Steven Moore > Quotes

“Reading Marguerite Young's 1,200-page Miss MacIntosh, My Darling was like slipping into a luxurious opium dream.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“When I first opened this book and saw all those scholarly footnotes, my heart leapt up as though I saw a host of golden daffodils.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800

“...and any discussion of art vs. entertainment in the present cultural climate invites accusations of elitism and snobbery.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“Volume 2 will begin with Cervantes and end with the most interesting novel of 2012.”
― Steven Moore

“With the motto “do what you will,” Rabelais gave himself permission to do anything he damn well pleased with the language and the form of the novel; as a result, every author of an innovative novel mixing literary forms and genres in an extravagant style is indebted to Rabelais, directly or indirectly. Out of his codpiece came Aneau’s Alector, Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller, López de Úbeda’s Justina, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Béroalde de Verville’s Fantastic Tales, Sorel’s Francion, Burton’s Anatomy, Swift’s Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels, Fielding’s Tom Jones, Amory’s John Buncle, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, the novels of Diderot and maybe Voltaire (a late convert), Smollett’s Adventures of an Atom, Hoffmann’s Tomcat Murr, Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Southey’s Doctor, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony and Bouvard and Pecuchet, Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Frederick Rolfe’s ornate novels, Bely’s Petersburg, Joyce’s Ulysses, Witkiewicz’s Polish jokes, Flann O’Brien’s Irish farces, Philip Wylie’s Finnley Wren, Patchen’s tender novels, Burroughs’s and Kerouac’s mad ones, Nabokov’s later works, Schmidt’s fiction, the novels of Durrell, Burgess (especially A Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers), Gaddis and Pynchon, Barth, Coover, Sorrentino, Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Brossard’s later works, the masterpieces of Latin American magic realism (Paradiso, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Three Trapped Tigers, I the Supreme, Avalovara, Terra Nostra, Palinuro of Mexico), the fabulous creations of those gay Cubans Severo Sarduy and Reinaldo Arenas, Markson’s Springer’s Progress, Mano’s Take Five, Ríos’s Larva and otros libros, the novels of Paul West, Tom Robbins, Stanley Elkin, Alexander Theroux, W. M. Spackman, Alasdair Gray, Gaétan Soucy, and Rikki Ducornet (“Lady Rabelais,” as one critic called her), Mark Leyner’s hyperbolic novels, the writings of Magiser Gass, Greer Gilman’s folkloric fictions and Roger Boylan’s Celtic comedies, Vollmann’s voluminous volumes, Wallace’s brainy fictions, Siegel’s Love in a Dead Language, Danielewski’s novels, Jackson’s Half Life, Field’s Ululu, De La Pava’s Naked Singularity, and James McCourt’s ongoing Mawrdew Czgowchwz saga.

(p. 331)”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“I'faith, 'tis an Occasion of no small Satisfaction to commence this Enquiry into the Romances & Fiction of the English--& their antick Neighbors, the Irish & the Scotch--free at last from the Tyranny of scurvy Translators--& to reacquaint myself with the earliest Works that engender'd my Love for the Novel. O Swift, O Fielding, O Sterne, I hail thee after too long an Absence, keen to revel once more in your rare Inventions and pricking Raillery, along with those of your less-fam'd Countrymen. Prithee look kindly on these Efforts of yr humble Servant to blazon your Glories to the gaping Pucklick.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800

“—I envy Christ, he had a disease named after him”
― Steven Moore, William Gaddis: Expanded Edition

“So we'll leave him [Plato] to the philosophers and not try to make a novelist of him against his will; he excluded innovative artists from his ideal republic, so we'll exclude him from our republic of fiction.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“And after the sack of Constantinople in 1204, we have few examples of any literary activity except by religious writers (who, like cockroaches, seem capable of surviving any catastrophe).”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“For some of us, there are few terms that induce narcosis quicker than "Christian allegory.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800

“4. You've had enough of the big city and decide to return home. Waiting for a bus, you pick up a discarded copy of Larva and, because you have a long bus-ride ahead of you, begin reading. You quickly discover it is not a conventional novel. Do you:
(a) discard it and stare out the window all the way back home?
(b)”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800

“Aretino was a satirist on the noble if futile quest to reform his corrupt society by shoving its face in its worse excesses. (Futile because has any society ever reformed itself after being shown the error of its ways by a satirist? anywhere? ever?)”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“I had to keep checking the copyright page to remind myself this novel [Karl Moritz's Anton Reiser] was published in 1785, not 1985.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800

“While it would be too reductive (but not wrong) to say Cervantes equates knight-errantry with religious belief, he does seem to insinuate a syllogism that goes: Chivalric novels are false; the Bible resembles those novels; therefore, the Bible is false. But Cervantes gleefully complicates matters by insisting repeatedly that Don Quixote is true, which he and everyone who reads it knows is untrue.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800

“Our lives will be a wealth of expectation and consummation," says one character eagerly, and conspicuous consumption and concupiscent consummation intertwine in a heady celebration of the material world.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“The difference between mainstream fiction and literature is what their writers do with words; the former places its emphasis on the story rather than the language used to tell that story; in literature, the language is the story; that is, the story is primarily a vehicle for a linguistic display of the writer's rhetorical abilities.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“Blessings be upon you, Heliodorus, for bringing the novel into full intellectual maturity and for showing what this newfangled genre could be in the hands of a master.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“So: an epic novel of the Tathagata? Yes, but not a very good one. Kerouac would have done better.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“Like all apocalyptic writers, the author despises people in general and fantasizes about the destruction of everyone different from him and his chosen group.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“And if the novel [The Education of Cyrus] remains dull by modern standards, we have to remind ourselves Xenophon didn't set out to write a "novel" — there was no such thing yet in his culture — but was feeling his way to a new form somewhere between factual history and fanciful epic. Our hat is always off to innovators.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“Polexander is a candidate, Thomas DiPiero proposes, for "what may be the most tortuous and labyrinthine narrative in all of French literature".”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800

“Sorel's novels deserve to be revived, but Polexander can be left in its watery grave.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800

“Marcus de Obregón is appealing and, yes, instructive, but is not entirely successful because the author often forgot he was writing a novel, not his memoirs.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800

“It's both an alternative history of the novel and a history of the alternative novel.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“Novelists always set up obstacles for lovers to overcome to make their eventual union all the more sastisfying, but Gomberville portrays love as a long, tedious ocean voyage to someplace miserable.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800

“Can't recognize the organization of a novel? Assume there isn't one. Baffled by "arcana" — i.e., stuff you don't already know? Call the author pretentious. Find a book hard-going? Assume the author is deliberately torturing you.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“Reader, I'd marry her.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800

“the art critic Crémer reminds Wyatt of Degas’s remark “that the artist must approach his work in the same frame of mind in which the criminal commits his deed”
― Steven Moore, William Gaddis: Expanded Edition

“It's the first novel [Satyricon by Petronius] in which the size of a male character's genitals is noted, a detail you hardly ever get in George Eliot's novels.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“It was a forged Titian that somebody had painted over another old painting, when they scraped the forged Titian away they found some worthless old painting underneath it, the forger had used it because it was an old canvas. But then there was something under that worthless painting, and they scraped it off and underneath that they found a Titian, a real Titian that had been there all the time. It was as though when the forger was working, and he didn’t know the original was underneath, I mean he didn’t know he knew it, but it knew, I mean something knew. I mean, do you see what I mean? That underneath that the original is there, that the real … thing is there, and on the surface you … if you can only … see what I mean? (450”
― Steven Moore, William Gaddis: Expanded Edition