Novel's Empirical World, The

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 2007 by Price, Leah

FRANCO MORETTI, ED., The Novel, Volume I: History, Geography, and Culture (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006), pp. 928, cloth, $125.00, paper, $35.00.

FRANCO MORETTI, ED., The Novel, Volume II: Forms and Themes (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006), pp. 960, cloth, $125.00, paper, $35.00.

Edited volumes are not usually known for their daring. Franco Moretti's crazily and characteristically ambitious undertaking breaks that and many other rules; its own form reminds us that fiction has always lived off of compilation, abridgment and trans-national circulation. Translated, abridged, and reshuffled, the two English-language volumes into which the five Italian volumes published in 2001-03 have now been squeezed remain kaleidoscopic: a multi-authored assemblage of narratological, bibliometric, intellectualhistorical, and literary-theoretical analyses of the novel's status at a dizzying range of times and places, punctuated by forays into film, short stories, and verse romances.

What structures this loose, baggy collection? Like a good novel, it tries to reconcile interiority with the social. The first volume, History, Geography, and Culture, approaches its object from the outside; the second, Forms and Themes, from the inside. Its organization thus mimics what one contributor calls the classical Chinese novel's negotiation "between the inner core of subjectivity and the changing objective circumstances of the external world" (210). The table of contents provides the literary-critical equivalent of a fantasy football league, with an array of fiction-writers and essayists thrown in for good measure. (Women figure more often as translators than as authors, with the exception of one section on "The Sacrifice of the Heroine.") Some of the chapters abridge important recent or forthcoming critical monographs; others provide surveys of national literatures or introductions to little-known texts. No reader will come away from these volumes without a long list of novels they now want to read-novels, in many cases, well-known within their own linguistic or national tradition but unfamiliar outside of it.

In other ways, the identity of that implied reader remains hazy. He or she is multilingual but needs Western analogies to make sense of Asian examples; long paragraphs are quoted in French, German and Spanish without any translation, but the Canterbury Tales are given in a modern English version. The frame of reference is implicitly European (with the nineteenth-century French, British, and Russian novel providing terms of comparison for other times and places), but the publishing history of these volumes complicates that model: radically compressed for the US edition, the Italian original will be translated in full in Brazil and South Korea. Like the texts described in Eileen Julien's chapter on "The Extroverted African Novel," this is criticism for export.

Inevitably, something gets lost in translation. The illustrations disappear; so does Mario Barenghi's fine piece on generic manifestoes, accompanied by a capsule anthology of early modern prefaces and essays on the novel- one of the many ideas in this book that have been carried out within national literatures but never across them. By cherry-picking individual chapters, the abridgment saps the structural elegance of the original volumes. The Italian version is bookended between an introductory chapter that asks whether modernity would be thinkable without the novel and a closing chapter that asks whether the novel would be thinkable without modernity; not so the English. Recombination opens up new connections absent from the original, however: in this iteration, for example, Philip Fisher's essay on Ulysses and the city serves as a gateway to a series of shorter essays on novels devoted to particular cities. Similarly, the English version cuts the Italian final volume consisting of "readings"-a reminder that all grand narratives must end with particulars-but concludes instead with a short series on twentieth-century texts called "A Century of Experiments," as if to emphasize that the novel remains a living form.

What remains? An almost Dickensian array of storylines-so many, in fact, that if s hard to mourn those that are gone. The cover illustration of Don Quixote announces Moretti's cervantine model: perspectival in its structure, each volume opens up dialogues between different accounts of single events. Magical realism appears first in the context of a discussion of Latin American fiction but resurfaces in a chapter on Africa; fictionality is discussed by way of Robinson Crusoe in Volume 1 and of Lazarillo de Termes in Volume 2. As in the Quixote, too, those debates turn on semantics: like Sancho and his master arguing about whether the object full of curds counts as a "basin" or a "helmet," the chapters in Volume 1 trace the balance of power between "romance" and "novel" - in eighteenth-century Britain, in nineteenth-century India, in twentieth-century Nigeria. In the antebellum US, we learn that even subtitles give no reliable index to the shifting relation of "novel," "romance," "tale," "sketch," and so on (456). John Austin's chapter thus widens its brief from "novel" to "fiction," situating the former within and against a larger field in which compilations, anthologies, and annuals jostle for space (459).