The Adventurer and/or Hero: Paul Zweig's The Adventurer

Since the emergence of the "realistic" novel in the eighteenth century, the adventure-romance has lived under a shadow, relegated by serious readers to the "lesser realms" of popular literature and entertainment for the young. So those of us who believe that adventure and romance have something to offer—beyond the guilty experience of escape from the "real" world—welcome efforts by writers and scholars to give these suspect genres the respect they deserve. We recall that Robert Louis Stevenson and Andrew Lang wrote spirited defenses of the adventure story, and major authors like Conrad and Malraux brought the weight of their achievements to enhance the dignity of the adventure-romance as an art form. More recently, there have been serious studies by major scholars such as, to choose just three, Robert Kiely's Robert Louis Stevenson and the Fiction of Adventure (Harvard, 1965), Northrop Frye's The Secular Scripture, A Study of the Structure of Romance (Harvard, 1976), and the work under consideration here, Paul Zwieg's The Adventurer.

In the opening pages of his book, Northrop Frye relates his discovery that the eminent critic R. P. Blackmur was a closet-romantic, given to the surreptitious reading of Sir Walter Scott—a weakness to which Frye also happily confesses. He defends his own abiding and recurrent interest in romance in terms that Zweig also applies to the adventure story: they are the oldest, most widespread of literary forms, and the clearest expression of fundamental human experiences and values. According to Zweig in The Adventurer, these stories, which feature heroes "who venture into myth-countries at the risk of their lives, and bring back tales of the worlds beyond men, bind together the fragile island of human needs and relationships by offering the possibility that mere men can survive the storms of the demonic world." Zweig deplores the fact that the modern world has misunderstood and dismissed what earlier cultures considered to be their highest form of expression: the hero's story of his adventures.

The Adventurer, is itself an adventure to read. Zweig's engaging style carries the reader on an enriching literary excursion from Gilgamesh and Odysseus through Aeneas, Beowulf, Dante, Quixote, Crusoe, the Gothic novel, Melville, Conrad, Malraux, and even Jean Genet; and what he has to say about these major figures is applicable to all literatures at all times, and on all levels. While Zweig does not speak of children's literature per se, he provides a historical and cultural history that illuminates the development of that literature; his discussion of the emergence of popular literature, of the traditions of the Hero and the Adventurer—and the distinction between the two types—has much to tell us about the forms and characterizations of children's adventure stories and society's response to them. Each reader of this book who is interested in children's literature will of course make his own application of Zweig's commentary to authors and works of his own choosing. In reading Zweig on Quixote, I personally think of Mark Twain; when he discusses Melville, I recall certain aspects of Marryat; and his remarks on Conrad's Marlow cast light on Jesse Bollier in The Slave Dancer. Reading his depiction of the nineteenth-century Adventurer, I call to mind Haggard's Alan Quatermain, the young English paragons of The Coral Island, Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver, Huck Finn, the Master of Ballantrae, even Toad of Toad Hall and the dauntless Abel of Abel's Island. And I speculate as to whether they are indeed Heroes—or are they Adventurers?

Before revealing to us that useful feature of his study—the distinction between the Hero and the Adventurer—Zweig covers considerable ground which, while familiar, is always viewed from his fresh and, to my mind, exciting perspective. For example, I found myself reconsidering the relationship between Odysseus and Aeneas, as heroes and adventurers, and Gilgamesh, about whom I knew very little; and I found illuminating his review of the medieval...