I find, Gentlemen, when you read with me in private, that nine out of ten of you dislike the 18th century and all its literary works. As for the Women students, they one and all abominate it.
All eighteenth-century novels are weird in one way or another, if only because the novelists of the time didn’t yet know a standard by which to make them not-weird. Robinson Crusoe (1719) famously has no chapter breaks. Tristram Shandy (1767) famously contains a blank page, with instructions for readers to “call for pen and ink” and hack out a portrait of one of the characters on their own. The Man of Feeling (1771) is hardly a novel at all: An anonymous “editor” explains how a fat curate of his acquaintance had used torn pages from a small memorandum book as wadding paper while hunting; the few surviving pages of that memorandum, representing the scattered observations of an eccentric parishioner, make up the slim novel The Man of Feeling . It’s pretty weird.
But one eighteenth-century novel is weirder than the rest. It is, in fact, by my estimation, weirder than any book written before Modernists of the twentieth-century started pushing the ( riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay ) weird envelope. That champion is Tobias Smollett’s 1769 The History and Adventures of an Atom , a book of exquisite beauty and mind-numbing tedium, of obscurity and libel, featuring some top-notch humorous set-pieces and also really a lot of gratuitous filth.
In the course of this review I’d like to step back and see how novels in general had reached a point at which Atom became possible; quickly touch upon Smollett’s career to find why he found Atom necessary; and only then delve into what makes Atom so weird. If you have no interest in the history of the novel, or of one random Scotsman, but you do want to learn about what it was like inside a medieval Japanese politician’s butthole, skip to part 3 . That’s where the Atom resides.
Proof that the novel is a minor art form: The Romans were better at it than the Greeks.
Don Quixote (1605–1615) is often called (e.g.g. here , here , and here ) the first modern novel…which is weird because of course Don Quixote is about a man who is obsessed with reading fiction. DQ is, in fact, a parody or fusion of two kinds of fiction, the romance and the picaresque . A romance is (broadly speaking) a book about a knight wandering around fighting dragons etc. and having martial adventures 1 . A picaresque (broadly speaking) is about a lowlife wandering around having comical misadventures; Huckleberry Finn (1884) would be a notable American example. The main joke of Don Quixote is that the Don thinks he’s in one kind of book and he’s actually in the other.
So how can Don Quixote be the first modern novel when both picaresques and romances by necessity must predate it? Do they not count as novels?
A lot of weight is borne by the word modern . In the first place, the novel (as a concept) is old enough that isolating the first novel qua novel is literally impossible. Doubtless the first novel ever written has not survived. Prose fiction is as old as the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, although it was generally fairly short at the time. The Greek examples, from around two thousand years ago, are longer…but are they long enough? Various writing guides will give a minimum word count for a novel (40k or 50k words), but how do those numbers translate into ancient Greek ?
The real problem is that, word count aside, no one can authoritatively define the rubric that covers short stories, novellas, and novels—all of what we might call fiction . You know it when you see it, as Potter Stewart would say. The basic elements—that it must be a prose narrative that is not true —are clear enough, but Parnassus is littered with examples of such narratives that don’t feel particularly like our idea of fiction—that do not seem, for lack of a better word, novelistic. I think the average reader, if handed a pre- DQ picaresque (such as Lazarillo de Tormes (1554)) or a pre- DQ romance (such as Amadis the Gaul (1508)), would have a hard time calling each a novel. They are clearly prose narratives, and the events in them are presumably false ( Amadis esp. o.c.; sorcerers etc.)—but somehow that’s not enough.
(The most famous prose romance in English—Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) starts off sounding like a (fictional) history and ends almost novelistically. Reading it through is like reading Return of the King backwards, starting with the appendix.)
Some of the things (I’ll call them points of alienation ) that make sixteenth-century protonovels strange to modern eyes survive two hundred years or so past Don Quixote ’s publication. They survive, in fact, up to and into (remember Smollett?) the writings of Tobias Smollett. They’re part of what makes eighteenth-century novels weird. Maybe you can come up a dozen points of alienation, but I’ll quickly name three:
Early narratives—protonovel or novel—tend to place emphasis on the wrong (or “wrong”) things, or at least in the wrong proportions. In Thomas Nashe’s picaresque The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), for example, we find [ CW for everything, because Nashe ] the following four entirely conventional and novelistic incidents: