Beyond Belles-lettres

Review Article Beyond Belles-lettres I.S. MACLAREN Percy G. Adams. Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel University Press of Kentucky '983. xi, 368. $30.00 'How much has been said about how the novel relates to the epic, the drama, or the autobiography, but how little about its connection with travel literature!' (p x). Thus Percy Adams commences an almost monumental attemptat a history ofboth travel literature in all European languages and the evolution of the novel particularly in England and France. Such an ambitious undertaking cannot perhaps avoid errors and pitfalls, but Adams does succeed in convincing his attentive and necessarily patient reader that by excluding travelliterature from the criticism and scholarship of belles-lettres, literary history has been guilty of either an appalling negligence or a prejudicial oversight. Adams's failure to provide an introduction causes the reader needless difficulties at the outset. Clearly, the study's title promises a parallel, if not a causal, relation between travel literature and the eighteenth-century novel, but with a preliminary chapter on the theory of what constitutes a novel, and when it was 'assembled' rather than invented as an art form, followed by a fine chapter on 'the story of travel writing to about 1800,' the reader is left wondering, with no help from any introduction, what claims are to be made. Not until much later in the study does one stumble on the realization that Adams is staking a claim for the reciprocal relations between narratives of travel and fiction; thereby, one learns that the 'and' in his title excludes causality butargues for simultaneity. A source of further irritation at the outset is the datedness of those theories of the novel (Watt, Kellogg and Scholes, Henry James, Showalter, F.e. Green, Booth, Todorov) which Adams sees as contending for hegemony. Mimetic, American formalistic, diachronic, syncretic, structuralist, and rhetorical critics might have ably constituted the panoply of critical approaches prior to, say, '970, but for a work published in December 1983 more is required. Some authoritative extension of the debate on the novel, narrative, discourse, and 'fiction' ought to be provided. In particular, a careful discussion of some aspects of post-structuralism, especially where it shows the influence of Foucault's work, could have benefited Adams's UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 55, NUMBER 2, WINTER 1985/6 TRAVEL LITERATURE AND THE NOVEL 205 view that fact and fiction in travel literature were often being blurred in those centuries during which the novel was evolving. Not only in the first chapter but throughout Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel the reader in 1986 is compelled to habituate himself to an older time scale: Ralph Freedman's 1968 article, 'The Possibility of a Theory of the Novel,' contains some 'recent wise conclusions' (p 5); James's The Art ofthe Novel (1934) is paraded forth for its contention that 'the novel remains still ... the most independent, the most elastic, most prodigious of literary forms' (p 6). The wreckers can be heard in the wings. Criticism of the 19505and 1960s is referred to in the present tense(p 25), and criticism written 'during the past dozen years or so' (p 34) cites sources whose dates run from 1969 to 1973; Frye's Secular Scripture (1976) 'has just now gone well beyond his earlier theories' (p 107). Such datedness is especially apparent in a field of literary criticism and theory whose character seems to alter almost month by month. Besides needlessly confusing his reader by inverting the order given in his title and dealing first with the novel, Adams has begun with what, by the end of the study, seems to be an extraneous chapter. Only in the second chapter does the author's voice become comfortable, authoritative, and engaging as a master ofthe 'gigantic' realm of travel literature and its relation to ur- and proto- novels, as well as to the 'fictions' of Cervantes, Rabelais, Swift, Defoe, Smollett, Fielding, and Sterne. Much more convincing than anything raised in the first chapter are several notable relations drawn between 'novel' and travel writing. One is that 'the modern novel was in great measure produced ... by a conflict and an alliance...