Reading Novels

1. Starting the Analysis

15 1 Starting the Analysis Analysis of a text begins with reconsideration and re-reading. We never encounter a novel as something completely unknown or unpredictable: we come to it with pre-expectations that will constantly be adjusted as we read on. A first reading of a novel is usually an attempt to go right through the work, to gather a global sense of its qualities. But after going through the text, we need to pause, to try to gain some sense of how the text is organized. In re-reading we approach the details within the text again, this time in the light of various hypotheses. Paratext As a first step it is worth giving attention to the material that surrounds the text: the paratext.1 Paratext includes the dust-jacket, blurb, title-page, dedication, contents page, and any prefaces or appendices. There may be illustrations and epigraphs (short quotations from other texts, placed after the title-page or at the start of each chapter). More loosely connected material may also be bound in with the text, such as advertisements for other books, or advertisements for other products (often in the nineteenth century for things like quack cures and breakfast cocoa). Or there may be interviews and publicity articles that came into circulation at the same time as the text. It is easy to take all this material for granted, but the paratext sets up, in effect, an agreement, or contract of reading, between text and reader.2 Information given in the paratext helps us decide what category to place a text in, and the choice of category will affect our reading and evaluation of the text. reading novels 16 Along with the name of the publisher and the publisher’s trademark, the title-page of the first American edition of The Awkward Age (1899) gives us the following: THE AWKWARD AGE A Novel. By HENRY JAMES Author of “Washington Square” “Daisy Miller” “Picture and Text” “Terminations” “The Private Life” The wording makes clear that this text is to be read as a novel. By 1899 James had already published fifty-two books, including at least eighteen that could be described as novels. Only two out of the eighteen are chosen for mention, Washington Square and Daisy Miller: both underline, for American readers, James’s background as a fellow American. (The English edition, published in the same year, advertises him as the author of two different novels.) The wide range of James’s fiction is indicated by the mention of Terminations and The Private Life, two collections of short stories. Significantly, James is also described as the author of Picture and Text, a collection of essays on art. The contract that is set up with the reader is thus one in which The Awkward Age may be considered as the work of a “man of letters,” with American roots and a high level of general culture. The paratext prepares us for an art novel, not a work of popular fiction. The first edition of Robinson Crusoe (1719) announces the work as shown on the facing page. We now regard Robinson Crusoe as a novel, but the word novel is not used here (though it had been used for some kinds of fictional narratives as early as 1566), and there is no mention of Daniel Defoe as author. Modern editions, even when they reproduce this old title-page for interest’s sake, find it necessary to provide another title-page, where “The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe” is given as the title of the novel, and the name of Daniel Defoe is given as that of the author. It could be said that the original edition poses as a genuine memoir, and is thus a piece of impersonation (from a hostile viewpoint, a clever starting the analysis 17 fake). It is described as the “Life” of Robinson Crusoe, but it is not the full life story, since it was later to be followed by two other volumes of “Farther Adventures” and “Serious Reflections during the Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures.” Strikingly, we are given an exact and real-sounding name (Robinson Crusoe), the name of the real city he comes from (York), and his job (mariner). Yet the information given here is not entirely consistent with the text. The title-page says that Crusoe is “deliver’d by Pyrates,” while the text itself describes him as being...