The Novel’s Late Arrival

Goody asks why it took so long for the novel form to develop in Europe. If it’s simply a matter of a shift from oral to written, or the technology of printing, that was all in place centuries before the novel took recognizable form. He argues that the main obstacle to its earlier rise had to do with the problem of fictionality. The scarcity of long fictional narratives “is related to the inherent problem of representations of all kinds pointed out by Plato – but in no sense limited to the Western tradition – that fiction is not historical (self-evident) truth; it is from the literal point of view a lie, although it may aim at another kind of imaginative truth – aim at but not necessarily succeed in achieving. And for some that aim will always remain illusory; the biography, which doubtless contains its element of make-believe, may be preferred to the invented story, which may offer only a distraction, not a truth of any kind.”