Steven Moore throws this question down like a gauntlet on page 25 of The Novel: An Alternate History - Beginnings to 1600. There follows a glib 'quiz' of the type found in teen magazines, where you chose answer a), b) or c) to some simple questions in order to find out what type of man you should date, or what kind of friend you are. In this case the aim is to discover if you are a) 'uncultured' and threatened by 'the new and different' or b) 'open to any new experiences and willing to try new things.' No prizes for guessing which group Steven Moore thinks he and all right thinking people belong to.
When I picked up Moore's huge, 698 page tome from the library I had certain expectations. Given its subtitle, I was anticipating a book of big ideas, that attempted to trace the lineage of the novel back to a root in the earliest known writings. I was hoping for an introduction to scholarship and debate about the form's genesis, and an interesting bibliography of early 'novels' to explore. What I did not anticipate was a thinly veiled diatribe about the superiority of experimental fiction, and a verbal assault on a named triumvirate of literary commentators who had published articles attacking 'the kind of fiction I [Steven Moore] love.' It was only as I read the introduction that I realised, with growing disbelief, that The Novel: An Alternate History was actually written as one big, angry fart in the face of the popularisation of literary culture. So biased, didactic and pompous was this introduction that I had no stomach to read the actual content of the book when I reached the end of it. I simply could not have trusted another word that Moore said.* Nevertheless, the 36 pages I did manage to read were so thought-provoking that I feel compelled to share my thoughts about it here anyway.
In 2001 B.R. Myers published an article called 'A Reader's Manifesto' in the Atlantic Monthly subtitled 'An attack on the growing pretentiousness of American literary prose'. It pretty much did what it says on the tin, and admonished contemporary literary fiction for being too self-conscious, pretentious and writerly. (You can read the full text online.) Around the same time Dale Peck wrote a review of Rick Moody's The Black Veil for the New Republic in which he used rather strong language in criticism of Joyce, Faulkner, Nabokov and others. (Again, the full text is online.) Finally, Jonathan Franzen used a review of some posthumous publications of William Gaddis in the New Yorker to question the relevance of avant-garde fiction. (You guessed it, the text is online.) For various reasons Steven Moore felt these criticisms keenly, not only on behalf of the authors in question but as a personal affront to his reading tastes. The fact that he was Gaddis' biographer was, I imagine, another contributing factor. In some ways I can understand his ire. I don't think Myers makes a particularly strong argument in his article either (although I think his observations about the unfortunate parallel between high-brow/low-brow novels in the past and literary/genre at present are astute enough). But Moore's response seems excessive.
His answer is to write a history of the novel which foregrounds 'innovative, unconventional' fiction, traces the ancestry of Joyce et al back to Apuleius and proves the superiority of 'difficult' books. Or at least:
'...if I couldn't convince MPF [Moore's disparaging way of referring to Myers, Peck and Franzen throughout] of the superiority of such novels over the kind they prefer - de gustibus non est disputandum ['there is no accounting for taste'] - I could at least try to refute these insulting, ill-informed assumptions about the writers who create such novels, and the readers who cherished them.'
Which makes pretty clear from the outset that it's going to get personal, and that the gloves are off. The sides are clearly drawn: Moore against MPF, Which would be fine, because I think there is a case to be made against the ideas expressed by Myers and the rest. The problem comes in the way Moore casts the debate as a fight between good and evil, setting up a series of uncompromising dichotomies: art vs. entertainment, culture vs. populism, innovation vs. stagnation, openmindedness vs. bigotry. He ends up sounding as dismissive, pompous and unreasonable as the critics he is opposing, not to mention thoroughly disagreeable.
At first the book is in a comic mode. Moore is rascally and funny, his prose style suggests a man of people, telling it like it is. But it's not long until his critcisms of MPF start to feel more like a sharp elbow in the ribs than a gentle, persuasive nudge in a different direction. There also comes a point when it is clear that he has decided that MPF are representatives of a wider class of reader for whom he has no respect. His implicit argument becomes as follows: if you don't like difficult authors it is because you don't understand them, and if you don't understand them it is because you are uncultured or uneducated or unworthy. 'Do you want to know a secret?' he says:
'Literature is not for everyone... when it comes to fiction, there's a democratic assumption that anyone with a basic education should be able to read and enjoy any novel... Hence some feel it is reprehensible to write a novel beyond a high school reading age. ... Why this bleeding-heart concern for 'the mass of readers', 'the common reader'? They have more than enough to satisfy them, as the best-seller lists indicate; most of the publishing industry caters to their tastes. Why this intolerance for the minority of readers with a different textual orientation who prefer an alternative kind of fiction... Such fiction is challenging and unconventional, granted, but the fact that it's not for everyone doesn't make it elitist, snobbish, pretentious, arrogant, or wrong-headed. It's simply not for everyone.'
Everything about this paragraph makes my skin crawl. But it's the dismissive 'they' that really gets to me. 'They' as in 'the masses' or 'common readers' who read best-sellers, who have a 'taste' for (Moore implies) unchallenging, conventional guff. Not the 'they' who think differently, or have different interests, but the 'they' who are not clever enough or flexible enough to like the 'challenging' (read: good and worthwhile) novels. When, a few pages later, Moore condescends to understand 'hostility from the uncultured... they always feel threatened by the new and different...', I'm just about ready to throw his own hefty tome at him. I don't think I've ever read anything which could be so aptly described as 'elitist, snobbish, pretentious, arrogant and wrong-headed.' It is so clear that the question of 'literary' vs. 'popular' novels has become symbolic of a much broader gulf for Moore. It is not about the books themselves, but about the people who read them. It is the people who are good or bad, who have right or wrong preferences, who are superior or inferior.
By the time I reached the part of the introduction in which Moore justifies his qualifications for writing The Novel: An Alternate History, I felt I was a spectator in a massive (excuse me for this) pissing contest:
'My speciality is 20th century fiction, so I spend most of this book trampling through many fields where (some academics might say) I don't belong, though I should point out in my defense that I read pretty widely in world literature before I settled on contemporary fiction. When studying for my master's degree in the early 1970s I became enamoured with medieval literature: I learned to read Middle English with some ease - I dedicated my first book to my Middle English professor, a flamboyant man named Sam Freeman, who died under mysterious circumstances the summer I studied Chaucer with him - then learned Anglo-Saxon from a former nun - and ate up things like the Welsh Mabinogion and Jackson's Celtic Miscellany. After graduating, I made a list of all the major literary works I had not yet read... and spent the next few years working my way through Gilgamesh, Greek and Latin classics, the Bible, the complete Burton translation of The Arabian Nights...Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes...the great Russian novelists, all of which while supporting a serious Joyce habit and trying my hand at a few novels myself.'
Learnt Anglo-Saxon from a former nun? I actually spluttered. It seems to me that the whole purpose of this passage, and of the introduction as a whole, is not to prove that experimental fiction is superior to any other type of fiction, so much as to prove that Steven Moore is superior. Not just superior to MPF and co., but superior to you, me and everyone else we know too.
There are no ifs and buts to anything he says, no room for another opinion. After dimissing the realist novel as 'straightforward, lightly romanticized stories of recognizable people out of everyday life, usually narrated in chronological sequence and in language no different from that of the better newspapers and journals', Moore declares the novel's traditional development narrative is 'Wrong' with a capital W. Here, as elsewhere, he admits of no subtlety or debate, despite the seriousness and complexity of his statement. Out goes Cervantes (along with Austen, Dickens, Scott and friends), and in comes Xenophon: 'The novel has been around since at least the 4th century BCE and flourished in the Mediterranean area until the coming of the Christian Dark Ages.' Now I don't think Moore is the first person to make this argument, far from it, and neither do I think that Cervantes sat down one day and had a bright idea that led to the birth of a new way of writing and thinking. The 'novel' is clearly a negotiated and multiplicitous form, the product of centuries of syncretism and evolution. However, I think it is rather foolhardy to scoop up extraordinarily diverse literary traditions of poetry and prose from ancient Egypt to Ming dynasty China and claim them all retrospectively as 'novels'. I think this is Pushing the Point Too Far, so far that it makes said point seem utterly ridiculous. Moore has to contort the definition of 'novel' until it is virtually meaningless in order to lasso together all the examples he wants to use.
This is a true shame, because I think that beneath the hyperbole and the ego, there is a worthwhile idea in The Novel. We are too quick to compartmentalise, circumscribe and define the novel, and fail to recognise its rich and complicated evolution or the ways in which it is still evolving. However, I don't think this history is fairly served when proselytised as part of a polemic, or presented as just another kind of absolutism. The novel is too organic and generous a medium to be used as a stick to beat people with for liking one thing over another,or to prove the superiority of one mode of expression or thought. It makes me sad to see it used in that way.
~~Victoria~~
* I was also turned off after fellow Alexandrian Nic read parts of the chapter on early Arabic 'novels' during a recent weekend visit and felt that the scholarship was highly dubious.