Reading Novels

Foreword

vii Foreword George Hughes’s Reading Novels is a unique piece of practical criticism, a comprehensive “poetics” of a genre that has not attracted a great deal of such attention, at least not on this level. It is a reader’s and student’s guide that reaches beyond issues of individual texts and historical traditions to essential features of the form. There are several sophisticated textbooks of this kind that deal with poetry. John Frederick Nims’s Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, published twenty-five years ago and now in its fourth edition, comes to mind as a comparable volume, both for the catholicity of its examples and the intelligence of its comments. But because of the length of individual novels, perhaps, or because of the difficulty of formalizing the conventions of a genre that is always foregrounding its departure from tradition, most books on the “rhetoric of fiction,” the “nature of narrative” or “structuralist poetics” that have broken important ground in the last half-century have been aimed at a scholarly, professorial audience, not at a readership of students, teachers of introductory courses, and that endangered species, the general reader. All of these more common readers stand to benefit greatly from this new book. At the same time, Hughes’s engagement with a wide range of French structuralist studies of the novel, of narrative, and of language in general reading novels viii makes Reading Novels a book that ought to be informative and valuable to many American scholars as well, especially those who teach English and American literature, since this kind of criticism, once fashionable, seems no longer to be widely read in this country. A great virtue of Hughes’s approach is the way it navigates between traditional formalist approaches and postmodern theoretical ones. There was a time, it is true, when the kind of structural analysis of the novel offered here was regarded as shockingly new, unpleasantly scientistic, and decidedly foreign, but from the perspective of a new century (and from the tactful, matter-of-fact way in which Hughes is able to advance structuralist terms and techniques), it now seems eminently sane and practical, reassuringly empirical in its concern not with politics or ideologies lurking behind the text but with the way novels construct themselves as systems of significance, with the way readers can make sense of the subtleties and particularities of meaning that this centuries-old European literary art form has always been capable of conveying. The influence of Ian Watt’s classic study The Rise of the Novel is still strong in English studies, but it has not led to the kind of classroom-level presentation that, say, Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry provided for the New Criticism of lyric poetry a generation or two earlier. Hughes brings a wide historical range of reference, a strategic preference for English and American examples in his sample passages, and a sophisticated French (and Italian) analytic perspective to bear on the novel that will be particularly welcome to teachers seeking to introduce their students to a genre that has gone well beyond its rise to literary respectability in eighteenth-century England. Reading Novels is practical and basic in its presentation, but it is never condescending. It assumes an intelligence and curiosity on the part of its audience that, as a long-time teacher of prose fiction, I find to be quite common among my own students. But it does not assume a great deal of experience in reading novels, in perceiving the devices and decoding their significance in print narratives hundreds of pages in length. This also corresponds to my experience as a teacher, especially in the last decade. With the competition of other media so strong and insistent, few students I encounter now have spent years reading for pleasure, for escape from boredom , or for general self-improvement, as was still common a generation ago among those arriving on college campuses. Students today are perfectly intelligent and academically ambitious, but they lack the literary competence, as Jonathan Culler has termed it, that comes with long experience in novel reading. They present new challenges to teachers, and it foreword ix seems to me that many teachers will see a valuable ally in George Hughes. He stands in a gap that many of us have long felt, providing a working vocabulary for focusing students’ attention on ways of reading that used to go unrecognized...