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PARTISAN REVIEW
Multi-track-in
which there are two such lines, or many.
The one or many lives may be present all the time in every
chapter, or else the author may use what I call the
switch,
mmor or
major.
Minor-when
the chapters in which the major life or lives are
actively present but alternate with chapters in which minor charac–
ters discuss those main lives.
Major-when
in multi-track novels the author switches com–
pletely from the account of one life to the account of another, then
back again. The many lives may be kept apart for long stretches, but
one of the features of the multi-track novel as a literary form is that
the many lives are bound to come into contact at this or that point.
Madame Bovary,
for instance, is a one-track novel, with hardly
any switches.
Anna Karenin
is a multi-track novel with major
switches. What is
Don Quixote?
I should call it a one-and-a-half-track
novel, with a few switches. Knight and squire are really one, and
anyway the squire only plays up to his master; however, at a certain
point in the Second Part they get separated. The switches are very
crude, as the author shuttles self-consciously between Sancho's
island and Don Quixote's castle, and it is a positive relief to every–
body concerned-author, characters, and reader-when the two get
together again and revert to their natural knight-and-squire combi–
nation.
From another point of view directed at questions of matter
rather than manner, modern novels can be divided into such types as
family novels, psychological novels (which are often written in the
first person), mystery novels, and so on. Major works are generally
a combination of various such types. Anyway, we should try not to
be too pedantic in this. The whole thing may become extremely bor–
ing and the question of type really loses all interest when we are
forced to tackle pretentious works of little or no artistic value, or on
the other hand, to try to cram a stuffed eagle of a masterpiece into a
pigeonhole.
Don Quixote
belongs to a very early, very primitive type of novel.
It
is closely allied to the picaresque novel-from
picaro,
meaning
rogue in Spanish-a type of story as old as the vineclad hills, which
has a slyboots, a bum, a quack, or any more or less droll adventurer
for hero. And this hero pursues a more or less antisocial or asocial
