The Earliest Novel - Where to Start?

If we were to rely on established definitions or starting points for the novel, "where to start?" might be a fairly simple question. But we are explorers here, and like Columbus setting off for the Indies, it's not even clear in which direction we should go. Throw out Defoe's Robinson Crusoe as a starting point and someone will remind you that there are novel-like prose works that predate it, like Don Quixote. Is Robinson Crusoe then the first English novel? (Refining the boundaries works wonders for precise definition.) It might be, until someone suggests that you may want to take a look at Aphra Behn's Oroonoko.

At the beginning of his book A Brief History of Time (1988), Stephen Hawking relates an anecdote about difficult cosmological questions addressed by science and mythology. In a lecture, he writes, a scientist describes

how the earth orbits around the sun, and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down." ( Brief History of Time 1)

Determining the origin of the novel seems like a similar exercise in ever-multiplying possibilities. Once we pick a possible starting point, it seems like another earlier work emerges with qualities identifiable with those we've come to associate with novels. In fact, David mentioned to me just this morning that we may want to consider The Tale of the Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (Lady Murasaki), the 11th-century Japanese prose narrative, which has by some been referred to as the world's first novel, though not without disagreement.

All this brings us to the fundamental question: What is a novel? If we can figure that out, then we can point to what looks like the first one. (My dad argues that "When is the first novel?" and "What is a novel?" are the same question; I think rather that the latter merely provides clarity for determining the former.) But to answer this question, I think we need to do two things. First, read some (which returns us to our original question of where to start) and begin inductively to describe each text's qualities, and second, consider what the novel is not, so that the qualities we identify can be contrasted with or compared to the not-novel.

I will begin with the anonymously written Lazarillo de Tormes (translated by Michael Alpert), a picaresque written around the mid-1550s. This book precedes Don Quixote but comes after many of the major romances and knight-errantry tales that Don Quixote parodies. If feel a little like I'm launching my boat on a journey to the East Indies, and I'm heading west.

Westward ho!
Randall