Novel Groupings: The Order of Things

Novel Groupings: The Order of Things* Edward H. Friedman Arizona State University ... no matter how intense the dramatic illusion, no matter how gripping the plot or believable the characterization, if we are to enter imaginatively into a work of fiction we must at all times feel that it is fiction, that a story is being told to us. The two parts of the equation — that it be like real life, and it not be real life — are absolutely indispensable. Louis D. Rubin, Jr., The Teller in the Tale As a late-bloomer in the field of genre, the novel has traditionally made rules by breaking rules. Without the precedence or precedents of other literary forms, the novel responded to a creative rather than a re-creative impetus. Those conventions that do exist occupy no sacrosanct space in the compositional process and may be as easily ignored or contradicted as respected. As a result, the concept of intertextuality—the presence and transformation of other texts in a given work — becomes problematic, for this "presence" may manifest itself as imitation, antithesis, or absence. Because form and meaning are open in the multiperspectivist universe of the novel, analysis and classification must attempt to illuminate a text or series of texts while recognizing both the multiple possibilities and the limitations of the critical enterprise. A comparative focus juxtaposes texts to offer individual and collective insights. Although criteria for selection are by no means absolute, the method is significant for a number of reasons. Critically speaking, new approaches may provide valuable new readings of texts; metacritically speaking, these approaches This paper is a review article of the following studies: William Riggan, Picaros, Madmen, Naïfs, and Clowns: The Unreliable First-Person Narrator (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981), 206p.; Arnold Weinstein, Fictions of the Self: 1550-1800 (Princeton. Princeton University Press, 1981), 302p.; and Walter L. Reed, An Exemplary History of the Novel: The Quixotic versus the Picaresque (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), 334p. 238ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW may foster polemics that will in turn lead to greater scrutiny of the texts. Recent studies by William Riggan, Arnold Weinstein, and Walter L. Reed explore the novel as process, as a reflection of a selfcreating and constantly changing dialectic. Riggan's Picaros, Madmen, Naïfs, and Clowns "intends to make a systematic investigation into the operation of unreliable narration . . . and to analyze in some detail one specific genus of the unreliable narrator: namely, the fictional autobiographer who recounts his own life, or a portion thereof, in his own voice and in a conscious act of writing" (p. 15). Rather than projecting a new theoretical model, the introductory section presents a summary of criticism on the unreliable first-person narrator. This is acceptable, in that the study will be an application of established models as opposed to the testing of a hypothesis. Unfortunately, however, Riggan's discussion of representative novels lacks the detail of the earlier studies on which he relies almost exclusively (Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction, Bertil Romberg's Studies in the Narrative Technique ofthe First-Person Novel, and Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg's The Nature of Narrative) and ignores narrative theory of the last fifteen to twenty years. The elaboration of the four types of narrators does not, as promised in the introductory chapter, shed new light on the operation ofunreliable narration, nor does it really evolve into a system. Picaresque fiction is particularly notorious for drawing critics into a vicious circle ofinterpretation. Inclusion in or exclusion from the picaresque paradigm is often based on a set of guidelines derived from the reading and interpretation of texts. These guidelines then begin to operate as if they had preceded the texts, affecting literary status and stature and perhaps limiting critical perspective. One could question the self-defining premise that "only if the picaro himself handles the entire narrative load will the account be imbued with a unified and completely 'picaresque' point of view and thus be wholly 'picaresque' " (pp. 39-40) and challenge the authority of a borrowed definition of the picaro that ends: "Within the religious and didactic purposes of the picaresque novel, he serves as an example...