The Novel Quotes

“Reading Marguerite Young's 1,200-page Miss MacIntosh, My Darling was like slipping into a luxurious opium dream.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“...and any discussion of art vs. entertainment in the present cultural climate invites accusations of elitism and snobbery.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“With the motto “do what you will,” Rabelais gave himself permission to do anything he damn well pleased with the language and the form of the novel; as a result, every author of an innovative novel mixing literary forms and genres in an extravagant style is indebted to Rabelais, directly or indirectly. Out of his codpiece came Aneau’s Alector, Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller, López de Úbeda’s Justina, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Béroalde de Verville’s Fantastic Tales, Sorel’s Francion, Burton’s Anatomy, Swift’s Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels, Fielding’s Tom Jones, Amory’s John Buncle, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, the novels of Diderot and maybe Voltaire (a late convert), Smollett’s Adventures of an Atom, Hoffmann’s Tomcat Murr, Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Southey’s Doctor, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony and Bouvard and Pecuchet, Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Frederick Rolfe’s ornate novels, Bely’s Petersburg, Joyce’s Ulysses, Witkiewicz’s Polish jokes, Flann O’Brien’s Irish farces, Philip Wylie’s Finnley Wren, Patchen’s tender novels, Burroughs’s and Kerouac’s mad ones, Nabokov’s later works, Schmidt’s fiction, the novels of Durrell, Burgess (especially A Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers), Gaddis and Pynchon, Barth, Coover, Sorrentino, Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Brossard’s later works, the masterpieces of Latin American magic realism (Paradiso, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Three Trapped Tigers, I the Supreme, Avalovara, Terra Nostra, Palinuro of Mexico), the fabulous creations of those gay Cubans Severo Sarduy and Reinaldo Arenas, Markson’s Springer’s Progress, Mano’s Take Five, Ríos’s Larva and otros libros, the novels of Paul West, Tom Robbins, Stanley Elkin, Alexander Theroux, W. M. Spackman, Alasdair Gray, Gaétan Soucy, and Rikki Ducornet (“Lady Rabelais,” as one critic called her), Mark Leyner’s hyperbolic novels, the writings of Magiser Gass, Greer Gilman’s folkloric fictions and Roger Boylan’s Celtic comedies, Vollmann’s voluminous volumes, Wallace’s brainy fictions, Siegel’s Love in a Dead Language, Danielewski’s novels, Jackson’s Half Life, Field’s Ululu, De La Pava’s Naked Singularity, and James McCourt’s ongoing Mawrdew Czgowchwz saga.

(p. 331)”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“Our lives will be a wealth of expectation and consummation," says one character eagerly, and conspicuous consumption and concupiscent consummation intertwine in a heady celebration of the material world.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“Nearly all of the stories [in The Heptameron] are about the sexual relations between men and women, with a large percentage dealing with the unromanic side: with rape, infidelity, the seduction of nuns and wives by monks (everyone in the Renaissance seems to have despised monks), loveless marriages, incest, and borderline necrophilia.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“Aretino was a satirist on the noble if futile quest to reform his corrupt society by shoving its face in its worse excesses. (Futile because has any society ever reformed itself after being shown the error of its ways by a satirist? anywhere? ever?)”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“If a third of the stories in the Decameron mock religion, two-thirds celebrate sex.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“So: an epic novel of the Tathagata? Yes, but not a very good one. Kerouac would have done better.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“And after the sack of Constantinople in 1204, we have few examples of any literary activity except by religious writers (who, like cockroaches, seem capable of surviving any catastrophe).”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“I suppose someone could trawl through the 383 volumes of Migne's Patrologiae Cursus Completus and extract some book-length hagiographies that qualify as novels — there had to be a few protonovelists who adopted hagiography as the only game in town, as painters of religious subjects learned to do — but that someone isn't me.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“It's the first novel [Satyricon by Petronius] in which the size of a male character's genitals is noted, a detail you hardly ever get in George Eliot's novels.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“Blessings be upon you, Heliodorus, for bringing the novel into full intellectual maturity and for showing what this newfangled genre could be in the hands of a master.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“Can you imagine a Jane Austen heroine declining an invitation to dance because she's having her period? Can you imagine how much saner our society would be if she had?”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“So we'll leave him [Plato] to the philosophers and not try to make a novelist of him against his will; he excluded innovative artists from his ideal republic, so we'll exclude him from our republic of fiction.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“And if the novel [The Education of Cyrus] remains dull by modern standards, we have to remind ourselves Xenophon didn't set out to write a "novel" — there was no such thing yet in his culture — but was feeling his way to a new form somewhere between factual history and fanciful epic. Our hat is always off to innovators.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“Like all apocalyptic writers, the author despises people in general and fantasizes about the destruction of everyone different from him and his chosen group.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“It's both an alternative history of the novel and a history of the alternative novel.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“Can't recognize the organization of a novel? Assume there isn't one. Baffled by "arcana" — i.e., stuff you don't already know? Call the author pretentious. Find a book hard-going? Assume the author is deliberately torturing you.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“The difference between mainstream fiction and literature is what their writers do with words; the former places its emphasis on the story rather than the language used to tell that story; in literature, the language is the story; that is, the story is primarily a vehicle for a linguistic display of the writer's rhetorical abilities.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“Finally, while I don’t want to disparage the traditional novel--I still prefer Dickens’s Great Expectations over Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations, though I’ll take Lauren Fairbanks’s Sister Carrie over Dreiser’s any day--there’s a whole other world of novels out there most people never even hear of, much less read. Let’s go see.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600