The Novel

by Steven Moore

  A good example of the kind of sophisticated novel Boyle’s was up against is Clitie (1688) by Richard Blackbourn, who died just before it was published, according to the preface by Nahum Tate. In Salzman’s opinion, “Clitie is perhaps the closest English novel to La Princesse de Montpensier and La Princesse de Clèves written at this time” (328). Like Lafayette’s most famous novel, it concerns a young girl (only 13 in this case) who gradually realizes she is surrounded by malicious people and becomes “possessed with a mortal hatred against mankind in general” (82) and yearns to leave it all behind. No sooner is she released into the shark tank of the court of Louis XIV than she becomes the victim of spiteful gossip by court ladies and the object of amorous attention by two aristocrats, decent Darbelle and caddish Amasis. The former kills the latter for boasting he’s enjoyed Clitie’s favors (she has been lukewarm at best toward both of them), and flees the king’s wrath to Italy, which endears him to our heroine. A prince named Lysidor, reminiscent of Lafayette’s Nemours, begins aggressively courting Clitie to her annoyance as she and Darbelle continue to exchange loving letters, but Lysidor buys off her maid Mariana, who steals their mail and spreads rumors that Darbelle has married an Italian woman, and later that he has died. Believing this lie, worn down by the persistent prince, Clitie reluctantly marries Lysidor but is haunted at a ball by Darbelle disguised as a ghost, who has returned to find out what’s wrong. They realize they have been victims of foul play, and then face further machinations as the prince and Mariana try to do away with Darbelle and further confuse Clitie, but eventually all is revealed and the novel ends with the king and Clitie’s father giving the reunited couple their blessings.

  Like The Princess de Clèves, Clitie alternates between outer actions and inner thoughts, another example of the shift toward interiority in some other novels of the period. The narrator often allows us to eavesdrop on his characters as they struggle to make sense of what’s happening: “Darbelle knew not what construction to make of her silence. Sometimes he would suspect that she was changed, and false; sometimes that she was either dead, or extremely sick; for he thought certainly were she not dead, or false, it could not be but she would have writ to him; again, he found that the last letters she sent were in a style most soft and kind . . . that he could not apprehend that she who made such a show to him, as Clitie did, could so soon fall from one extreme to another. All these things rendered him in a perplexing incertitude” (71–72). In realistic contrast to the absolute certainty enjoyed by religious fanatics like Boyle’s Theodora, Darbelle and Clitie live in “perplexing incertitude,” and we tap into her mind as well:

  She entered into a deep musing, so that she seemed immovable; she leaned against one of the sides of the theatre, ruminating of a thousand things one after another, and knew not what she should believe. Mariana’s brother had [falsely reported he had] seen Darbelle married, and La Rock [Darbelle’s valet] swears he never was, but that he had always loved her most tenderly; she considered that Mariana’s brother’s assertions were the foundations why she herself had married, which was the occasion of Darbelle’s death, after she had been the cause of his misfortunes. Calling to mind all the afflicting adventures, she could not refrain from pouring down floods of tears and giving herself up to an excess of sorrow which had took possession of her heart. (146)

  Critic Maximillian Novak singles out this scene as an example of a newish narrative technique that Blackbourn didn’t sufficiently exploit: “There is a moment in Clitie in which the heroine is at the theatre watching a play. We see nothing of the play but rather learn what is passing in her heart. These internal reflections do not last very long, but for that time we might be at the theater with Catherine Morland in Austen’s Northanger Abbey” (130). This isn’t quite accurate—Clitie is not watching a play but waiting for it to begin—but it correctly praises Blackbourn for moving toward interior monologue.

  The concluding section of the short novel is louder and more melodramatic, departing from the “soft manner” (198) of the first two-thirds, and like Clitie herself, Clitie may have been the victim of foul play. Salzman wonders if “Blackbourn lost his nerve, or perhaps he did not even write the final part, which is headed ‘The third and last Part, being an addition to the two first Parts’ ” (326). I suspect Nahum Tate, who was responsible for publishing this after the author’s death: he was notorious for rewriting Elizabethan plays, giving King Lear a happy ending, for example. The narrative arc suggests a darker conclusion, as in The Princess de Clèves, than we have here. At any rate, Clitie successfully updates traditional romantic motifs with more modern epistemological concerns and psychological introspection.

  The big book came back with a bang in 1691 with the publication of a 3-volume, 450-page novel entitled A Voyage round the World; or, a Pocket Library . . . which contains the Rare Adventures of Don Kainophilus . . . The whole work intermixed with essays historical, moral and divine, and all other kinds of learning. This was the brainchild of bookseller/editor/publisher John Dunton (1659–1733), who wanted to offer his customers something novel, and the result is an eccentric novel that influenced more famous eccentric novels like A Tale of a Tub and Tristram Shandy (both Swift and Sterne grudgingly acknowledged reading it) and set a new standard for autobiographical fiction. In essence, it’s a lightly fictionalized account of Dunton’s early life: his birth in Grafham in 1659, the son of three generations of clergymen; his mother’s early death; his schooldays, during which it became obvious to his father that he wasn’t suited for the ministry; and then his apprenticeship to a London bookseller at age 15. The third volume ends when the narrator is 23 and ready to open his own bookstore. Dunton had planned to continue the story up until age 30 (when he began writing it), but the reading public’s indifference to his experiment in autobiography caused him to abandon the 24-volume project.

  Dunton’s Voyage is utterly unlike any autobiographical novel written before it. Though narrated in the first person, it alternates between two narrative personae, almost in Jekyll-and-Hyde fashion. Dunton calls himself John Evander, alias Don Kainophilus, which means a lover of novelty. Insisting that he is not Evander/Kainophilus while dropping numerous hints that he is, Dunton created this dual narrator to reflect two aspects of his personality: Evander is the respectable clergyman’s son who dutifully serves an apprenticeship, sets up his own bookstore specializing in religious publications, and marries a lovely woman he calls Iris (and whom he rhapsodically apostrophes throughout, as Sterne would his Jenny). Kainophilus, on the other hand, is a born rambler hungry for novelty and adventure, and expresses himself in flamboyant prose, as in this description of his alter ego: “Evander is a person without flattery, endued with all accomplishments that nature ever crammed into a jelly of stars to make a cheesecake of. Like the rising run round the head of his Apollo, he is always employed in circumnavigating the sphincter of some myopical primogenity; and sure I am that should Diogenes his tub come to life again, he would be the first man chosen by the States of the Moon to crack chestnuts with a pair of butter-firkins. But to be less Ciceronian. . . .”81 Nashean might be a better word for it, for like The Unfortunate Traveler Dunton’s Voyage is written in a maximalist mixture of learned wit, demotic language, goofy metaphors, dialect, literary allusions, poetry—the novel often veers into verse (sometimes Dunton’s own, sometimes “borrowed” from others)—along with, in the words of his carnival barking introduction, “witty songs, riddles, posies, and anagrams. . . . Here’s hieroglyphics and cabalistic treasures as unintelligible, as inestimable, such unheard of curiosities as Gaffarel and Parcelsus82 never dreamt of nor would have done (though sometimes good wits jump) they are so rare and extraordinary, though they had lived this thousand years” (41–42). Although he acknowledges his use of nonfiction miscellanies like Gaffarel’s book and quirky travel guides like Thomas Coryat’s Crudities (1611), he boasts of the originality of his work, and acknowledges only a few predecessors in fiction: “Cervantes among the Spaniards was the
first who wrote in this drolling sort of prose satire,” he writes in the preface to volume 2, and tips his hat to both Quevedo’s Sueños and Furetière’s Bourgeois Romance, “which perhaps is nearer the design here intended than any before mentioned.” It’s that alternative line of fiction (which he traces back to Lucian) that he follows, not that of conventional romance novels, which he warns apprentices against reading, “at least till your mind is formed and you have seen something of the world” (2.8). At times, the text resembles not only Tristram Shandy but modern stream-of-consciousness writing, as here when Evander leaves behind some religious disputants and goes down to the Thames to cross the river:

  Let ’em be so kind to fret their gills out if they think fit, while Evander steps down to Old Swan and takes water―Stay,―but ’tis against tide―What if the mills should suck him in―well considered―An elder brother’s thread is generally twisted very tenderly.―I’m off of such a long ramble―I’ll to the Steleyard―The tide runs strong―’Tis good to be sure―Come the Three Cranes is but a little further―or Queen Hithe―And now I’m here, ’tis but edging to Blackfriars Stairs and then there’s no danger; Aye,—now—let’s see—sure now we’re safe—be not we, waterman―See how the rogue laughs―but he does not know my value as well as I do, and what a loss the world would have if Evander should feed the fishes. (1.7)

  Despite the unconventional nature of his text, however, he insists his “method [is] not confused, though somewhat cryptical, and requiring a little study to crack the shell and get out the kernel” (2.1)—the same image for difficult fiction Mackenzie used 30 years earlier.83

  But unlike The Unfortunate Traveler and all previous first-person novels, the Voyage begins ab ovo. Working back from his present age of 30, the narrator states, “I am the man—was the boy, the infant—the—the—the chicken—the tread of a cock-chicken—the eye of a needle—the point—the nothing at all” (60–61). After speculating on his possible animal ancestry—“As great a coward as I am, there may have gone I know not how many particles of a lion into my composition, and as small as my body is, my great grandfather might be made out of a whale or an elephant” (1:1)—it’s clear he’s not speaking metaphorically but genetically, and that he’s abreast of the latest scientific discoveries in obstetrics: from “my mother’s belly, [I] just rambled out of nothing, or next to it, nothing like what I am now, into a little live thing, hardly as big as a nit. Should I tell you, as the virtuosi do, that I was shaped at first like a tadpole, and that I remember very well when my tail rambled off, and a pair of little legs sprung out in the room on it[?]” (1:1). He then goes on to describe his stillbirth and resuscitation.

  He’s also hip to the latest thinking of the philosophical virtuosi, who had revived the atomic theory of the ancient Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus, whereby all physical matter is made up of an infinite number of atoms (“corpuscles” in 17th-century terminology) moving and combining at random in the universe. The Voyage portrays just such a universe, a world in flux, especially in the “panegyric verses” Dunton wrote for the first volume, which have lines like “the ship was steered by chance/As chaos was by atom’s dance” (12); “Nothing i’th’world is steady found/But an eternal dance goes round” (13);84 and “Nothing in Nature’s fixed and steadfast found,/But all things run an endless circuit round” (19). Aware of recent discoveries in astronomy, he notes that the so-called fixed stars “Yet ha’ been found by optic engines / To’ve rambled backward a whole sign since” they were first “fixed,” and some planets “move by eccentric’s epicycles” (13). The fixed universe of the medieval worldview (and three generations of Dunton clergymen) had been exposed as unfixed, unstable, “steered by chance,” eccentric; as a thoroughly modern author in the current battle between the ancients and moderns, Dunton consequently gives his novel a modern form, for it too is eccentric, chaotic, and digressive. Although the Voyage proceeds in roughly chronological fashion, it constantly leaps forward, “rambles backward,” and/or darts sideways into digressions, following the “atom’s dance” in what Kainophilus is pleased to call his mind instead of the fixed assumptions of how a story should be told.

  The Voyage is less an attempt to tell his story than “to reflect on my own self. . . . I followed my self in my busy imagination from cradle to grave,” as he tells us in the introduction, where he boasts “I can nowhere find my parallel, and am apt now to believe what I thought too much my friends have sometimes been pleased to compliment me with, that I was indeed an Original” (35–36). He decided to write this song of myself whether the world was interested or not: “What, thought I with my self very soberly, if I should oblige this world now, this ungrateful world, with a history of this strange life of mine:—Hang it—it doesn’t deserve it. Yet I may do it for my own sake, not theirs” (37). This is a remarkable assertion of the value of the private individual; there are plenty of “lives and actions of great princes,” but here the reader “will find the life of one traveler, my individual self, Don Kainophilus, alias Evander, the whole description of, I scorn to say one country, one age, or one world, but of all the habitable and unthinkable Creation” (39). Dunton greatly admired Montaigne and cites him often in the third volume, but his attitude here has the cosmic confidence of Walt Whitman.

  Throughout the Voyage, Dunton/Evander/Kainophilus makes metafictional asides on what he is writing, and defends his unconventional narrative choices. Sterne obviously took note of the beginning of chapter 6, for example, when young Evander sees London for the first time:

  Now does the reader greedily expect a description of London, aye, and such a one it shall be when it once comes that shall put down a Stow’s Survey, Howell’s Londonopolis,85 Delaune, R. B., and all that ever writ on it since London-stone was no bigger than a cherry-stone, or Julius Caesar built the Tower. I question not in the least, no not in the least, but ’twill pit, box, and gallery with—let me see—with, aye, with Jordan’s Lord Mayor’s show, or his successors either, though that’s a bold word that’s the truth on it.

  By this time I guess the reader is big up to the chin with expectation, as Mrs. Abigail and her little master at Bartholomew Fair when they are just a-going to begin for two or three hours together, & to satisfy his curiosity, I tell him now whatever I made him believe in the last chapter, that he’s not like to hear a word more on it this two hours. Thus do I love to elevate and surprise, and sprinkle now and then some of that same in my writings which is so remarkable in my self—that people should miss what they expected, and find what they never looked for—though both still very excellent—nor must you think I do this without sound advisement and sage reason . . .

  . . . which is that he wants to finish the story of his father from the previous chapter. He spends a page justifying this structural choice, then concludes: “Well then now you have it; you can’t miss it if ye had never so much mind to it. Vol I. Chap. 6. The Life and Death of Evander’s immediate Male Progenitor. [All this pains I take now to make the matter clear, and instruct even the meanest capacity how to make the best use of this most useful Book.] Why then, stand by London, and room for father” (1:6).86

  This self-consciousness about writing permeates the novel as Dunton plays with the idea of the world as a book, and people as texts. Instead of an errata page, he substitutes this couplet: “The author hath his faults, the printer too/All men whilst here do err, and so do you” (34).87 Later, Evander confesses, “were I to correct the errata of my short life, I would quite alter the press,” adding a few pages later, “Return we now to my life again, wherein not a line have I written but has need of correction” (3.1), collating both his life and his written account of his life. He compares different sizes of people to “quartos, folios, and decimosextos” (2.1), as Melville would later do with whales. He comically compares his worn clothes to “an old or dusty translation,” then runs “to the barbers for a new face [typeface], for you must note my beard as yet was but of the third edition . . .” (3.4). In a punning
poem written earlier in his career entitled “The Ingenious Art of Printing Spiritualized,” Dunton compares the Christian god to a typesetter (“Great blest Master Printer”), concluding,