Good Form by Rosenthal Jesse;

Author:Rosenthal, Jesse;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4768011
Publisher: Princeton University Press

A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT

Suppose I tell you that I have a Victorian novel for you to read. I have not yet told you who wrote it or what it’s about. But if you have some familiarity with the field, with the meanings attached to the “Victorian novel,” then you likely know quite a bit about it. It will be long—probably five hundred pages or more in a modern Penguin edition. It will not offer much in the way of sex scenes. Its hero will probably be young and not yet set in life. There will be some maturation, most likely some carriages or a railroad, a career for a hero or a marriage for a heroine, and a polite degree of anxiety about industrialization and commodity culture.

But here’s something else you will probably know: the novel that I’m going to give you will not be particularly difficult to read. It may take you a while—but it will seem more familiar, more like a novel than the work of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century (Austen, as always, conspicuously excepted); and it will require a good deal less aesthetic sophistication and effort against the grain than a modernist novel. When we talk about the “Victorian novel,” one of the principal things we are referring to is a certain sweet spot in relation to the post–World War II reader: modern enough to be recognizable; not so modern as to be obscure. And for this reason, it does not need to be taught to competent contemporary readers—at least not at the level of basic textual comprehension. More precisely, we can say that Victorian novels are those novels that do not need to be mediated by historians or interpreters. They might benefit from such mediation, as those who have taught them know, but that is only because students are only too eager to find themselves in them. Teachers and critics have to assert the need for historical or formal mediation precisely because the novels do not seem like they need it: because they seem immediate. Neither dated nor obscure, they are readable.

Theories of the realist novel, more generally, take this sort of experiential proximity as a given. José Ortega y Gasset, in his Meditations on Quixote, addresses this question directly. In discussing Don Quixote’s famous categorization as the first novel, he moves quickly to an interpretation that stresses readerly familiarity. Quixote, he says,

is said to be a novel; it is also said, and perhaps rightly, that it is the first novel in point of time and in merit. Much of the satisfaction that the contemporary reader finds in it comes from what it has in common with the kind of literature favored in our times. As we peruse its old pages, we find in them a modern note which is bound to draw the venerable book closer to our hearts: we feel it to be at least as close to our innermost sensibility as are the builders of the contemporary novel—Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, or Dostoievski.11

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