Romance after Critique

A postcritical eighteenth century might be an eighteenth century without the novel, or at least with the novel put in its place as one prose genre among several. Different genres, of course, make different demands and afford different practices of reading. To recognize that many of our default ways of reading are informed by the formal assumptions of the novel—a genre of realism, representation, and modernity—is also to recognize that there are, and were, other ways of reading, other kinds of texts, and other patterns of literary history.

Fredric Jameson observes "the history of the novel is inevitably the history of the realist novel."¹ But the history of fiction is not inevitably the history of the novel. Jameson has defined the "ideal of realism" as "a narrative discourse which in one form or another unites the experience of daily life with a properly cognitive, mapping, or well-nigh scientific perspective."² I'm interested in what comes into focus if we discard the category of the novel, with its mapping of ordinary experience, and consider modes of fiction that operate outside those exigencies. What becomes visible if we reject the seemingly automatic assumptions that the novel is what modern prose fiction is and the tendency and telos of literary history? For Georg Lukács, the novel is the indigenous genre of modernity, "the form of mature virility" by which we moderns comprehend ourselves as modern, estranged from the immanence of traditional meaning but compensated by an enlightened, demystified understanding and what Michael McKeon characterizes as the "negative freedom of autonomous self-recognition."³ But do we only read for these brave, manly, and heroic exigencies? I want to suggest that the category of the novel, with its focus on realism, mapping, and modernity, is not adequate for all fiction—and not even in the modern world. I pose four intertwined questions. What is fiction without the novel? What is literary history without the novel? What is reading without the novel? What other forms might we recognize, and what other demands, pleasures, and practices of reading might emerge by sidelining the novel?

Fiction without the novel is romance, a modality of story less concerned with rendering ordinary life or serving a useful moral, psychological, or political purpose than with affording experiences that are avowedly extraordinary and valuable for just that reason. Romance is also a name for anachronism and so a reminder that we are never fully modern, defined by a single time, or existing in a single timescale. Rather, we are dense overlays of evolved nature and interwoven cultures of multiple provenance, tangled roots, and manifold impurities.

Romance also names the entropy of literary history, the way forms decay but also drift, survive, and sometimes even thrive in distant and foreign worlds. Literary history without the novel is turbulent and recursive, not organized by the trajectories of modernity and progress but a record of accident, indirection, improper passion, and sometimes willful mistakes. To tell this story, we need a looser sense of history that's responsive to chance and entropy and a weaker sense of agency that's shared across local use and the subtle momentum of the forms we adopt. At the heart of such an eighteenth century might be two parables of the survival of anachronistic forms and the drift of fictions, Don Quixote and The Arabian Nights, both of which stage the problems, pleasures, and possibilities of storytelling and reading in ways that remain enormously helpful and neither of which can be even remotely accounted for in strictly national or contextual terms. Yet both of these foundational works had enormous impact on the cultures that borrowed them, adapted them, and made them their own. And they are still vibrantly entertaining and wonderful to teach to students who like, quite rightly, to read about divine fools, djinns, crossed lovers, fantasy, baroque cruelties, and all the other stuff that's bled out of the realism we piously insist is the only worthy material of literary education.

I take romance not merely as the prehistory of the novel but also its alter ego, its contemporary and complement—and...