A Little History of Literature (12 page)

For the first time, it acknowledged that an author composes something original – the author's ‘own intellectual creation’, in the
modern phrase – and that it has value. As soon as that original creation has been written down (typed or word-processed, these days), the author owns the copyright – the written work is what we would now call ‘intellectual property’. It can be ‘materialised’ – as a printed book, or nowadays an e-book, or adapted into a stage play or a film. But crucially, from 1710 onward, under copyright law the original creation remains the author's and other people can only use it under the author's licence.

This first copyright statute foresaw the danger of ‘perpetual ownership’. The creator of a work, or whomever they had sold it to, could own the right to copy it only for a limited period of time. After that it would enter what is called ‘the public domain’, and would be everybody's and nobody's. In 1710 the period of copyright protection was fairly short; it has been extended over the years and in Europe is currently seventy years after the death of the creator.

Another careful element in the Queen Anne Act was to decree that there is ‘no copyright in ideas’. This makes the law very different from, for example, patent law, which does protect ideas. Let's explain it this way. If I write a detective novel in which, on the last page, it is revealed that ‘the butler did it’ and you later write a detective novel in which – hey presto – there is the same last-page revelation, you are free to do so. What you may not do is copy my form of words. It is the
expression
, not the thoughts behind the words, that is protected.

The author's licence to ‘reap where you have not sown’ is one the great, controlled freedoms that have enabled literature (notably narrative literature) to bloom. There is a network of other laws that control freedom. Libel laws make it illegal to write malicious untruths about living persons. Censorship has made it, over the centuries, illegal to publish what is considered (at any particular time) pornographic or blasphemous. More recent legislation controls the publishing of material thought to be racially provocative or an incitement to violence. But the basic freedoms, and disciplines, which make literature what it is today were created by those wise parliamentarians 300 years ago.

British copyright law was adopted further abroad, and other countries formed their own conventions. It took some time to
happen. America did not sign up to international copyright until 1891, which meant the USA was free to plunder British and other nations' literary work. It famously infuriated Dickens, who never did forgive those damned Yankee pirates. Chapter 37 continues the international story.

The printed book has lasted for over 500 years. Caxton would recognise the copies of Chaucer in our high-street bookshops as a modern version of his own. But is the book at the end of its life in the twenty-first century? Will the e-book take over, as the codex took over from the papyrus scroll? No one knows for certain. But some kind of co-existence seems likely. There is something wonderfully physical about the old vehicle. You use your legs to walk to the shelf, your arms to take the volume down, your opposable thumb and index finger to turn the page. It's a bodily engagement you don't feel with a Kindle or iPad. My guess is that the ‘feel’ (the touch, and even smell) of the printed book will continue to give it a lasting place – if not necessarily first place – in the world of literature for some time to come.

CHAPTER
12

The House of Fiction

Human beings are storytelling animals. That goes as far back as we can trace our species. If you think of fiction, do you think of novels? Well, we did not start writing and reading novels until a fairly precise moment in literary history, in the eighteenth century. We will come to that in the next chapter. Before that moment, fiction took different forms. If we dig, we can find what we might call some ‘proto-novels’ in literature before, in some cases long before, what we think of as the first novel. Five European works of literature will make the point clearer. They are not novels, but we feel a novel trying to get out in their narratives:

The Decameron
of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75) became hugely
popular and influential across Europe (inspiring Chaucer, for instance), particularly after it was printed in 1470. Its bundle of stories resurface everywhere in literature thereafter. The frame story of
The Decameron
is simple and gripping. The Black Death is ravaging Florence, as it routinely did in the fourteenth century. (In Wakefield, which we looked at in Chapter 6, the disease wiped out a third of the town's population.) You couldn't cure it, all you could do was run away from it and hope it didn't catch you. Ten young people of wealth and breeding – three men and seven women – take refuge in a villa in the countryside for ten days (hence the title –
deca
is ‘ten’ in Greek) until the plague burns out. To pass the time this
brigata
(‘brigade’, as the author calls them) each tell one story every day, so that the book contains 100 stories. Boccaccio, the most famous Italian man of letters of his day, used an interesting word for these stories:
novella
– Italian for ‘some new little thing’. These tales are told in the warmth of the evening, under the olive trees, to the soft chirp of cicadas, with refreshment to hand.

The subjects range from the fabulous (verging on the fairy story) and neo-classical (drawing on the literature of the ancients) to the bawdy and the knockabout comic, with a stress on the infinite variety of life as it is lived. The stories are cunningly plotted and overwhelmingly subversive in tone. Many of them satirise the Church and ruling establishments – this is young persons' literature. And this ‘new thing’, the novella, is a literary genre that wilfully breaks literary rules and flouts convention. That is part of its newness.

Rabelais's
Gargantua and Pantagruel
, originally published as five separate books, has less of a framework than
The Decameron
. It loosely clumps a huge number of disconnected anecdotes and running jokes around two highly unlikely giants, father (from whom we get the adjective ‘gargantuan’) and son. It is even more mischievous – or ‘licentious’ – than
The Decameron
and has been, over the centuries, a book much banned. The epithet ‘Rabelaisian’ has become shorthand for literature which is just this side of publishable; sometimes, when the moral climate is harsh, it has been unpublishable and, occasionally, burnable.

Despite the long history of banning it suffered, there is nothing squalid in
Gargantua and Pantagruel'
s joyous naughtiness. It overflows with what the French call
esprit
– for which there is no exact English translation, although ‘wit’ comes near. It differs from
The Decameron
in drawing its energy from the streets, bawdy folk tales and vernacular, or common, speech. All these will be ingredients in the novel to come two centuries later. François Rabelais (
c
. 1494–
c
. 1553) was not himself of the streets. He was a formidably well-read one-time monk who, in his sprawling fantasia, takes the whole of classical and ‘respectable’ literature and turns it into his personal playground. To cause laughter, he proclaims in his preface, is the mission of literature. He succeeds magnificently in that mission.

Don Quixote
, the third of our proto-novels, is a work whose story everyone knows but which too few nowadays read cover to cover. Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) was a diplomat's assistant and soldier who lived an unusually eventful life. He is supposed to have had the idea for his great work as a bored prisoner in Spain. It was written for an age in which people had more time than we do. The plot is simple – in fact there is no plot as such.
Don Quixote
popularised the variety of fiction known as ‘picaresque’: narratives that wander all over the place. The protagonist (more anti-hero than hero) is Alonso Quijano, a middle-aged gentleman living in quiet retirement in La Mancha. It is not, however, a serene retirement. His brain has been poisoned by ancient romances – tales of chivalry and knight errantry. He hallucinates himself into the role of a knight – ‘Don Quixote de la Mancha’ – and sets out, with a homemade cardboard helmet, on a ‘quest’. As his squire he recruits a fat peasant called Sancho Panza. A broken-down nag, Rocinante, is his ‘charger’.

There ensue a series of comic adventures, or ‘sallies’, the most famous of which is his battle with the windmills, which in his madness the Don thinks are giants. After a series of similar disasters he returns home, dejected but, at last, sane. Once again he is Alonso Quijano. On his deathbed he draws up his will and repudiates all the romances that have poisoned his mind and ruined his life.

Nonetheless, there is something touching – admirable even – in that rickety, deluded, old man, his nag and his fat cowardly ‘squire’ bravely taking on the windmills. Like all the best fiction,
Don Quixote
leaves us in two minds. Fool or lovable idealist? That uncertainty is wrapped up in the word we have taken for general use from the story: ‘quixotic’.

Ever since
The Pilgrim's Progress
, our fourth proto-novel, was published over three centuries ago, it has been a runaway bestseller, and hugely influential on later English fiction. Its writer, John Bunyan (1628–88) was a son of the working classes, entirely self-educated, and he wrote much of it in jail after being sentenced for preaching ‘heretical’ (i.e. unofficial) religious doctrine. Bunyan's father had been a pedlar, tramping wearily across the country, a pack on his back, a staff in his hand. That, for the son, was an image of life. John was driven, however, by another vision – that of eternal bliss for the righteous, as promised in the Bible. But his view of righteousness was not that of the authorities. Hence the prison and hence – fortunately for us –
The Pilgrim's Progress
.

Like Cervantes, Bunyan sees life as a lifelong quest. In Bunyan's case it is a quest
towards
something – the gleaming city on the hill. Salvation. And what we have to conquer on the way are not foes, but the obstacles that afflict the religious mind: depression (‘the Slough of Despond’), doubt (‘Doubting Castle’), compromise (‘Mr Facing Both Ways’) and, most dangerous of all, the seductive temptations of the city – ‘Vanity Fair’.

The story opens dramatically. The hero, Christian, is reading a book (the Bible, we can deduce – and, significantly, in English: see Chapter 8). What he has just been reading raises a terrible question in his mind: what shall he do to be saved? Suddenly he runs off shouting ‘Life, life, eternal life’. He knows what he has to do. His wife and children try to stop him, but he puts his fingers in his ears and runs on, leaving them behind. Why this heartlessness? Because everyone must save themselves, a key tenet of the Puritan doctrine. As the next chapter explains, individualism was to become a key element in the novel as a form, which is why so many of them have names for titles:
The History of Tom Jones
,
Emma
,
Silas Marner
, and so on.

There are a number of other aspects in
The Pilgrim's Progress
that feed into the novel of later centuries. The twentieth-century writer D.H. Lawrence called the novel ‘the bright book of life’ – a modern Bible for an age that had outlived the traditional holy text. The kind of novel that Lawrence wrote (as did Jane Austen, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad and many others) is about how to do the right things in life to find fulfilment – what Bunyan called ‘salvation’ – as the historical and personal circumstances define it. This has been called ‘the great tradition’ of English fiction and that great tradition begins with
The Pilgrim's Progress
.

The last of these proto-novels has an added interest in that it is by a woman, the gloriously named Aphra Behn (1640–89). Women would have to wait more than 200 years before they could claim full social equality with men. That fact alone would make this author of interest. But what is still more fascinating about Behn is how cunningly she adapted her literary talents, which were great, to the turbulent historical period in which she found herself, the Restoration.

Some background history helps us understand Mistress Behn's extraordinary achievement. After the Civil War and the execution of Charles I, the victorious Oliver Cromwell went on to overrule Parliament and set up a republic known as the Commonwealth. He also imposed on the country an iron Puritan dictatorship, backed by the formidable (‘Roundhead’) army of the Protectorate. During these years of war and republic, King Charles's son, who would later come to the throne as Charles II, took refuge with his court in various locations in mainland Europe, particularly enjoying France's sophisticated pleasures.