The Novel’s High Road

The novel is an idealist genre. In Thomas Pavel’s eloquent and generous book, the history of the novel is a discussion about the shape, and the possibility, of the ideal human life. The realist novel is part of this history, but for Pavel, realism is neither the genre’s defining formal trait nor its only historical tendency. Rather, realism is one phase in a millennia-long conversation about the changing ways human greatness has been understood and depicted—and questioned and challenged—that takes place through, and as, the history of the novel. The greatest strength of this book is the catholicity of its explanations and its appreciations of an impressive breadth of novels. A loose and flexible ensemble of dynamics, centered on questions of character and plot, allows Pavel to show what the novel has been for a wide array of novelists with a wide variety of aesthetic and moral projects and rationales.

The novel is not only a modern genre. Pavel’s study participates in recent efforts to lengthen and broaden the novel’s history, which have challenged the standard account of the novel as a modern genre, indeed, the genre of modernity.¹ Pavel roots his book in Georg Lukács’s account of the novel’s “concept,” the way it represents the world, and the way it develops through the stages of abstract idealism (Don Quixote), romantic disillusionment (Oblomov), and reconciliation (Wilhelm Meister)—a very abstract, foreshortened, and unchronological account of the novel’s trajectory, as Pavel notes. So while adopting Lukács’s insight about the basis of the novel in the struggle of homeless individuals in a hostile world, Pavel offers a broader historical analysis of various relationships between people and worlds over a much longer time frame and in relation to a wider set of cultural, aesthetic, and formal concepts. Pavel’s story centers on a long-term debate between idealist and anti-idealist accounts of human behavior, a debate that informs the entire history of the genre, though its terms change over time. With the development of a more plausible idealism in the eighteenth century and a historicized understanding of the individual’s place in world in the nineteenth, the locus of individual integrity changes from strong souls to sensitive hearts, and then to enigmatic psyches.

Pavel is perhaps best known for his work on the semantics of fiction and his adaptation of the theory of “possible worlds” for the study of narrative. As was the case with his indispensable Fictional Worlds (1986), Pavel again focuses on content: “Novels propose substantial hypotheses about human life and imagine fictional worlds governed by them” (17). For Pavel, the novel is first and foremost a genre of story, and he emphasizes character and plot to a degree that is both refreshing and instructive. The first part of the book presents the “confederation of genres” that organized the first millennium and a half of the novel’s history. Pavel is superb at reading with the grain, presenting the range of problems and pleasures of these works in their own terms. His first stop is Heliodorus’s Ethiopian Story, the summative masterpiece that capped two centuries of classical narrative experiment, and then provoked two centuries of further experimentation when it was rediscovered by European humanists in the sixteenth century. (Pavel does not play the game of “secret histories,” but if one were to do so, there is no work that, in its historical trajectory and influence, offers a better example of the novel’s history: a late classical fruit that becomes a modern seed.) Ancient Greek novels present idealized characters struggling against a hostile fortune. In contrast to earlier epic heroes, they are not defined by hearth and kin, nor are they sponsored by friendly divinities. Rather, Heliodorus’s adventuring lovers Chariclea and Theagenes are defined by a double removal from both social and divine ties. What characterizes them instead is what Pavel strikingly calls an alliance between a hidden space within, and a silent Providence above (33...