Occasional Prose (17 page)

Cervantes, often cited as the inventor of the novel, had a wonderful understanding of every form of narrative and exemplified it in
Don Quixote
. That he appreciated the effect of counting, of simple accumulation, so profoundly rooted in the tale is shown in Chapter 20 of Part One, where the knight orders Sancho Panza to tell him a tale to help them both pass a wakeful night in the outdoors. Sancho Panza obliges, bidding his master, as the condition of his story-telling, that he keep mum and not interrupt.

“I say then,” recounts Sancho, “that in a village of Estremadura there was once a goatish shepherd (I mean that he tended goats), and this shepherd, or goatherd, as my story goes, was called Lope Ruiz, and this Lope Ruiz fell in love with a shepherdess, who was called Torralba, which shepherdess called Torralba was the daughter of a rich flock master, and this rich flock master—” “If you tell your story, Sancho, that way,” interrupts Don Quixote, “and repeat everything you have to say twice over, you will not finish in two days.” “My way of telling it,” replies Sancho, “is the way they tell all stories in my country, and I don’t know any other way of telling it.” “Tell it as you please then,” answers Don Quixote, “and since it is Fate’s will that I can’t help listening, go on.”

Thereupon Sancho continues his story, till he gets the goatherd to the bank of a river (duly named) with his flock of goats, which he wants to take across. But, instead of a ferry, he can find only one fisherman, with a boat so small that it will hold only a man and a goat. “All the same,” says Sancho Panza, “he spoke to him and arranged with him to carry himself and his three hundred goats across. The fisherman got into the boat and carried one goat across, returned and carried another, and came back again and carried over another—Now keep an account, sir, of the goats the fisherman is carrying over, for if one should slip from your memory, the story will end and it will be impossible for me to tell you another word of it. I’ll go on, then, and say that the landing place on the other side was very muddy and slippery, which delayed the fisherman a good deal on his ferrying back and forth; all the same he came back for another goat, and another, and another—”

“Reckon that he has ferried them all over,” interrupts Don Quixote, “and stop coming and going in that manner or you will not finish getting them over in a year.” “How many have gone over so far?” inquires Sancho. “How the devil do I know?” says Don Quixote. “There you are!” comments Sancho. “Didn’t I tell you to keep a good count? Well, the tale is ended, thanks be to God, for there’s no use in going any further.” There in fact the tale ends. Like somebody in a fairy story, Don Quixote, heedless of Sancho’s warning, has broken a spell. It is like the legend of Cupid and Psyche. As Sancho remarks, philosophically, “As far as my tale is concerned there’s nothing more to add, for it ends where the mistake in the counting of the goats begins.” In short, being a true tale, it is endless and can only be stopped.

Don Quixote, needless to say, is a reader of romances—a higher class of narrative. The romance is to the tale as Don Quixote is to Sancho Panza. His impatience with Sancho’s patient adding of one goat to another is a literary criticism: he misses the foreshortening (“Reckon that he has ferried them all over”) familiar to him in his beloved romances of chivalry. In this sharp difference of tastes, Cervantes himself does not take sides. Don Quixote, after all, addled reader of romances, and Sancho Panza, methodical teller of primitive tales, are both characters in still another literary genre—the newborn novel. And in one sense, certainly this
Don Quixote
, ancestor of a whole new tribe of fictions, is something more than a “straight” fiction. It is an extended piece of technical commentary, studded like a ham with piquant samples of every known type of literary composition. Such various-ness and amplitude are characteristic of the novel. You will not find the like in tales or even in romances, despite their habit, or vice, of digression.

Both the tale and the romance deal with the marvelous, with faraway, fabled lands (“Heart of Darkness,”
Invisible Cities
), with forests, jungle (
Green Mansions
), remote, barely navigable rivers, and especially islands (
Robinson Crusoe
,
The Swiss Family Robinson
,
Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique
,
Lord of the Flies
), desert by preference. Both are close relations of the literature of voyages and exploration (Hakluyt,
The Oregon Trail
,
Two Years Before the Mast
,
The Green Hills of Africa
), and it may be hard to separate, within a single author, e.g., the Melville of
Typee
, travel report from Polynesian romance.

The tale’s distance from its listeners, when not geographical, may be an effect of inhabitual weather: tempests, floods, extremes of heat or cold. Poe’s “Descent into the Maelstrom,” an almost clinical description of the sucking motion of a giant whirlpool, is a classic account of the malevolence that natural forces when irritable seem to possess. But the necromancy practiced on an ordinary and familiar environment can produce an effect of strangeness to a frightening degree. Whereas romances are rarely fearsome, even when teeming with dragons, tales quite often are. The fear that must underlie even our most cordial relation with the elements has an established place in them. I think of “Rock Crystal” (“
Bergkristalle
”) in the wonderful collection
Colored Stones
(
Bunte Steine, 1853
) of the Austrian Adalbert Stifter; it tells of two children, brother and sister, lost in a mountain snowstorm at Christmas-time while returning from a custom-honored three-hour walk to their grandmother’s house down the valley. The quite ordinary and familiar two-horned alp traversed by the shoemaker’s children becomes a mountain more magic than any of Thomas Mann’s imagining.

All the tales of
Colored Stones
have minerals for titles—“Granite,” “Chalkstone,” “Tourmaline”—and the central fable in each has to do with the rescue of children from some menace jutting out of the everyday—the folkish model, I suppose, would be “Hansel and Gretel.” Yet even in his longer works, which are not so deep in enigmatic Nature, Stifter has the faculty of “making it strange.” His long novel or tale or romance—I hardly know what to call
Der Nachsommer
, the book every German-speaker remembers from schooldays—centers on a fairy-tale house behind a trellised gate,
das Rosenhaus
, every inch covered with roses, as though it were made of petals; there is a bird-feeding station at every window and, inside the simple and practical but delectably wealthy dwelling, are a great marble staircase, to mount which one must don felt slippers, a marble hall, a sculpture gallery, a picture gallery, a scholar’s library, inlaid furniture of rare and curious woods, a collection of musical instruments, drawers upon drawers of prints and drawings. Attached to the estate are farm buildings, dairies, a cabinet-making shop, a grotto, cold frames, hothouses, watering devices; the whole ingenious paradise, which runs like a Swiss watch, has proceeded from the brain of a mysterious, white-haired, plainly dressed owner whose aristocratic name we do not learn till we are more than halfway through the story.

Like a novel, it has a young narrator who doubles as hero and like a novel it is compendious and extremely instructive, giving lessons in mineralogy, gem-cutting, castle restoration, furniture restoration, church architecture, soil irrigation, agronomy, ornithology, meteorology, botany, landscape architecture, the growing of cactuses in greenhouses, in particular the
Cereus Peruvianus
—I cannot begin to tell you everything that is in that book. Like a romance, it has high-born characters (with the exception of the “I” and his friends) and the complications, misunderstandings, false-seemings, endless journeying typical of the genre.

What decides me, finally, that it must be a tale (yes, a protracted fairy-tale) are the relatively low birth of the hero (“Mein Vater war ein Kaufmann” is the first sentence, and “die Mutter,” he is quick to tell us, “war eine freundliche Frau”) and the fact that despite his adventures in learning to know the world and every single thing in it, he is never an active agent, as the hero of a novel or a romance should be, but even in love always passive, docile, wondering, wonder-struck, like someone in a dream. It has a queer, troubling likeness to a
Bildungsroman
in that the hero, whose full name we never know, is constantly
acquiring
—as is proper maybe for a merchant’s son—knowledge that is sensed as tangible property while he himself, like a Tom Thumb, does not grow or age.

The novel is set in society, whether of country folk, thieves, or worldlings. The tale is set in Nature or the crannies of History; the romance is set in a Nowhere, without a capital city or foundation myth but generally endowed with a name, be it Graustark or Amazonia. A novel, with all due allowances, lays claim to being true; that is why plausibility is one of the main criteria by which its events and characters are judged. In the tale (as I have indicated) the presence of a living narrator is proof of veraciousness, as though the fellow appeared before a notary public (“Before me personally came ...”) to affirm that in some far-off place or time such-and-such events happened, wonderful as it may seem. While the reverse of veraciousness
and
of plausibility is the romance’s stock in trade.

Emma
is believable;
Middlemarch
is believable—there were and still are quantities of Lydgates and Rosamonds and a fair share of Mr. Casaubons.
Madame Bovary
is believable. All of Balzac is believable; no oath is needed to certify that things like those described happen with due regularity. You can say that of any true novel. It
reminds
you of what you know.
Anna Karenina
, they say, originated in the suicide of a lady who lived near the Tolstoys; several smart social arbiters, we learn, “sat” to Proust for the Duchess of Guermantes. But the force of a tale derives from the sense that it is scarcely believable but true, both at once. Very different from the sensations of the reader of a novel: you are willing to credit it because someone who was there—a fictional someone—is telling you.

That is the situation with
Wuthering Heights
, a highly improbable story. So much so that it needs
two
narrators to convince us: Mr. Lockwood, the new tenant of a nearby house, succeeded by his housekeeper, Nelly Dean, who in her youth was in service at Wuthering Heights. If a non-participating narrator is a fairly sure sign that the story we are reading is a tale, the multiplication of such narrators suggests that something “smells fishy” in the whole case, perhaps because of an uncertainty of genre. Moreover, there can be two different sorts of first-person narrator in one and the same book. For example,
Lolita
, which purports to be a “found” manuscript, is introduced by Narrator A, who explains that he has merely edited a text written in prison by a certain Humbert Humbert (Narrator B) shortly before his trial. This framing device lets the reader know in advance how the story will end, with its teller’s death. An unromantic, even anti-romantic piece of information that informs us, also, that we are on the frontier of novel-land.

To repeat, a romance is improbable on the face of it. Nobody but Don Quixote would confuse romances with real life. Look at “romance,” sense 3, in the big Oxford dictionary: “A fictitious narrative in prose of which the scene and incidents are very remote from those of ordinary life;
esp.
one of the class prevalent in the 16th and 17th centuries, in which the story is often overlaid with long disquisitions and digressions.” By its very nature, the romance is unhistorical, the antithesis of recorded history. Sidney’s
Arcadia
, written for the entertainment of the Countess of Pembroke, his sister, is a good example in English of the genre: the king of Arcady, Basilius, has two shepherdess daughters, Pamela and Philoclea, who enlace destinies with two shipwrecked princes to engender a typical vine-like, branching plot, which has no more to do with the annals of antiquity than the decorative patterns of twining garlands and vegetable motifs on a pillar of the day.

Curiously enough, this is not the case with the tale, which is embedded in history like ore in a mountain fissure. In his beautiful essay “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin speaks of a tale by Johann Peter Hebel that tells of a young miner entombed in the bottom of his tunnel on the eve of his wedding. The bride never marries, and one day many years later, when she has turned into a wizened old woman, a body is brought up from the abandoned tunnel that she recognizes as her betrothed, preserved by the action of iron vitriol from the normal processes of decay. To show how Hebel was able to make graphic the lapse of a long period of years, Benjamin quotes the following sentences.

In the meantime the city of Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake, and the Seven Years’ War came and went, and Emperor Francis I died, and the Jesuit Order was abolished, and Poland was partitioned, and Empress Maria Theresa died, and Struensee was executed. America became independent, and the united French and Spanish forces were unable to capture Gibraltar. The Turks locked up General Stein in the Veteraner Cave in Hungary, and Emperor Joseph died also. King Gustavus of Sweden conquered Russian Finland, and the French Revolution and the long war began, and Emperor Leopold II went to his grave too. Napoleon captured Prussia, and the English bombarded Copenhagen, and the peasants sowed and harvested. The millers ground, the smiths hammered, and the miners dug for veins of ore in their underground workshops. But when in 1809 the miners at Falun ...

And, speaking in his own voice, Benjamin adds:

Never has a storyteller embedded his report deeper in natural history than Hebel manages to do in this chronology. Read it carefully. Death appears in it with the same regularity as the Reaper does in the processions that pass around the cathedral clock at noon.