Just Because: 'The Novel: A Biography'

Rarely have I been so excited to get my hands on a book. The reviews of Michael Schmidt's The Novel: A Biography are mostly so positive as to be said to be glowing (http://www.themillions.com/2014/09/the-art-of-the-novel.html, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/how-the-novel-made-the-modern-world/361611/, http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/book-review-the-novel-a-biography/). Even those reviewers who find the book less satisfactory admit to at least some glimmers of brilliance (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/28/the-novel-biography-michael-schmidt-review-compelling-yet-limited-survey) (though I have to agree with that reviewer that any solid exploration of a novel must consider the societal influences that surround and, inevitably, flow through it). The opening lines of the Preface, the Introduction, and the book itself are all so good, I don't know which to choose. Oh, Chapter 1, I guess. Read it and be gratified!

1

"Literature Is Invention"

Mandeville's Travels, Ranulf Higden's Polychronicon, De Proprietatibus Rerum

One of the first popular English authors of fiction is Sir John Mandeville. Mandeville's Travels, originally known as The Voiage and Travaile of Sir John Maundevile, is not a novel as such, but it has a consistent narrator who combines personal memoir and travel book. It pretends to be true but is in fact woven from half-truths and lies. For a century and more after it was written, readers believed it. They believed in Sir John. Gradually his book has found its place in the realm of fantasy, but fantasy based less in romance than invention. Most of the invention was not Mandeville's own: it was borrowed from "authorities." The author may himself have believed what he pretended to have seen: lands where men's heads grew under their arms, for example; gryphons, hippocentaurs, men with dogs' heads, dames with breasts like basilisks, banana trees figuring the Cross, lambs that grew on plants.
   The narrator is English. The book was composed in French around 1356 or 1357 and disseminated in manuscript between 1357 and 1371. It was so popular that more than
250 manuscripts survive, among them translations into Latin and most of the vernaculars of Europe. In English it soon existed in at least five different versions, one of them in galumphing rhyming couplets. None is authoritative: scribal copies seldom are. Copyists making cheap scripts truncated the text, or worked from defective sources with sheets missing, or had deadlines to meet. If the copyist knew something the "original" omitted, he had no compunction in adding it. We talk with caution about "form" in early works. The process of transmission distorted whatever the original forms might have been.
   First printed in English in 1496, Mandeville's Travels has stayed in print ever since, often in illustrated editions. Wynkyn de Worde, Caxton's successor in the printing business, published an edition in 1499 with bold woodcuts, following in the manuscript tradition that included illustrations, some pious, some bizarre. The Duc de Berry had the Travels illuminated. There is a Czech manuscript of the first half of the book, the journey to the Holy Land, in which the travels are told entirely in clear grisaille images, a proto-comic book.
   The first part of the Travels is a pilgrim's guide, not a pious Fodor or Guide Bleu but a "personal" account tracing the routes a traveler might take to get to Rome and the Holy Land, and a description of the holy places. Mandeville's Rome is recognizable, but once off the beaten track things get brighter, more allegorical, fantastic, and yet more orderly than the actual places ever were. A traveler trusting him as sole guide would never get home. After Jerusalem, he ventures south and east. He becomes embroiled in Egyptian politics, Chinese conflicts; he works as a consultant, even a mercenary, before making his way back to Europe suffering from a rheumatic gout ("gowtes artetykes that me distreyen": that much is quite believable), and stopping in Liège to convalesce is attended by Bearded John, a physician he had vaguely known in Cairo, who urges him to write down his story, to combat boredom. This the earliest Latin translation tells us. The earliest surviving French version is mute on the subject.
   So plausible is the narrator's courtesy, his unemphatic, persuasive manner, his firsthand witness, his amazement at the things he sees and does, and his backing evidence of other witnesses, from Roman Pliny to sources nearer to his own day, that it is no wonder he was believed. he is also steeped in scripture that underwrites his truthfulness. He invites readers into complicity, challenging them to supply further wonders from their own travels. Given the variations from text to text, it would seem that some scribes did just that. In one version Sir John remembers a story he heard as a boy, about a man who traveled east and east until one day he arrived at an island where a ploughman called to his oxen in words he understood. He had gone around the world. For Mandeville the world was round, even if not quite in the way that our world is. But round enough to inspire a reader a century later, Christopher Columbus. Chaucer, the Gawain poet, the mathematical magician John Dee, and (more skeptically) Shakespeare read him too, and Donne, and Milton; his enchantment (by then celebrated as mere enchantment) affected Keats and the Romantics.
   ...