Memory, Interiority and Historicity: Some Factors in the Early Novel

Abstract

How did the novel begin, and how does it differ from earlier literary genres? From a material perspective, novels as written texts — and usually as printed books — are sharply distinguished from the oral delivery of the storyteller. There is universal agreement that the novel was a late arrival on the literary map and that prose fiction’s growing dominance over other genres is unprecedented in pre-modern cultures.² Numerous accounts have tied the novel’s emergence to the invention and spread of printing. Walter J. Ong, for example, claimed in Orality and Literacy (1982) that ‘the print world gave birth to the novel’,³ and Don Quixote, in what feels like an epoch-making moment, visits the printing shop where the story of his adventures is already being manufactured. Yet there were novels before printing. Ancient Greek drama was, as Ong also remarks, ‘the first western verbal art form to be fully controlled by writing’ (148) but novels may have come a close second. Were the ancient novels written for silent reading, as modern novels are, or were they scripts for recitation? Cervantes in his prologue specifies a single, solitary ‘idle reader’ (desocupado lector), whom he addresses familiarly as ‘tú’. Some fifteen hundred years earlier, Apuleius in The Golden Ass (c. ad 100) also addresses the reader in a prologue: ‘Reader, pay attention, and you will enjoy this’ (Lector intende: laetaberis).

Idle reader, you can believe without any oath of mine that I would wish this book, as the child of my brain, to be the most beautiful, the liveliest and the cleverest imaginable.

(Cervantes, Prologue to Don Quixote, 1605)¹