Following my earlier ruminations on Sir Walter Scott and the titular idiom, I decided to go through the index of Leslie Fiedler's magisterial LOVE AND DEATH IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL--which, though centered upon American authors, contains a lot about their European forbears-- and reread everything the critic had to say about the inventor of the historical novel. I knew from previous readings that nearly everything Fiedler had to say about Scott was virulently negative, with the exception of crediting Scott with being able to create literary myths that appealed to wide audiences. In Fiedler's demi-Marxist views from that era-- late fifties to early sixties-- Scott's greatest offense was that (according to Fiedler) all or most of the author's works allowed the viewpoint characters to give up ideas of revolting against authority and accepting the bourgeois lifestyle. I'm sure even back then Fiedler had read more of Scott than I have now-- though to be sure, Fiedler doesn't cite a lot of Scott works, saying nearly nothing about the classic IVANHOE and (quite naturally) not mentioning the work that recently engaged me, THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL. But I still find this a very superficial pronouncement.
In previous readings I highlighted a lot of Fiedler's remarks in LOVE. Yet, given all of my earlier commentary about the intertwined literary categories of "the metaphenomenal" and "the heroic"--particularly in this essay-series-- I'm surprised I missed this one, in which Fiedler brilliantly links the rise of the gothic novel in Europe (beginning with Horace Walpole's 1764 THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO) with Scott's invention of the historical novel with WAVERLY in 1814.
...behind the Gothic there lies a theory of history, a particular sense of the past. The tale of terror is a kind of historical novel which existed before the historical novel (the invention of Walter Scott) came into being.
Fiedler then credits Samuel Richardson with having essentially invented the naturalistic novel's sense of "the present," beginning with 1740's CLARISSA. I'm not sure why Defoe's 1722 MOLL FLANDERS is out of the running in that department, or why Defoe doesn't even rate a mention in the whole of LOVE. But I agree with Fiedler's next point, that "the Gothic felt for the first time the pastness of the past." Long before Walpole subtitled OTRANTO as "a Gothic Story," the word "gothic" had been used since the Renaissance to indicate that which was medieval and therefore barbaric. Literature following the Renaissance rejected, as Fiedler says of the naturalistic novel, all those "improbable and marvelous" elements that culminated in the late 1500s with Spenser's FAERIE QUEENE. Wikipedia pegs the beginnings of the Enlightenment with Descartes, but I prefer 1603, the publication-year of the first book of DON QUIXOTE, which essentially ended the chivalric romance for the next two centuries.
What is "the pastness of the past" in OTRANTO? Though of course Walpole wrote the novel in 1764, he published the book anonymously, claimed he had translated a manuscript from the 1500s, retelling a story from a distant medieval era. Walpole fooled some contemporary reviewers into believing that OTRANTO was an authentic work penned between the 9th and 11th centuries, and when he eventually admitted authorship, many scholars of his time regarded the novel as meretricious. However, setting the story in the medieval past allowed the author to represent wild fantasies of his own creation, much like the metaphenomena of chivalric romances.
During the early 1700s there had arisen a passion in Europe for both original literary fairy tales and reworkings of oral stories, the last including a craze for the newly translated THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS. There were also a few freewheeling fantastic like GULLIVER'S TRAVELS and proto-SF works like Voltaire's MICROMEGAS. But OTRANTO inspired imitators to delve into the historical past, and to threaten the commonplace natural world with such horrors-- ghosts (real or fake), deals with the devil, and even the "occult science" of alchemy that infuses Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN. The idiom of the Gothic even inspired an inventive hybrid of the European Gothic and the Arabian Nights fantasy in William Beckford's 1786 VATHEK.
WAVERLY, the first of Scott's historical novels, doesn't delve very far into the past. Only about sixty years separate the novel's action during the Jacobite rebellion in Scotland and 1814, when Scott published the story. Then in 1820 Scott published IVANHOE, which, though it was a naturalistic story set in England's 12th century, nevertheless revived the genre of the chivalric romance. Further, even before the down-to-earth WAVERLY, it's also worth remembering that in 1805 Scott wrote his first original narrative poem, the aforementioned MINSTREL. And though it's not as imaginative as VATHEK, it certainly presents more wonders than did the average Gothic, such as a goblin, river-spirits, a book of magic spells, and a magician who comes back from death to reclaim his property. A case could made that just as Walpole gave birth the Modern Horror Story, Scott-- rather than usual nominees like George MacDonald or William Morris-- gave birth to the Modern Magical-Era Fantasy Tale. I now credit Leslie Fiedler with supplying me with a crucial conception for both of these modernized forms of older genres: that they are modern because they, unlike their predecessors, could not help but engage with modernity-- even whem the authors might be seeking with might and main to forswear the heavy hand of history.
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