Margaret Bruzelius, Romancing the Novel: Adventure from Scott to SebaldRomancing the Novel: Adventure from Scott to Sebald. Margaret Bruzelius . Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007. Pp. 285.

Abstract

Like most literary readers, Bruzelius is especially sensitive to figurative operations of language. The nonfigurative side of the adventure story might also invite commentary. One rather peculiar phase of the genre illustrates this point. Written around the end of the nineteenth century, Gustave Aimard's and Karl May's westerns and Emilio Saligari's jungle tales seem to have no precise anglophone equivalent (though the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs would count if Burroughs had decided that he was Tarzan of the Apes). Aimard, May, and Saligari made probably sincere, and in any event widely credited, claims that they themselves had lived the perils they wrote about; Aimard, in addition, seems to have thought that he was the rightful heir to the throne of the Byzantine Empire. There is no shortage of eccentric adventure writers, but these three set a new standard in their time. The so-called mediocre heroes of Scott can and must find their way in and then out of adventure worlds, which are ultimately dismissed, like dreams. May, Aimard, and Saligari seem to set their hearts on adventure as a permanent condition. The dream persists, book after book; as the series format implies (even in the down-to-earth Scott), it can be indefinitely extended. By this means, the dream acquires reality. Aimard, May, and Saligari cut through the subtleties of suspension of belief and other Coleridgean accoutrements of fiction. Literalists par excellence, they ask for absolute, unqualified assent. The readers that these books create, or want to create, are Don Quixotes without Sancho Panzas. Bruzelius gives a strong literary reading of adventure—but adventure is sometimes the opposite of literature, at least as it is usually understood.