Digressions in European Literature: From Cervantes to Sebald (review)

This volume of essays on literary digressions contains fifteen chapters in addition to the editors’ Introduction, with contributions from some of the major names in digression studies, such as Ross Chambers, Olivia Santovetti, and J. J. Long. First impressions are promising, but the volume does not quite live up to the expectations its marketing creates. A closer look at the table of contents reveals that the editors’ understanding of Europe in terms of its languages is narrow: the articles cover literatures in English, French, Spanish, and German, with a single, token nod to Russian (Chekhov). Yet, bizarrely, the geographical understanding of European literature has been broadened to include American and Australian authors: two of the three figures discussed by Chambers are the American writer, poet, and art critic Frank O’Hara and the Australian poet John Forbes, while Henry James is the focus of Ian F. A. Bell’s contribution (although James did become a British citizen shortly before his death). Despite these limitations, the book offers a wide-ranging chronological perspective on literary digressions from the Spanish Golden Age up to the present era. It deals largely with the most well-known of digressionists — Cervantes, Sterne, Proust, Beckett, and Calvino, for example — and some of the contributions on these canonical names are refreshing. Jeremy Robbins chooses Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, rather than the more obvious Don Quijote, to explore how Cervantes used digression to draw a comparison between the unpredictable trajectories of narratives and of life. Samuel Frederick moves away from the canon to present an inventive and thorough exposition of how Robert Walser’s ‘story-stealing’ practice sets forth a new type of narrativity stemming from the ‘dialectical interaction’ of plot and digression (p. 141). Equally, chapters on more contemporary authors such as Flann O’Brien and W. G. Sebald are theoretically well grounded and carefully argued. Articles like these do much to support a volume that, in some other respects, appears to have been rather hastily put together. A number of the contributions would have benefited from greater care with regard to structure, presentation, and English expression, while the extensive footnotes in some articles (despite the author–date referencing system) can distract from the principal points being argued. And some readings could usefully be taken much further: for example, Judith Hawley’s argument that digression in the seventeenth century is linked to femininity invites much greater development in relation to Sterne’s work and beyond. In spite of certain editorial shortcomings, the somewhat variable quality of the contributions, and the restricted range of writers and literatures represented, the volume contains some fascinating new perspectives on the function of digressivity in literature. It is certainly a welcome resource for scholars working in the field of narratology, and should open the way for further academic exploration of the topic.