MAR3802 Discussion 5/LESSON CONTENT – HISTORY OF THE NOVEL
MAR3802 Discussion 5/LESSON CONTENT – HISTORY OF THE NOVEL
Is the right price a fair price. Should a price reflect the value that customers are willing to pay or should prices reflect the cost involved in making a product or service? (respond in 2 paragraphs between 100-300 words).
In her essay “Sounds of Otherness: The Representation of Music in Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto,” Vera
Alexander discusses the intersection between the artful and escapist elements of music with the
necessary violence of terrorism that form the core of Patchett’s novel.
Alexander observes that
The power of opera constructed by the novel and centred in the character of Roxane Coss,
to emotionally address people of all national, cultural, educational and political
backgrounds, introduces a unique, though unrealistic, dimension that clashes with the
topical power theme circumscribed by the hostage-taking. From the beginning music is
introduced as the art which has brought the international dramatis personae together and
which gradually proceeds to knit the terrorists and their hostages into a community.
Alexander’s point here is that Bel Canto, in its overarching use of an escapist medium such as opera,
glosses over more serious thematic issues of the novel-i.e., the traumatic effects of terrorism and the
global imbalances at its root. Moreover, Alexander notes that
During the months of the hold-up, affiliations and collaborative routines form between the
aggressors and their victims, designed to draw readers into wishing for a continuation
rather than the violent end which is foreshadowed early on in the narrative.
In this way, not only the characters but also the readers of Bel Canto, according to Alexander, are
implicated in perpetuating this conflation between terrorists and hostages: “it is the narrated version of
music, the sounds evoked by words describing unheard music, which colonises readers into fellow-
captives unwilling to address questions of right and wrong, or even of the logic of the taking of
hostages to free prisoners, not to mention the absurdity of ‘taking’ such a ‘thing’ as opera.”
It’s worth noting that the inspiration for Bel Canto came from an actual hostage taking. Take a moment
to read an interview with Patchett in which she discusses the novel’s genesis. Here is some background
information on the Japanese embassy “hostage crises” that took place from late 1996 to early 1997 in
Peru.
Did you know that there is a term for when hostages develop positive feelings toward their captors?
Read this short article on Stockholm Syndrome.
But back to Vera Alexander’s essay on Bel Canto:
Alexander is not trying to impeach Patchett the novelist; this is an academic essay, not a book review.
Alexander’s investigation is more into the ways in which art can function, potentially problematically, as
a diversion from more serious and complex socio-political issues that should be more at the forefront of
our notice. Bel Canto was of course written and published prior to 9/11, and Alexander, herself writing
some years after those terrorist attacks, has the privilege of hindsight to regard Patchett’s novel as a
“last minute-view” of a state’s dominance over its insurgents. “Terrorism as tamed by singing,”
LESSON CONTENT – HISTORY OF THE NOVEL
In The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, Ian Watt places the emergence of
the novel in Western Europe, roughly between the end of the 18th century and beginning of the 19th
century. The novel, contends Watt, can be “distinguished from other genres and from previous forms 0
fiction by the amount of attention it habitually accords both to the individualization of its characters an.
to the detailed presentation of their environment” (17-18). As opposed to sagas, fables, verse, and the
vast range of other narratives that came before, the novel’s chief concern is the “immediacy and
closeness of the text to what is being physically described” (29).
According to Watt, it was the sharp realism of writers such as Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson tha
emerged organically from a society increasingly influenced by rationalist philosophic thought that
privileged human individuality. The matter-of-fact, memoir-like narrative of a novel like Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe typified the genre and, in its own way, set the tone for many novels to come, novels
devoted to relaying “truth to individual experience” (Watt 13).
Pushing the novel’s rise was the industrialization of Europe and, within the span of 100 years, the
doubling of the reading population. As demand for not only novels but reading material in general grew
in Europe, so did printing presses. People-particularly the literate middle class, particularly women-
had leisure time on their hands, time to fill with an increasing abundance of novels. Indeed the novel,
as Milan Kundera attests in the Art of the Novel, is “Europe’s Creation” (16).
That said, we should to bear in mind what Steven Moore and others have written about the origins of
the novel, a genre more geographically and historically expansive than Watt might have us believe by
focusing on the novel’s roots in realism. Read what Moore, the author The Novel: An Alternative
History, claims about the novel’s beginnings, and our assumptions about those beginnings.
Sources Consulted
Kundera, Milan. The Art of the Novel. New York: HarperPerenniaI, 2000. Print.
Moore, Steven. “The novel is centuries older than we’ve been told.” Book blogs. The Guardian, 23 July
2010. Web. 14 May 2011.
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. 1957. Berkeley: U of
California P, 2001. Print.