A Little History of Literature by John Sutherland

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 (Giovanni Boccaccio, 1351, Italy)
Gargantua and Pantagruel (François Rabelais, 1532–64, France)
Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes, 1605–15, Spain)
The Pilgrim's Progress (John Bunyan, 1678–84, England)
Oroonoko (Aphra Behn, 1688, England)

    The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75) became hugelypopular 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