do not allow him to explore), discusses Reynard the Fox as an example of an amoral “individual who spits on society” (54), and then turns to Renaissance examples—François Rabelais and especially the picaresque—that form the key points of historical reference for such nov-els. Pavel distinguishes between amoral picaros, like Lazarillo in Lazarillo de Tormes, and preaching picaros, like Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache. Lazarillo struggles for survival in a world without trust or promises (or, con-sequently, love), while Alemán surveys a material world of hunger and pain from a moral perspective that points up its brutality. Like idealist novels, pica-resque narratives are random and organized by the shapelessness of chance and accident. But picaros are not lit within by strong souls or watched over by

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Providence or providential plots; they have to survive in a world they do not have the resources to control or resist. Moll Flanders and Roxana are Pavel’s final examples of the genre, and they show how Daniel Defoe adapts this kind of story. In contrast to the earlier examples, Moll’s life has the single, well-defined shape of Puritan life-writing, and she wrestles with historically specific problems of emerging capitalist structures of commerce, credit, and finance. Roxana too moves beyond the traditional picaresque in the arc of its story, which is determined by a return of the past, at once a tragic and Chris-tian design. (It might be argued that Moll’s story also features a similar return of the past, in a more fantastic version, when the long-lost Jemy suddenly reap-pears in the jailhouse just in time for a final change of direction.) There are a few questionable summaries that might give readers of this journal pause. Of the first sustained episode, Pavel says Moll is “seduced by the young heir, and though she cannot snare him, she does at least manage to wed his younger brother” (65), which does not get the agency quite right. And he suggests Moll comes “to know exactly what she wants—a good, sober husband to whom she could be a good wife” (65), which may be a nice way to say Moll wants a rich, secure husband to whom she could be a careful housewife—the novel sharply separates the important affairs of the purse, which motivate Moll throughout, from either morals or pleasures. But Pavel richly compensates for such loss of fine detail in the readings by offering a long-range, historical perspective, which allows him to recognize Defoe’s familiar plots as inflecting a picaresque tradition with modern, realistic details, rather than defining a new genre of modern realism. For Pavel, such watershed moments come before and after Defoe, with Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and Samuel Richardson, each of whom, in distinct ways, provides the kind of multigeneric amalgamation that drives the novel’s modern turn.

But before he gets there, Pavel offers an interlude on “the ideographic method,” a typically understated but important suggestion about the novel as a genre. The ideographic method “shapes the imaginary world according to a leading idea” (72), which clarifies a general meaning rather than testifying to the details of the actual world. This reminds us that, despite our tendency to read the history of the novel in our own aesthetic terms, with the rationale of realism (as if every novel is trying to be, or failing to be, Balzacian) or histori-cism (as if the only way to read fiction is as documentary), the novel has been informed by a variety of approaches, and by a range of ways of understand-ing the relationship of characters to the world. Pavel’s readings offer a strong brief for reading with the grain, taking seriously the ideals that inform and structure novels, without reducing them to a single historical tendency to real-ism or trajectory toward modernity. In idealist and picaresque novels, char-acters display the features that illuminate the leading ideas of their novels,

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whether those characters are deliberately perfect or deliberately inadequate. This convincingly rebuts E. M. Forster’s programmatic dismissal of flat char-acters who are “constructed around a single idea or quality,” which makes the aesthetic program of the modern novel the default setting of the genre more generally and the telos of its history—a familiar modern move, but historically inaccurate; not all novels did, or do, or should work in that way.2 And like-wise in Pavel’s coverage of other story traditions—elegiac stories of bereft and reflective lovers, novellas organized by unities of action, and pastoral stories of gentle souls turned by love—he offers holistic accounts of their particular goals and pleasures. He explains the realism of novellas, for instance, as enabling the kind of induction they depend on: they are set in familiar circumstances so readers can quickly grasp the situation and be startled by the typically exces-sive reactions of characters that drive their plots. (In his interesting discussion of Peronella’s story, Decameron 7.2, he might have mentioned that Boccaccio poached this story from Apuleius, an example of the fruitful theft and recy-cling of good stories that was, and still is, integral to the history of fiction.) And in his discussion of the typology of motivations in the novella—external, internal and perceptible, internal and perceptible but incomprehensible—Pavel observes that the novella addresses issues that will become central to the novel. But while Cervantes in Don Quixote’s inset story of the Ill-Advised Curios-ity and Madame de Lafayette in The Princess of Clèves explore the “enigmatic psyche,” these are not anticipations of later concerns, but rather effects of local aesthetic problems. Similarly, the pastoral’s concern with love attends to the hidden recesses of the heart, but in these stories, the mysteries of desire serve as plot impediments, not as guides to self-understanding. Not every innova-tion is an anticipation, and recognizing the full range of moral and aesthetic programs that have driven novelists allows Pavel to tell a diversely motivated history of novels that serve many needs, and are not just practicing to fulfill our expectations.

The novel becomes modern, in Pavel’s opinion, by amalgamating earlier genres. The first such watershed is Don Quixote, which Pavel regards as emerg-ing out of the fruitful debate about the future of the idealist novel that was consequent on the sixteenth-century rediscovery of Heliodorus. The ancient novel’s shapely stories of secret fugitives calmly rooted in wisdom and patiently awaiting the resolutions of Providence offered an alternative to romance’s “loose, baggy monsters” filled with chivalric adventures, with their loose mor-als and their monsters on the loose. According to Pavel, Cervantes undertakes a two-stage, plan, first to discredit the chivalric romances in Don Quixote, and then to offer a modernized idealistic novel on the Heliodoran model with Per-siles and Sigismunda. Pavel explains Don Quixote as growing from a novella-like seed that satirizes the absurdity of chivalric stories and shows the dangers of

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such stories, which allow readers to dismiss the ideals as readily as the fiction, indeed as just another fiction. Then, mimicking the long books Cervantes sat-irizes, Quixote’s adventures branch out, and allow Cervantes to demonstrate his abilities in a variety of genres. (Pavel does not address the reflexive aspects of Don Quixote, or of other novels, but the Canon of Toledo, a metafictional mouthpiece for Cervantes, defends romances by saying they offer such oppor-tunities for working in various genres.) In this way, Cervantes stumbles onto an essential ingredient of what will become the canonical form of the novel in his combination of earlier subgenres. But, as with Lafayette’s genre-expanding experiment with the novella later in the century, Cervantes does not achieve a genuine synthesis with his patchwork tapestry.

While Pavel’s coverage of Cervantes is solid, one notices a couple of gaps: he discusses only the first part of Don Quixote (1605), and neither the second part (1615), which is as important to the history of the novel as the first part, nor Persiles and Sigismunda, which had less influence on the trajectory of the novel but offers a fascinating experiment in the kind of modernized idealism that is a recurrent feature of the genre for Pavel. Cervantes more fully synthe-sizes the elements of Don Quixote 1, in distinct ways, in each of his later books. For Pavel, it was Richardson who achieved “an unprecedented synthesis of the moral splendor of the idealist novel, the inner tremors described by the pas-toral and the elegiac story, the picaresque’s closeness to everyday life, and the unity of action perfected in the novella” (125). Pamela brings the idealist novel close to home, immersing readers in the life of an ideal heroine who looks like the girl next door. Along with this rescaling of the ideal goes a reorientation from strong souls to sensitive hearts as the heroine is lit from within rather than from above. And the picaro’s first-person narrative is retooled to dem-onstrate the goodness of the heroine, recording her minute responses to the tests and trials she is confronted with to prove her virtue. In so adapting the narrative tools of other genres for an idealist story of a character who valiantly resists the world, Richardson develops a new, more intensified idealism, with an even more isolated heroine undergoing her trials in a familiar environment, not safely away in the wild woods. For this reason, Pavel suggests that both those who assert a deep continuity between the ancient and modern novel, and those who see eighteenth-century British fiction as a new form are correct—each recognizes one of the two sides of Richardson’s more plausible version of the old idealist convention. In an important reminder, Pavel observes that the results of Richardson’s innovation were neither sudden nor universal; the tra-ditional narrative genres survived, with older kinds of idealist novels, novellas, and picaresques all still flourishing in the eighteenth century. And even when novelists did follow Richardson in rewriting the ideal heroine in more local terms, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau did, they did not necessarily follow him whole

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hog. Julie features a “subjective iconography” that relates her emotions in more general, abstract terms, rather than describing what they feel like to her (133–34); she is a Pamela observed from the surface of the pool, not from within. In this chapter, as in the others, Pavel’s far-ranging discussions of the novel as a shared European tradition carried on between novelists of many countries (and not just among novelists of a single moment or single country) emphasizes that the novel’s history is necessarily international and formal. Writers read, of course, and they respond to books from other places and other times as well as to their own local contexts (and books were part of international commerce). And those responses have their own aesthetic rationales, with Rousseau’s take on Pamela, or Richardson’s take on Pierre Carlet de Chamblain Marivaux’s Marianne, part of a conversation about how to tell a story, and what kind of story to tell.

With the eighteenth century, Pavel’s story becomes one of competition, not coexistence, between idealist and anti-idealist novels. Henry Fielding’s novels suggest, for Pavel, that the proper job of the novel is “to examine the amusing truth of human shortcomings” (136). Pavel remarks that what Fielding did not understand about Cervantes’s project was its preparatory aspect, Don Quixote comically clearing the ground for the renewed idealism of Persiles (137). But arguably this is what Pavel does not understand about Fielding’s proj-ect, Fielding’s own positive answer to the problem he satirizes and comically critiques. Pavel is eloquent about Fielding’s “witty, tolerant, morally reliably, consistent voice” (141), and has an incisive analysis of what he calls the “mag-netism of the inn” in both Tom Jones and Don Quixote, the way inns collect and entangle storylines—effects, he notes, of both authors’ apprenticeships in the theater. But I wonder if in his own division of historical labor, he assigns Field-ing too polar a place in opposition to Richardson’s idealism. For Pavel, comedy is simply opposed to idealism. But as Fielding says, quoting Horace, “Surely a Man may speak Truth with a smiling Countenance.”3 This kind of variety within novels, and not just among them, is the hallmark of Fielding’s own ide-alist practice, an idealism with a laughing face and a bracing dose of irony, but no less serious an answer to representing moral perfection, which, for Pavel, is the high road of the novel’s history. Pavel considers Fielding’s characters half-way between caricature and icons (141), but Fielding’s novels seem inhabited by carefully distinguished satiric caricatures and idealized icons. Tom travels with Partridge, but each is formed of different kinds of generic material—Tom is certainly human, hot, vigorous, and fleshy, but drawn at a larger scale for all that. While serving to undercut Richardson’s obsession with chastity (and the claim that morally corralling erotic desire will reform society), Tom also embodies an equally unrealistic ideal of charity—which may be part of his sexual generosity as well. The providential returns on Tom’s instinctive char-

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ity are integral to Fielding’s comic denouement, which does not simply mock the aspiration to represent a good life, but rather offers a different ideal of it.

In general, comedy seems uncongenial to Pavel. He does not touch on the comic elements in Don Quixote, or mention Nikolai Gogol (just one example of something I especially missed). And Pavel finds Tristram Shandy, and later Ulysses, more disorienting than amusing—“The narrator contrives to stun and hypnotize his reader” (143)—and even disturbing: “Between the verbal cor-nucopia and the poverty of plot, the reader senses a disturbing gap, as though the familiar split between character and world were being replaced here by a breakup between the story and the discourse that plays around it” (144). This is interesting; the frustrated (and funny) efforts of Laurence Sterne’s characters to shape their lives, and Tristram his Life, critique the heroic adequacy of earlier characters, and certainly are offset by the lively narrative voice. But Sterne’s place in the history of the novel has as much to do with his sentimental touches as his metafictional extravagances, the former the basis of his nineteenth- century reputation and the latter of his twentieth. And his unmatched ability to render the colloquial cadences of English conversation is evident in both registers, in the portraits of the characters, as well as in Tristram’s commen-tary. Indeed, the scenes in the Shandy living room imply an alternative form of characterization—characterization by conversation rather than action—even as that conversation ironically compensates for the characters’ failures of action. Sterne’s comedy does what Pavel says Fielding’s does, offering a critique of heroic idealism. But even Sterne’s satiric mockeries of the best-laid plans, his own included, arguably rest, in part, on a moral foundation of humility that is lightly sketched, in a typically backhanded way, in the story of the unobtrusive hero Yorick. Both Fielding and Sterne suggest that comic novels do not neces-sarily reject the new idealism—though some do—but may offer different ide-als of human perfection, ones based on the more social virtue of charity, on an acceptance of human frailty, or on a recognition of the limits of human under-standing. Pavel is eloquent in his readings of such modest, modified forms of idealism in his later chapters, but tells his history in such a way that comedy merely reacts against idealism.

In the eighteenth century, idealist characters grow hearts. In a wonder-ful chapter on “love, romantic and impossible” at the end of the century, Pavel focuses on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Benja-min Constant as examples of the problems of the sensitive heart. The Goethe readings are especially compelling. Discussing Werther, Pavel writes that Goethe “supports neither Richardson and Rousseau’s solution—magnificent but implausible inner strength—nor Fielding’s moral skepticism. With Char-lotte and Werther, Goethe aptly differentiates between two kinds of sensi-tive hearts, between her way of finding peace in an imperfect world and his

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inability to accept that world” (154). And of Werther and Hölderlin’s Hyperion, Pavel remarks: “It’s as if these two novels were aiming to prove that the new idealism’s weak point was not so much the existence of a character who enter-tains high ideals, as the worldly success of such a character” (156). This points toward the “new task of the novelist” in the nineteenth century, the road-testing of characters in real-world conditions. Earlier idealist novels depicted characters acting according to extra-social norms, lit from above or within, but the nineteenth-century novel becomes a laboratory in which to explore individuals negotiating the world, with its customary, not eternal, values. The perennial issue of “how fiction portrays greatness” (197) is answered by Walter Scott and James Fennimore Cooper carefully rooting their great characters on the exotic edges—and historical cusps—of modernity, and Heinrich von Kleist offering a portrait of a precisely located character, Michael Kohlhaas, forced by circumstances to become extraordinary. For such novelists, ideal charac-ters move to the periphery of geography and history. Others explore the pos-sibilities of home-grown heroes, with Charles Dickens’s waifs humbly wait-ing to be noticed by discerning uncles (Pavel’s example is Oliver Twist, which does not fully represent Dickens’s more complex mature work), or with more active heroes who take matters into their own hands and are distinguished by professional success and worldly competence, like the carefully scaled heroes of Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas-père, Victor Hugo, or Eugène Sue. For Balzac, Pavel explains, social realism forcefully assists the idealist tradi-tion (191), as the energetic efforts of his characters form both themselves and their worlds in novels that align the two traditions. In contrast, George Sand “deliberately idealizes her characters: for her art is not the study of objective reality; it is a search for the ideal truth” (189). This is the epigraph of Pavel’s book as well, and his accounts of the various formal strategies of a variety of idealisms, even in the contexts where historians of the novel often look for realism, are excellent.

That said, some of my favorite local readings are in Pavel’s sketch of the counterparts to these idealist traditions, which he catalogs as the schools of irony (Stendhal, William Makepeace Thackeray), bitterness (Gustave Flaubert, the Goncourts, Émile Zola), and empathy (Jane Austen, Henry James). Pavel comments that “Stendhal is probably the first novelist to present the most seri-ous actions people take as essentially governed by fantasy, absentmindedness, and momentary impulses. . . . The psyche, difficult to gauge and explain, was now on its way to becoming a central concern for the novel” (202). And his dis-cussions of free indirect discourse in Austen, Flaubert, and James are elegant. Austen, he notes, learned from Fielding, the “double look” of character and narrator that gently but devastatingly ironizes what the narrative presents of the characters’ perspective—endorsing the value of that perspective with such

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careful attention, but also demonstrating the limits of the character’s own sym-pathy, care, and attention. “Free indirect discourse is precisely meant to illus-trate the human psyche’s mixture of lucidity and incomprehension” (206). In contrast, Flaubert uses free indirect discourse to narrate what Emma cannot fully articulate (210), and in doing so savagely critiques the aesthetic and moral paucity of her fantasies and the vitiated culture that fuels them. While Flau-bert exposes his characters’ limited perspectives with something of Fielding’s satiric bite, James presents the limitlessness of his characters’ depths with an Austenian sympathy so thoroughly deferential as to withhold judgment, and even understanding, altogether: “He uses free indirect discourse to evoke com-plexities of psyche directly, as it were, without the mediation of moral vocabu-lary” (222). Of Isabel Archer’s final decision, Pavel writes: “Is it pride, compas-sion for him, concern for the teenager who is now her stepdaughter? Difficult to know. James’s characters have their own center of gravity within them, and it moves silently” (223).

The novel reaches its maturity, perhaps, with the syntheses of George Eliot and Leo Tolstoy. (Pavel’s final section of his chapter on “Syntheses, High Points,” is called “Maturity?”) The nineteenth-century bildungsroman offers a middle way between idealists and anti-idealists, featuring characters who display spontaneous good will and who slowly adjust to their worlds through a process of trial and error. With Middlemarch, which carefully locates the great heroine in a setting she is defined by but also finally illuminates, “Eliot gave novels the task of celebrating the unknown bearers of the ideal” (230). Pavel’s readings of this kind of quiet heroism (though heroism may no longer be the right word) are themselves quietly wonderful. His interpretation of Adalbert Stifter’s The Bachelors is especially so (and I thank Pavel for pointing me to Stifter, whom I had not known, and now love). But even better is Pavel’s reading of Anna Karenina and his explanation of the way Tolstoy answers the tragedy of Anna’s love story, and its critique of the possibility of modern heroism, with the “moderate idealism” of Kostya Levin’s story. Levin’s story offers a plau-sible narrative idealism, and in an elegant move, Pavel connects Tolstoy’s own “naïve generosity” of narrative attention, the basis of what the Russian formal-ists called his “defamiliarization,” with Levin’s gentle perspective: “In Tolstoy’s novel, an unsophisticated, generous character catches a few surprising glimpses of the world and lets them fill him with wonder” (235). This is just the effect of Tolstoy’s own attention in War and Peace to the vivifying, humanizing detail of the dimple on a dead enemy soldier’s face. In contrast, Fyodor Dostoevsky “rejects both narrative idealism, which extols human greatness and indepen-dence, and anti-idealism, which finds human imperfection either amusing or dismal” (249): “Dostoevsky is one of the most formidable adversaries of the belief that human beings can discover a moral law and follow it freely. Left

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to themselves, he tells us, people are fallible, unstable, incapable of principled behavior. Only rarely does an otherworldly perfection adorn a small elect” (251). And such characters, like Myshkin, are distinguished by the quality of their suffering, not by heroism.

Pavel’s model is less at home in the twentieth century, as novels shift attention to such small elects, often self-elected. Of Ulysses he writes: “The dizzying style does suggest an answer to fiction’s familiar question [are we at home in the world?], revealing a gloomy world whose inhabitants must accept its ways without ever understanding them” (278). If James Joyce’s style is diz-zying (excitingly so, for me at least), his world seems anything but gloomy; the vibrant experiments with style are Joyce’s heroic play, or playful heroism, though to Pavel’s regret, this no longer serves the story: “Joyce’s stylistic verve, instead of helping make the story comprehensible, uses it for his own pur-poses” (278). The struggle of individual against the world has shifted up a level with modernism, with artists themselves becoming the heroes of their sto-ries, carefully articulating (or disarticulating) themselves in relation to their fictional worlds as earlier characters were defined (or not) by theirs—Pavel’s treatment of Marcel Proust’s version of this is especially compelling. This shift means that the art of plot and character construction becomes the very site of contestation. (Such narrative reflexivity is not, however, peculiarly modern, but Pavel’s silence on the metafictional aspects of even some of the key sign-posts of his history—The Ethiopian Story, Don Quixote, Pamela—creates that impression.) While James leaves readers to piece together motive, Joyce and his followers leave us to piece together plot itself; what happens is as much a question as why—and how one understands motive may determine how one understands an event itself. Pavel expresses frustration with such opacities: “The reader may well wonder whether the concept of ‘helping the story move forward’ retains any meaning in Faulkner’s foggy, torrid world” (280), and he is more comfortable with the modernisms of Ford Madox Ford, who is praised for his “neatly crafted story,” and Alfred Döblin, who does not abandon “inter-pretive responsibility” (282). Pavel asks of other modernists—Italo Svevo, Vir-ginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett—“Why would these great writers neglect the art of telling stories?” (285). The question, of course, is what kind of story? Accord-ing to Pavel, modernism, perhaps without realizing it, revives the earlier, more inductive model of the novella that presents singular, complicated cases and invites readers to draw their own conclusions, rather than embodying ideals in stories of exemplary characters as ideographic fiction does. I think there may be another kind of return going on as well.

Pavel’s model of the novel reaches its apex in the internalization of the idealist/anti-idealist debate within single works, as with the two plot arcs of Anna Karenina, the locally moderated idealism of Middlemarch, the anti-

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idealist critiques of Dostoevsky, or perhaps Ford’s Parade’s End. Indeed, Pavel’s comments about Tietjens might serve as a fitting envoi to the idealist tradition, or perhaps even mark its continuing force: “While the novel depicts Edwardian high society as deeply corrupt, the protagonist, Christopher Tietjens, stands out as a model of magnanimity and self-restraint. Constantly prosecuted by jealous, malevolent rivals, he remains silent, impassive. . . . The knowledge that the world is a corrupt place does not deter Tietjens from acting according to his ideals” (281). Pavel values novels that synthesize his dialectic of idealism and realism, and once the genre achieves this kind of fusion, his history traces the declining fortunes of plot, the abandonment of such stories in the face of historical pressures and existential forces novels no longer claim to understand or represent. (The final sections of the book are a crowded catalog of classifica-tory lists and name-checking of the last fifty years of the novel in its explosive variety and global reach.) But I wonder if some modernists abandon the plots of realism in order to preserve the practices of idealism.

Pavel describes the characters of modernist novels as fragile psyches, over-sensitive individuals who fail to integrate into society (267). That “fail-ure” revalues in more modern terms the problems and challenges of the “strong souls” of earlier novels who resist or refuse accommodating with their worlds, and whose stories offer a counterbalancing ideal to the social pressures, pas-sions, and powers of the world. So while some modernist novels certainly are as fascinated by failure and fragility as earlier ones were by strength, there also seems to be a tension between Pavel’s important insight about the form of the novel and the dynamics of his history. Pavel writes beautifully about the pleasures of contemplating the adventures of characters defined by their disarticulation from the world (Chariclea, Pamela, Julie) or not fully defined by their integration into the world (Dorothea Brooke, Kostya Levin). But his analysis of modernism’s heroes seems organized by the suppositions of the realist novel. Obviously, many novels are clearly, perhaps simply, anti-realist, and concerned with the inability of delicate souls to assimilate into society. But some modernist novels continue the tradition of idealism with stories of characters who are not defined by worldly identities. Clarissa Dalloway’s story exists to explore facets of her character that are not revealed by the klieg lights of realism, or the “gig lamps” of modern fiction. Woolf forgoes plot in order to preserve the novel’s long-standing practice of telling stories of incompletely socialized souls. I think Pavel misses an opportunity to show how the novel remains the space in which to portray characters who are not fully of the world or finally formed by it, and matter because they aren’t. What defines such characters throughout the novel’s history is are variously construed reservoirs of significance—strong souls, sensitive hearts, enigmatic psyches—that are finally not affected by worldly pressures, or fully explored by plausible plots

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of realism. Chariclea, Pamela, Dorothea Brooke, and Clarissa Dalloway each preserves an ideal integrity against the formative pressures of the world. And it may be by abandoning realism, which drives the history of the genre in the past century every bit as forcefully as realism did the previous one, that the novel returns to its historical roots, and role, as an idealist genre. Woolf rejects plot for idealist reasons, for the same reasons earlier novels used it: to show a character who is not defined by the stories told of her—of family, society, or the accidents of fate—but by “a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope” of significance that lights her “unknown and uncircumscribed spirit.”4 In one sense, this takes the novel as a genre beyond the traditional telling of artful stories, but it does so precisely to preserve the ideographic significance that Pavel rightly recognizes at the heart of the genre. It may be by rescuing such idealism from the plots of realism—or by reinventing it—that the novel in Pavel’s own terms continues to develop as a genre of stories of secretly signifi-cant characters.

What kind of story is the history of the novel? For Pavel, it is a story of accommodation to the world, a fusion of idealism and realism that gives the genre its mature profile. But this is neither the only kind of story novels tell, as Pavel’s rich history eloquently reminds us, nor is it the end of that history. Rather than privileging the realism the novel passes through, habituating itself to the world, Pavel’s own terms imply the possibility of a differently shaped history, and one that might offer an alternative to the kind of regret he feels about the waning of realist plots. Realism is just one of the programs the novel has been formed by, and perhaps even something of an anomaly in the his-tory of a genre organized (both before and after) by different ideals. From the start, novels have told stories of characters who are not defined by the world, but rather by those aspects of themselves that are perhaps not even theirs at all, their souls, hearts, or psyches, which are tuned to something other than the formative pressures of the world. Pavel’s history is one of the changing loci of the novel’s defining alliance of a hidden space within and a silent Providence above, those personal depths that mark an individual’s difference from his or her social, historical self. From this perspective, the continuity of the idealist project through, and beyond, the genre’s fateful intersection with history is as much a part of its story as the way realism refracts those ideals.

I am struck, finally, by the silences at the core of Pavel’s account of this gregarious genre. And I wonder if in Pavel’s comment about idealist novels appealing to “our instinctive Platonism, the pleasure we feel when contem-plating perfection,” he may point to a further silence, on the other side of the book, in the kind of passive but alert reading that is one of the secret pleasures of reading novels. When we talk professionally and pedagogically about novels, we usually do so in realist terms. But not all novels work like that, either before

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or after realism. Or even, Pavel reminds us, during its heyday. The novel’s encounter with historical verisimilitude is neither the beginning nor the end of its history. Rather, as Mikhail Bulgakov, Tanizaki Junichiro, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Doris Lessing, Ben Okri, and many, many others remind us, we read novels—and we need novels—because they engage, stage, and argue about the myriad kinds of stories we tell of ourselves, covering the full range of aspirations and realities, old and new and renewed, that form a fully human life, including stories that are not defined by self-formation, or by worldly activity at all, but rather by patience, endurance, even passivity—by just the kind of passive but alert attention we are invited to practice when we read novels. In these terms, neither the form nor the history of the novel ever is, or should be, fully uprooted from its idealism. Novels do their best and most important work, still, by offering a space for the kind of contemplation built into a genre of long stories to be read with careful attention, and with enough modesty to abide the possibility of wonder.

Notes

1. Pavel refers to the important work of Margaret Doody, Franco Moretti, and Steven Moore in lengthening the history of the novel. And he situates his own study in relation to European critics, Erwin Rohde, the Russian formalists, Mikhail Bakhtin, and especially the young Lukács, but does not refer to any of the classic North American histories of the long trajectory of prose fiction, like Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism and Robert Kellogg and Robert Scholes’s The Nature of Narrative, both of which share Pavel’s own long scale and breadth of appreciation.

2. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt, 1927), 67–68.3. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (1749), ed. Martin C. Battestin and Fredson

Bowers (Middletown: Wesleyan Univ., 1975), 5694. “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous

halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of con-sciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?” Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” from Essays, vol. 4: 1925 to 1928, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1984), 160.

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