BOOKS
463
ILLUSION AND REALITY
PARTIAL MAGIC: THE NOVEL AS A SELF-CONSCIOUS GENRE.
By Robert Alter. University of California Press. $10.00.
Johnson 's
Dictionary
defines a novel as "a small tale,
generally of love." Johnson distinguished it from the "romance," and
his practice and taste reflect even wider tolerance: his own
RasseLas
is a
philosophical Oriental tale, and he praised the epistolary novels of
Richardson, though he admitted anyone who read C
Larissa
for the plot
would hang himself in frustration. The distinction of "novel" from
"romance" became programmatic in Sir Walter Scott's practice, and
from him passed into American fiction, explicitly down
to
Melville,
implicitly beyond. Even Jane Austen, most polished practitioner of the
"novel" in Johnson 's strict sense, made the hero in
Northanger Abbey
a great reader of Gothic romances, and Austen asserted her own form
not as better, but as more suited to a certain level of English reality.
Only rather recently did the term "novel" spread imperialistically to
cover any long prose fiction. And by an unhappy paradox, some critics
shrank prose fiction to fit within the prescriptive confines of the novel,
until F. R. Leavis's disastrously narrow
The Great Tradition (1948)
could attempt to judge all English fiction by the standard of discursive
exposition in the service of providing, in Alter's phrase, "intent
verisimilar representations of moral situations in their social context."
Alter's aim in this sane and thoughtful book is to rescue the novel
from such narrow preconceptions. He intends instead
~
pluralist
approach to this "capacious" genre. Returning to Cervantes, Alter
argues that the ' novel arose in a time of doubt about the nature of
reality. Its form confronts a radical skepticism and so constantly
conducts a "critical exploration through technical manipulation of the
very form that purports to represent reality." Cervantes already shows
the full range of these "technical manipulations," among them,
doubled characters, explicit recognition that there are many possible
ways to represent reality, and fusion of criticism with creation in
parody and in comments by narrator and characters on fictional forms
and their rules. The reader does not get an illusion of reality, but
