BOOKS
469
ALL NOVELS
SABBATICAL: A ROMANCE. By John Barth. G. P. Putnam's Sons.
$14.95.
About half of the world's great novels set out to do one
thing. Jane Austen never seeks to make
Emma
anything but a
classic novel of manners. And no matter how diverse the sources
of Austen's imagination and how vexed the morals of her novel,
Emma
is a lways just that-a classic novel, not an aspiring epic,
not a romance.
Fere Coriot
is a novel, melodramatic perhaps but
a novel, not another thing. And Forster, in
Howard's End,
is
working the territory laid out by two centuries of ancestors, and
although the cu lture is a ltered, the generic imperatives are not.
The' other half of the world's great novels set out to be a ll
books-not intentionally perhaps but along the way.
Don
Quixote,
by common consent, sets out to be anti romance.
Dreaming the impossible dream, that crazy hidalgo turns the
book into romance. The Engli sh eighteenth century thought it
nonstop farce, and in a sense it is. Praised by Auerbach and others
before and since for its fidelity to the texture of seventeenth -century
Spanish dailiness, the book seems to be a novel.
It
has been de–
scribed, more than a few times, as an epic. Robert Al ter surprises
no one by placing it at the origins of the reflexive tradition, a
long and brilliant body of books about books. And to an influen–
tial group of Hispanists, it is no prose fiction at all but a sacred
text.
Tom]ones
is a ll hooks. It provides information, then suckers
the readers into pseudo-information. It draws upon the heritage
of Western man at once for support and mockery.
It
promises
epic and delivers a lehouses, whi le remaining in some quite
p lausible sense, epic.
It
promises no illusions and it presents
none, whi le giving us bastard turned gentleman, love conquering
all.
Ulysses
is the culmination of the impulse to make not a novel
but an excursion through the infinite possibilities of prose fiction:
everything, the panoramic and the private life, the solipsistic
and the communal, the verba li stic and the representational, the
red and the black, the agony and the ecstasy, love and death, war
and peace.
